Being Ergi
by Lydia Helasdottir
excerpt from Wightridden: Paths of Northern-Tradition Shamanism
by Lydia Helasdottir
Yes, you have to be in the middle, you can't be at one end of the gender continuum or the other, and you have to do things that are averse to societal norms. Sex is involved too, the taboo-breaking of sexual gender roles. There's a huge amount of power in breaking taboos anyway, but especially these. Ergi is something that you are, not something that you do. It's not an easy road at all. I was born with hugely excessive amounts of testosterone from my mom taking fertility drugs; testosterone poisoning from the womb onwards. I came in being genetically female, physically in-between, and mentally about 2/3 female, 1/3 male at all times, which is a kooky space to be in.
There was taboo and power in that from the very beginning. From the age of about 12 on, my mom said, "You know, not everybody's like you." I think what she meant was that we had lived all over, and we had just moved to a small village in Holland where everyone had lived five generations in the same street, so they just didn't get us. But I took it on a much deeper level, because I was just realizing that not everybody did things that I did. Does that mean I'm abnormal? I had no idea, at the time.
I struggled with it a lot. I didn't want to transition to male, because that isn't me. I'm both, and I want to be 50/50 in that third space, but I find that I can swing either way in terms of who I'm being, and what my energy system has got on any given day. We have this running joke, when I have to deal with corporate guys - that we all slapped our dicks on the table and mine was the biggest one of all, and I'm the only "woman" in the room. But it meant that I had to get used to being the outsider. I was the outsider for a number of reasons - not being from wherever we were living, having a weird sexual orientation, being masculine....the best thing that could happen to me at that point was that someone would mistake me for a boy, because then it would validate the fact that I was both. It gave a lot of access, strangely enough, to being ambiguous about who I was - which was good, because it let me out of the social role, and once I accepted that I was ambiguous about my gender identity, then I could also be ambiguous about all the other social expectations, like being a nice person and not drinking people's blood and stuff like that.
And then I found that there's just simply a lot of power in it. I like that a lot; it's an exciting, life-affirming thing to me. It's powerful partly because it's just perverse to societal norms. If you consider that all fixed structures are potential power, when you knock down a tower, the energy released is huge, because of all the potential power that went into building it up comes exploding out. Societal structures hold a huge amount of power, and when you break that by being unusual, or having unusual proclivities - and particularly in doing it in a ritual or magical or spiritual context - you get a huge rush of power. Also, from being able to mingle male and female energy in me, and have all of the bits working on an energetic level at once, it gives not only a different power level, but also a different flavor that you cannot achieve otherwise. Baphomet has got both, and uses all of it, and all of it is functional. It's the power contained in the double wand of power, the dual phallus. All these things are only available to people who can do both, or at least have some kind of ability to get into the space where unusual sexuality is happening.
And just to seduce otherwise really straight people, and for them to realize three-quarters of the way down the road all of a sudden that "Oh! But this is so abnormal!" but they still want to do it, It is natural for even a fully female-identified female to have a strong reaction to my maleness, but because I don't come in a form that they're used to having a physical attraction towards, they don't really realize it until it's too late. Then it's like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of the canyon cliff, and then looks around, and only falls when he realizes that he's run off the cliff. And there's a lot of power in that, too. There's a fear moment in that about what will the neighbors think, and or if I do you, what am I? Am I queer now? If I was entirely female and a girl did it with me, that just makes her queer. But given that I'm a bit of both, what does that make her? What part of you am I attracted to, and what part did I have sex with?
I have functional female bits, although quite larger than normal by a long way. But my astral bits, my energy bits - I have both, and funnily enough I can actually be in a female space but use the male astral bits, the phallus, even though being female. Hela taught me that trick. She can have a phallus, but it's a female phallus, a very strange thing. And similarly, I can be in a male space and use my vaginal opening. One of my favorite weird twisted things has been to imagine that I was a boy imagining that I was a girl, because then the fantasy is fulfilled by the female bits. That I find a very healing experience to have. One could do it the other way around, too, if one has the boy-bits that one doesn't really like, that aren't sufficient to cover the whole spectrum. I've found that this is beyond even being a 50/50 mix; it's something that has become something else altogether.
I was forced to learn to stay in my body, even with dysphoria. That staying in the body with a dislocated kneecap was a lesson in that as well. When it first happened, I said, "Oh, this is going to be OK, I'll just disassociate." Tink. Tink. Tink. It was like there was a bell jar around me; I couldn't get out of my body. But dissociating from gender dysphoria does have advantages; it teaches you that you don't need to stay gendered...or human. If you can have a phallus, you can have wings, or claws. But actually, for me it went, if I can have wings I can have a phallus. If I can have claws that really, functionally do something to someone, and make them feel it....then I can do it with a dick.
The two poles of ergi sex magic seem to be about being stone, or getting buttfucked. Being stone forces you to use the astral bits rather than the physical ones - I'm stone with everyone except Joe. Relying on the astral bits rather than the physical ones, I find that really brilliant because you just don't get involved with all the usual boy meets girl (or girl meets girl or boy meets boy) and they have all the ordinary sexual decisions and roles that limit you. As soon as genitals get touched, it tends to get complicated. Anal sex opens you right up, if you're ergi and you're wired for that sort of thing. And everyone has an asshole, regardless of gender. It makes a channel that goes right up and out the top of your head, opening you up.
There's a point that is like being a species that never had two genders; they just are, and when they come together with new ones, they just are. I got a lot of that from doing sexual but non-carnal energy exchanges with people that didn't even involve astral genitals, it involved hands and exchanging energy through the hands. Because it was just not focused on the genitals at all, it was relieved of the polarity that goes with bits, and it just became a very swirling kind of energy, like a yin-yang with a million fractal yin-yangs inside of it, and all these little polarities going on, but they were just little dynamos, not determining the nature of the interaction at all.
I understood at a very young age what it was to be sexually penetrative, even though it wasn't done with a penetrative organ made of flesh. In a way, you're piercing someone with the experience of sex with you. The meat may be coming in one direction, but the actual energy penetration, and the strong experience, goes the other way. For me, it's like putting a plug in the socket. All the electricity comes out of the socket into the plug, end of story. You might stick the plug physically into the socket, but everything important goes in the other direction, out of the socket and into the plug and down the wire. So that was my concept of sexuality from the beginning.