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lb_lee(This post brought to you by chatting with Orion and Noel)
We know a bunch of people digging around in plural history stuff, which is awesome! Some people ask us where we find some of our data and stuff, so here’s a word of advice:
Stay curious about the world! It can be extremely tempting to narrow your focus further and further, until you end up like one of those academics who is the utmost authority on the chickens of 1500s Cornwall but is completely lost the moment you hit 1600 or go to the next town over. Putting on those blinders narrows your thinking, and it becomes increasingly liable you’ll mistake 1500s Cornwall chickens for the global reality of all chickens everywhere. This is how you get guys like Ralph Allison, who became increasingly convinced of his own crackpot religious multi theories over time, or those equally obnoxious multi academics who only accept THEIR kind of multi as real because to do otherwise would ruin their precious theories. That’s foolish. Don’t be like those guys! Explore outside your milieu! Keep multiple interests going!
This isn’t just to prevent going up your own ass. A LOT of marginalized ANYTHING history is hidden between the lines, a one-sentence footnote in an otherwise completely unrelated book. If you aren’t READING those unrelated books, you won’t find the data! Among our “one-sentence wonders” include:
* a reference to a sex worker marrying Santa Muerte (a female grim reaper venerated mostly by people living under violence and oppression in Mexico)
* a lesbian, Robin Finkelstein, describing how “After I read Stone Butch Blues, I related so much to Leslie Feinberg’s character that I seriously thought maybe I was Jess [the main character] reincarnated. I actually sorta believed that for a while.” (Marie Cartier’s Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, London and New York: Routledge, pg. 139)
* Maya Deren describing how to felt to be mounted by a loa, despite not being a Vodouisant herself (admittedly, this is a whole chapter... in the appendices of the book version of Divine Horsemen)
* Harry Hay saying that being gay gave him an outlook on life that meant he extended egalitarian personhood (or what he calls subject-to-subject relations) to not only other gay men, but “my fantasy love,” “my teddy bear,” “the talking trees and the handsome heroes in my picture-books.” (“A Separate People Whose Time Has Come,” in Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, pg. 283-284)
* Arthur Evans explicitly drawing a correlation between gay sex and noncorporeal sex, to the point of having a whole chapter on it in his unfinished book, Moon Lady Rising: “sex with them [demons] was considered the moral equivalent of ‘buggery’ (meaning both ‘heresy’ and ‘homosexuality’).” (The Evans Symposium, Granville: White Crane Press, 2018, pg. 253) That one fucking line sent me on a research rabbit hole that’s still ongoing, to see if there really are correlations between queer sex and noncorporeal sex in the record, or if that was just Evans wondering!
All of these things came from books that weren’t about multi at all! They’re all queer religion books, and only one of them is academic. The others were popular or small presses, of varying levels of fame.
I’ve also found a truckload of stuff while volunteering at the sci-fi library. You’d be amazed how many authors will just flat-out admit they channeled their characters in an author’s note in some crusty old anthology! By reading all sorts of things, we keep learning, and the same goes for whatever medium you prefer.
If you restrict yourself to specific search terms, you restrict yourself to the times and places that specific term was used. For example, DID wasn’t used before 1994, and remained a USA-only term for a long time after; if you restrict yourself to DID, you won’t get far. And especially as you get further and further abroad, you’ll encounter folks using their own words for what’s going on, like Harry Hay’s “subject-to-subject.” You have to stay open and pay attention to the experiences being described, not just the vocabulary words used for them. (This goes both ways; I’ve found that “spirit possession” encompasses many experiences that I don’t consider multi at all.) You have to be willing to question and change your own opinions about what those experiences mean.
Over time, the stuff I’ve grown more interested in (and which I habitually and incorrectly call “multi” when on my own, because there is no simple word encompassing it all) is a hodgepodge of spirit marriage, possession, body sharing, psychological/imaginative landscapes, and relationships with beings deemed not (corpo)real by the mainstream society around me. It’s not a rigorous or unified definition. Mostly, it’s just what I want to learn about!
And fortunately, that stuff can be found in all sorts of sources, not just academic works that can be expensive and hard to obtain (and let’s be honest, awful to read). There’s all sorts of little bits and pieces hiding out there, and you don’t need a PhD to read them!
I feel like when I focused exclusively on self-proclaimed “plural” subcultures, what I read was homogenized and blah. It was like eating a steady diet of mayo on Wonder Bread. It was only by venturing farther afield, going further back in time, that I started feeling nourished properly.
Stay curious. Ask the next question. Don’t become the Cornwall chicken guy.
We know a bunch of people digging around in plural history stuff, which is awesome! Some people ask us where we find some of our data and stuff, so here’s a word of advice:
Stay curious about the world! It can be extremely tempting to narrow your focus further and further, until you end up like one of those academics who is the utmost authority on the chickens of 1500s Cornwall but is completely lost the moment you hit 1600 or go to the next town over. Putting on those blinders narrows your thinking, and it becomes increasingly liable you’ll mistake 1500s Cornwall chickens for the global reality of all chickens everywhere. This is how you get guys like Ralph Allison, who became increasingly convinced of his own crackpot religious multi theories over time, or those equally obnoxious multi academics who only accept THEIR kind of multi as real because to do otherwise would ruin their precious theories. That’s foolish. Don’t be like those guys! Explore outside your milieu! Keep multiple interests going!
This isn’t just to prevent going up your own ass. A LOT of marginalized ANYTHING history is hidden between the lines, a one-sentence footnote in an otherwise completely unrelated book. If you aren’t READING those unrelated books, you won’t find the data! Among our “one-sentence wonders” include:
* a reference to a sex worker marrying Santa Muerte (a female grim reaper venerated mostly by people living under violence and oppression in Mexico)
* a lesbian, Robin Finkelstein, describing how “After I read Stone Butch Blues, I related so much to Leslie Feinberg’s character that I seriously thought maybe I was Jess [the main character] reincarnated. I actually sorta believed that for a while.” (Marie Cartier’s Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, London and New York: Routledge, pg. 139)
* Maya Deren describing how to felt to be mounted by a loa, despite not being a Vodouisant herself (admittedly, this is a whole chapter... in the appendices of the book version of Divine Horsemen)
* Harry Hay saying that being gay gave him an outlook on life that meant he extended egalitarian personhood (or what he calls subject-to-subject relations) to not only other gay men, but “my fantasy love,” “my teddy bear,” “the talking trees and the handsome heroes in my picture-books.” (“A Separate People Whose Time Has Come,” in Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987, pg. 283-284)
* Arthur Evans explicitly drawing a correlation between gay sex and noncorporeal sex, to the point of having a whole chapter on it in his unfinished book, Moon Lady Rising: “sex with them [demons] was considered the moral equivalent of ‘buggery’ (meaning both ‘heresy’ and ‘homosexuality’).” (The Evans Symposium, Granville: White Crane Press, 2018, pg. 253) That one fucking line sent me on a research rabbit hole that’s still ongoing, to see if there really are correlations between queer sex and noncorporeal sex in the record, or if that was just Evans wondering!
All of these things came from books that weren’t about multi at all! They’re all queer religion books, and only one of them is academic. The others were popular or small presses, of varying levels of fame.
I’ve also found a truckload of stuff while volunteering at the sci-fi library. You’d be amazed how many authors will just flat-out admit they channeled their characters in an author’s note in some crusty old anthology! By reading all sorts of things, we keep learning, and the same goes for whatever medium you prefer.
If you restrict yourself to specific search terms, you restrict yourself to the times and places that specific term was used. For example, DID wasn’t used before 1994, and remained a USA-only term for a long time after; if you restrict yourself to DID, you won’t get far. And especially as you get further and further abroad, you’ll encounter folks using their own words for what’s going on, like Harry Hay’s “subject-to-subject.” You have to stay open and pay attention to the experiences being described, not just the vocabulary words used for them. (This goes both ways; I’ve found that “spirit possession” encompasses many experiences that I don’t consider multi at all.) You have to be willing to question and change your own opinions about what those experiences mean.
Over time, the stuff I’ve grown more interested in (and which I habitually and incorrectly call “multi” when on my own, because there is no simple word encompassing it all) is a hodgepodge of spirit marriage, possession, body sharing, psychological/imaginative landscapes, and relationships with beings deemed not (corpo)real by the mainstream society around me. It’s not a rigorous or unified definition. Mostly, it’s just what I want to learn about!
And fortunately, that stuff can be found in all sorts of sources, not just academic works that can be expensive and hard to obtain (and let’s be honest, awful to read). There’s all sorts of little bits and pieces hiding out there, and you don’t need a PhD to read them!
I feel like when I focused exclusively on self-proclaimed “plural” subcultures, what I read was homogenized and blah. It was like eating a steady diet of mayo on Wonder Bread. It was only by venturing farther afield, going further back in time, that I started feeling nourished properly.
Stay curious. Ask the next question. Don’t become the Cornwall chicken guy.
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Date: 2025-11-16 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-11-16 10:46 pm (UTC)