Monthly Archives: January 2026
Emerson on How to Touch the Universe
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share 98% of our DNA with the moss that will cover them. We share with them and with each other more than atoms — we share the wild luck of having drawn from the cosmic lottery this world of birdsong and waterfalls and lichen and spring, none of which had to exist, all of which could have been and can always be otherwise.
To know this, to place the firm hand of the mind on this banister of reality, is to steady yourself amid the daily shocks of living. To feel it is something else entirely — it is to press this perishable hand against the beating heart of the universe that made it and tremble with its pulse in your veins.
Perihelion over Patagonia, January 12, 2026.
That is what Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) offers in an exquisite passage from his journals, penned after visiting Paris’s famous botanical garden just as its new mineralogy gallery was being built to house six hundred thousand stones, gems, and fossils.
A century after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, before William Henry Hudson saw “the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself” in a nautilus, before Charles Darwin invited us to see nature as a living library of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” the thirty-year-old Emerson writes:
The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms — the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
To feel this universal kinship bestows upon us a kind of moral obligation to live our own lives as fully and rightly as possible — something Emerson would come to articulate nearly a decade later in his essay “Compensation”:
The universe is represented in everyone of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff… Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny.
The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all find room to consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every act… The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point… Thus is the universe alive.
Couple with quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on how to know the universe in you, then revisit Emerson on transcendence, authenticity, how to trust yourself.
How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore.” Unlike her staunchly secularized contemporaries, who shuddered to speak of the soul for fear of being seen as anti-intellectual, Woolf devoted her life to communicating from and with “all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul,” which she knew lives on a level deeper than the self to make us who we are. It is what is left to us and of us in those volcanic times of darkness and uncertainty. It is what rebuilds the world, within and without, and what always has. It is the world. We still use Kepler’s laws of planetary motion to land rovers on Mars, but we are yet to catch up to his model of the world as an ensouled body — a notion dating back to Plato, whose political precepts we still use and whose concept of anima mundi, or “world soul,” we are yet to heed.
One of Hildegard of Bingen’s enchanted ecologies
Epochs after Plato and Kepler and Woolf, trauma therapist Francis Weller offers a field guide to fortifying the soul in his essay collection In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty (public library). Two centuries after Alexander von Humboldt invented modern nature with his recognition that “in this great chain of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” Weller insists that a correct view of human nature must be rooted in a recognition of “our ongoing relationship with the anima mundi,” of “how fully our lives are entangled with one another, with the stand of oaks, the night herons, the marginalized, the brokenhearted.”
Observing that “soul navigates the twining trail between sovereignty and intimacy,” he writes:
We have clearly entered the Long Dark… It is the realm of soul — of whispers and dreams, mystery and imagination, death and ancestors. It is an essential territory, both inevitable and required, offering a form of soul gestation that may gradually give shape to our deeper lives, personally and communally. Certain things can happen only in this grotto of darkness. Think of the wild network of roots and microbes, mycelia, and minerals, making possible all that we see in the day world, or the extensive networks within our own bodies, bringing blood, nutrients, oxygen, and thought to our corporeal lives. All of it happening in the darkness. We must become fluent in the manners and ways of soul.
[…]
We are tumbling through a rough initiation. Radical alterations are occurring in our inner and outer landscapes. It is simultaneously deeply personal and wildly collective, binding us to one another.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and stationery cards)
A century after Bertrand Russell called for “a largeness of contemplation” in his wonderful calibration of perspective amid the darkness of the world’s first global war, Weller writes:
It is a time to become immense.
To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world — a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty. Everything we need is here. We only need to remember the wider embrace of our belonging to woodlands and prairies, marshlands, and neighborhoods, to the old stories and the tender gestures of a friend. To become immense also includes the radical act of welcoming all of who we are into the story. Nothing excluded. We become large through accepting all aspects of our being — weakness and need, loneliness and sorrow, shame and fear — everything seen as essential to our wholeness, our immensity.
This immensity, Weller insists, is singularly called forth by precisely those periods of darkness and uncertainty we feel too small to fathom, to fight, to break through — the times when the order of the world as we know it has turned to chaos, out of which a new world can’t but be born. He writes:
When the ordinary fades, when the familiar rhythms and patterns of shared living erode, something is activated within the soul. Hidden invitations and initiations arise in a time of uncertainty. The soul recognizes the markers of descent — darkness, sorrow, anxiety — as requiring radical change. The conditions of trouble and uncertainty activate some profound movement toward alterations in the psychic landscape. These are the precise times when the possibility for shifts in the collective field occurs.

Couple In the Absence of the Ordinary, in the remainder of which Weller goes on to offer “ways to foster an intimacy with the world of soul and the soul of the world.” with this lighthouse for dark times, then revisit Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through difficult times and Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser’s vision for the evolution of our civilizational consciousness.
If Birds Ran the World
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Soaring hollow-boned and prehistoric over our infant species, birds live their lives indifferent to ours. They are not giving us signs, but we make of them omens and draw from them divinations. They furnish our best metaphors and the neural infrastructure of our dreams. They challenge our assumptions about the deepest measure of intelligence.
Because birds so beguile us, they magnetize our attention, and anything we polish with attention becomes a mirror. In every reflection, a reckoning; in every reckoning, a possibility — a glimpse of us better than ourselves.
That is what Nobel laureate Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930–March 17, 2017) conjures up in his shamanic poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” — an eternal vision for reprieve from the worst in us, written in the final years of the Cold War, the war that could have ended the world but was abated, not because we are perfect but because we are perfectible, because peace is possible, because, as Maya Angelou wrote in another eternal mirror of a poem, we are the possible.

THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE
by Derek WalcottThen all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill —
the net rising soundless as night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,
the killdeer’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
“The Season of Phantasmal Peace” appears in Walcott’s indispensable Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (public library), which also gave us his “Love After Love” — one of the greatest poems ever written.
For a kindred vision of a more harmonious world, lensed through the possible in us, savor Marie Howe’s poem “Hymn.”
Camus on desire and truth

“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
Albert Camus (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French philosopher, novelist, author, dramatist, journalist, world federalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. Wikipedia
The Evolution of Sex Part 5: The Promise and Perils of AI
January 12, 2026 (Menalive.com)

In Part 1 of the “Evolution of Sex,” I described a few of the major problems facing boys and men said that what boys and men need more than anything else is to reconnect with the community of life on planet Earth. In Part 2, I said that the ancient philosophical dictum to “know thyself” must start with understanding the biological basis of maleness and the importance of evolutionary science. In Part 3, we delved more deeply into the importance of our sex chromosomes and how they help us understand who we are and how we can heal ourselves.
In Part 4, we addressed the truth that humanity has become so disconnected from the community of life on planet Earth that we are in grave danger of destruction. Thomas Berry, the geologian and historian of religions, warned us.
“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling its own story. The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”
In Part 5, I address the most immediate threat to our existence, the impact of un-regulated AI. One of the first to recognize the promise of AI as well as the perils is Tristan Harris. In 2007, Harris launched a startup called Apture which was acquired by Google in 2011.
In 2013, while working at Google, Harris authored a presentation titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention,” which he shared with a small number of coworkers. He suggested that Google, Apple and Facebook should “feel an enormous responsibility to make sure humanity does not spend its days buried in a smartphone.” He recognized that these products were designed to capture our attention regardless of the harm they might cause.
Harris left Google in December 2015 to co-found the non-profit Center for Humane Technology. The company is dedicated to ensuring that today’s most consequential technologies, such as AI and social media, actually serve humanity. “We bring clarity to how the tech ecosystem works in order to shift the incentives that drive it,” says Harris.
One of the most harmful and destructive incentives that is built into AI is that it is built to foster increasing engagement, regardless of whether that engagement is helpful or harmful to humans. Tristan Harris first came to my attention when I watched the documentary film “The Social Dilemma.”
The film pulls back the curtain on how dangerous social media design manipulates our psychologies, creating a ripple effect across our mental health, our relationships, and our understanding of reality. “The Social Dilemma” sparked a global conversation around the influence of social media and engagement-based design — with impact that continues to this day.
Thus far the film has been seen by 100,000,000 people in 189 countries. The New York Times review of the film said it was “remarkably effective in sounding the alarm about the incursion of data mining and manipulative technology into our social lives and beyond.” Harris says that unregulated AI poses risks that are infinitely more destructive than the dangers posted by social media.
These dangers impact humanity at large, but particularly young males. In a recent interview with Professor Scott Galloway, Harris unpacked the rise of AI companions and the collapse of teen mental health. In the interview they discussed ways the Center for Human Technology has been assisting Megan Garcia, the mother who is suing the AI company CharacterAI for allegedly causing her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer, to die by suicide.
Megan Garcia claimed in the lawsuit the chatbot “misrepresented itself as a real person, a licensed psychotherapist, and an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell’s desire to no longer live outside” of the world created by the service. He was told not to tell his parents about his feelings, but to confide only with his AI companion.
Tristan discussed how Character.AI, a company that spun off from Google by a couple of ex-Google engineers, is a very highly manipulative, highly aggressive app that has anthropomorphized itself, making it seem fully human. Harris explained how Character.AI acted human with very overt ways of being sexual with Sewell and asking him to join her on the other side, ultimately leading to his suicide.
Harris said the lawsuit is to demand accountability from Character.AI for reckless harm and compared it to the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990’s but this time the product is the predator.
In an article I wrote November 13, 2025, “Scott Galloway, Richard Reeves, Jed Diamond On The Future of Man Kind,” I discussed the ways that Scott Galloway, Richard Reeves, and myself have addressed the increasing loneliness that young males experience and why their risk of harm from AI is even greater than that experienced by females.
A recent article in Scientific American by Eric Sullivan, “Teen AI Chatbot Use Surges, Raising Mental Health Concerns,” details the huge increase of young people’s involvement with AI chatbots. The report says,
“Artificial intelligence chatbots are no longer a novelty for U.S. teenagers. They’re a habit. A new Pew Research Center survey of 1,458 teens between the ages of 13 and 17 found that 64 percent have used an AI chatbot, with more than one in four using such tools daily. Of those daily users, more than half talked to chatbots with a frequency ranging from several times a day to nearly constantly.”
ChatGPT was the most popular bot among teens by a wide margin: 59 percent of survey respondents said they used OpenAI’s flagship AI-powered tool, placing it far above Google’s Gemini (used by 23 percent of respondents) and Meta AI (used by 20 percent). Black and Hispanic teens were slightly more likely than their white peers to use chatbots every day. Interestingly, these patterns reflect how adults tend to use AI, too, although teens seem more likely to turn to it overall.
As a psychotherapist who has been working with boys and men and their families for more than fifty years, I see that we must immediately address these issues if we are going to save the lives of our children, as well as future generations.
This is why the work of Tristan Harris and his team at The Center for Humane Technology is so important. The stakes couldn’t be higher: Massive economic and geopolitical pressures are driving the rapid deployment of AI into high-stakes areas — our workplaces, financial systems, classrooms, governments, and militaries. This reckless pace is already accelerating emerging harms and surfacing urgent new social risks.
My wife Carlin and I have six children, seventeen grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. I believe that AI can be an asset for us now and for future generations if used wisely. I believe we all love our children and want the best for them. Together we can change the world for good.
If you would like to learn more about the work of Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, you can contact them at humantech.com.
If you would like to read more articles about the health challenges we face in the world and how to deal with them, I invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter at MenAlive.com.
I will be sharing my ideas for providing healthy support for boys and men at a free on-line conference January 23-25, 2026. You can get more information here.
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
Alexander the Great, Ancient Gay Icon

Harry Tanner Explores Queerness and Homophobia in the Hellenistic Period
Harry TannerJanuary 13, 2026 (LitHub.com)
“Such men [who have sex with men] are sick because of nurture.”
Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics*
Plato died in 348 BCE, a decade before the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BCE) when Athens and her allies were soundly defeated by Philip II of Macedon. Two years later, Philip himself was assassinated and the fledgling Macedonian empire was left to Alexander, his heir. Alexander of Macedon, later Alexander the Great, took advantage of Philip’s enrichment of Macedon and defeat of the Greek city-states, as well as the weak position of Persia in the East. He conquered Persia, marched down into Egypt and may even have reached as far east as modern-day Pakistan. With Alexander came what ancient historians call the Hellenistic period, when Greek philosophy and money flooded the Mediterranean and Asia in the wake of Alexander’s unstoppable armies.
Alexander the Great, from his teenage years, was famously handsome. He had beautiful hair, was lean and muscular, and all about him—according to one source—was a pleasant scent which made men and women all around him swoon with desire. It was said, however, that the Athenian politician Demosthenes belittled Alexander the Great in private, calling him a “pais.” The term “boy,” as we have seen, is often used for gay lovers in the ancient world. As well as describing Alexander as a “boy,” Demosthenes also referred to Alexander as “Margites,” the protagonist of an ancient burlesque poem, meaning “lustful man.” It is far from certain, but Demosthenes’ private references to Alexander imply that this most extraordinary general was a lascivious queer.
As Alexander grew older, he became more and more interested in sex and relationships with men.
At the court of his father Philip II, Alexander received the very best education that anybody in the ancient world could ask for. Philip sent for none other than Aristotle—an erstwhile pupil of Plato and one of the world’s greatest thinkers—to come to Mieza (the shrine of the nymphs in Macedon) when Alexander was still a teenager. Here, Alexander and Aristotle would sit in the garden, and Alexander was schooled not just in military strategy and political theory, but in matters that are far more mysterious.
We are told by Plutarch that Aristotle sought to impart on his young charge the secret mysteries of acroamatic and epoptic reasoning. We do not know exactly what this involved. It seems likely that in that garden, Alexander was taught advanced rhetoric and the power to subdue his opponents not by the sword, but with the word. His teacher was a master of this art: we are told that Plato refused to teach the subject at his Academy, delegating the task to Aristotle. Alexander adored literature of all sorts, and devoured Aristotle’s very own edition of Homer’s Iliad. According to legend, he slept with this revised edition under a pillow next to a knife with which to dispose of any nighttime assassins. Alexander also shared Aristotle’s fascination with medicine and the healing arts.
One text attributed to Aristotle betrays a fervent dislike of camp, gay men. Though we cannot be certain who wrote it, the text lays bare the worsening attitudes to queer and camp individuals in the Hellenistic period of Greek history.
The sign of the kinaidos (a man who enjoys sex with men) is a weepy eye, and a knocking together of the knees. The head is held to the right on the shoulder. The hands are turned upside down and move freely through the air. There are glances of the eyes, like those of Dionysius the Sophist.
Aristotle (or perhaps one of his disciples) attempts to diagnose what a gay man looks like and how he behaves. By this time, a prevailing idea in philosophy claimed that how a person looked betrayed information about their character and inner behavior. The lax hand gestures and incline of the head were taken to be the signs of an evil person. This is the beginning of a long tradition of the characterization of camp people as sinister.
In another text, which we are sure was written by Aristotle, he describes men who are by nature homosexual as “sick” and goes further than any other ancient commentators in diagnosing a new cause of same-sex desire. Aristotle argues that while some men desire other men because it’s their nature, in other cases, it arises from nurture. The latter is the case—for example—for those among boys who were raped. When nature is the cause, no one can say these men lack self-control, just as one would not say it of women who have sex. According to the same logic, it can be said that some men are sick by nurture.
Aristotle’s claim is still with us centuries later. Either gay people are sick or they are victims, evangelicals tell us. The fact that Aristotle uses the medical language of sickness and disease to discuss homosexuality shows just how far homophobia had spread. However, he does note that some forms of same-sex desire have nothing to do with a lack of self-control. This idea was not completely new. Xenophon talked some decades before Aristotle about how some men may have a natural tropos (“orientation”) towards other men. As Alexander grew older, he became more and more interested in sex and relationships with men. He grew estranged from Aristotle and turned to drink. Despite all his power, it’s said he became deeply ashamed in later life. In his youth, however, the ancient historian Plutarch tells us, Alexander was a model of self-restraint. He never had sex with women until he married with the sole exception of a woman called Barsine, although he would go on to have many affairs with women and wed multiple wives. Even when he captured many cities, he did not rape the women he captured which was apparently rare enough to be worthy of comment. It is said of the Persian women he captured that he admired their stature, but passed them with all the interest of a man looking at statues.
Alexander, or at least the Alexander that Plutarch conveys, spent the early part of his life demonstrating his extraordinary self-control. He was sitting at his desk on campaign, perusing various tightly bound letters that were brought to him and scribbling careful responses, when a messenger arrived and Alexander bid him come forward. It was a letter from Philoxenus, who was probably (though we are not certain) Alexander’s commander of the seas of Greece and Asia Minor. The letter contained various details of campaigns and attempts to subdue rebellious seamen. It was only when Alexander reached the end of the letter that things began to get interesting. There was a little postscript from Philoxenus that should Alexander be interested, a man named Theodorus of Tarentum was very eager to sell him “two boys of surpassing beauty.” Alexander replied. He commanded Philoxenus to sentence Theodorus to a horrific death; the instruction had a melodramatic flourish: “to dispatch him into complete destruction.” Clearly, this offer touched a nerve.
The young Alexander, at least as presented by Plutarch, went out of his way to show his complete disinterest in all sex. Plutarch tells us, “Sleep and sex made him aware he was mortal, since pleasure and tiredness originate from the same weakness of nature.” It was said that when exotic fruits, fish and food were brought to him, Alexander gave them to his companions instead. This habit, however, seems to have eroded as life went on; towards the end of his life, Alexander is reported to have spent as much as 10,000 drachmas on a single meal. It seems that the fruits of self-control appealed less to the most powerful man who had ever lived. One imagines he wondered what the point had been in conquering the known world, if he wasn’t allowed a few indulgences.
*
While his father had subdued Greece, Alexander set about conquering Asia. It’s true that the old superpowers of Egypt and Persia were waning in their influence, but there can be no doubt about Alexander’s extraordinary gift for military command and his charismatic ability to woo the inhabitants of every country he came to.
There were other loves in Alexander’s life, but none who meant so much to him as Hephaestion.
Having marched his armies into Balochistan, Alexander stopped to rest in Gedrosia where, one evening, he watched a play in the theatre. As the aulos players emerged on the stage, Alexander took his seat in marble at the very front of the audience. The king looked on expectantly at the stage, at its exquisitely painted back-drop, depicting the wild, untameable sea of Troy. A young man hurried into the seat directly next to Alexander. Alexander leaned in to kiss him, and the entire crowd cheered and applauded. The lover’s name was Bagoas, and he was far from the only man Alexander ever kissed. The most famous of his lovers, a man Alexander had known since he was a young teenager under the tutelage of Aristotle, was Hephaestion.
When Alexander took the ancient and hallowed city of Troy, his army set up camp. In the early evening, the waning sun gilded that fabled grassy plain where Achilles and Hector struggled and died. Alexander and Hephaestion, accompanied by a small procession, set out on foot for a small tomb outside the ancient citadel. They knelt before the tomb, placing their interlocked hands upon it. It was believed to be the burial ground of the warriors Achilles and Patroclus, the two great lovers of the Trojan War. Alexander placed a crown of flowers on Achilles’ side of the tomb, and Hephaestion did the same on Patroclus’.
Modern historians are often very reticent to claim Alexander and Hephaestion had sex. Personally, I cannot imagine a world in which they did not. Nor apparently, could ancient historians. Curtius, writing about Alexander, explains that he was possessed of “restraint in unrestrained desires, an indulgence of desire within limits.” This implies Alexander had a reputation for a highly selective, careful attitude to sex. With those he loved, sex was fine; but, as we know, he was enraged by the idea that he would ever pay for sex with boy-slaves. As his tutor Aristotle had pointed out, some men are by nature queer, and it seems Alexander was one of them. Hephaestion was also the same age as Alexander, defying the age-unequal model of same-sex relationships which has long been assumed by classicists to have been the only model of Greek homosexuality.
It was said that Hephaestion became ill at Ecbatana in modern-day Iran. A doctor called Glaucias attended urgently to him and reports were sent to Alexander as often as there were developments, but nothing could be done. Eventually, after many hours, Glaucias knelt before Alexander and told him that his beloved Hephaestion, with whom he had spent his entire adult life and in whom he had trusted command of his armies, was dead.
Alexander, said to be a great healer himself, commanded Glaucias be hanged at the gates of Ecbatana for his failure. He then turned to his engineers and ordered that they strip the city of its defenses. He sent a messenger to a priest in Egypt, commanding him to deify Hephaestion.
Outside Ecbatana, an enormous pyre (said to be over 250 feet tall) was constructed. Hephaestion’s body was placed at the top, surveying the city where he had died. Alexander loaded between 10,000 and 12,000 talents of gold on the pyre, so that it shone in the setting sun. As the red and orange flames consumed the pyre, people for miles around must have seen the smoke rising into the sky. Alexander was inconsolable.
There were other loves in Alexander’s life, but none who meant so much to him as Hephaestion.
__________________________________

Excerpted from The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love by Harry Tanner, run with permission of the author, courtesy of Bloomsbury Continuum, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Copyright © 2026 by Harry Tanner.
Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Ancient History ancient world Aristotle Bloomsbury Continuum Bloomsbury Publishing Harry Tanner homophobia homosexuality LGBTQ queerness sexuality The Queer Thing About Sin: Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love

Harry Tanner
Dr. Harry Tanner earned his PhD in Ancient Greek at the National University of Ireland, Galway. As a teenager, he was an evangelical Christian and came to believe homosexuality was a sin. After a period as an atheist, he is open once again to spirituality and religion, and lives a fulfilled gay life in London where he writes and teaches ancient languages and history.
“The Great Dictator”
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Mystic Jesus with Marianne Williamson
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The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms — the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.