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resplendent-ragamuffin · 2 months

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I have encountered issues with JVP in the past in regards to not accommodating kashrut/shabbat observance (and wheelchairs), but previously hasn’t heard about the Mikvah thing. Do you have any sources I can refer to?

Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. The noise I made when I saw this ask.

You are probably unaware but I have literally been working on a post on this topic since February. Bless you for asking me about it and giving me a reason to share it. Genuinely. I'm delighted.

Without further ado, now that I've finally finished:

On the JVP Mikveh BS

Some of you are no doubt aware of the Jewish Voice for Peace Mikveh Guide (on JVP’s website here, and here on the Wayback Machine in case that link breaks). You may have seen the post I reblogged about it, you may have seen the post about JVP in general on @is-the-thing-actually-Jewish, or you may have heard about it elsewhere. Or maybe you’ve somehow managed to avoid all knowledge of its existence. (God I wish that were me.) Even if you know about it, even if you’ve scanned through it, you probably haven’t taken the time to read it through properly.

I have.

God help me.

I was originally looking through it to help draft the @is-the-thing-actually-Jewish post back in February, but some terrible combination of horror, indignation, and probably masochism compelled me to do a close reading, so that I could write this analysis and share it with you, dear readers. For those of you who’ve never heard of a mikvah, for those of you who’ve immersed in one, for those of you who’ve studied it intensely—I give you this, the fruit of my suffering, so you too can understand why “Mikveh: A Purification Ritual for Personal and Collective Transformation,” written by Zohar Lev Cunningham and Rebekah Erev for Jewish Voice for Peace has got so many people up in arms.

Brace yourselves. It’s going to be a long journey.

First off, a disclaimer: When I say something is “required in Jewish law” or whatnot, I’m talking about in traditional practice / Torah-observant communities; what is often called “Orthodox.” There’s a wide range of Jewish practice, and what is required in frum (observant) Judaism may not be required in Reform Judaism, etc. Don’t at me.

Second note: I myself am Modern Orthodox, and come from that perspective. I’m also very much more on the rationalist side than the mysticism side of things. I did run this past people from other communities. Still, if I’ve missed or misrepresented something, it was my error and was not meant maliciously.

Third: I am not a rabbi. I am a nerd who likes explaining things and doing deep dives. Again, I may have made errors–please let me know if you spot any, and I’d be happy to discuss them.

Now then. Before we get into the text itself, let’s give some background.

WHAT IS THIS MIKVEH THING ANYWAY?

A mikveh (or mikvah, both they and I switch between spellings; plural mikva’ot) is a Jewish ritual bath, sometimes translated as an immersion pool. Some communities or organizations that run mikva’ot will have a single all-purpose all-purpose, some have separate human- and utensil-pools, and some have separate women’s and men’s pools. The majority of the water in a mikvah has to be “living waters,” i.e. naturally collected rather than from a tap or a bucket. Some natural bodies of water can also be used, such as the ocean and some rivers (ask your local rabbi). The construction is complicated and has extremely detailed requirements. Here’s an example of a modern mikvah:

(By Wikimedia Commons (ויקיגמדון) - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17373540)

Whoever is being dunked (the scientific term) has to be entirely immersed, and the water has to be in direct contact with all of them. That means no clothes, no makeup, no hair floating on the top of the water, no feet touching the floor, no clenched fists. You have to be completely clean as well, so no dirt is obstructing you from the water.

In essence, a person or thing is immersed in a mikvah to change their/its state from tameh (ritually “impure”) to tahor (ritually “pure”). I use quotes because “pure/impure” aren’t really good translations—they have value judgments that tameh/tahor don’t. There’s nothing wrong with being tameh, you aren’t lesser because you are tameh—it’s just a state one enters when one comes into contact with death and related concepts. (There are also different levels of both.) As a matter of fact, technically speaking even after going to a mikvah basically all people are tameh now—the tum’ah (“impurity,” sort of) that comes from contact with dead humans can only be removed by the Red Heifer offering (see Numbers 19), which we can’t do without the Temple. (Why I say “all” even if you’ve never been to a funeral is a much much longer tangent that I’ll spare you for now.) To quote one of my editors on this, mikvah is “about the natural oscillation between states of ritual purity and impurity. Men go to mikveh after having seminal emissions. Menstruating women go to mikveh on a monthly basis (emphasis added).” It’s just states of life.

In the days of the Temple, one had to be tahor to enter it (the Temple). Archaeologists have found a ton of ancient mikva’ot in Jerusalem that were presumably used by people visiting the Temple, which personally I think is extremely cool.

Nowadays, there are three main traditionally required uses for a mikvah. First, and most importantly, observant married women will go about once a month as part of their niddah (menstrual) cycle, part of practice known as Taharat HaMishpacha, or “Family ‘Purity,’” which at its root is a way to sanctify the relationship between spouses. Until she immerses, a wife and husband cannot resume relations. And not just sex—in some communities, they can’t sleep in the same bed or even have any physical contact at all.

The second use is for conversion—immersion is a central part of the conversion ceremony. One enters the water a gentile, and emerges a Jew.

The third usage is a bit different as it’s not for people. Tableware—plates, cups, etc.—made of certain materials have to be immersed before they can be used. This isn’t what the Guide is about, so I’m not going to go into that as much, but felt remiss if I didn’t mention it was a thing. If you want to know more, Chabad has an article on it here.

Aside from uses required by Jewish law, there is a strong tradition in some communities for men to go to the mikveh just before Yom Kippur, or sometimes every week before the Sabbath, to enter the holiday in as “pure” a state as possible these days. (The things they’re “purifying” from still made them tameh, it just matters less without the Temple.) There is also a strong custom to immerse before one’s wedding. Less traditional communities have also started using mikvah for other transitional moments, such as significant birthdays or remission from cancer. There has recently been an “open mikvah” movement, which “is committed to making mikveh accessible to Jews of all denominations, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and abilities (Rising Tide Network old website, “Why Open Mikvah”).”

To quote others:

No other religious establishment, structure or rite can affect the Jew in this way and, indeed, on such an essential level. —Rebbetzen Rivkah Slonim, Total Immersion, as quoted on Chabad.org

The mikveh is one of the most important parts of a Jewish community. —Kylie Ora Lobell, “What Is a Mikveh?” on Aish.com

How important? According to Rav Moshe Feinstein, one of the great American rabbis of the 20th century, one should build a mikveh before building a synagogue in a town that has neither, and even in a town where there is a mikveh but it’s an inconvenient distance away from the community (Igros Moshe: Choshen Mishpat Chelek 1 Siman 42).

A mikveh is more important than a synagogue.

I’d say that’s pretty important.

Tl;dr: A mikveh is the conduit through which a convert becomes a part of the Jewish people. It is traditionally used to sanctify the relationship between spouses. It was required for people to go to the Temple, back when we still had it. It is extremely central to Jewish practice.

So. What does JVP have to say about it?

THE JVP MIKVEH GUIDE

The document in question is titled “Mikveh: A Purification Ritual for Personal and Collective Transformation,” by Zohar Lev Cunningham and Rebekah Erev. I am largely going to quote directly from the text and then analyze and explain it.

Now let me be clear. I’m not trying to say the authors aren’t Jewish. I’m not saying they’re bad people, or that you should attack them. I am not intending any of this as an ad hominem attack. But given the contents of this document, I do think it is fair to call this appropriative, even if it is of their own culture—in the same way someone can have internalized racism, or twist feminism into being a TERF, I would argue that this is twisting Judaism into paganism. In fact, while I use “appropriation” throughout this document, an extremely useful term that’s been coined recently is “cultural expropriation”--essentially, appropriative actions done by rogue members of the community in question. One example of this would be the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles, which is the source of a lot of the Madonna-style “pop Kabbalah.” It was founded by an Orthodox Jewish couple, but it and its followers are widely criticized by most Jewish communities. In much the same way, the Guide is expropriation.

We start off with a note from the authors.

Hello, Welcome to the Simple Mikveh Guide. This work comes out of many years of reclaiming and re-visioning mikveh. The intention of this guide is to acknowledge and give some context to what mikveh is, provide resources related to mainstream understanding of mikveh and also provide alternative mikveh ideas. Blessings for enjoyment of this wonderful, simple Jewish ritual! Zohar Lev Cunningham & Rebekah Erev

This is fairly normal, though “alternative mikveh ideas” is a bit odd to say. I also find “blessings for enjoyment” to be odd phrasing, somewhat reminiscent of the Wiccan “Blessed Be,” but it could be a typo.

The first main section is titled “Intro to Mikveh,” and begins as follows:

Mikveh is an ancient Jewish ritual practice of water immersion, traditionally used for cleansing, purification, and transformation. It's been conventionally used for conversion to Judaism, for brides, and for niddah, the practice of cleansing after menstruation.

This is relatively accurate, and credit where credit is due avoids making niddah out to be patriarchal BS. I do object slightly to “purify” as a translation without further explanation, as I went into above, and “cleansing” for similar reasons—it implies “dirtiness,’ which isn’t really what tum’ah is about. Also, though this is pretty minor, a bride going to the mikveh before her wedding is actually a part of the laws of niddah. I’d also note that they entirely leave out that it was important for going to the Temple in ancient times, though given this is published by JVP I’m not terribly surprised.

For Jews, water signifies the transformative moment from slavery in Egypt, through the parted Red Sea, and into freedom.

On the one hand, I suppose it’s not unreasonable to connect the Red Sea and mikveh, though I think I’d be more likely to hear it the other way around (i.e. “going through the sea was like the people immersing in a mikveh and being ‘cleansed,’ so to speak”). Though they were, rather importantly, not actually immersed in the water. However I don’t think I’d say water as a whole signifies the Splitting of the Sea. In fact, water imagery is more often used to signify the Torah, see for instance Bava Kamma 82a.

There is also a mystical connection to mikveh as a metaphor for the womb of the divine.

A mikveh being like a womb is also not uncommon. It’s found in the Reishis Chochmah (Shia’ar HaAhavah 11,58) and the writing of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (The Aryeh Kaplan Anthology, vol 2., p. 382; both as quoted in 50 Mikvahs That Shaped History, by Rabbi Ephraim Meth), see also “The Mikveh’s Significance in Traditional Conversion” by Rabbi Maurice Lamm on myjewishlearning. Filled with water, you float in it, you emerge a new being (at least for conversion); it’s not an absurd comparison to draw. I’m not sure I’ve found anything for the Womb of the Divine specifically, though. (Also, Divine should definitely be capitalized.)

Entering a mikveh is a transformative and healing experience and we have long wondered why it is not available to more people, including the significant trans and queer populations in Jewish communities.

So. I am NOT going to say there’s no problem with homophobia and/or transphobia in Jewish communities. It’s definitely a community issue, and many communities are grappling with it in various ways as we speak. And I’m certainly not going to say the authors didn’t have the experience of not having a mikveh available to them—I don’t know their lives, I’m not going to police their experiences.

However, while Orthodox mikvahs are often still restricted to married women (who by virtue of the community will generally be cis and married to men) and potentially adult men (given the resources and customs, as mentioned above), there are plenty of more liberal mikva’ot these days. Some even explicitly offer rituals for queer events! The list of reasons to go to the mikvah linked up above, for instance, includes:

(Mayyim Hayyim, “Immersion Ceremonies”)

Again, that’s not to say there aren’t issues of queerphobia in the Jewish community, but if you are queer and want to go to the mikvah, there are options out there. If you’re looking, I’ve included some links at the end.

When we make ritual, we are working with the divine forces of presence and intention. The magic of mikveh comes in making contact with water. Contact with water marks a threshold and functions as a portal to bring closer our ritual intention/the world to come.

This is…a weird way to put things. I would say this is the start of the red flags. “When we make ritual,” first of all, is, to quote @the-library-alcove (who helped edit this), “a turn of phrase that is not typically associated with any branch of Jewish practice; we have a lot--a LOT--of rituals, and while it's certainly not completely outside of the realm of Jewish vernacular, the tone here, especially in light of the later sections, starts veering towards the vernacular of neo-paganism.” One might say “make kiddush” (the blessing over wine on Shabbos and holidays) or “make motzi” (the blessing over bread), but not generally “make ritual.”

The next section is titled “Who Gets to Do Mikveh?” Their answer:

Everyone! Mikveh practice is available to all of us as a healing tool at any time.

The healing tool part isn’t the original purpose of mikveh, but there are some who have used it as a part of emotional recovery from something traumatic, by marking a new state of being free from whatever caused it, see for instance Mayyim Hayyim’s list linked above.

The “everyone” bit is a little more complicated. To explain why, we’re going to skip ahead a little. (Some of these quotes will also be analyzed in full later.)

We want to make mikveh practice available as a tool to all Jews and non-Jews who want to heal wounds caused by white supremacy and colonialism. [..] To us, a queer mikveh welcomes anyone, regardless of spiritual background or not. […] Queer mikveh is accessible physically and spiritually to any and all people who are curious about it. You don't have to be a practicing Jew to enter queer mikveh. You don't have to be Jewish. (pg. 2, emphasis added)

Now, I am told there are mikva’ot that allow non-Jews to immerse. I have yet to find them, so I don’t know what rituals they allow non-Jews to do. I also haven’t been able to find any resources on non-Jews being allowed to immerse. I have found quite a few that explicitly prohibit it. If there are any sources you know of, please send them to me! I’d love to see them! But so far everything I have come across has said that mikvah immersion is a closed practice that only Jews can participate in. (Technically, to quote the lovely @etz-ashashiot, any non-Jew can do mikvah…once. And they won’t be non-Jews when they emerge. There is also one very extreme edge-case, which is absolutely not mainstream knowledge or practice, and basically isn’t actually done. You can message me if you’re curious, but it’s really not relevant to this–and even in that case, it is preferable to use a natural mikvah rather than a man-made one.)

If there are any legitimate sources that allow non-Jews to do a mikvah ritual, I would assume said non-Jews would be required to be respectful about it. Unfortunately, this is how the paragraph we began with continues:

Who Gets to Do Mikveh? Everyone! Mikveh practice is available to all of us as a healing tool at any time. You don't need any credentials. Your own wisdom is all the power you need to be a Jewish ritual leader. (emphasis added)

This is where we really go off the rails. First of all, you need more than “wisdom” to lead a Jewish ritual. You need to actually know what you’re doing. You can’t just say “oh you know what I feel like the right thing to do for morning prayers is to pray to the sun, because God created the sun so the sun is worth worshiping, and this is a Jewish ritual I’m doing.” That’s just idolatry. Like straight up I stole that from a midrash (oral tradition) about how humanity went from speaking with God in the Garden of Eden to worshiping idols in the time of Noah (given here by Maimonides; note that it continues for a few paragraphs after the one this link sends you to).

Second of all, this is particularly bad given this guide is explicitly to Jews and non-Jews. As @daughter-of-stories put it when she was going over an earlier draft of this analysis, “they are saying that non-Jews can just declare themselves Jewish ritual leaders based on nothing but their own ‘wisdom.’”

I hope I don’t need to explain why that’s extremely bad and gross?

While we’re on the topic of non-Jews using a mikvah, let’s take a moment to address an accusation commonly mentioned alongside the mikvah guide: that JVP also encourages (or encouraged) self-conversion.

I have been unable to find a separate document where they explicitly said so, or an older version of this document that does. This leads me to believe that either a) the accusation came from a misreading of this document, or b) there was a previous document that contained it which has since been deleted but was not archived in the Wayback Machine. EITHER is possible.

Even in the case that there was no such document, however, I would point out that such a suggestion can be read–intentionally or not–as implicit in this document. This is a guide for mikvah use by both Jews and non-Jews, and includes an idea that non-Jews can perform Jewish rituals on their own without any guidance or even background knowledge, as quoted above. Why would a non-Jew, coming into Jewish practice with very little knowledge, go looking to perform a mikvah ritual?

I would wager that the most well-known purpose of immersing in a mikvah is for the purpose of conversion.

Nowhere in this guide is there any explicit statement that you can do a self-conversion, but it also doesn’t say anywhere that you can’t, or that doing so is an exception to “you don’t need any credentials” or “your own wisdom is all the power you need to be a Jewish ritual leader.” It may not be their intention, but the phrasing clearly leaves it as an option.

Even if this were from a source that one otherwise loved, this would be upsetting and disappointing. The amount of exposure this document is getting may be at least in part because it comes from JVP, but the distress and dismay would be there regardless. If there is further vitriol, it’s only because JVP is often considered a legitimate source by outsiders, if no one else–in other words, by the very people least likely to have the background to know that this document isn’t trustworthy. It’s like the difference between your cousin telling you “the Aztecs were abducted by aliens” versus a mainstream news program like Fox reporting it. Both are frustrating and wrong, but one has significantly more potential harm than the other, and therefore is more likely to get widespread criticism (even if you complain about your cousin online).

On the other hand, as one of my editors pointed out in a moment of dark humor, they do say you don’t have to be Jewish to lead a Jewish ritual, so perhaps that mitigates this issue slightly by taking away a motivation to convert in the first place.

Returning to our document:

We do mikvahs in lakes, rivers, bathtubs, showers, outside in the rain, from teacups, and in our imaginations.

At this point the rails are but a distant memory.

In case you’ve forgotten what I said about this at the beginning of this post (and honestly I wouldn’t blame you, we’re on pg. 9 in my draft of this), there are extremely strict rules about what qualifies as a mikvah. Maimonides’s Mishnah Torah, just about the most comprehensive codex of Jewish law, has eleven chapters on the topic of the mikvah (though that includes immersion in it as well as construction of it). I’m not going to make you read through it, but let’s go through the list in this sentence:

Lakes and rivers: you might be able to use a river or lake as a mikvah, but you need to check with your local rabbinical authority, because not all of them qualify. In general, the waters must gather together naturally, from an underground spring or rainwater. In the latter case, the waters must be stationary rather than flowing. A river that dries up in a drought can’t be used, for instance. (The ocean counts as a spring, for this purpose.)

Bathtubs and showers: No. A man-made mikveh must be built into the ground or as an essential part of a building, unlike most bathtubs, and contain of a minimum of 200 gallons of rainwater, gathered and siphoned in a very particular way so as not to let it legally become “groundwater.” Also, it needs to be something you can immerse in, which a shower is not.

Outside in the rain: No? How would you even do that?? What??

Teacups: Even if you were Thumblina or K’tonton (Jewish Tom Thumb), and could actually immerse your entire body in a teacup, it wouldn’t be a kosher mikvah as a mivkah can’t be portable.

In your imagination: Obviously not, what the heck are you even talking about

We will (unfortunately) be coming back to the teacup thing, but for now suffice it to say most of these are extremely Not A Thing.

Mikveh has been continually practiced since ancient Judaism. It is an offering of unbroken Jewish lineage that we have claimed/reclaimed as our own.

I find the use of “claimed/reclaimed” fascinating here, given this guide is explicitly for non-Jews—who, whether or not they are permitted to use a mikvah, certainly shouldn’t be claiming it as their own—as well as Jews. I find it particularly interesting given the lack of clarity of how much of JVP’s membership is actually Jewish and JVP’s history of encouraging non-Jewish members to post “as Jews.” Kind of telling on yourselves a bit, there.

(Once again, I’m not commenting on the authors themselves, but the organization they represent here and the audience they are speaking to/for.)

We want to make mikveh practice available as a tool to all Jews and non-Jews who want to heal wounds caused by white supremacy and colonialism. We want to make mikveh practice available for healing our bodies, spirits, and the earth.

Setting aside the “Jews and non-Jews” thing, since I talked about that earlier and this is already extremely long, I do want to highlight the end of the paragraph. While there are some modern uses of the mikvah to (sort of) heal the spirit, I haven’t heard of anyone using a mikvah to heal the body—as a general rule Jews don’t tend to do faith healing, though of course some sects are the exception. Healing the earth, however, is absolutely not a use of a mikvah. Mikvah rituals, as we’ve now mentioned several times, are about tahara of a person or an object, and require immersion. You can’t immerse the earth in a mikvah. The earth contains mikva’ot. Healing the earth with a mikvah is a very strange worship (IYKYK).

We acknowledge that not all beings have consistent access to water, including Palestinians.

This is a tragedy, no question. I don't mean to minimize that. However, it is also unrelated to the matter at hand. The Guide also doesn’t give any recommendations on how we can help improve water access, so this lip service is all you get.

A lack of water does not make mikveh practice inaccessible.

Yes, in fact, it does. Without a kosher mikvah of one variety or another one cannot do anything that requires a mikvah. That’s why building a kosher one is so important. I haven’t gone looking for it, but while I’m sure there’s lots (and lots and lots and lots) of Rabbinic responsa out there of what to do in drought situations, you definitely do need water in all but the most extreme cases. If you do not have water, AYLR (Ask Your Local Rabbi)--don’t do whatever this is.

The spirit of water can be present with us if we choose to call for water, so even when water is not physically available to us we can engage in mikveh practice.

This is just straight up avodah zarah (“strange worship,” i.e. idolatry) as far as I can tell. The “spirit of the water”? What? We’re not Babylonians worshiping Tiamat. What source is there for this? Is there a source??

Like all material resources, the ways water is or is not available to us is shaped by our geographic and social locations. The ways we relate to water, what we decide is clean, treyf (dirty), drinkable, bathable, how much we use, how much we save, varies depending on our experiences. We invite you to decide what is clean and holy for your own body and spiritual practice.

This is going to require some breaking down.

To start with, let’s define “treyf.” To quote myjewishlearning, “Treyf (sometimes spelled treif or treyfe) is a Yiddish word used for something that is not kosher [lit. "fit"]. The word treyf is derived from the Hebrew word treifah, which appears several times in the Bible and means 'flesh torn by beasts.' The Torah prohibits eating flesh torn by beasts, and so the word treifah came to stand in for all forbidden foods.”

You may note the lack of the word “dirty” in this definition, or any other value judgments. Myjewishlearning continues, “over time, the words kosher and treyf have been used colloquially beyond the world of food to describe anything that Jews deem fit or unfit.” While this does have something of a value judgment, it’s still not “dirty.” I can’t say why the authors chose to translate the word this way, but…I don’t like it.

Now, when it comes to what is kosher or treyf, food and drink are most certainly not based on “our experiences.” There are entire books on the rules of kashrut; it generally takes years of study to understand all the minutiae. Even as someone who was raised in a kosher household, when I worked as a mashgicha (kosher certification inspector) I needed special training. What is considered kadosh (“sacred” or “holy,” though again that’s not a perfect translation) or tahor is also determined by very strict rules. We don’t just decide things based on “vibes.” That’s not how anything in Jewish practice works.

Water, in fact, is always kosher to drink unless it has bugs or something else treyf in it. And mikvehs aren’t even always what I’d consider “drinkable;” I always wash utensils I’ve brought to the mikvah before I use them.

We come to our next heading: What is Queer Mikveh?

What is Queer Mikveh? To us, a queer mikveh welcomes anyone, regardless of spiritual background or not.

As I’ve said above, I have yet to find a single source (seriously if you have one please send it to me) that says non-Jews can go to a mikvah. As one of my editors for this put it, “to spin appropriation of Jewish closed practices as ‘queer’ is not only icky but deeply disrespectful to actual queer Jews.”

Also, and this is not remotely the point, but “regardless of spiritual background or not” is almost incoherently poor writing.

As Jews in diaspora we want to share and use our ritual practices for healing the land and waters we are visitors on for the liberation of all beings.

I have tried to be semi-professional about this analysis, but. “Jews in the diaspora,” you say. Tell me, JVP, where are we in the diaspora from? Hm? Where are we in diaspora from? Which land do we come from? Which land are we indigenous to, JVP? Do tell.

Returning to the point, I would repeat that mikvah has nothing to do with “healing the land and waters.” It’s ritual purification of whatever is immersed in it. You want to heal the land and waters? Go to your local environmental group, and/or whoever maintains your local land and waters. Pick up trash. Start recycling. Weed invasive species. Call your government and tell them to support green energy. You want liberation for all beings? Fight bigotry—including antisemitism. Judaism believes in action—go act. Appropriating rituals from a closed religion doesn’t liberate anyone.

We have come up with this working definition and welcome feedback!

Oh good, maybe I won’t be yelled at for posting this (she said dubiously).

Queer mikveh is a ritual of Jews in diaspora. We believe the way we work for freedom for all beings is by using the gifts of our ancestors for the greatest good. We bring our rituals as gifts.

I have nothing in particular new to say about this, except that I find the idea of “bringing our rituals as gifts” for anyone to use deeply uncomfortable, given Judaism is a closed religion that strongly discourages non-Jews from joining us, and that has had literal millennia of people appropriating from us.

It acknowledges that our path is to live on lands that are not historically our peoples [sic] and we honor the Indigenous ancestors of the land we live on, doing mikveh as an anti-colonialist ritual for collective and personal liberation.

Again I would love so much for JVP to tell us which lands would historically be our people’s. What land do Jews come from, JVP? What land is it we do have a historical connection to? What land do our Indigenous ancestors come from??

And why does it have to be our path to live on lands other than that one?

Secondly, to quote the lovely @daughter-of-stories again when she was editing this, “Mikveh as anti-colonialism, aside from not being what Mikveh is, kinda implies that you can cleanse the land of the sins of colonialism. So (a) that’s just a weird bastardization of baptism since, mikveh isn’t about cleansing from sin, and (b) so does that mean the colonialism is erased? Now we don’t have to actually deal with how it affects actual indigenous people?”

I’m sure that (b) isn’t their intent, but I will say that once again they don’t give any material suggestions for how to actually liberate any collectives or persons from colonialism in this document, including any links to other pages on their own website*, which surely would have been easy enough. It comes across as very performative.

*I disagree strongly with most of their methods, but at least they are suggesting something.

Queer mikveh is a physical or spiritual space that uses the technologies of water and the Jewish practice of mikveh to mark transitions. Transition to be interpreted by individuals and individual ritual.

I have no idea what the “technologies of water” are. Also usage of a mikvah to mark transitions beyond ritual states is a fairly new innovation, as mentioned above.

Queer mikveh in it's [sic] essence honors the story of the water. The historical stories of the water we immerse in, the stories of our own bodies as water and the future story we vision [sic].

This just sounds like a pagan spinoff of baptism to me, if I’m being honest. Which would be non-Jewish in several ways.

Queer mikveh is accessible physically and spiritually to any and all people who are curious about it. You don't have to be a practicing Jew to enter queer mikveh. You don't have to be Jewish.

First off, once again whether or not non-Jews can use mikvah seems at best extremely iffy. Secondly, accessibility in mikva’ot is, as one of my editors put it, “a continual discussion.” We have records of discussions regarding access for those with physical disabilities going back at least to the 15th century (Shut Mahari Bruna, 106; as quoted in 50 Mikvahs That Shaped History by Rabbi Ephraim Meth), and in the modern era there are mikva’ot that have lifts or other accessibility aids. That said, many mikva’ot, especially older ones, are still not accessible–and many mikva’ot don’t have the money to retrofit or renovate. Mikvah.org’s directory listings (linked at the end of this) notes whether various mikva’ot are accessible, if you are looking for one in your area. If you want to help make mikva’ot more accessible to the disabled, consider donating to an existing mikvah to help them pay for renovations or otherwise (respectfully) getting involved in the community. If you want to help make mikva’ot more accessible for non-Orthodox Jews, try donating to an open mikvah (see link to a map of Rising Tide members at the end of this essay) or other non-Orthodox mikvah.

Queer mikveh is an earth and water honoring ritual.

Not even a little. We do have (or had) rituals that honor the earth or water, at least to an extent–the Simchat Beit HaSho’evah (explanations here and here) was a celebration surrounding water; most of our holidays are harvest festivals to some extent or another; there are a large number of agricultural mitzvahs (though most can only be done in Israel, which I suppose wouldn’t work for JVP). (Note: mitzvahs are commandments and/or good deeds.) Even those, though, aren’t about the water or earth on their own, per se, but rather about honoring them as God’s gift to us. This description of mikvah sounds more Pagan or Wiccan–which is fine, but isn’t Jewish.

Queer mikveh exists whenever a queer person or queers gather to do mikveh. Every person is their own spiritual authority and has the power to create their own ritual for individual or collective healing.

Absolutely, anyone can create their own rituals for anything they want. But it probably won’t be a mikvah ritual, and it probably won’t be Jewish.

Do you know what it’s called when you make up your own ritual and claim that it’s actually a completely valid part of an established closed practice of which you aren’t part? (Remember—this document is aimed just as much at non-Jews as at Jews.)

It’s called appropriation.

With the next section, “Some Ideas for Mikveh Preparation,” we begin page three.

(Yes, we’re only on page three of seven. I’m so sorry.)

The most important part of mikveh preparation is setting an intention.

This isn’t entirely wrong, as you do have to have in mind the intention of fulfilling a mitzvah when you perform one.

Because mikveh is a ritual most used to mark transitions, you can frame your intention in that way.

To quote myself above, “usage of a mikvah to mark transitions beyond ritual states is a fairly new innovation.” I’d hardly say it is mostly used for marking transitions.

You can do journaling or talk with friends to connect with the Jewish month, Jewish holiday, Shabbat, the moon phase, and elements of the season that would support your intention.

If this were a guide for only Jews, or there was some sort of note saying this section was only for Jews, I would have less of a problem. But given neither is true, they are encouraging non-Jews to use the Jewish calendar for what is, from the rest of the descriptions in the Guide, a magical earth healing ritual.

This is 100% straight up appropriation.

The Jewish calendar is Jewish. Marking the new moon and creating a calendar was the first commandment given to us as a people, upon the exodus from Egypt. Nearly all our holidays are (aside from the harvest component, which is based on the Israeli agricultural seasons and required harvest offerings) based on specific parts of Jewish history. Passover celebrates the Exodus and our becoming a nation. Sukkot celebrates the Clouds of Glory that protected us in the desert. Shavuot celebrates being given the Torah.

According to some opinions, non-Jews literally aren’t allowed to keep Shabbat.

If you are a non-Jew and you are basing the collective earth healing ritual you have created under your own spiritual authority around Jewish holidays and calling it “mikvah,” you are appropriating Judaism.

Full stop.

This isn’t even taking into account the generally Pagan/witchy feel of the paragraph, with “moon phases” and “elements of the season.” Again, if you want to be a Pagan be a Pagan, but don’t call it Jewish.

Things only go further downhill with their next suggestion for preparation before you go to the mikvah.

Divination: A lot can be said about divination practices and Judaism.

There certainly is a lot to be said. First and foremost, there’s the fact that divination is forbidden in Judaism.

(Screenshot of Leviticus 19:26 from sefaria.org)

One method of divination they suggest is Tarot, which is a European method of cartomancy that seems to have begun somewhere in the 19th century, though the cards start showing up around the 15th. While early occultists tried to tie it to various older forms of mysticism, including Kabbalah, this was, to put it lightly, complete nonsense. (Disclaimer: this information comes from wikipedia; I’ve already spent so much time researching the mikvah stuff that I do not have the energy or interest to do a deep dive into the origin of Tarot. It isn’t Jewish, the rest is honestly just details.)

I have nothing against Tarot. I think it’s neat! The cards are often lovely! I have a couple of decks myself, and I use them for fun and card games. But divination via tarot is not Jewish. If I do any spreads, I make it very clear to anyone I’m doing it with that it is for fun and/or as a self-reflection tool, not as magic. Because that is extremely not allowed in Judaism.

The authors suggest a few decks to use, one of which is by one of the authors themselves. Another is “The Kabbalah Deck,” which—holy appropriation, Batman!

In case anyone is unaware, Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) is an extremely closed Jewish practice, even within Judaism. Traditionally it shouldn’t be studied by anyone who hasn’t already studied every other Jewish text (of which there are, I remind you, a lot), because it’s so easy to misinterpret. I mentioned this above briefly when explaining cultural expropriation. Pop Kabbalah (what Madonna does, what you see when they talk about “Ancient Kabbalistic Texts” on shows like Supernatural, the nonsense occultists and New-Agers like to say is “ancient Kabbalistic” whatever, it’s a wide span of appropriative BS) is gross, combining Kabbalah with Tarot is extremely gross. I’m not 100% sure, as the link in the pdf doesn’t work, but I believe they are referring to this deck by Edward Hoffman. For those of you who don’t want to click through, the Amazon description includes this:

(Screenshot from Amazon)

Returning to our text:

Another practice that's been used in Judaism for centuries is bibliomancy. You can use a book you find meaningful (or the Torah) and ask a question. Then, close your eyes, open the book to a page and place your finger down. Interpret the word or sentence you pointed at to help guide you to answer your question.

Bibliomancy with a chumash (Pentateuch) or tanach (Bible) in Jewish magic is kind of a thing, but the tradition of Jewish magic as a whole is very complicated and could be its own entirely different post. This one is already long enough. This usage of bibliomancy is clearly just appropriative new-age BS, though, especially given you can use “[any] book you find meaningful.”

Also, if you aren’t Jewish, please don’t use the Torah for ritual purposes unless you are doing it under very specific circumstances under the laws for B’nei Noach (“Children of Noah,” also called Righteous Gentiles; non-Jews who follow the 7 Noachide Laws).

Sit with your general intention or if you aren't sure, pose a question to the divination tool you are using. "What should be my intention for this mikveh?" "What needs transforming in my life?" "How can I transform my relationship with my body?"

As I hope I’ve made clear, there are very specific times when one uses a mikvah, even with more modern Open Mikvah rituals. You always know what your intention is well before going—to make yourself tahor, or mark a specific event. I’m not here to police how someone prepares mentally before they immerse—meditation is fine, even encouraged. But magic? Like this? That’s not a thing. And given the fact that divination specifically is not only discouraged but forbidden, this section in particular upset a lot of Jews who read it.

Those of us already upset by everything we’ve already covered were not comforted by how the Guide continues.

How to Prepare Physically For Mikveh: Some people like to think about entering the mikveh in the way their body was when they were born. By this we mean naked, without jewelry, with clean fingernails and brushed hair. This framing can be meaningful for many people.

We went into this at the beginning of this essay (about 6500 words ago), but this is in fact how Jewish law mandates one is required to immerse. This is certainly the case in most communities, whether you are immersing due to an obligation (as a married woman or a bride about to be married) or due to custom (as men in post-Temple practice) or due to non-traditional immersion (as someone coming out); wherever on the spectrum of observance one falls (as far as I could find). A mikvah isn’t a bath, it’s not about physical cleanliness—you must first thoroughly clean yourself, clip your nails, and brush your teeth. Nail polish and makeup are removed. There can’t be any barriers between you and the water. Most mikva’ot these days, particularly women’s mikva’ot, have preparation rooms so you can prep on site. When you immerse, you have to submerge completely—your hair can’t be floating above the water, your mouth can’t be pursed tightly, your hands can’t be clenched so the water can’t get to your palms. If you do it wrong, it doesn’t count and you have to do it again. It’s not a “framing,” it’s a ritual practice governed by ritual law.

We suggest you do mikveh in the way you feel comfortable for you and your experience.

This isn’t how this works. If you have a particularly extreme case, you can talk to a rabbi to see if there are any workarounds—for example, if excessive embarrassment would distract you from the ritual, you may be able to wear clothes that are loose enough that the water still makes contact with every millimeter of skin. But you need to consult with someone who knows the minutiae of the laws and requirements so you know if any exceptions or workarounds apply to you. That’s what a rabbi is for. That’s why they need to go to rabbinical school and get ordination. They have to study. That’s why you need to find a rabbi whose knowledge and personality you trust. For someone calling themselves a religious authority in Judaism to say “you can do whatever, no biggie” with such a critical ritual is…I’m not sure what the word I want is.

The idea is to feel vulnerable but also to claim your body as a powerful site of change that has the power to move us close to our now unrecognizable futures.

The idea is to bathe in the living waters and enter a state of taharah. Though that could be an idea you have in mind while you are doing it, I suppose. I could see at least one writer I know of saying something like this to specifically menstrual married (presumably cis) women performing Taharat HaMishpacha (family taharah, see above).

For some people, doing mikveh in drag will feel most vulnerable, with all your make-up and best attire.

Absolutely not a thing. As I said last paragraph, the goal isn’t to feel vulnerable or powerful or anything. It may feel vulnerable or powerful, but that is entirely besides the actual purpose of the ritual. What you get out of it on a personal emotional level has nothing to do with the religious goal of the religious practice.

And if you are wondering how one would submerge oneself in water in full drag, don’t worry, we’ll get there soon.

For some, wearing a cloth around your body until just before you dip is meaningful.

This is just how it’s usually done. Generally one is provided with a bathrobe, and one removes it before entering. You don’t just wander around the building naked. Or the beach, if you’re using the ocean.

If you were born intersex and your genitalia was changed without your consent, thinking about your body as perfect, however you were born, can be loving.

I’m not intersex, so I’m not going to comment on the specifics here. If you are and that’s meaningful to you, more power to you.

We enter a new section, at the top of page 4.

Where To Do Mikveh: There is much midrash around what constitutes a mikveh.

“Midrash” is not the word they want here. The midrash is the non-legal side of the oral tradition, often taking the form of allegory or parable. This is as opposed to the mishna, which is the halachic (legal) side of the oral tradition. They were both written down around the same time, but most midrashim (plural) are in their own books, rather than incorporated in the mishna.

There is, however, a great deal of rabbinic discussion, in the form of mishna, gemara, teshuvot (responsa), legal codices, and various other genres of Jewish writing. More properly this could have just said “there is much discussion around what constitutes a mikveh.”

Most mikvot currently exist in Orthodox synagogues[—]

This is perhaps a minor quibble, but I don’t know that I’d say they’re generally in synagogues. They are frequently associated with a local congregation, but are often in a separate building.

[—]but there is a growing movement to create more diverse and inclusive spaces for mikveh. Mayyim Hayyim is a wonderful resource with a physical body of water mikveh space. Immerse NYC is a newer organization training people of all genders to be mikveh guides. They also work to find gender inclusive spaces for people to do mikveh in NYC.

This is true! Mayyim Hayyim is a wonderful organization I’ve never heard anything bad about, and ImmerseNYC also seems like an excellent organization. Both also only allow Jews (in which group I am including in-process converts) to immerse.

The mikveh guides thing I didn’t explain above, so I’ll take a moment to do so here. Because the rules of immersion are so strict, and because it’s hard to tell if you are completely immersed when you are underwater, most mikva’ot have a guide helping you. Depending on the circumstance and the mikvah, and depending on the patron’s comfort, who and how they do their jobs can differ somewhat. For a woman immersing after niddah, it will usually be another woman who will hold up the towel or bathrobe for you while you get in the water, and will only look from behind it once you are immersed to make sure you are completely submerged. If you are converting, customs vary. Some communities require men to witness the immersion regardless of the convert’s gender, which is very much an ongoing discussion in those communities. Even in those cases, to my knowledge they will only look once the convert is in the water, and there will likely still be a female attendant if the convert is a woman. While there are negative experiences people have had, it is very much an intra-community issue. We’re working on it.

Mikveh can be done in a natural body of water.

Again, this is true, though not all bodies of water work, so AYLR (Ask Your Local Rabbi).

Some people are also making swimming pools holy places of mikveh.

We’ve already explained above why this is nonsense.

In the Mishneh (the book that makes commentary on the torah [sic]) there are arguments as to what constitutes a mikveh and how much water from a spring or well or rainwater must be present.

The main issue in this section is their definition of the Mishneh. As I explained above, the Mishna (same thing, transliteration is not an exact science) is the major compilation of the Oral Torah, the oral tradition that was written down by Rabbi Judah Ha-Nasi so it wouldn’t be lost in the face of exile and assimilation. It’s not so much a commentary on the (Written) Torah as an expansion of it to extrapolate the religious laws we follow. It’s certainly not “the book that makes commentary on the Torah.” We have literally hundreds of books of commentary. That’s probably underestimating. Jews have been around for a long time, and we have been analyzing and discussing the Torah for nearly as long. There are so many commentaries on the Torah.

The second issue is that while there are arguments in the Mishna and Gemara (the oral discussion on the Mishna that was written down even later), they do generally result in a final decision of some sort. Usually whichever side has the majority wins. Variations between communities are still very much a thing, and I can explain why in another post if people are interested, but there usually is a base agreement.

We are of the school that says you decide for yourself what works.

The phrasing they use here makes it sound as though that’s a legitimate opinion in the Mishnah. I cannot emphasize how much that is not the case. While I myself have not finished learning the entire Mishnah, I would be willing to wager a great deal that “whatever works for you” isn’t a stance on any legal matter there. That’s just not how it works. While some modern branches of Judaism may have that as a position, it is definitely not Mishnaic.

If you are concerned about Jewish law, the ocean is always a good choice. There are no conflicting arguments about the ocean as a mikveh. As the wise maggid Jhos Singer says in reference to the ocean, "It's [sic] becomes a mikveh when we call it a mikveh." Done.

(To clarify, I don’t know if that typo was carried over from the source of the original quote or not.)

This is true. However if you are concerned about Jewish law I would very much urge you to look to other sources than this one—be that your local rabbi or rebbetzen, the staff at your local mikvah, or a reliable website that actually goes into the proper requirements. If you want to use a mikveh according to Jewish law, please do not use this document as your guide.

We recognize immersion in water does not work for every body. Therefore, a guiding principle for where to do a mikveh is: do a mikveh in a place that is sacred to you. Your body is always holy and your body is made of mostly water. Later in this guide there is more information on mikveh with no immersion required.

I cannot emphasize how much I have never once heard this before. This, to me, reads like New Age nonsense. If you are unable to immerse in a mikvah, talk to your rabbi. Don’t do…whatever this is.

Our next section is a short one.

Who To Do it With: Do mikveh with people you feel comfortable with and supported by.

This is fine, though many mikva’ot (perhaps even most) will only allow one person to immerse at a time.

Do a solo mikveh and ask the earth body to be your witness.

With this, we return to the strange smattering of neo-Paganism. The “earth body” is not a thing. Yes, the Earth is called as a witness in the Bible at least once. It’s poetic. You also, unless you are converting, don’t actually need a witness anyway. A mikvah attendant or guide is there to help you—if you were somewhere without one, you could still immerse for niddah or various customary purposes.

Do mikveh with people who share some of your vision for collective healing.

As I’ve said before in this essay, collective healing is not the point of a mikvah. If you are Jewish and want to pray for healing, there are plenty of legitimate places for this–the Shemonah Esrei has a prayer for healing and a prayer where you can insert any personal prayers you want; there’s a communal prayer for healing after the Torah reading. You can give charity or recite a psalm or do a mitzvah with the person in mind. You can also just do a personal private prayer with any words you like, a la Hannah, or if you want pre-written words find an appropriate techinah (not the sesame stuff). If you want to work towards collective liberation, volunteer. Learn the laws of interpersonal mitzvot, like lashon hara (literally “evil speech,” mostly gossip or libel). Connect fighting oppression to loving your neighbor or the Passover seder. We have tons of places for this–mikvah isn’t one of them.

Next segment.

What To Bring to A Mikveh: 1. Intentions for the ritual for yourself and/or the collective.

See previous points on intention.

2. Items for the altar from your cultural background[…] (emphasis mine)

If I wasn’t appalled by the “immersing in makeup” or the “do divination first,” this would be the place that got me. This is wrong on so many levels.

One is not allowed to have an altar outside of The Temple in Jerusalem, the one we currently do not have. It’s an extremely big deal. One is not allowed to make sacrifices outside of the Temple. Period. This is emphasized again and again in the Torah and other texts. Even when we had a Temple, there were no altars in a mikvah.

And you certainly couldn’t offer anything in the Temple while naked, as one is required to be when immersing in the mikvah.

Even when we did bring offerings to altars (the Bronze Altar or the Gold Altar, both of which were in the Temple and which only qualified priests in a state of tahara could perform offerings on), the offerings were very specifically mandated, as per the Torah and those other texts. Even when non-Jews gave offerings (as did happen) they were required to comply. You couldn’t just bring any item from your cultural background. This is paganism, plain and simple.

Now, again, let me be clear: if you’re pagan, I have no problem with you. My problem is when one tries to take a sacred practice from a closed religion and try to co-opt it as one’s own. It’s a problem when someone who isn’t Native American decides to smudge their room with white sage, and it’s a problem when someone who isn’t Jewish tries to turn a mikvah into a pagan cleansing rite. And even if the person doing it is Jewish--I have an issue when it’s Messianics who were born Jewish, and I have an issue when it’s pagans who were born the same. Either way, whether you intend to or not, you are participating in appropriation or expropriation.

Which makes the line that follows this point so deeply ironic I can’t decide if I’m furious or heartbroken.

After suggesting that the reader (who may or may not be Jewish) bring items for an altar to a mikvah, the Guide asks:

[…] (please do not bring appropriated items from cultures that are not yours).

Which is simply just... beyond parody. To quote one of my editors, “This is quickly approaching the level of being a new definition for the Yiddish word 'Chutzpah,' which is traditionally defined as 'absurdist audacity' in line with 'Chutzpah is a man who brutally murders both of his parents and then pleads with the judge for leniency because he is now an orphan bereft of parental guidance.' If not for the involved nature of explaining the full context, I would submit this as a potential new illustrative example.”

The next suggestion of what to bring is

3. Warm clothes, towels, warm drinks

All these are reasonable enough, though most mikva’ot provide towels. Some also provide snacks, for while you are preparing. They may also not allow you to bring in outside food.

4. Your spirit of love, healing, and resistance

This, again, has nothing to do with mikvah. The only spirit of resistance in a mikvah is the fact that we continue to do it despite millennia of attempts to stop us. Additionally, to me at least “a spirit of love” feels very culturally-Christian.

Our next section is titled “How to Make Mikveh a Non-Zionist Ritual.”

Right off the bat, I have an issue with this concept. Putting aside for a moment whatever one may think of Zionism as a philosophy, my main problem here is that mikvah has nothing at all to do with Zionism. In Orthodoxy, at least, Jews who are against Zionism on religious grounds perform the mitzvah the same way passionately Zionist Jews do, with the same meanings and intentions behind it. It is performed the same way in Israel and out, and has been more or less the same for the last several thousand years. It is about ritual purification and sanctification of the mundane, no more and no less.

There is a word for saying anything and everything Jewish is actually about the modern Israel/Palestine conflict, simply because it’s Jewish.

That word is antisemitism.

How to Make Mikveh a Non-Zionist Ritual: Reject all colonial projects by learning about, naming & honoring, and materially supporting the communities indigenous to the land where you hold your mikveh. Name and thank the Indigenous people of the land you are going to do your mikveh on.

If you removed the “non-Zionist” description, this would be mostly unobjectionable. We should absolutely help indigenous communities. The framing of “reject all colonial projects” does seem to suggest that there is something colonial about the usual practice of going to the mikvah, though. I would argue that the mikvah is, in fact, anti-colonial if anything—it is the practice of a consistently oppressed minority ethno-religion which has kept it in practice despite the best efforts of multiple empires. Additionally, while Zionism means many different things to those who believe in it, at its root most Zionists (myself included) define it as “the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in our indigenous homeland.” Our indigenous homeland being, of course, the land of Israel. (This is different from the State of Israel, which is the modern country on that land.) If you are a Jew in Israel, one of the indigenous peoples of the land your mikvah is on is your own. That’s not to say there aren’t others—but to claim Jews aren’t indigenous to the region is to be either misinformed or disingenuous.

Take the time to vision [sic] our world to come in which Palestine and all people are free.

I really, really dislike how they use the concept of The World To Come here. The Jewish idea of The World To Come (AKA the Messianic Age) is one where the Messiah has come, the Temple has been rebuilt, and the Davidic dynastic monarchy has been re-established in the land of Israel. Arguably that’s the most Zionist vision imaginable. This isn’t to say that all people, Palestinians included, won’t be free—true peace and harmony are also generally accepted features of the Messianic Age. But using the phrase in making something “non-Zionist” is, at the very least, in extremely poor taste. (As a side note, even religious non-Zionists believe in this–that’s actually why most of them are against the State of Israel, as they believe we can’t have sovereignty until the Messiah comes. They do generally believe we will eventually have sovereignty, just that now isn’t the time for it.)

Hold and explore this vision intimately as you prepare to immerse. What is one action you can take to bring this future world closer? Trust that your vision is collaborating with countless others doing this work.

Having a “vision” of a world where all are free isn’t doing any of the work to accomplish it. A “vision” can’t collaborate. At least not in Judaism. This sounds like one is trying to manifest the change through force of will, which is something directly out of the New Age faith movement, where it is known as “Creative Visualization.” Even when we do have a concept of bringing about something positive through an unrelated action–like saying psalms for someone who is sick–the idea is that you are doing a mitzvah on their behalf, to add to their merits counted in their favor. It’s not a form of magic or invocation of some mystical energy.

(Once again: I have nothing against pagans. But paganism is incompatible with Judaism. You can’t be both, any more than you can be Jewish and Christian.)

Use mikveh practice to ground into your contribution to the abundant work for liberation being done. We are many.

If you will once more pardon a brief switch to a casual tone:

Nothing says liberation like *checks notes* appropriating a minority cultural practice.

The next section of their document is titled “Ideas for Mikveh Ritual,” and this is where the Neo-Pagan and New Age influences of the authors truly shift from the background to the foreground.

We start off deceptively reasonably.

Mikveh ritual is potentially very simple. Generally people consider a mikveh to be a full immersion in water, where you are floating in the water, not touching the bottom, with no part of the body above the surface (including the hair).

Technically, most people consider a mikveh to be a ritual bath (noun) in which one performs various Jewish ritual immersions. But if we set this aside as a typo, this is…fairly true. What they are describing is how one is supposed to perform the mitzvah of mikveh immersion. However, in much the same way I wouldn’t say “generally people consider baseball to be a game where you hit a ball with a bat and run around a diamond,” I wouldn’t say it’s a case of “generally people consider” so much as “this is what it is.”

This works for some people. It doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't work for all bodies. Because of this, mikveh ritual can be expanded outside of these traditional confines in exciting, creative ways.

Once again, if you are incapable of performing mikvah immersion in the proper manner, please go speak with a rabbi. Please do not follow this guide.

Before we continue, I would just like to assure you that. whatever “exciting, creative ways” you might be imagining the authors have come up with, this is so much worse.

Method One:

Sound Mikveh: One way that's felt very meaningful for many is a "sound mikveh." This can be a group of people toning, harmonizing, or chanting in a circle. One person at a time can be in the center of the circle and feel the vibrations of healing sound wash over their body. Another method of sound mikveh is to use a shofar or other instrument of your lineage to made [sic] sounds that reach a body of water and also wash over you.

This makes me so uncomfortable I barely have the words to describe it, and I know that I am not alone in this. This is not a mikvah. If someone wants to do some sort of sound-based healing ritual, by all means go ahead, but do not call it a mikvah. This is not Jewish. I don’t know what this is, aside from deeply offensive.

And leave that poor shofar out of this. That ram did not give his horn for this nonsense.

(I could go on about the actual sacred purpose of a shofar and all the rules and reasons behind it that expand upon this, but this is already over 9000 words.)

Method Two is, if anything, worse. This is the one, if you’ve seen social media posts about this topic, you have most likely seen people going nuts about.

Tea Cup Mikveh: Fill a special teacup. If you want, add flower essence, a small stone, or other special elements. Sing the teacup a sweet song, dance around it, cry in some tears, tell the cup a tender and hopeful story, hold the teacup above the body of your animal friend for extra blessing, balance it on your head to call in your highest self. Use the holy contents of this teacup to make contact with water.

This is absolutely 100% straight-up neo-pagan/New Age mysticism. Nothing about this is based on Jewish practice of any kind. Again, I’m at a loss for words of how to explain just how antithetical this is. If you want to be a witch, go ahead and be a witch. But do not call it Jewish. Leave Judaism out of this.

They end this suggestion with the cute comment,

Mikveh to go. We’ve always been people on the move.

Let me explain why this “fun” little comment fills me with rage.

As you may recall, this document was published by Jewish Voice for Peace. Among their various other acts of promoting and justifying antisemitism, JVP has repeatedly engaged in historical revisionism regarding Jews and Jewish history. In this context, they have repeatedly ignored the numerous expulsions of Jews from various countries, and blaming sinister Zionist plots to explain any movement of expelled Jews to Israel (“In the early 1950s, starting two years after the Nakba, the Israeli government facilitated a mass immigration of Mizrahim,” from “Our Approach to Zionism” on the JVP website; see @is-the-thing-actually-jewish’s post on JVP and the posts linked from there).

So a document published by JVP framing Jewish movement as some form of free spirited 1970s-esque Bohemian lifestyle or the result of us being busy movers-and-shakers is a direct slap in the face to the persecution we’ve faced as a people and society. No, we aren’t “on the move” because we’re hippies wandering where the wind takes us . We’re always on the move because we keep getting kicked out and/or hate-crimed until we leave.

But there is no Jew-hatred in Ba Sing Se.

Method three:

Fermentation Mikveh: Some food goes through natural changes by being immersed in water. If we eat that food, we can symbolically go through a change similar to the one the food went through.

Again, this has no basis anywhere in halacha. We do have concepts of “you are what you eat,” specifically with reference to what animals and birds are kosher, but there isn’t any food that makes you tahor if you eat it. In the Temple days there were, in fact, foods you couldn’t eat unless you were tahor.

Jews may like pickles, but that doesn’t mean we think they purify you.

Also, the change from fermentation is, if anything, the opposite of the change we would want. Leavening (rising in dough or batter, due to the fermentation of yeast) is compared in rabbinic writings to arrogance and ego, as opposed to the humility of matza, the “poor man’s bread” (see here, for example). Is the suggestion here to become more egotistical?

As we wrap up this section, I’d like to go back to their stated reason for using these “alternative” methods (“It doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't work for all bodies”), and ask: if these really were the only options for immersion, would these really fill that same spiritual need/niche? These obviously aren’t aimed at me, but from my perspective it seems almost condescending, almost worse. “You can’t do the real thing, so we’ll make up something to make you feel better.” If any of them had an actual basis in Jewish practice, that would be one thing, but this just feels…fake, to me. Even within more liberal / less traditional streams of Judaism, there is a connection to halacha:

“We each (if we are knowledgeable about the tradition, if we confront it seriously and take its claims and its wisdom seriously) have the ability, the freedom, indeed the responsibility to come to a [potentially differing] personal understanding of what God wants us to do… [Halacha] is a record of how our people, in widely differing times, places and societal circumstances, experienced God's presence in their lives, and responded. Each aspect of halacha is a possible gateway to experience of the holy, the spiritual. Each aspect worked for some Jews, once upon a time, somewhere in our history. Each, therefore, has the potential to open up holiness for people in our time as well, and for me personally. However, each does not have equal claim on us, on me…Portions of the halacha whose main purpose seems to be to distance us from our surroundings no longer seem functional. Yet some parts of the halachic tradition seem perfect correctives to the imbalances of life in modernity…In those parts of tradition, we are sometimes blessed to experience a sense of God's closeness. In my personal life, I emphasize those areas. And other areas of halacha, I de-emphasize, or sometimes abandon. Reform Judaism affirms my right, our right, to make those kinds of choices.” – Rabbi Ramie Arian

“[Traditional Reconstructionist Jews] believe that moral and spiritual faculties are actualized best when the individual makes conscious choices…The individual’s choices, however, can and should not be made alone. Our ethical values and ritual propensities are shaped by the culture and community in which we live. Living a Jewish life, according to the Reconstructionist understanding, means belonging to the Jewish people as a whole and to a particular community of Jews, through which our views of life are shaped. Thus, while Reconstructionist communities are neither authoritarian nor coercive, they aspire to influence the individual’s ethical and ritual choices–through study of Jewish sources, through the sharing of values and experiences, and through the impact of the climate of communal opinion on the individual. …While we may share certain values and life situations, no two sets of circumstances are identical. We hope that the Reconstructionist process works to help people find the right answers for themselves, but we can only assist in helping individuals to ask the right questions so that their choices are made in an informed way within a Jewish context. To be true to ourselves we must understand the differences in perception between us and those who have gone before, while retaining a reverence for the traditions they fashioned. If we can juxtapose those things, we ensure that the past will have [in the phrase of Reconstructionism’s founder, Mordecai Kaplan,] a vote, but not a veto.” – Rabbi Jacob J. Straub (Note: the Reconstructionist movement was founded in the late 1920s, and has gone through a very large shift in the past decade or so. I use “Traditional” here to refer to the original version of the movement as opposed to those who have shifted. Both are still called Reconstructionist, so it’s a bit confusing. This is on the advice of one of my editors, who is themself Traditional Reconstructionist.)

You may note, neither of these talk about inventing things from whole cloth. To paraphrase one of my editors, “You don’t completely abandon [halacha], because if you did how would you have a cohesive community? Even in a ‘do what’s meaningful’ framework, you’re taking from the buffet, not bringing something to a potluck. Even if you don’t see halacha as binding, there are limits.”

(Again, disclaimer that the above knowledge of non-Orthodox movements comes from my editors, and any errors are mine.)

The next section is “Prayers for Mikveh.”

As a note, I’m going to censor the names of God when I quote actual blessings, as per traditional/Halachic practice. I’ll be putting brackets to indicate my alterations.

I’m not going to go much into detail here, because frankly my Hebrew isn’t good enough, and the six different people I asked for help gave me at least six different answers, but I will touch on it a bit.

First, the Guide gives a link to an article on Traditional Mikveh Blessings from Ritualwell (here is a link on the Wayback Machine, since the original requires you to make an account). Ritualwell is a Reconstructionist Jewish website, and accepts reviewed submissions. Here is their about page. The blessings on this page, as far as I know, are in fact exactly what it says on the tin. I’m not sure the first one, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al ha-t’vilah, is said for non-obligatory immersions (i.e. not for niddah or conversion), as it is literally a blessing on the commandment. The second blessing at that link is Shehecheyanu, which the Guide also suggests as a good prayer. This is the traditional form of the blessing, given at Ritualwell:

Baruch Atah Ado[-]nai Elo[k]eynu Melech Ha-Olam shehekheyanu v’kiyimanu v’higiyanu lazman hazeh.

Blessed are You, [LORD] our God, Monarch of the universe, Who has kept us alive and sustained us, and brought us to this season.

(As a quick note, you may notice this is not quite how they translate it on Ritualwell–I have no idea why they say “kept me alive,” as it’s definitely “us” in the Hebrew. There’s a long tradition, in fact, of praying for the community rather than ourselves as an individual, but that’s not the point of this post.)

The Guide, however, gives an alternate form:

B’rucha At y[-]a Elo[k]eynu Ruakh haolam shehekheyatnu v’kiyimatnu v’higiyatnu lazman hazeh. You are Blessed, Our God, Spirit of the World, who has kept us in life and sustained us, enabling us to reach this season.

Under the assumption that most of you don’t know Hebrew, I’m going to break this down further. The main difference between these two is grammatical gender–the traditional blessing uses masculine forms, which is common when referring to God. However, while there are often masculine descriptions of God, it is worth noting that Hashem is very specifically not a “man”--God is genderless and beyond our comprehension, and masculine is also used in Hebrew for neutral or unspecified gender. A whole discussion of gender and language is also beyond the scope of this post, but for now let’s leave it at: changing the gender for God in prayer is pretty common among less traditional Jews, and that’s fine. Some of the changes they make (or don’t make) here are interesting, though. The two letter name of God they switch to is–despite ending in a hey (the “h” letter)–not feminine grammatically feminine. I’m told, however, that some progressive circles consider it neutral because it “sounds feminine.” “Elo-keynu” is also grammatically masculine, but a) that’s used for neuter in Hebrew and b) it’s also technically plural, so maybe they didn’t feel the need to change it. Though if that’s the case I would also have thought that Ado-nai (the tetragrammaton) would be fine, as it’s also technically male in the same way. I’m also not sure why they didn’t just change ”Melech HaOlam” to “Malkah HaOlam,” which would be the feminine form of the original words, but perhaps they were avoiding language of monarchy. It’s apparently a not uncommon thing to change.

One of the responses I got said the vowels in the verbs were slightly off, but I can’t say much above that, for the reasons given at the beginning of this section.

Also, and this is comparatively minor, the capitalization in the transliteration is bizarre. They capitalize “At” (you) and “Elo[k]eynu” (our God), but not “y[-]a…” which is the actual name of God in the blessing and should definitely be capitalized if you are capitalizing.

The Guide next gives a second blessing that can be used:

B’rucha at shekhinah eloteinu ruach ha-olam asher kid-shanu bi-tevilah b’mayyim hayyim. Blessed are You, Shekhinah, Source of Life, Who blesses us by embracing us in living waters. -Adapted by Dori Midnight

The main thing I want to note about this is that…that’s not an accurate translation. It completely skips the word “eloteinu.” “Ruach ha-olam” means “spirit/breath of the universe/world,” not “Source of Life,” which would be “M’kor Ha-Olam,” as mentioned above. “Kid-shanu,” as she transliterates it, means “has sanctified us,” or “has made us holy,” not “blesses us”--both the tense and the word are wrong. “Bi-tevilah” doesn’t mean “embracing us,” either, it means “with immersing.” In full, the translation should be:

“Blessed are You, Shekhinah, our God, Spirit of the World, Who has sanctified us with immersion in living waters.”

The Shekhinah is an aspect/name of God(dess), though not a Name to the same level as the ones that can’t be taken in vain. It refers to the hidden Presence of God(dess) in our world, and is the feminine aspect of God(dess), inasmuch as God(dess) has gendered aspects–remember, our God(dess) is One. It’s not an unreasonable Name to use if you are trying to make a prayer specifically feminine.

(Though do be careful if you see it used in a blessing in the wild, because Messianics use it to mean the holy ghost.)

“Eloteinu” is, grammatically, the feminine form of Elokeinu (according to the fluent speakers I asked, though again I got several responses).

It is, again, odd that they don’t capitalize transliterated names of God, though here there is more of an argument that it’s a stylistic choice, Hebrew not having capital letters.

The Guide then repeats the link for Ritualwell.

Finally, we come to the last section, “Resources and Our Sources:”

First, they credit the Kohenet Institute and two of its founders. I do not want to go on a deepdive into the Kohenet Institute also, as this is already long enough, but I suppose I should say a bit.

The Kohenet Institute was a “clergy ordination program, a sisterhood / siblinghood, and an organization working to change the face of Judaism. For 18 years, Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institutes founders, graduates and students reclaimed and innovated embodied, earth-based feminist Judaism, drawing from ways that women and other marginalized people led Jewish ritual across time and space” (Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute Homepage). It closed in 2023.

I have difficulty explaining my feelings about the Kohenet Institute. On the one hand, the people who founded it and were involved in it, I’m sure, were very invested in Judaism and very passionate in their belief. As with the authors of the Guide, I do not mean to attack them–I’m sure they’re lovely people.

On the other, I have trouble finding a basis for any of their practices, and most of what practices I do find trouble me–again, with the caveat that I am very much not into mysticism, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Of the three founders, only one (Rabbi Jill Hammer) seems to have much in the way of scholarly background. Rabbi Hammer, who was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary (a perfectly respectable school), has at least one article where she quotes the New Testament and a Roman satirist making fun of a Jewish begger who interpret dreams for money as proof “that Jewish prophetesses existed in Roman times,” which to me at least seems like saying that the Roma have a tradition of seeresses based on racist caricatures of what they had to do to survive, if you’ll pardon the comparison. In the same article, she says that Sarah and Abigail, who are listed in the Talmud as prophetesses “are not actually prophetesses as I conceptualize them here,” (pg 106) but that “abolitionist Ernestine Rose, anarchist Emma Goldman, and feminist Betty Friedan stand in the prophetic tradition.” Given God says explicitly in the text, “Regarding all that Sarah tells you, listen to her voice” (Genesis 21:12), I have no idea where she gets this.

The second founder, Taya Mâ Shere, describes the Institute on her website as “spiritual leadership training for women & genderqueer folk embracing the Goddess in a Jewish context,” which to me is blatantly what I and some of my editors have taken to calling Jews For Lilith. Now, it is possible this is a typo. However assuming it is not, and it would be a weird typo to have, this rather clearly reads as “the Goddess” being something one is adding a Jewish context to–which is exactly what I mean when I say this guide is taking Paganism and sprinkling a little Judaism on it. If it had said “embracing Goddess in a Jewish context,” I’d have no problem (aside from weird phrasing)--but “the Goddess” is very much a “divine feminine neo-pagan” kind of thing. We don’t say “the God” in Judaism, or at least I’ve never heard anyone do so. We just say God (or Goddess), because there’s only the one. In fact, according to this article, she returned to Judaism from neo-Paganism, and “began to combine the Goddess-centered practices she had co-created in Philadelphia with what she was learning from teachers in the Jewish Renewal movement, applying her use of the term Goddess to Judaism’s deity.” The “Goddess-centered practices” and commune in Philadelphia are described earlier in the article as “influenced by Wiccan and Native American traditions, in ways that Shere now considers appropriative (“After Kohenet, Who Will Lead the Priestesses?” by Noah Phillips).” I’m not sure how it suddenly isn’t appropriative now, but taking the Pagan practices you were doing and now doing those exact same rituals “but Jewish” is, in fact, still Pagan.

Shere also sells “Divining Pleasure: An Oracle for SephErotic Liberation,” created by her and Bekah Starr, which is a “divination card deck and an Omer counter inviting you more deeply into your body, your pleasure and your devotion to collective liberation.”

I hate this.

I hate this so much.

For those who don’t know, the Omer is the period between the second day of Passover and the holiday of Shavuot, 50 days later. It’s named for the Omer offering that was given on Passover, and which started the count of seven weeks (and a day, the day being Shavuot). The Omer, or at least part of it, is also traditionally a period of mourning, much like the Three Weeks between the fasts of the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av–we don’t have weddings, we don’t listen to live music, we don’t cut our hair. It commemorates (primarily) the deaths of 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva in a plague (possibly a metaphor for persecution or the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt). It is often used as a time for introspection and self-improvement, using seven of the Kabbalistic Sephirot as guides (each day of the week is given a Sephira, as is each week, so each day of the 49 is x of y, see here). It’s not, as Shere’s class “Sex and the Sephirot: A Pleasure Journey Through the Omer” puts it, a time to “engage…toward experiencing greater erotic presence, deepening our commitment to nourishing eros, and embracing ritual practices of…pleasure.”

The final of the founders, Shoshana Jedwab, seems to be primarily a musician. In her bio on her website, scholarship and teaching are almost afterthoughts. I can find nothing about her background or classes. She’s also, from what I’ve found, the creator of the “sound mikvah.”

So all in all, while I’m sure they’re lovely people, I find it difficult to believe that they are basing their Institute on actual practices, particularly given they apparently include worship of Ashera as an “authentic” Jewish practice, see the above Phillips article and this tumblr post.

The institute also lists classes they offered, which “were open to those across faith practices - no background in Judaism necessary.” If you scroll down the page, you will see one of these courses was titled “Sefer Yetzirah: Meditation, Magic, & the Cosmic Architecture.” Sefer Yetzirah, for those of you unaware, “is an ancient and foundational work of Jewish mysticism.”

You may recall my saying something some 5700 (yikes) words ago about Jewish mysticism (i.e. Kabbalah) being a closed practice.

You may see why I find the Kohenet Institute problematic.

I will grant, however, that I have not listened to their podcasts nor read their books, so it is possible they do have a basis for what they teach. From articles I’ve read, and what I’ve found on their websites, I am unconvinced.

Returning to our original document, the Guide next gives several links from Ritualwell, which I’ve already discussed above. After those, they give links to two actual mikvah organizations: Mayyim Hayyim and Immerse NYC. Both are reputable organizations, and are Open Mikvahs. Neither (at least based on their websites) seem to recommend any of the nonsense in this Guide. In fact, Mayyim Hayyim explicitly does not allow non-Jews to immerse (unless it’s to convert). ImmerseNYC has advice to create a ritual in an actually Jewish way. I would say the link to these two groups are, perhaps, the only worthwhile information in this Guide.

They then list a few “mikveh related projects,” two of which are by the writers. The first, Queer Mikveh Project, is by one of the authors, Rebekah Erev. The link they give is old and no longer works, but on Erev’s website there is information about the project. Much of the language is similar to that in this guide. The page also mentions a “mikvah” ritual done to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, in which “the mikveh…[was] completely optional.” And, of course, there was an altar. The second project, the “Gay Bathhouse” by (I believe) the other author and Shelby Handler, is explicitly an art installation.

The final link is to this website (thanks to the tumblr anon who found it), which is the only source we’ve been able to find on Shekinah Ministries (aside from a LOT of Messianic BS from unrelated organizations of the same name). So good news–this isn’t a Messianic. Bad news, it also seems to have a shaky basis in actual Jewish practice at best. It is run by artist Reena Katz, aka Radiodress, whose MKV ritual is, like “Gay Bathhouse,” a performance project. As you can see from the pictures on Radiodress’s website (cw for non-sexual nudity and mention of bodily fluids), it is done in a clearly portable tub in a gallery. As part of the process, participants are invited to “add any material from their body,” including “spit, urine, ejaculate, menstrual blood,” “any medication, any hormones they might be taking,” and supplies Radiodress offers including something called “Malakh Shmundie,” “a healing tincture that translates to “angel pussy” made by performance artist Nomy Lamm” (quotes from “An Artist’s Ritual Bath for Trans and Queer Communities” by Caoimhe Morgan-Feir). The bath is also filled by hand, which is very much not in line with halacha. Which, if you’re doing performance art, is fine.

But this Guide is ostensibly for authentic Jewish religious practice.

And with that (aside from the acknowledgements, which I don’t feel the need to analyze), we are done. At last.

Thank you for reading this monster of a post. If you have made it this far, you and I are now Family. Grab a snack on your way out, you deserve it.

Further Reading and Resources:

https://www.mayyimhayyim.org/risingtide/members/

https://www.mikvah.org/directory

https://www.mayyimhayyim.org/

http://www.immersenyc.org/

https://aish.com/what-is-a-mikveh/

https://www.chabad.org/theJewishWoman/article_cdo/aid/1541/jewish/The-Mikvah.htm

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1230791/jewish/Immersion-of-Vessels-Tevilat-Keilim.htm

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/why-immerse-in-the-mikveh/

Meth, Rabbi Ephraim. 50 Mikvahs That Shaped History. Feldheim Publishers, 2023.

#jvp #mikvah #mikveh #teacup mikveh #jewish #long post #I know so much more than I ever wanted to about this movement now #every time I did more research I found something worse #thank you very much to those of you who helped me with this #bless you all #and bless those of you who read through all of this #six months of my life #my ramblings #asked and answered #queerdo-mcjewface #I can't wait to see how my inbox is going to explode now hahahaha. haha.#will this be the post that finally gets me on the blocklists?

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comfortless · 5 months

Note

Offering you a prompt because I know you could make it perfect! ( ๑‾̀◡‾́)✨ You know about Minoan Bull Leaping? What about that with a hybrid Köni?

content/warnings: 18+. minors do not interact. König is a man here!!: ears and a tail and a set of horns but that’s it!, fem (afab) reader, nondescript animal death, codependency and a little possessive behavior, reader gets injured, historical inaccuracies, one-sided worship, mentions of violence, reader is a virgin for three seconds, cunnilingus, smut.

word count: 11.5k.

You’ve practiced this, and still the tension and nervousness bleeds through you, courses like a steady river under skin and curves around bone. The bulls are so much larger than the fallen trees and heavy stones you’ve danced around and over for practice, and the nights spent tempting them with treats had never been enough to prepare. Twigs and jagged edges are nothing in comparison to the horns of very alive and breathing beasts; petting their heads is far simpler than prancing over their horns.

The bulls wait in the field, grazing, sturdy monoliths amidst a sea of green below the warm light of the sun. It kisses every inch of skin, highlights the determination and giddiness on the faces of others and lines your frown in shadow. Three feral bulls for two men and a woman far more practiced than you; a rugged, adolescent thing with his horns barely poking through waits just for you, misplaced from the herd and huffing indignantly some distance from the rest.

You watch the others go, one by one, as they skip and somersault toward their gruffer partners. Your hand rises up the expanse of your robe to brush over the jewels layered along your throat. Their movements are rushing water, fluid and perfect, so elaborate and pretty that you fear even blinking will cause you to miss the most important details.

And then they reach their bulls.

Some huff, one tilts his head in curiosity. An attempt to gore, perhaps, except… these things are not vicious, only happy creatures. They know the importance of the dance just as you do. When the curious one does accept the grasp of a man’s hands over his horns, you feel yourself beginning to walk, possessed by the need to claim your own bull and perform just as they do.

The show that you put on is less graceful, but does not lack heart. A trip on your first somersault that sends you into the grass, righted immediately when you hear your bull huff only paces away. You laugh, coo, and chirp as you approach with more balance. The sparkling jewels dance over your skin just as the others dance over their bulls, leap after leap, and the animals remain calm.

Yours is no different. He allows you to graze your fingertips over the soft fur of his back, does not so much as flinch when your press your palms flat over the sides of his face. The horns poking out of his skull are rounded at their tips, not yet properly grown in. You kiss the dip between his eyes and tell him how special this performance must be. To tame a wild animal is something divine in itself, but to tame a bull takes someone truly virtuous.

The grass tickles along your calves, the sun feels so warm and lovely against your face. You sigh in contentment as your steps lead you back, arms raised in preparation to jump. The others cheer you on, guide you with their voices as they wait next to their animals. The scent of nectar and pine lulls you to comfort, allows you the courage that you lacked initially; knees bend and arms raise, your eyes locked on the sprouting horns.

With your posture immaculate, you take your first leap.

The sun catches on something tar black and glimmering waiting in the trees just out past the pasture. Two tall horns springing from either side of a head, the stature of a man, just as your fingers curl over the calf before you’s much smaller horns.

The heart in your chest ceases its pounding for a moment, and your eyes must have widened the very same as a child’s would when encountering something sweet or shiny to treasure.

There’s a man attached to those horns in the tree line. Though you could not make out his face beneath all of the shade and foliage, you were so certain that it must have been a man.

A man larger than any man in Crete. Impossible and imposing.

The tumble that follows this reverie is what breaks away any hope of this being a lovely day.

Your concentration was broken the very second that the creature showed itself, and it was far too late to stop even when you were no longer a part of what was occurring between you and your sable-furred calf. The animal senses the not-right about the situation, takes it as a cue to move just as you were lifted over him and sends you sprawled out into the blooming wildflowers. The earth at your back, the sky to your front, and the pain takes its time to trickle in like winter chill and crawl up from your soles to the base of your neck.

The thin gold of your necklace must have snapped, because one of the jewels lies over your middle now, and several others have been left for dirt and birds to claim in the grass.

It’s your bull that comes to worry over you first, his wet nose nudges at your cheek when the scent of blood from broken skin taints the air with iron. It’s just a scrape along your palm, sullied by the peak of a jagged rock lying buried just below the soft soil of the pasture. The blood runs in small streams when you marvel at the wound, held up keeping sun from your eyes.

His coarse tongue finds its way to your hair, retrieves the flowers from it as if his stomachs could not wait for the consoling to be done to be fed. In your stupor, you almost want to call the poor thing stupid, but you only tell him that he’s done as well as you hoped.

You’ll dance with him again, you promise.

The injury takes time to recover from, even with the most patient of healers seated at your bedside. He reminds you that a woman of your standing is something special in herself. Proud, noble, and meant to be wed in the coming months each time he layers salve over the scrapes and the expanse of bruising along your back. Your linens are changed by the slaves of your household, new jewels provided in abundance and placed around your neck as though you even need to look presentable now, bruised and stuck in your bed.

No one knows what you saw, not really. You aren’t even certain what that vision was. They whisper of madness when you bring it up. The Minotaur remains in the labyrinth, far away from here and bedded down in the dark. Men don’t possess the horns of bulls, and you must have damaged your head too, because no one believes a word you speak about it, about him.

Your mistake, you learned, was probably what spurred your poor calf to be chosen for sacrifice. A bad omen forfeit, maybe. So young and gentle, and now gone. The soft fur off his ears and the quivering of his nose wouldn’t be felt again, and worse still…What if you were not meant to leap with them at all?

There is fruit and barley served up onto a plate made of bone as you’re ordered to eat by your healer. People can be crueler than bulls, you think to yourself; you haven’t even got the desire to eat after hearing such a thing. You’re bleeding from the heart when the first bite is forced into your mouth, gut twisting and fingernails digging into soft linen.

“I promised…” Your voice is muffled by a particularly fat portion of plum. It goes ignored by the withering old healer that tilts your head back and strokes your jaw with a soft palm to encourage you to swallow.

“Eat.”

And when you don’t, when you spit it back onto the plate, you’re rewarded with another bite and further encouragement as your sobs fill the room. It should be expected, not as hard as bone or as tough as the skin of the fruit when you’re finally offered sweet wine to swallow it down. You shouldn’t be a mess over an animal who served his purpose well and would be heralded as some savior for giving some clumsy woman trust and a chance.

It’s just that there’s so much more to it, for you. Patches of purple and swelling are much easier to spot than guilt and other turmoils.

Your first should have been beautiful, should have left those watching with stars dancing in their irises. You couldn’t even handle a calf, and you feel more pitiful and helpless the longer that you harp on those thoughts.

You rest and have dreamless bouts of slumber. You walk alongside the healer, leaning against the old man for support when you find the pain is still very much there, stinging and vile. The people about the city always smile to you, offer you flowers and sweet fruit and ask when you’ll be well enough to dance again.

Often, it even soothes the ache that they can’t see well enough. Provides some hope that, yes, you can return to what you’ve always hoped to do, display your grace and strength and find some place in a flowery pasture before the day of your wedding. You’ve heard of women tearing a place that makes them bleed on horseback, how getting the pain over and done with then has made consummation far easier when that day comes for them. Maybe that could happen for you too.

You ask to hear the story of the Minotaur more times than should be appropriate from the slaves of your household. Some of them are foreign, not entirely sure of just how it should be told. You find yourself especially fond of one of them who twists her words to make everything seem honey.

“…I like to think that he wasn’t alone down there,” she finishes on her second retelling of the night. The first had ended with a separate possibility altogether, one that saddened you to the core.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she laughs, taking the comb of carved bone to your hair, gently running it through each tangle provided by your pillow from lying in bed for the entire day. “Maybe he had friends or…”

“A wife?,” you question in amusement. Bulls didn’t take wives, even if they were part manâ€¦

“He is a man. Surely he had a woman,” she laughs again, bright and giddy, and follows it with a shrug. “You said that you saw him. Maybe it’s a sign.”

“I didn’t say it was him,” you almost wail in embarrassment. It was true that you had endlessly questioned and pondered for the past few weeks, speculated on what may or may not have been there, beneath the trees when you took your fall. For some odd reason, your fascination with that creature had ignited a flame someplace in your chest, growing ever brighter with each day that passed. “He didn’t have a bull’s head. Only the horns.”

She plucks at your hair with the comb a little longer in silence before setting it aside and casting you an almost fretful glance. “That sounds scary…”

“Oh,” you sigh. She’s right, of course. There were plenty of terrible things described with those attributes. But… if bulls didn’t scare you, then surely bullmen could not be any worse. “He didn’t hurt anyone though.”

“But you did get hurt,” the girl reminds you sympathetically.

You swallow dryly, and at last decide to put these fantasies aside. Your injuries were almost healed in full, and the last thing that you needed was for everyone to think that you were not simply wounded, but crazy too. A mad woman wouldn’t find a husband, and you were not a cow meant to be fantasizing over bullmen. The place you were given since birth was that of noble standing, a woman worth her weight in pearls and gold, not meant for fields and horns.

When morning rises and the yellow-red glow of the sun pokes its way through your window, you find you’re able to stand properly without the old man’s help to keep you upright.

You wash your face with the water from the clay pot in the corner, smile to yourself when you dab carmine onto your cheeks and smear it with the palm of your hand to look the part of some blushing dove.

Your robe is clean and soft when its pulled over you and fastened, delightfully comfortable when there’s no more bruising to irritate. Incense is lit, and you immerse yourself in what is before you rather than in shadow.

There’s a clamoring in the street below your window as you finish preparing for the day, both cheers and shouts of fear that stir both confusion and trepidation in your belly. It takes some time before you can coax yourself into taking a peek, find the strength in your trembling legs to look upon what may very well be the final march for a man deemed worthy of execution or perhaps some other misfortune.

Everything is painted honey and gold over the chalked clay of the buildings and the smooth stones layered over the streets.

There are women fleeing, a few cowardly men accompanying them. Children walk backwards or affix themselves to high walls to stare back at what’s being led by soldiers clutching thick lines of woven rope.

The thing that follows behind them leaves your heart in your throat, because it… he, is no prisoner or omen.

The bullman from your endless daydreaming walks with his arms fastened behind him, thick tail flicking in irritation at his backside, soft auburn ears fold back against his head.

The face, closer now, intrigues you the most, because as you’ve claimed endlessly: he only looks the part of a man. Some rugged barbarian, for certain, but still he does not bare any resemblance to the Minotaur or any other beast from the tales and songs. Though his nose is crooked, and pale scarring layers in abundance over tanned flesh, he looks almost sweet. There’s a gentleness about him that betrays the strangeness of his silhouette from before.

And he bleeds crimson like any other man, from a wound dug out in his shoulder where a spear must have pierced him. The blood along his chest has not even had the time to dry.

The poor man is bleeding and naked, not a scrap of cloth to conceal him any place, not even where his hair curls above his loins.

You imagine what the healer and slave girl must think now, when the subject of your endless ramblings is out on display for the entire city. Whether monster or forgotten god, the bullman is here, and in your haze of thought you will yourself to storm out into the street. There are hisses of confusion and fear all filtered and feathering on the air, many voices, but what is worse are the screams.

He doesn’t even possess it within him to look afraid, only terribly annoyed or maybe even somber. It was difficult to tell by the lack of expression on his face. His eyes are sad, but his lips are pressed into the barest line. The only indication that he feels anything at all is the swishing of his tail, a tell of anger in bulls. Maybe in men baring their resemblance, too.

“Where are you taking him?,” you demand, a shrill cry from your doorstep.

No answer comes your way from the soldiers at his side.

“Please…”

The words fail you as you find yourself stepping in front of this march. Ten soldiers to keep one man in a hold, it was ridiculous. Though he towered over them and possessed horns sharp enough to gore, to see him like this… It all stirred so much emotion within you that you almost think you must have really injured something in your skull, because the city spins around you and your eyes sting fiercely.

Every step halts when you begin to sob right there in the street like a bereaved wife finding out her husband has been tortured or killed in some distant land. Even the bullman seems intrigued by your tears. The quiet blue of his eyes flits from what stands beyond you to your face, puffed and slick with tears. Why cry for a man you do not know?, he seems to ask wordlessly. Why throw yourself out in the midst of danger?

“… my bull is dead, so I would like to…” To dance with this one. To see past the abomination of what he was and maybe cherish him in the way he deserved without deserving.

His ears prick forward, and he huffs something whispering and foreign in his tongue. Just one word that you’re uncertain of the meaning of, probably demeaning considering that you had called him an animal, not man. But he speaks. He speaks and that is enough for the soldiers to exchange cautious glances from the titan they lead to the curious display of the crying woman in front of them.

“You want to dance with this bull?,” one asks, both amusement and disbelief painting each syllable.

You nod your head, weak but fiercely resolute in your wish.

Not “this bull”, but perhaps “this god”.

You’re both stripped bare of any defenses, fates left in the hands of men who only know to kill and fuck. Somehow luck shimmers through, because you’re presented with one of the ropes a soldier carries. It’s offered to you with a stiff, callused hand, dropped unceremoniously into the palm that rises up to wait.

You walk beside your bull, not where you would rather lead him but where the other men urge for you to go. People watch on with curious stares, and you know most assuredly that when your healer hears of this new derangement, you will suffer another fortnight in bed with herbs and prayers over your head.

The bull watches you the entire time with a stare that lacks any emotion. The beast could be grateful, humiliated, or considering ripping you apart the moment his binds were undone and you wouldn’t have the slightest idea of it until he was upon you. What’s stranger still is that you don’t fear him. He looks to you the entire time and your hand clutching the rope does not tremble. Your pulse races, but only with something beyond fear, something an ordinary man has never gifted to you.

The gated pasture is bears a cool breeze when you enter, you watch as one of the men ties your new bull to a post and tells you that he is wicked, but the only crime he’s being accused of is being what he is.

“You’re hurt,” you assess a little dumbly when everyone has paraded away. The grass stains the white linen you wear as you sink to your knees at the titan’s side.

You’ve nothing to tend to his wound with. Dirt is smudged into the divide in his flesh with gentle swipes of your thumb, a strip ripped from your robe when you try to stop the bleeding further. He hisses when you fasten it tight, shoots you a glare that both makes stars fall in your eyes and sets a stampede to rush in your heart. Your heart, you think, but really it’s something else. You feel hot all over and it’s the stupidest thing.

“I know, I know..,” you mumble as you tie the cloth, straighten yourself out and cover the expanse of your thigh that’s been revealed as you settle back into place. “Can you move it?”

“Yes.”

It hardly registers that he’s freed himself somewhat until a massive hand curls tightly around your wrist. The touch is not at all gentle, it’s probing, the tip of each digit leaving small curved indentations in your flesh, intent on keeping you thoroughly in place.

“Why aren’t you afraid?” His voice comes as an odd grumbling, seemingly unused for some time. It isn’t deep, either, which comes as the most jarring thing about all of this. It’s so pleasant, that even with his iron hold you find yourself smiling as a flurry of affection stirs between your breasts.

Because I was right, you yearn to say, but hold your tongue for fear of seeming too brazen and less subservient than you should be, catering to a god you’ve never even heard of. Both man and bull, something divine and strikingly handsome even with his soft features.

“Should I be? Will you curse me..?,” you ask, softening your grin to glance up at him through your lashes. Demure and flirtatious before you even think to catch yourself. A maiden should be more cautious dealing with ordinary men or things not yet known, but even when your expression reverts to one of mere curiosity, it seems too late.

His nostrils flare as he regards you; then, his hand shifts upward to stroke at your bare shoulder, fingertips move to dance over your clavicle. The hand comes to rest beneath your jaw, a thumb carefully brushing over your chin. Then, he withdraws all at once, turns his head with a huff of breath. He doesn’t bellow as the other males in the pasture, does little to seem more cow than man in your presence. Perhaps it’s a practiced courtesy: to appear more human than the additions crowning his head suggest.

“Dummes mädchen.” He doesn’t tell you what that means, and his voice canters off to silence when you push and prod to ask.

He doesn’t budge when you ask where he’s come from, some distant land across the sea you even speculate. You ask him what he is in name, and in turn his ears seem to lower, flatten further, as though he were trying to hide them altogether. There wasn’t much he could do about the horns, though.

The bull barely even returns your shy glances, the only indication that he knows and rather likes that you’re still seated at his side is the flare of pink that rises from his throat to settle upon his cheeks, the way his jaw tightens and loosens when you speak.

“What is your name?,” you ask him when the silence grows too much. You’re starting to feel beads of sweat prick at your skin from the glow of the summer sun above, and more than anything you want some closeness, some proof that maybe your listless life is not a total loss. Earning a god’s favor would only be too lovely, the perfect cure for the unnamed thing that ails you. “So that I might worship you properly?”

That prompts a response.

He turns to you with a forced stoicism, one that does little to subdue the way his eyes widen and his face burns. Being jabbed at and held captive like an animal would make any man more than a little unhappy or wary, but your words dissolve that into smoke in an instant. He tells you his name in a keening sort of voice, one reserved for wolves or agitated horses.

“König.”

You repeat it, once, twice.

It sounds funny and foreign, too simple for what he appears to be. You tell him your own when he doesn’t ask, repeat it just the same so he remembers his only acolyte. Someone so cute for a god of beasts or maybe even good harvests.

You wanted to pry further, have every secret expelled from his tongue, unite in words and quell that horrid, demanding passion. It’s why men run way to brothels, you supposed. Excitement and the allure of something pretty to stake a claim into… but you’re a maiden rather than some feather-headed soldier.

“When you’re better, we will dance,” you declare with a hope that he might understand. “My first offering to you.”

König stirs, rumbles someplace in the expanse of chest. His hair curls there in the widest patch, you note, trails down right to thighs that make brick resemble only soft clay. You’ve never openly ogled a man like this, and it doesn’t feel shameful, not when you’re convinced you already have an understanding here.

You couldn’t imagine he would crawl on his knees for you to prance over him like a yearling deer, bellow like a proper animal when you took his horns in hand. The ugly, ivory prongs about his head looked too dangerous anyhow. One slip… you didn’t want to imagine what would happen then.

“… Richtig.” Then, “What do I give to you?”

His question confuses you fully, because the way he speaks it does not seem curious at all. As if there’s already a resolution in the words. No clothing, no weapons, not even a coin. The only thing present and available is what sits between his thighs, a daunting pillar. He asks only for a consent to what he does not bring out in words, only hinted at from the way his gaze drags up from your throat to your eyes.

The strangest mating rite from the strangest man of all…

You don’t ask him about that.

You let the words hang in the air for a stretch of time. Then, you fetch him some water from the creek just past the field. You untie the binds still shackling him to the fence post as he drinks from the shallow bowl. He laps at it like a dog, furrows his brow a little when you’re caught staring again.

There’s too much to look at to entirely separate yourself from him. And he speaks so oddly it’s difficult to distract him with conversation. So you settle to admire, and he does so in turn. When you find yourself watching the way his chest puffs with each intake of breath, his stare only maps you the same, mimicking or appraising.

He grunts, too; flicks an ear when he stares down at your lap and embarrassment immediately floods you when you realize that his senses are not entirely human, either.

You fold your hands into your lap and part your lips to speak again, to maybe ask him why he came here at all to serve as some distraction from the way he appraised your hips with that dreadful stare.

“When?,” he interrupts immediately, casting his dish aside and straightening up to look down upon you. Exacting some misplaced wrath, you assume. Let a woman leap over him and maybe have his freedom after. He just wants it over with, and you can’t blame him at all.

“I told you… when you’re better.”

That must not have been the right thing to say, because his injured arm is the one he gathers you with, brings you up and over him to press your chest to his and glare down at you. The glow of the setting sun seems dull by comparison to the ember in his eyes.

“I am fine.”

The calendars have been a blur since you fell. You huff and pout in thought, trying to think in spite of the way the closeness has you feeling dumb and dizzy.

“A few days..,” comes your answer, quiet and apologetic. “I’m nearly certain.”

König sighs and you feel it flutter your hair, the warmth on your neck. His arm drifts from around you, as if to signal that you could depart at any moment. Whatever had possessed you now leaves you in place, flustered and miserably infatuated. It pains you that he only seems exasperated by this entire ordeal rather than enthused, but he seems to soften somewhat when you don’t bolt away immediately. The tension leaves his shoulders slowly, and the summer sky of his eyes is placid instead of burning.

He could strike you down at any moment, leave you gored out here in the grass with common bulls, destroy the fence and maybe all of the people in the city too… but he seems intent on just keeping this silly oath and having you seated here.

“They caught me when I came to find you,” he says, blunt and careless, as if seeking out a woman he saw once from across a field is just a common thing to do. The very same as worshiping some creature driven out from the forest. “I saw you. Then you fell.”

“You were looking for me?” Your words are expressed with shaky intakes of breath, nerves alight with both love and caution. Led toward you by want, a thing you both seemed to feel.

He goes utterly stiff at that, but grits his teeth softly as his gaze casts down to where you’re seated in his lap.

A chance meeting… or maybe it was something as wonderful as fate after all.

You looked the part of lovers already, and perhaps that’s made him shy… but bulls don’t get shy, and König is no exception here, because his hand immediately rises to lift the robe covering you, drifts the linen up to reveal the soft fabric of your loincloth.

“Yes,” he grunts, staring down at the prize between your legs. A reward he’s already promised to himself, one you freely give when you don’t give him a smack or shove his hands away.

He smells of the forest: of wispy pine nettles, water from a spring, juniper. Of a man, whose closeness you had yet to have entirely. No bristling comes; you don’t close yourself off. He’s the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen— sad cow eyes and the bulk that only comes from a life rich with work and fighting, survival and instinct.

Had he ever even had a woman?, you wonder. Did he find you lovely, too?

König huffs appreciatively, lowers his head to your chest to bump his nose against your breasts. You release the breath that was caged unbeknownst to yourself, and your arms come around him naturally, cradle him there. Maybe he had never even been held… So, you pet him, trail your hand along the nape of his neck, up and through the messy strands of hair atop his head.

“You are injured too,” he hums into plushness, breath washing over thin fabric and causing your nipples to rise in answer. He must have felt the scab on your palm, healing, but still coarse and stiff. Even in what you perceive must be some sort of courtesy, worrying over your scrape, he doesn’t peel himself away from what entices him most here. His hands descend to stroke at your sides, trail down lower until both palms are fitted against your backside.

He squeezes, slow and intentional, weighs your flesh in hand. Explorative and further appreciative when another hiss leaves his lips to filter out along your clothed sternum. If he were not seated on his tail, you imagine it would have swayed fiercely, excited by the earlier fight and now the prospect of breeding some silly woman. You don’t have that indicator to read his thoughts, but the throb of the mighty weapon between his legs is enough to know. It’s warm and hard beneath you, gives a slight jump when your fingers dance over the base of his horns.

“I got hurt because of you.”

“Little maiden… I would never hurt you. Only please you,” he declares, sounding prideful. Just as a bull should, even in such a predicament. Like a god, proper and true. Surely this city would be cursed for what they’ve done to him. He will fuck their virgins and leave everything else scorched and ruined. And a part of you is almost giddy to know the very first would be you.

You’ve yet to touch men, but you knew well enough what the wetness down there meant, what his erection meant. Why men grope and fondle just as he does to you now, when a hand rises to tug down the top of your thin dress, when his head lifts just enough to lick at the side of your tit.

The air around you both thrums, pulses as though there are thunder strikes surrounding. And the sky is still clear when your head lolls back to face it in full as a nipple is enveloped by a hungry maw. He suckles at you, pushes his hips upward and strokes at your ass when you whine and pant. The cover of nightfall grants you some mercy, because no one is around to hear those cries or the way he grunts into your flesh, greed pouring from the both of you. No gods or stable hands, only a glassy moon and a blanket of star shine amidst murky sable like sea water.

When he lies you back, viciously lapping at your breasts, sucking your skin to grind between his blunt teeth, you take the horns into your hands again to tug him close. He groans, bellows like a man starved into your chest, drool and bruises layered over your skin. You should be in bed, waiting for some droning dullard to wed you first… not allowing a beast of a man to lower you into grass and dine upon you like this.

The gods would probably find this humorous… even if he might very well be one of them. How easily mortals could be swayed, even virtuous women, at the appeal of some miserable thing to save with an ugly, big cock.

But one or two bullmen was more than enough for this world, surely. No spawn of yours would be sent to a labyrinth deep below the earth, dark and desolate, and you’ve already bled this moon…

It pains you to push back against the face that sends pure fire through your belly with each swipe of his tongue, but you do. König seems both dumbfounded and frustrated when he separates from your flesh, the moon in his eyes eclipsed in full.

“I can’t..,” you try to explain, to tell without telling that you don’t want to push some horned infant from your cunt just because you like him a little. You wet your lips and stare up at him, hopeless and lost here.

“Why?” Your bull doesn’t understand, because of course he doesn’t. He’s trying to give you the only thing that he has to offer. Maybe he’s fucked other women before, women who took him gleefully and sang pretty beneath him, coated that raging thing between his muscular thighs in their essence and left lovely pictures in his memory. You don’t know why that thought alone is enough to make your head feel cloudy with wrath.

He asks again when you tug your bottom lip between your teeth. Bulls may be sacred, but no one’s ever said that they were not stupid.

König only pulls away enough to hover over your sex instead, panting gruffly like something starved and prepared to plunder an unsuspecting hen. Still, he waits for an answer, and you don’t think to spare yourself enough to close your parted thighs.

“I thought we would… after we danced,” you try, and maybe that would have worked if you didn’t have your softness and every treasure laid bare to him like a submissive vixen.

The beast only shakes his head and raises your legs to rest over each of his bare shoulders, corded in muscle and heat. He doesn’t nick you with his horns, careful even as he pushes his face right to your womanhood. The loincloth remains in place, but it’s the most fragile barrier. His breath makes your toes curl as it hits your sex, sends a wave of pure want swooping from your chest right to your cunt.

“You smell..,” he muses quietly, trails off as though drunk on just a whiff of you. When a thick finger tugs the cloth aside, you squirm from panting breath arcing over sensitive flesh. It’s the wettest you’ve ever been: little fantasies did nothing by comparison to the real thing, presented right before you and inspecting you down there.

He flattens his tongue over your entrance and relishes in the way that makes you squeal, draws back just to repeat the motion and watch you with pupils blown when your chest begins to rise and fall rapidly.

“You have not been touched.” His ears flick as he speaks, gaze dragging down, back to the pussy that calls for him.

“No… that’s why- ah-“

The ideas of children and expectations are long forgotten when his tongue presses to a spot that sends you shivering. It circles over it, too warm and heavy to bear. Your back arches, breasts heave, and he laughs into your cunt knowing he’s found the very spot that would make you forsake all but him.

The torture grows delicious and lovely, what he had done to your breasts is exactly what he does there. He suckles at the bud, scrawls his name over it with a wet, lapping tongue. You feel as though you truly have gone mad, fingers curling into the earth to keep you in place, because not even the gods could tear you away from this moment, not now…

It’s when your trembling thighs begin to tense and your voice grows further pitched that König decides to probe at you with a finger, too. It slips in with resistance, and the intrusion is strange… both horrible and ethereal at once. The titan finds a space inside of you, one to curl his finger against. It’s clumsy, uncertain until he finds that that is what makes you cry the loudest.

There’s a blinding white as though the sun has seared its way into your skull, sent the rays of its warmth into your very veins. It brings about a haze, leaves you quivering and panting as bliss rolls over you in steady waves. He gives you another lick, from your slit down to your ass before sitting up. Not an ounce of hesitation is weighed in his stare or his actions when he brushes the thick cockhead through your labia.

“I am going to fuck you,” he declares in a groan, already feeding you a fat inch of him. There’s still lingering resistance, but the honey that drips there now is in abundance, coats him with each shallow thrust.

You choke on the pain of such a sudden stretch, but find yourself only leaking more at the sight of him: a god laying claim to some mortal girl, you, above you, in you. The sounds he makes only ripen the elation. There’s desperation in each grunt, and his eyelids flutter as though he’s found something truly holy.

He drops over you, an arm to either side of your head when he sinks in fully. As if to dull the ache of your womanhood, at the loss of your title of maiden, he licks your cheek, the corner of your mouth, any place to soothe. When you capture him in a real kiss, your taste still lingers there upon his lips.

He seems even more delighted that you would show him affection than what’s occurring between you. The press of his hips comes to a halt, because he savors that display of what is or isn’t love. It’s almost shy, the way his mouth molds over yours, the way a hand drifts to your hair to pet at you. The other lowers to take your thigh and draw it up and keep you pinned in place.

You think to hold him now, too, when he breaks away from the kiss to gaze down at you with a shimmering stare, one that speaks more substance than anything he’s given you in your entire conversation. Your nails stay bedded down with the dirt, though, knowing with a fierce certainty that once he moved again it would be the only tether to dull the ache of a vicious fucking.

Except, he’s only gentle.

The cock inside of you takes a slow drag out, teasing and tentative as though trying to memorize every ridge inside.

It’s agony, because it feels like lovemaking.

Beasts don’t make love, they only have violent ruts and part ways entirely. König fucks like a man devoted. His eyes never stray from your face when he pushes back inside, all too careful. It must feel better than the being amongst his kind in the mountain he descended from, because the sounds he makes are fragile, barely contained whines that seem foreign from a man of his stature.

“I have been… watching you for so long, little..,” he huffs, burying his hand into your hair and dropping his head to press his forehead to your own. The words barely register, hardly make sense when the thick tip of him pushes right into the softest part of you again. It’s better than a finger… better than anything you’ve ever felt, and with everything so doughy and hot what you want to say only comes in a keening whine.

“Gods,” he continues when your sounds are smothered and blanketed by the filthy, sloppy sounds of your own wetness. You must be soaking the very earth you lie upon, dewy and warm. “Better than I dreamed.”

The slowness paves way for a heady, brutal thrust when he realizes that he isn’t hurting you. It only feels better the more that he moves, with each thick vein along his cock felt, with how he repeatedly spears against that spot that brings tears of rapture to the corners of your eyes. That new pace does not relent. You squeeze him the most like this, savoring in how he carves his way inside, molds you to take shape for him in what looks like pure violence but feels like love.

The sounds of impact and the scent of sweat and arousal surround you, the moon above and everything beneath it seem of so little importance now.

König does not silence himself even though you wished that he would. He pants against your face in his mother tongue, babbling endlessly as pleasure spikes for him. It wouldn’t be long until he filled you to the brim with thick spurts of seed, you could feel it in the way he throbbed against your walls, how each thrust was more prolonged and deep. Your mind swims, pleasure so intense its as if you’re drowning in the deepest depths of the sea itself.

“I came from the valley..,” he tells you in a feverish whisper, only now recalling that you didn’t know a thing about him before offering your cunt, maybe even your heart…

“Not a god… not anyone…”

It’s too much when his hips press in faster, when his cock reaches the end of you, over and over in frenzied repetition. Overwhelmed and stuffed to capacity, you sob and quiver, taking him into your arms and clawing at his broad back. The pain only seems to make him more feral, because his hands leave your thigh and your hair to grasp at your face instead, thumbs brushing your cheeks as he bares his teeth and spears into you relentlessly.

“Little one… I want this for the rest of my life,” he growls. “Promise me…”

The words sit on your tongue, fully prepared to surrender yourself to some beast of a faraway valley, chased and poked with spears or fire… Any hope of a cozy life would be forfeit here, already has been the moment you allowed him between your legs. It’s a horrible secret, one surely only Pasiphaë must have known of… how wonderful it felt to be bedded by a man like this. Not old enough to have fathered the Minotaur, but surely bred to be something akin to him.

“…I promise,” you whisper, perhaps desperate for this torturous copulation to end… or continue. Feeling so whole, full, right. Your offering is beating warm and overflowing in your chest, and König only looks as though he’s about to break at your words. The blue of his eyes grows glassy, translucent waves painting over each iris, but those tears don’t shed. They’re only dismissed with more needy rasps.

He growls, hooks his teeth into the sensitive flesh of your throat when his strokes begin to stutter. Your bull comes with a muffled howl, pumps pearly ropes of seed as deeply into you as he can manage. Your hiss of surprise is stifled with a blazing kiss where he moans into your open mouth, delves his tongue as deeply as his cock. He pumps several more times, intent on spilling every last drop inside, none wasted.

It seeps to earth when he parts from you, when he inspects the milk and honey of successful union between your legs. He looks surprised, confused almost when that stare is guided back up towards you as his chest continues to rise and fall swift with exertion.

You raise yourself up on your elbows, draw your legs shut. Not in shame, but… apparent embarrassment, your former courage is diminished when he looks at you as though you’re the most peculiar thing beneath the stars, when you’ve revealed yourself almost entirely and had him fuck and take apart all of it.

Maybe it’s the same for this beast, because his surprise and unshed tears are so evident here. He no longer looks the part of a god, but a lost man.

Not anyone, he had said. Is that what he felt? Or only what he had been told..?

“You’re not a monster,” you whisper. The chill of night settles over your skin, but there’s still warmth here, blooming like a flower in volcanic soil; the sun itself was incomparable to this peculiar thing that had taken root here.

He snorts at that and shakes his head. The ears there are cute and pluming with fluff, a reddish brown that suits him so remarkably. He’s kissed by the sun, even bathed in moonlight here. The prettiest of monsters, if he’s fooled himself into believing he is one.

“You should not have given yourself to me,” he tells you as his eyes narrow. The threat holds no weight, if it were one at all, because he grasps at you and pulls you in close; brings your cheek to his chest, right over his pounding heart. “I will not leave you alone.”

“Good.”

Maybe he’s speaking through the haze of a good fuck after being the cause for screams or raised weapons for so long, but you pray it comes from a truth. You’ve offered him a full meal of you, a treasure that none other has had, left yourself weak and aching all for one. His grip only tightens around you, refusing to let go as if to confirm your belief.

You’re brought back to the earth with your bull curled at your back, two powerful arms snaked around your middle with his nose pressed into your hair.

“After your dance, you will come with me.” There’s no longer a request, only an order. You’ve accepted him as both your man and mate, and it seems to please him greatly. His chest puffs against you, pride and contentment harbored there.

“To where?,” you ask him dreamily. The sea is what you’ve seen the most of, and the foothills and mountains seem a distant place. You imagine that maybe where he’s arrived from must have had others like him, maybe the women there were what he had had before… And maybe that makes you more precious somehow, different and coveted because you hadn’t run, only charmed him with questionable nursing and a request to prance over his back.

“Everywhere,” he answers immediately, stroking at the dip between your breasts. “I will never let you go.”

— — —

You’re separated from your bull come morning. It’s heart wrenching and terrible after a night of such passion, but you couldn’t allow for anyone to see you out there with your clothes in disarray and sperm slick and running down your legs. You had waited for him to sleep, for his dreaming to give way to raucous snoring before you slipped away, casting him a woeful glance. The giggling on the way from the pasture would have been terribly humiliating had anyone been awake to hear, but you were fortunate last night.

Come morning, there’s a pain between your legs and traces of blood in your loincloth. You hastily cast that from your body, hide it beneath your mattress before crawling back into bed with your thoughts a whirl. Candied fruit and precious stone, everything sap sticky and sad all the same… because as much as you would like to venture there, to see him, it was most rational to keep away.

If you were caught, you could only imagine the trial or lack thereof. The spears that would have come then wouldn’t miss their target. He would be deemed something far worse than a monster for daring to touch a lady such as yourself.

You bide your time tending to your duties and praying that your loss of virginity isn’t as apparent as it feels to you; when the thoughts drift back, the warmth upon your face only grows and your thighs immediately press together.

And you ponder his offer of leaving the temples and people behind to haunt someplace else with him, away from all else.

It's mad.

You barely knew him, of even what he was. He didn’t even have the sense to keep secret that he had been stalking you for some time, before you ever even noticed, with his fat cock buried inside of you. His ways of courtship lacked any shame, and maybe that’s why the passing thought of a normal man being in your future seems only lackluster. König could hunt, build, provide far better, you assumed, given his stature… And the gods gave him the knowledge of the most tempting tricks with his tongue.

The days leading up to what would call you back to him pass in a tortuous crawl. Even distracting yourself with thoughts of him in lonely silence with a hand between your thighs seems too little. You’ve even asked every slave woman here just how she gets the thoughts of men out of their heads. The advice is merely that sex does not always lead to marriage and children; they part ways like the animals in the forest and leave little room for love in their dens.

You hoped that he was thinking of you, too.

It would be ridiculous to say you’ve missed him, but seeing him in that field bound by rope again once you return is exactly what you want to shout. The birds call from the trees, singing beautifully and everything seems to glow, all except for König.

There are shadows beneath his eyes, cast long and dark from a lack of sleep. He does not even look your way when you take your place next to the others.

He’s forlorn. Maybe even pissed at having been gifted a warm meal only to have his face tugged away and a rope secured to hold him back from tasting or touching again. You should have warned him, about customs and etiquette, reassured him with your words that a little distance was fine because you’ve already made up your mind… but it seems too little and too late to peep your objections now.

The beast is led toward the other bulls by a man half his size, looking as though he’s on the brink of soiling himself from fear. The screams from before are not present now from onlookers, but König seems far less comfortable here than he did in the streets of your city.

Flowers are brought and tossed to both the hooves of bulls and the feet of dancers, yet none are presented to your partner at all. Even with green springing up below his feet, the area he waits in seems barren by comparison. It’s miserable and sad, all of it, and you once more long for being so winded against him that you two seemed to be the only things alive beneath a night sky.

You call to him when the man holding his lead gives it a sharp tug, and it’s dropped instantly as if you really hold some power over what becomes of him… You only hoped that whatever fate lay in wait for him would be coupled with your own. A passive life in a cave or something like that, where you could call him your husband, even… watch the sweat drip down the muscles of his back as he coaxed a fire to life.

Your bull tilts his head towards you, and though he tries to force the very same indifference from before his inner thoughts betray him. His brow remains furrowed, his expression grim, but his ears perk up and he immediately marches toward you. His gait is more of a charge, and had those horns been pointed to you, peril would await.

Punishment only comes in the form of a large man staring at you as though you’ve just wounded him terribly. You remind him there are no blades here with the gentlest touch of your hand along his bicep, swept down to curl at his wrist. It’s the most you could do here, and you could only pray to Aphrodite that your love would be understood regardless.

“You left,” he gruffs, raises a hand to tilt your chin up just enough to face him, though his gaze averts the second that you lock eyes. Shy, definitely not, but with so many watching, he seems entirely out of his element. The hand that graces beneath your chin even trembles, but it’s not fear you find when you search his eyes again.

Hurt.

It’s unmistakably hurt.

“I’m surprised that you did not,” your answer is a whispered one. He should have freed himself, whisked you away like an unsuspecting bride. You recall the other women’s ramblings from before, of men and how little what you experienced together may have meant.

“I do not wish to be apart from you.” He speaks as though it’s the most common knowledge of all, as though you’re a silly thing for ever believing that your want and his are one in the same. “Come with me.”

He doesn’t belong here, amidst people that cast their judgment yet herald the animals that he bears a small resemblance to.

Neither do you belong, you realize. You haven’t belonged since the day you spotted him amongst the trees.

The odd looks that follow König are cast upon you now, too. They see this peculiar beast with one of their women and think of her as sullied down to the marrow in her bones. You must smell of him, marked without a proper mark at all. He hasn’t branded you with any more than soft bruises from kissing your breasts and fitting the length of himself inside of you.

You take your risks and call them offerings, and he greedily accepts each and every one you bestow. You allow it when the hand cupping your jaw drifts lower, graces your breast with the softest touch before taking your fingers between his own.

“You have to be patient.”

He snorts at that.

Bulls are not patient creatures.

The ceremony has already begun. There are real animals here: beasts even larger than König that chew at the grass below them, flick their tails and ignore all that happens around them. There’s prancing and singing, elaborate acrobatics and leaps that must have taken years of practice.

And when you dance with your bull there is none of it.

He stands in place as you twirl around him, weaving around behind and before him as you bend to collect fallen blooms from the ground. Yellows, blues, flowers with no name or place, scavenged from fields further than the pasture. Your laughter pulls even a smile from his hardened face, a face you’ve found handsome since seeing, but must provoke terror in most men…

He’s so horribly endearing in his own ways. It’s the fastest you’ve ever fallen, or anyone in the whole world has, even… The legends and stories speak of love that shoots straight and strikes true like feathered arrows, singing on the wind until they prick their targets. You honor them just as he seems to, and you would tell them to him if only he asked.

Your head and heart are muddled and sick with love, melted down like precious metal within your body. He twists and brings you back together and whole when you’re taken up in his arms and lifted.

“I could touch the sky,” you laugh, clinging to an ivory horn. Pressing a kiss to the pointed tip of it, you swear you detect the heat from his face on your belly.

“Little one… I will take the sun for you, if you ask.”

“You would burn,” you warn.

He drops you then, cradles your body close to his chest instead and carries you as though you’re nothing more than a small dove with broken wings, something to be cared for.

“You make me burn already.”

“König…”

“No, not…” He shakes his head, smushes your cheeks between a thumb and the rest of his fingers as you’re forced to lock eyes again. The giant’s hand is careful with you, more gentle than his teeth or his…

“Call me something else. Something better.” There’s a keening to his voice, a fervent desperation there. A need to be not simply wanted. Wherever your titan has come from with his constellations of scars, the wound still there on his shoulder and all the pain he masks in behind a forced grimace… it has all led him here.

To the woman he watched practice taming bulls for weeks or months, to the only person he believed could accept what he is.

He only wanted to hear it, to have the most shattered wish answered with a tender chime. To bed you wasn’t enough: it could never be so simple. Your heart has been what he’s after all along; he reassures you in self just in voicing this.

“You’re lovely… my love,” you breathe. “You’re mine.”

His throat bobs as he swallows thickly, and the pools gathered in his eyes do seem to shed. Your face is released as he rubs away anything that may shed. The dark circles are coupled with red rings now, but still no part of him seems weak or broken. He hides that away with everything else, bottles perceived weakness and sets it out to sea and gives you the grin of a proper brute instead.

“Ja… you are mine too.”

You’re set down only as the bull leaping comes to a close, when the people retreat and König seems content in knowing that no one is left to whisk you away. It’s all that he’s waited for, to have you alone after this tradition he did not quite get. He played his part well enough, even if you hadn’t had the chance to climb onto his back as the others had with their bulls.

Only then does he begin to tell you of a life bought and sold without end, of the fighting pits you’ve only heard of and never seen. His tongue does not spare you details of chains and spears, what they do to men like him. There are hundreds of scars, each with a misery attached, some still carrying pain that never heals. Promises were always in abundance to keep him contained, weapons were smithed and placed into his hands since before he could remember…

The life you had imagined for him has never existed. There’s never been love there: he spares you the nature of the women he may have been fortunate enough to touch before, but he whispers that you’re the only one who has ever kissed him.

Your heart breaks for the wounded boy he’s buried inside, and you weep when he tells you he’s only ever prayed for a woman like you. Someone soft and cute, who didn’t run or wail… Who craved him just as terribly if not more, gashes and teeth, horns and all the rest.

And he comforts you when you cry, pulls you in so tightly that your breath catches and the tears do sob. You whisper apologies into the hair on his chest, for all the awful things you would never imagine doing to him, and he scoffs at the pity in your voice.

“Do not cry for me,” he whispers into your hair, leaves a trail of kisses along the crown of your head before dropping to his knees before you and pacifying the best he can by stroking along your back. “I have you now, hm? My little maiden, richtig?”

“Yes. Yes, always,” you promise. Another gift.

You’re led away from the pasture under the veil of nightfall, your arms curled around one of his own. There are men about carrying sharpened steel, thieves and drunkards hiding out in the dark as well, but not an ounce of fear trickles through you to diminish what’s already felt. The stars above are in abundance, brighter somehow on the night you forfeit all.

König speaks unguarded now, each question is met by a response. It’s the first time he’s ever been asked about himself, he tells you this when you express your satisfaction at finally hearing more than a few words at a time. He’s terribly cute when all of the praise and attention cause his face to ripen like summer fruit, red and shimmery with sweat rather than dew.

You’ve brought nothing for a journey, but he swears to you that there is pilfered honey, wine, fruit and furs in his den, some dark place he describes as special. It’s the only place he’s ever called home, so surely it must be.

König doesn’t warn you that the trek takes weeks, nor that the mountains are even more beautiful up close. The foliage is wild, the air fresher and free of the smell of cattle and people, and each climb seems steeper than the last. He doesn’t tell you of the wolves or bears, but you hear them at night when he pulls you even closer to him. The wild things won’t hurt you; the wildest of them all considers himself to be the king here, a ruler that they respect or dread rather than dare to cross.

It isn’t a cave that greets you when you come to rest after days and nights of exertion, but a hut built of cut wood and clay. Built as well and thoroughly as any builder from the city would have done. He tells you of where he learned such things, watching men work after sparring with animals and their own kin in pits; how they would promise to rear families in structures like this, how he hoped in crafting all of this that one day he might have the same.

“It’s wonderful,” you tell him, crossing the threshold to find just what he has already told you was waiting here, so far off from common roads that none of it has been pillaged.

The gifts come aplenty, too: a new comb make of bone for your neglected hair, jarred honey and trinkets from his travels or pulled away from a former captor’s corpse. There’s even a weapon for you here, a blade sleek and shimmering, some foreign sword that astonishingly reminds you of a part of him.

“I will find a prettier one for you,” he says as you examine the blade, heavy even when held in both of your hands. It’s only a mercy that you are not the provider here, because there would be no deer or even rabbits slain when even holding it makes your movements sluggish.

“… I like it. All of it.”

He plucks the blade from your hands with ease and casts it aside. The sound of it tapping, then clattering against the wooden boards rings out loudly before he’s upon you. The trek to the mattress seems an eternity, longer than even the venture here. Cloth and jewelry, the only lasting remnant of your former life follow suit, piling over the sharpened steel.

There’s a bear’s pelt beneath you to soften the stiff straw, less wild and ferocious than it may have been in life, now smothered by the lingering scent of him. The lonely nights spent here must have been terrible and tragic. Did he allow the shield to fall and weep then? In the comfort of bear skin and the calling of night birds outside, tears and wasted seed.

The urgency is a looming beast on the air, prevalent and fierce when you’re pulled into König’s lap. Your bull lacks the patience to prepare you with his mouth or a curled finger now, only pivots your hips to take him with a prod as his head lowers for his mouth to latch onto your breast.

“I am in love with you,” he whispers against your flesh. You’re left at his mercy as he guides you with one large hand placed upon your thigh and an arm curled around your back. It’s slow, always slow when he begins, when he’s drunk on the feel of you surrounding him and every new feeling that floods his head.

The ears prick forward when you sing for him, whimpering as he buries himself further. As though it’s the most pleasant sound he’s ever heard in the span of his life. The only thing more beautiful is the acceptance and surrender you offer. There’s never been a shield in place, no guards to watch over you… he’s the only thing; he’s broken through every gate or wall to steal you away from those perceived defenses.

He knows, too, when your panting mouth repeats his own words.

He bucks into you with more haste, slips his tongue into your mouth and groans when you take it between your teeth. Skyward and earthly with each motion, the sea and the mountain tethered as one. And maybe you’ve never leapt with the cattle from your city, but you dance with this bull so naturally that it vanquishes any doubt of where you’re meant to be. What you’ve yearned for was not the taming of animals, but maybe a man…

Your orgasm comes sudden, a wave of wet heat that drools from your core, aids in the glide of the feverish pace he guides your hips into. König’s head tilts back, bliss painted upon his expression from how you close in around him.

You take your chances and press your face to the column of his throat, biting down on him just as he had you. The salty sweat on his skin leaves its taste on your tongue as you lick over the freshly painted mark. The sounds of his own pleasure are cast away; he goes silent and still, and you almost fear you’ve made some terrible mistake here… But König comes undone at that, desperately gathers you in his hold as he pulses within you, writhes beneath you.

He refuses to release his grip even when his cock grows soft, just rolls you onto your back and covers you like the thickest blanket.

“You didn’t fall this time,” he huffs into your hair.

Though your lips part to try and order him to be quiet, he grinds his hips against your own as if to make the obscenity of his comment even more apparent. It only heightens the warmth you feel sweep up into your cheeks.

“Little dancer…”

And finally he rises above you, another wild grin slowly gracing his scarred face. A thumb brushes against the pulse in your neck until his hand rests right over the heart tucked beneath your breast. It’s better than any promise of a lofty field or a mountaintop, even covered in sweat and come, to see the way that his eyes light up with pure mirth when he feels it’s beating.

“You feel it… you didn’t lie,” he mutters, and you try your best not to allow that comment to claw amongst the others he’s made that left wounds in your heart, gashes that bleed for him.

“Why would I?,” you ask, voice so thin and soft you would think it unheard if not for the flick of his ear.

“I did not think anyone would ever…” He rubs at his face as he falls to your side, only to pull you in close again. The defenses raise in those words, but lower as they do time and time again when you nestle into his chest, pet at the curls of hair there.

“They said no one could ever love me.”

The tears in his eyes finally are laid bare. They roll down his cheeks, and he does nothing to hide them this time. You accept his silent crying without comment, the only indication you share that you know, see, is in the way you press a kiss to his jaw where they gather and spill.

“Fools, they were..,” you whisper to him, just as quietly as before. The sanctity blooms further as his chest rumbles, a contented hum coupled with a squish to bring you even closer to him.

“Ja… just fools,” he answers you in a voice not broken, only softer than it has ever been. “Like you. For this… giving so much.”

“And you are greedy.”

He nods once before reaching for your hand; his own curls over it, still splayed out over his chest. He’s no cocky, rough brute now. He pets at it with a trembling thumb.

“I will never let you go.” He speaks it as though it is a curse, rather than the blessing you’re certain that it is. Most women would fear a lustful beast raised up to kill even gladiators, yet there’s only the sweetest consoling to be found with him for you. “You will suffer me until we both die.”

“I could not imagine a better fate.”

#könig x reader #konig x reader #i did not proofread this if you spot an error do not look at me #steadily going through my inbox i pray this was worth your century long wait lil wisp..!

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