Meeting Raven Kaldera

Being a pagan shaman is a complex role. “It’s the only job for which being transgender is not just an advantage but a necessity,” says Raven Kaldera, who has been a herbalist, author, transgender activist, ordeal-master, god-slave and shaman for over a decade now.
Earlier this year, Raven undertook a teaching tour of pagan BDSM (yes, that’s pagan Bondage, Dominance, Sadism & Masochism) lectures and workshops across Europe, accompanied by Jessica, Raven’s daughter (who naturally calls him ‘mum’), and Joshua, his slave (“The ‘slave’ word,” says Raven, “I don’t like it, but there isn’t a better one.”). Meanwhile, Raven’s wife Bella has been looking after Cauldron Farm, the Massachusetts homestead where they grow vegetables and keep goats, sheep and chickens.
Amid this intense programme, Raven took a little time out to see the Chelsea Physic Garden and spend a while in conversation with FT.
“I’m a herbalist and a garden geek so I really love these plants,” he says, delighted by the 17th-century Apothecary’s garden.
It’s not every day I get to relax on a park bench with a transsexual shaman, and I wonder how he became one.
For Raven, as with shamans throughout history, it began with the shamanic calling, brought on by a near-death experience while battling with lupus. Shamanism is an especially challenging vocation as one’s working, spiritual, and personal lives are inextricably linked. More than that, shamans are ‘selected’ by the gods and, it seems, given no choice but to do what they are told.
“I was already a neo-pagan, certainly, but I had planned to be a science fiction writer and a folk musician on my little farm… but then it came out of nowhere.
“During this drawn-out illness, I had a massive vision of the goddess who had been involved with me throughout my life. She wouldn’t tell me her name, but I knew she was a death goddess. We played a Rumpelstiltskin sort of game: ‘Are you Hecate? Are you Kali?’”
The goddess revealed herself to be Hela (or Hel), the Norse goddess of death, who set about transforming the stricken Raven.
“She hung me up, tore me apart like a butchered animal and rebuilt me. When I came to, I was different. I lost some fears, I lost some memories, I lost some personality traits, and there were some new things. I’d always been able to sense ghosts but now could see them much more clearly. I’d always been able to vaguely sense the presence of gods and divine entities, but suddenly they were there, like an electric fence.
“What’s happened to me is not something that’s going to happen to everyone – only a few people are called by the spirits to be a shaman. They only pick the people who would be good at it. For that reason, I don’t expect everyone to believe what I believe. I’m aware of how strange it can look, but the question is not whether it looks strange but whether it seems to work for that person.”
The experience left Raven at the beck and call of the various gods and goddesses he now works with. They have instructed him, for example, to learn 27 forms of divination and he asks for their advice on a daily basis.
Animistic religions such as neopaganism see spirits in everything from stones and the land itself, to plants and people. Spiritual herbalism is a large part of Raven’s work; through his eyes, the Physic Garden is alive with entities and every healing shrub and herb has a spirit of its own.
“You have to be able to talk to the spirits. There are two levels of plant spirit: there’s the spirit of that one plant, which may not be more intelligent than a chicken, and then there’s the grandfather or grandmother spirit, and every plant is a piece of their body. They are huge wise entities, many of which have a history of helping humans”
Raven consults these spirits even to help with issues beyond general health, he says. “People come to me for all kinds of things. The biggest question put to me is: ‘What should I do with my life?’ But also they come to me if they think they’re seeing ghosts, and we’ll check if it is ghosts or if it’s something in their own heads, or something else. What is harder is when they’re suffering from a mental illness and picking up something real as well.”
Raven has congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a genetic abnormality that causes gender confusion in girls and very early puberty in boys. When he recovered from lupus, Raven’s goddess, Hela, told him to make the change from woman to man; it was a procedure he’d been considering for a while.
“I was told, ‘You need to do this’ and I was like, ‘But why?’ And Hela said, ‘I’m sending you where you’re needed most.’ I had held out for a long time because back in those days intersexuals weren’t supposed to get sex changes. I went ahead and took testosterone and had chest surgery. I decided to stick with the bits I’ve got, because they are what they are, and lower surgeries aren’t very good right now for FTMs [female-to-male transsexuals].
“It was a gamble, it was a leap in the dark, but it was absolutely wonderful. For me it was sacred shape-shifting. OK, socially it’s been very difficult, but y’know, it’s hard to be a minority.
“The irony was that I went through my second puberty at 30, around the same time my daughter went through normal puberty.”
The celestial root of transsexual conditions is a mismatch between what Raven describes as the physical body and the energy body. He describes what it is like to feel gender dysphoria.
“It’s kind of like phantom limb syndrome: if you get your arm or your leg whacked off, for a very long time you feel an arm or a leg there. Physically, your brain doesn’t believe that your arm isn’t there, and it keeps giving you stimulus. On a cosmic level, your energy body is still whole, your energetic limb is still there communicating to your physical body.
“People who are transgender are born with the wiring to think that their bodies are maturing in a certain gender direction, and so they get phantom limb syndrome for bits they don’t have.”
Many pagan gods are intersexual or hermaphroditic, and shamanism has long been associated with transgenderism in various cultures. This mismatch between the energetic and physical bodies is actually an advantage in shamanism.
“Shamans have to work with their energy bodies a lot,” says Raven, “they have to shape-shift and things like that. If you grew up with an energy body that was different to your physical body, you’re used to that distance and you’re used to being able to do things with your energy body that the ordinary person doesn’t even think about. I found that many transfolk are able to see and know and move their energy body around much faster than others.”
In spite of these spiritual benefits, transgender people are the victims of attacks and persecution around the world. Raven’s online advice to those considering sex change surgery makes for harrowing reading, and he is a fervent campaigner for transgender rights.
“People are being hunted down in the streets and murdered. In America, in November, we now have the transgender day of mourning where we get together and read off the list, which gets longer every year, of transgender people who have been murdered. The site http://www.gender.org/remember/ has all the names. Some were just hunted down and beaten to death in the streets, intersex babies were found dead in trashcans. It’s really sad.To be one of my people is to live in a war zone.”
Unsurprisingly, there is a kinkier side to Raven’s shamanism; his relationship with Baphomet (who he sees as a filth-eating god from 12th-century France), is jaw-dropping. “I didn’t know much about Baphomet till he showed up and started talking to me. The reason that he, or she, liked me is that he’s a hermaphroditic god. He can shift back and forth, but he’s always mixed.
“I’ve lent him my body. In Afro- Caribbean terms, I’m a ‘horse’, in that I will lend my body consensually to god-possession under certain circumstances or rituals. He makes sure, while he’s using my body, to leave me a lesson of some kind.”
As well as lending his body to Baphomet, Raven runs paganBDSM.org, Baphomet’s online temple, on which he sells books and publishes articles and poetry devoted to Baphomet along with instructions for some really quite bizarre sexual rituals. Be warned: the text is surreal and explicit.
“Baphomet made me accept my own sexual perversions. I was doing the whole ‘Oh, maybe I should purge myself of that,’ and he came down and he said, ‘This is a tool and you won’t be able to fix it anyway. It’s who you are, which means you have to use it. Get going!’”
As part of his shamanic duties, Raven is an ‘ordeal master’ acting as Baphomet’s tool to help others “let go of their junk” through spiritual BDSM.
“If you put BDSM into a spiritual context, it’s not a question of if something deep will come up; it’s a question of when.
“It has to be a very humble position. I am the one in charge, but it’s also all about the person who’s going through it. It’s not about my ego, it’s about me being the best possible instrument to help them to their underworld and back safely – especially with the gods watching. The gods and spirits, they love to smack you around with your ego.”
As we slowly tour the garden, our conversations about plants, spirits and gender identity blend into one great puddle of polytheism. Raven’s is a complete worldview, made possible by his pantheistic approach to spirituality. While doing my best to take on board what he says, my imagination throbs as we discuss the responsibilities of actually having a slave.
“Basically, Joshua has dedicated his life to serving me and to helping me to do my work. And because he enjoys that, it’s very fulfilling to him to be in a position of service. I am a slave myself: I am a god slave. This tattoo is my slave brand, and I am Hela’s property. She’s made it very clear to me that as I treat him, so I will be treated. If I’m a jerk to him, she will create circumstances to teach me the error of my ways.”
Although what Raven believes is far out – and even in his own words “perverted” – it is at least organic. I might be interested to spend a day in Raven Kaldera’s shoes, talking to gods and plants – although I’d make sure I was safely out of them before night fell.

Published in the Fortean Times.