Nomad Codes

today is anything like the pwes Spiro visited in the 1960s, ladyboys—whether crossdressers or more hormonally driven hermaphrodites—dominate the sacred congress between nats and human life.
    In the modern West, people celebrate tranny culture, when they do, because of the way the transgendered scramble and expand forms of sexual identity and erotic possibility. But many traditional cultures have recognized that transgendered folks—whether “homosexual” or something more ambiguous—also have a sacred and numinous power. From the primal hermaphrodites of Chaldean and gnostic myth to the mystic crossdressers of South Sulawesi to the Native American “Two-Spirit,” who often serves as both an oracle and healer, transgendered people have the power to pass between the worlds, to draw down the gods, to penetrate and contain the cosmic mystery sustained by the primal polarity between masculine and feminine. On the most mystic level, the transgendered being embodies the coincidentia oppositorum , the union of opposites captured in the alchemical androgynes of German spiritualists like Jacob Boehme and Franz von Baader, and later of Jung. Here the anatomical wonders of the ladyboy—monstrous to some—are spiritualized into a “perfect man,” an Adam Kadmon characterized by a primal wholeness that lies beyond gender.
    The sacred hermaphrodite is a crossroads being. Holding masculine and feminine in her left and right hand, he is also characterized by another, more vertical polarity: between the “higher” spiritualized androgyny of perfect union and the polymorphous eroticism of the sexual depths. So while Burma’s nat kadaw certainly serve an oracular and even sacred function, they are also hip-deep in the erotic. According to Spiro, who makes curious asides about the temptations of “bottom-pinching” stirred up by Taungbyon’s crowds, the nat kadaw are frequently initiated into their roles through sexual visions. Like medieval incubi, nats often approach their future servitors in dreams, seducing and then fucking them. Many people so approached marry their nats ritually and become mediums— nat kadaw means “nat spouse.”
    For most, there is not a lot of choice in the matter—nats are capricious and vengeful players, and it takes a lot of guts to reject their advances. Sometimes the nats allow their new spouses to continue ordinary sexual relationships, but mostly they jealousy demand fidelity. From a more sociological perspective, the call of the nat serves as perfect cover for individuals born into Burmese society who do not confirm to standard heterosexual identities; the role of the nat kadaw offers “the third gender” an avenue toward status and financial power otherwise nearly impossible to achieve. At the same time, they continue to carry a transgressive and threatening sexual charge—though the nat kadaw are respected for their oracular skills, they are also suspected of being promiscuous sluts or even prostitutes.
    To J and me, the nat kadaw largely seemed like voodoo voguers, exuberantly kicking up their heels in the superstitious limelight. After squeezing through the crowd that thronged one pwe enclosure, J and I were approached by a friendly character wearing a baseball cap and a lime-green Hawaiian shirt decorated with dolphins. With the proud air of a successful entrepreneur, he invited us to join his extended family inside the enclosure for the next pwe, which he had sponsored. A sponsor like him might pay around two hundred bucks to rent the stall and hire the orchestra and the mediums, who often accompany the sponsor from his home town (the orchestra stays put as different mediums and sponsored groups come and go). The sponsor’s fee does not include the whiskey or cigarettes consumed by the nats and occasionally dolled out to the devotees who crowd the floor between the orchestra and the altar. Nor does the fee cover the wads of crisp, small denomination bills that the mediums in turn throw at the crowd, who lunge for this “lucky money” like contestants at a game show.
    J and I followed the sponsor into a dark, musty room that abutted the enclosure, where the two nat kadaw he had hired, bedecked in elaborate head gear and lacy white robes tied with thick red sashes, were quietly waiting for their turns on the stage. The boss medium must have been in her fifties, a shriveled and leathery ladyboy, imperiously fanning herself in the gloom. Her partner was younger, moon-faced