In Search of Venus Barbata, the Bearded Venus

Aphrodite. 

Venus. 

The goddess of love. 

When you think of her, what comes to mind? 

And if you’re a gamer, you might think of… whatever this nonsense is.

Clearly, she’s depicted as whatever the male gaze finds appealing at the time, and the female gays don’t seem to mind it either. 

There are plenty of mythological stories about Aphrodite as well, and a lot of them aren’t really surprising for a love goddess. 

There’s the Judgment of Paris – that time where Aphrodite wanted to be hotter than Hera and Athena so badly that she started the Trojan War over it.

There’s the time she actually fought in the Trojan War, but she was so bad at fighting that a mortal warrior, Diomedes, managed to wound her and draw blood.

There’s the time she married Hephaestos, the forge god, but then there are also the times she boned Hermes, Ares, Dionysus, Zeus, the Trojan prince Anchises, and probably a bunch of others too.

So she’s hot, she’s femme, everybody knows it, and she gets around.

And yet, she wasn’t always portrayed this way.

In case this is your first time on the channel, welcome. I’m Sophie, and this is We Have Always Existed. It’s a show where we examine the wealth of transgender history and transgender mythology that comes from the ancient Mediterranean.

Now if you’re particularly clever, a student of the great Sherlock Holmes himself, you might have used your great powers of deductive reasoning to conclude that this video existing means there’s some transgender mythology around Aphrodite.

In fact, Aphrodite’s heritage can be traced across tens of thousands of years, from some of the earliest human settlements in the Mediterranean all the way until the end of the Roman Empire and beyond – and every step of the way, we can find something that really doesn’t fit into what we might consider a typical gender presentation.

NO TRANS PEOPLE ARE NEW THIS IS MODERN DEGENERACY INVENTED BY WOKE THERES JUST TWO GENDERS THERE’S ALWAYS BEEN TWO GENDERS NYEH NYEH NYEH NYEH

If you’re one of those types, it’s unlikely you’re watching this video in the first place. But on the off chance you are, please know that I have no interest in trying to convince you that anything in this video, or in this series in general, is true. You may have heard some right wing dingus tell you that trans people are some new modern type of degeneracy or whatever. And if that’s the case, you maybe didn’t bother looking at the matter any closer and just believe that’s correct. After all, you’d never heard of all this transgender stuff before a few years ago, right?

But it’s not logical to cling to your beliefs when there’s compelling evidence to the contrary, and I don’t think it’s terribly interesting to engage with people who have that sort of attitude. It makes me think of that debate Bill Nye had with young earth creationist Ken Ham back in 2014, remember that (cite)? Back in the day before the new atheist crowd went all in on far right reactionary junk and became just as hateful as the far right Evangelical churches they despise so much? (except you Steve Shives, thanks for being not terrible dude, really <3). It was a simpler time, back when we thought we could get through to evangelicals if we put together a compelling enough argument. Back before “facts and logic” became a fascist dog whistle. 

Ah, those were the days.

Anyway, at one point, the moderator asked each man “what, if anything, would ever change your mind?” (1:49:50) Bill Nye said that if enough evidence was laid out to him, it would cause him to question the science, quote:

We would need just one piece of evidence, we would need the fossil that swam from one layer to another; we would need evidence that the universe is not expanding; we need evidence that the stars appear to be far away, but they’re not. We would need evidence that rock layers can somehow form in just four thousand years instead of the extraordinary number. We need evidence that somehow you can reset atomic clocks and keep the neutrons from becoming protons. Bring out any of those things, and you would change me immediately.

– Bill Nye (Ham & Nye 1:52:03)

Ken Ham, meanwhile, said that because of what’s written in the Bible, absolutely nothing could ever change his mind.

The Bible is the word of God… And so far as the word of God is concerned, no. No one’s ever going to convince me the word of God is not true.

– Ken Ham (Ham & Nye 1:50:00)

My videos are well researched, drawing from ancient archaeological evidence, written sources of the time, and modern peer reviewed scholarship analyzing them. I’m not perfect, and as much as I try to research these topics thoroughly, there might be some details I get wrong or that I overlook. I accept that. But if you’re arguing from the perspective that transgender history isn’t real, you’re either loudly ignorant of the topic, or you’re purposely ignoring the stuff you don’t like, and either way I’m not interested in dealing with you.

So if you’re a Bill Nye – if you’re interested in learning, in expanding your understanding of reality, of the human condition, and all the diverse ways we express our humanity, stick around. That’s what we do here – we explore. We’re curious. We’re intrigued by what came before us, and we want to understand how we fit into the long, fascinating story of humanity. So, like, comment, subscribe. You might find something interesting.

On the other hand, if you’re a Ken Ham – if you’re already convinced I’m wrong regardless of what I say in this video, you think Bill Nye was co-opted by the woke agenda or whatever, and you really think leaving a one sentence comment telling me I’m wrong is an appropriate response to an hours-long video, you’re free to hit the back button on your browser, and continue on your way with your ignorance intact.

Special thanks to my supporters on Patreon and channel members, who help me keep this series going. Capitalism sucks, but that’s what we’ve got to live with for now, and your support helps me turn this series into a self sustaining thing instead of an expensive hobby. If you’re able, and you’re willing, it starts at just a buck a month, and it really does make a difference.

And if you’re interested in science fiction as well, here’s a link to my novel, The Bottom Line. I’m sure some psychologist somewhere might have some opinions about how my interests lie in either the ancient past or the distant future – as far away from the present day as possible.

Our journey begins with Aphrodite’s mythological origins, according to two of the most influential Greek mythographers, Homer and Hesiod. From there, we’ll leap more than a thousand years forward in time, to the twilight of the Western Roman Empire, where the writer Macrobius will spark a journey through the millennia long history of transgender art on the island of Cyprus as we search for a particular statue, the namesake of this video.

There’s some really wild stuff to be found here, and I’m excited to reveal it to you. But before we dig in, may I ask that you pay tribute to the patron of all YouTubers, the almighty algorithm? Take a moment to SMASH that like and subscribe button? This stuff really does make a difference. If you think transgender history is interesting and important, it takes about 1.7 seconds to like and subscribe. That tells the YouTube algorithm that people like you like content like this, so they’re more likely to show it to other people like you. If you’re feeling particularly frisky, you can even leave a comment.

Even if it just says “I like the video Sophie!” that still helps.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

(wait for 5 seconds, file nails)

We good?

Excellent.

Chapter 1: The Birth Of Aphrodite

When it comes to the mythology around the births of the various gods in the primary classical pantheon, most of them are either the children or grandchildren of Kronos (Saturn in Latin).

Kronos, having overthrown his father Ouranos (Caelus in Latin), became the god of the sky, ruling the cosmos with his siblings, known as the Titans, before himself being overthrown by his son Zeus (Jupiter).

After, Zeus and his two brothers divided up the various elements of reality. Zeus became god of the sky, Poseidon (Neptune) became god of the sea, and Hades (Pluto) drew the short straw, so he became god of the underworld.

Zeus married his sister Hera (Juno), and together they had Ares (Mars) and Hephaestos (Vulcan). But Zeus got around too, and had Hermes (Mercury), Athena (Minerva), Dionysus (Bacchus), Artemis (Diana), and Apollo (no Roman equivalent) with various mythological baby mamas.

Along with Jupiter’s sisters Demeter (Ceres) and Hestia (Vesta), these are the descendants of Kronos that ruled the cosmos.

The above, minus Hades and plus Aphrodite, were known as the twelve Olympians. Hades didn’t count because he lived in the Underworld, not on Mt. Olympus.

Now, if you’re paying close attention, you might notice that actually adds up to thirteen Olympians. The list excludes either Hestia or Dionysus, depending on who you ask.

But okay, so that’s a pretty neat and tidy origin story for everybody, except Aphrodite. Where does she fit in?

There are two different myths speaking of the birth of Aphrodite, so let’s take a look at them both.

The first one is the simplest – it comes from Homer’s Iliad Book V, the epic poem telling the tale of the Greek invasion of Troy. According to Homer, she’s the daughter of Zeus and Dione. This particular Dione – there are several of them in Greek mythology – is one of Kronos’ sisters, which would make her Zeus’ aunt, and would make Aphrodite his daughter as well as his cousin. Theological family trees are… really something. In the Iliad, after Diomedes wounds Aphrodite in battle, Dione tends to her wounds (Hom. Il. V.297-415). There’s not much more to say about this.

The second one has to do with the story of how Kronos overthrew his father Ouranos. We get this story from the Theogony, a collection of myths written by Hesiod, a Greek poet from the city of Kyme, somewhere around the same time as Homer, the 8^th or 7^th centuries BCE. Kyme is on the west coast of Anatolia about halfway between Troy and Halikarnassos, which is where Herotodus came from, we’ve talked about him plenty on the channel before (Lattimore, Hesiod intro 4-5).

Theogony literally means “birth of the gods,” and it essentially gives an origin story of the gods – their birth, their families, and how the Olympians came to be MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. Here’s the TL;DR version (105-200).

Ouranos had a god tier sex drive and wanted to bang constantly. But he also had god tier spunk, so his wife Gaia (Terra in Latin) was pretty much constantly pregnant. She had eighteen children – the 12 Titans, Kronos was the youngest, as well as the three cyclopes Brontes, Steropes, and Arges (Hes. Theog. 140), and Kottos, Briareos, and Gyes, the three hecatonchires (Hes. Theog. 148), which translates loosely as “guys with a hundred hands.”

Ouranos imprisoned the cyclopes and hecatonchires, and Gaia wasn’t happy about this – she still loved her weird kids, after all. But after eighteen pregnancies, she was tired of being his fleshlight. So she gave her son Kronos, one of the Titans, a scythe with which to attack his father, with the idea of overthrowing him. Kronos hid, waiting for Ouranos to come and do his business, and came at him with the scythe, snipping off Ouranos’ nads, which he tossed over his shoulder like a spent beer can.

I guess you can say Ouranos had… reaped what he’d sown.

Anyway, the nads landed in the water, floated around the Mediterranean, began to foam, and out popped Aphrodite.

But while it’s a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, this would mean she’s actually the youngest child of Ouranos, the sister of Kronos, Zeus’s aunt, and the 13^th Titan. It also means she has no mother, and was birthed from a man.

And ever since then, we’re not allowed to say mother goddess anymore, we have to say birthing deity. Thanks, Ouranos!

A man who gave birth. Transgender history!

If cis men are from Mars and cis women are from Venus, I guess trans men are from Uranus.

Leave a comment if you know what planet trans women are from so I can go back there, I’m tired of living on this planet.

Anyway, Kronos and the Titans took control of the universe, and set up shop at Mount Othrys, a bit south of Olympus. He imprisoned the cyclopes and hecatonchires down in Tartarus, basically the ancient Greek equivalent to hell. Hesiod says that if you were at its gates, it would take you a full year of falling down until you reached it, because you’d be blasted back and forth as you fell (Hes. Theog. 740). Which is, I guess, a good place to trap an immortal being.

Kronos married his older sister who had many different names, including Rhea, Ops, Asherah, and Kybele, remember her? All this stuff is connected. If you haven’t yet, check out the previous videos in this series about Kybele and her Galla priestesses, who are one of the clearest examples of trans people living in the ancient Mediterranean we have, and Kybele herself has some interesting transy stuff in her mythology too. Queue it up for after this video, you’ll like it.

Or don’t, what am I your great mother?

RELATED: The Gallae: The Roman Transgender Priestess of Kybele

Anyway, Kronos would, of course, be overthrown as well, by Zeus, in a war called the Titanomachy – Zeus’ Olympians versus most of Kronos’ Titans. Zeus freed the cyclopes and hecatonchires from Tartarus, who joined the Olympians as well (Hes. Theog. 495-508).

This is why Zeus won, he was good at building coalitions and reaching across the aisle.

The hecatonchires threw rocks at the Titans, which doesn’t seem like a big deal until you remember they had a hundred hands each, and the cyclopes made thunderbolts for Zeus, which turned the tide in the war, and after ten years the Titans were defeated. I guess it’s complicated when there’s a war between two groups of beings who can’t die. Zeus stuffed Kronos and his brother Iapetus down in Tartarus and made the hecatonchires their guards, what fun.

The rest of the Titans were allowed to remain free, though none of them lived on Mt. Olympus or had much influence over things.

Except for Aphrodite.

Hesiod explains the journey of Ouranos’ nads once they were, ahem, removed, and believe it or not that gives us some interesting insight into Aphrodite’s history, and might just be the most well-documented voyage of a set of castrated nads ever written. He says, quote:

But the members themselves when Kronos had lopped them with the flint, he threw from the mainland into the great wash of the sea water and they drifted a great while on the open sea, and from there spread a circle of white foam from the immortal flesh, and in it grew a girl, whose course first took her to holy Kythera, and from there she afterward made her way to sea-washed Cyprus and stepped ashore, a modest lovely goddess, and about her light and slender feet the grass grew, and the gods call her Aphrodite, and men do too. 

– Hesiod – Theogony 187-197

Now, classical mythology didn’t have a bible or anything. There was no central text they looked to that guided their religious life. But in terms of influence, Homer and Hesiod were about as important to the Greeks as the Bible is to Catholics today.

RELATED: Transgender Christians in History

So what happened when they had conflicting views?

Originally, there was no real distinction between the two, despite this obvious inconsistency (Farnell 621-22).

Plato would later try to retcon it in The Symposium by saying that these are actually two different goddesses. Aphrodite Ourania, or Aphrodite of the heavens, was the one born from Ouranos’ junk, and Aphrodite Pandemos, or Aphrodite for all the people, was the daughter of Zeus (Pl. Symp. 120-121).

When I read the second name, I realized that’s the root of the word pandemic, which I guess is “for all the people” from a certain, morbid point of view, huh?

But Plato aside, the ancients didn’t care much about consistency in their mythology, so there are different stories that referenced both origins. However, as influential as Homer was on the development of classical Mediterranean culture, it’s Hesiod’s story that seems to have become the more widely accepted version of her birth. Homer himself even seems to have recognized Hesiod’s story, or at least its origin, since in the Iliad book V, just before Diomedes wounds Aphrodite, Homer refers to her as “the lady of Cyprus” (Hom. Il. V: 330).

Anyway, Hesiod’s is a much more interesting story for our purposes today.

That’s because his tale of floppy flotsam, of jizzy jetsam, this one-eyed odyssey, this Johnson’s journey, this bone voyage… I can’t believe I wrote this… actually gives us a road map to follow the origins of Aphrodite.

Kythera is an island just off the southern coast of Lakedamonia, the territory around Sparta and under their control. The island was also under Spartan control for most of the pre-Rome classical era, and was well known as a centre of worship of Aphrodite.

Fun fact – the Ʌ symbol on Spartan shields is the Greek letter lambda, equivalent to the Latin L, which was for Lakedamonia.

So I guess when that Persian guy got kicked down the well by Leonidas in the movie 300, you might say he… took the lambda.

And of course Cyprus is south of Asia Minor, which is most of modern day Turkey. And from Cyprus, we can trace Aphrodite’s lineage even further, to ancient Sumeria.

In fact, what we’ve come to know as Aphrodite is actually a blend of four different goddesses – a Roman goddess of love, a Greek goddess of love – very similar, but not exactly the same thing, at least not at first – a Cypriot fertility figure, and a Sumerian goddess of both love and destruction. But we’ll go to Sumeria another time.

So, what did all that have to do with transgender history?

Stick around…

Chapter II: Venus Barbata

Early on when I was reading about the myths of Venus, what caught my eye was the story of Venus Barbata, or Venus with a beard. Like many of the topics I like to cover in this series, it starts with some assorted whispers and conversations in the community – a tweet here, a poorly cited WordPress blog there. In this case, it was a footnote in a Wikipedia article while I was researching the Hermaphroditus video, which led me to a Google search, but there’s not a lot of information out there about Venus Barbata.

Remember when Tumblr invented a Greek goddess, Mesperyian, and people actually believed it for a while until someone was like “hey if you actually look up Mesperyian the only thing you find is this Tumblr post and some amateur fiction on Booksie?” (one-in-lemillion).

Good times…

But of course, I’m not going to make a video THIS long based on just a tweet. No, it turns out there is actually some compelling evidence of a Venus Barbata in the ancient world. The first real source I came across was the 5^th century CE Roman writer Macrobius, who might be a new name to you even if you’re into classical studies. When I did my undergrad, all my professors seemed to stop caring once Constantine died, but it turns out the Roman world continued on for some time after that (citation needed tho).

Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, or just Macrobius, was a Roman writer who lived at some point toward the end of the empire in the west.

We don’t know much about him.

He might have been a praetorian prefect of Spain or Italy, he might have been proconsul of Africa, he might have been from Egypt.

The only real details we know about him come from hints in his writings.

He mentions at the beginning of the Saturnalia that he had a son named Eustachius (1.1), was “born under an alien sky”, and implies Latin was not his first language (1.11). He probably held public office and so was an aristocrat of sorts, and he was familiar enough with both Greek and Latin to write a grammatical treatise on the differences between the two. He might have been a pagan too, which was notable since the 5^th century CE was well into the Christian era of the Roman Empire. But that’s about it (Davies 1-2).

A pretty big chunk of the Saturnalia is devoted to literary criticism of the poet Vergil’s works. Remember him? He wrote the Aeneid, which we referred to a few times in the first video introducing Kybele and the Gallae.

At the beginning of chapter 8 of book 3, Macrobius speaks thusly:

We sometimes impair the worth of a passage which illustrates the wide range of Vergil’s knowledge by a wrong reading. Thus there are some who (where Aeneas is telling of his escape from Troy under the guidance of his mother, Venus) read: ‘I depart and under the guidance of the goddess [Venus] make my way through fire and foe’ [Aeneid 1.632] although the poet said ducente deo [under the god’s guidance] and not ducente dea and showed thereby how great was his learning; for according to Aterianus we should read, too, in a poem of Calvus: ‘Venus the powerful god (not goddess).’

– Macrobius, Saturnalia III.VIII.I-II

Okay, so what?

Macrobius mentions at least two different poets – Vergil and Calvus, quoted by Aterianus – who refer to Venus as “the god” and not “the goddess” – is that really that big a deal? After all, that’s a simple matter of semantics, and it’s not like that’s really evidence of any sort of gender nonconformity is it?

But he continues.

There’s also a statue of Venus on Cyprus that’s bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditos, and Laevinus says: ‘worshipping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is male or female, just as the Moon is a nurturing goddess.’ In his Atthis Philochorus, too, states that she is the Moon and that men sacrifice to her in women’s dress, women in men’s, because she is held to be both male and female. 

– Macrobius, Saturnalia III.VIII.II-III

And okay wow there’s a lot to unpack there. And it’s at this point in working through this script, looking at the fact that it’s 99 pages long and I’ve still got so much more to do, that I’m realizing my favourite pastime when it comes to writing, it seems, is to bite off FAR more than I can chew.

What starts off as a boring semantic analysis gets a lot more in depth. (spit out the bread) Apparently there was a statue of Venus on the island of Cyprus that had a beard and a phallus, but had womanly curves, was dressed like a woman, and treated as androgynous?

And that Venus is referred to as androgynous by Aristophanes, Laevinus, and Philochorus, as well as Vergil and Calvus?

And that worshipers of this Venus Barbata dressed as the opposite gender to make sacrifices to her?

There’s gotta be more to this.

To start, what does it mean that Venus had a beard?

For one interpretation, we need to take a look at the Assyrian goddess Ishtar, whose earlier myth is closely related with Venus. We found a hymn to the goddess on a tablet at Nineveh (Meek), which reads thusly:

In the midst of which she dwells, Ishtar, the queen. Like Ashur she is bearded with a beard, she is clothed with splendor, a diadem shines upon her head like a star 

-K. 1286 V-VII

Okay, so Ishtar had a beard. Seems pretty straightforward, right?

Not necessarily.

Ashur is another Assyrian god, who was associated with the Sun. That seems to suggest masculine traits to this goddess of love. But it’s also possible they were describing something else.

Morris Jastrow Jr. talks about this in detail in his paper “The Bearded Venus” (1911).

Ishtar was associated with the planet Venus, just like the goddess Venus was, but the Assyrians called the planet Dilbat. Jastrow analyzes another Assyrian astrological tablet, K137, which describes what happens if the planet Venus either does or doesn’t have a beard in various months of the year. For example, the first month of the year is Arah Nisanu, which is the end of March and beginning of April in our calendar. If Venus has a beard during this period, more men will be born, and if Venus doesn’t have a beard, crop yield will be poorer than usual (Jastrow 1911:272).

What does all this mean?

Keep in mind this is an astrologer’s writings, not a mythographer, and certainly not a historian. In a closer read of the original Assyrian, the scribe tells us the term “beard” means “to shine.” In other words, if Venus shines more strongly than usual, she has a beard. And I guess I can see that – if you take a look at Venus, as the morning star or the evening star, I suppose the rays could look a bit like a beard. And when you consider that she “has a beard like the god Ashur,” who’s associated with the Sun, it makes even more sense (Jastrow 1911:273).

But if it were that simple – if Venus Barbata was nothing more than a metaphor for an astronomical phenomenon – what do we make of what Macrobius is saying? He’s very clear in saying there was a statue of Venus with a beard, and he left us a trail of literary references talking about the masculine aspects of Venus as well.

Let’s take a look at some of those references.

We’ll start with Vergil

Vergil lived during the age of the emperor Augustus, and wrote the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, the latter of which is one of the most important Latin poems ever written. Yeah, that guy. Anyway, when Vergil refers to how Venus guided Aeneas in his wanderings, Macrobius tells us he specifically uses the masculine “ducente deo.” That phrase says “under the guidance of the god,” but a male god specifically, and in order to understand how this works, we need to do a little linguistics lesson here.

CONTENT WARNING: INSUFFERABLY NERDY DETAILS ABOUT A LANGUAGE BARELY ANYBODY HAS SPOKEN FOR 1500 YEARS

Think back to your French or Spanish or whatever language class you took when you were a kid – remember when your teacher taught you about conjugating a verb, and you really had no idea what the hell she was talking about because you never conjugated anything in English and never heard of the concept before? Just me?

In Latin you conjugate verbs too, but you also decline nouns.

Latin and ancient Greek nouns and adjectives have declensions. A bunch of modern languages use this too, including German and Turkish, but if you’re a native English speaker like me you might not be immediately familiar with how they work.

Noun declensions in Latin have six different cases, which will tell you where it fits into a sentence.

That includes nominative (the subject), accusative (the direct object), dative (the indirect object), genitive (to indicate possession), ablative (acts sort of like an adverb), and vocative (to address a single person), as well as whether something is singular or plural, whether it’s past present or future, etc.

So, take the opening sentence of Vergil’s Aeneid, for example: arma virumque cano.

We can tell that arma (weapons) and virum (a man) are both the direct objects based on their declension. The ending que is something you put on the end of the second item in a list. Tt works like the English word “and”. Cano, meanwhile is both the sentence’s verb and its subject, which means “I sing”.

I sing of weapons and a man.

But we could swap those words around – cano virum armaque, for example, and the sentence still has the same meaning because the declensions haven’t changed.

This makes Latin really versatile for poetry, because the order in which you put the words doesn’t really matter in most cases so you can make things fit a meter much more easily.

It’s often subject object verb, but it doesn’t have to work that way.

Anyway, there are five different declensions in Latin. First declension words are usually feminine and end with –a (in the nominative case), second declension words are usually masculine and end with –us or neuter and end with -um.

Ah yes, the three genders.

But unironically though, Latin has three linguistic genders, die mad about it weirdos.

So let’s get back to when Vergil says “ducente deo.” “Deo” is the dative case of the second declension Latin noun “deus,” or god, and second declension -us nouns are usually masculine in Latin. If Vergil wanted to call Venus a goddess, he would have said “ducente dea,” but he didn’t. So, referring to Venus as “deo” means more than just, like, calling Natalie Portman an actor instead of an actress. There’s a nuance that’s lost in translating this to English, but the word is a distinctively masculine form. It’s like calling Natalie Portman a “male actor.”

But this begs the question – why, then, if the ending -us denotes a masculine name, is Venus named Venus, and not Vena?

In Latin, we can usually tell the gender of whomever we’re talking about by the ending of their name. Consider Julius Caesar, for example – a good proper second declension noun, masculine – and his granddaughter Julia – first declension, feminine. We see this in modern Latin derived languages as well. Gino is an Italian guy, Gina is an Italian gal.

We even see this in English, where adding an –a to the end of a man’s name turns it into a woman’s name.

Robert becomes Roberta.

Eric becomes Erica.

Andrew becomes Andrea, etc.

I’m so happy for them, I hope their transitions go well.

Now, the name Venus reads like a second declension noun, but it’s actually third declension.

First declension is usually feminine, second declension is usually masculine or neuter, but third declension nouns are a total mixed bag.

Some are masculine, some are feminine, some are neuter, and if it’s an adjective, it can be any of the above depending on context. I’m not going to get into fourth and fifth declension because it’s not really relevant here and this is already becoming way more of a grammar lesson than I wanted it to be.

If you really want to know more go find a dusty old copy of Wheelock’s Latin at your local used bookstore and enjoy the scent of undergraduate tears permanently infused into it.

Most of the other Roman goddesses have either names that are distinctively feminine, like Minerva, Diana, and Vesta, or that are more ambiguous, like Juno and Ceres.

Why is Venus the outlier here?

Scholar Norman D. DeWitt suggests the origin of her name is actually neuter, and it comes from the same etymology as the word genus, which means category or type, but originally seemed to mean produce of the soil (DeWitt 297) – which would make Venus, you guessed it, a fertility symbol, which isn’t that surprising for a goddess of love.

Oh, and that word genus? It also means gender, and in fact it’s the root of the word in English.

So this suggests that Venus started off as a gender neutral figure, and only took on her more hyperfeminine aspects later on.

So, that’s Vergil.

Remember that we were looking at literary sources, and that this isn’t about Latin grammar?

What About Philochorus?

Philochorus was born around 340 BCE, and his father was named Kyknos.

He wrote several works, including a history of the island of Delos, another on the island of Salamis, a chronology of festivals and rituals, a literary criticism of the tragic poet Euripides, and a number of others.

Today, we’re most interested in his Atthis.

All this writing leads us to believe he was a professional scholar.

He was executed in 262 or 261 BCE (we’re not sure) at the end of the Chremonidean War, which was fought between the descendants of two of Alexander’s generals: the Antigonids who ruled Macedonia, and the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt.

The Antigonids won the war, but Philochorus backed the Ptolemies, so they killed him. Whoops.

The Atthis was not related to Kybele’s consort Attis that we talked about in the Gallae videos, but a local history of Attika, the polis, or city-state, of Athens.

But anyway, the point is, Philochorus’ Atthis is a history of Attika.

His work came to be known as Atthis, which just means Athenian history, but it might have been known as something else at the time, we don’t know.

Philochorus’ Atthis was 17 books long, and told an extensive history of Athens from its earliest mythological origins to its capture in 261 BCE at the end of the Chremonidean War, which as we mentioned was when he died, so he didn’t write much after that.

Unfortunately most of it is lost.

What we have today survives mostly in fragments quoted by other writers (Harding 1-4).

Apparently there were several different books in the ancient world known as “Atthis”. Scholar Phillip Harding put together a translation of all the different Atthidographies by all the different Atthidographers (yes this is what historians actually call them), but unfortunately, what we have doesn’t tell us much beyond what Macrobius already says.

But what we have tells us that there was a ritual sacrifice to Venus where women dressed as men, and men as women.

The scholars I read on the subject (Delcourt 27, Carla-Uhink 15) seem to think Philochorus was referring to such rituals occurring on Cyprus, but to me, the fact that his work was a history of Athens suggests that this worship happened in Athens itself as well.

Only a better preserved manuscript of Philochorus could clarify this, which we don’t have.

But there are plenty of Attic vases with men dressed in women’s clothing. These are called “anacreontic” (Miller 223). I know it’s hard to tell from a modern eye, but this is an example of a jar depicting a man wearing women’s clothing (Miller 227). So clearly that was a thing the Athenians were into.

Alright, fine.

How About Laevinus?

There are a few different people named Laevinus who are mentioned in Roman history (Polyb. VIII.III, Hor. I.VI, and many points in Livy), but it doesn’t seem like they wrote anything.

We do have Publius Lavinius, which sounds sorta like Laevinus.

Maybe he read the name wrong.

If this is who he’s talking about, Aulus Gellius tells us he wrote a work called De Verbis Sordidis, or “On Vulgar Words” (NA XX.XI). But otherwise, his work is lost.

Dead end there.

There’s also a Latin poet named Laevius, who lived during the 1^st century BCE.

He’s mentioned by Aulus Gellius too, and by Suetonius. (Suet. Gram. et Rhet.III.V, Gell. NA II.XXIV, XII.X, etc).

He might have written a collection of light hearted poems called the Erotopaegnia, which is also lost.

And if he isn’t either of those guys, we don’t know anything at all about him.

Neato.

Okaaaayyyyy…

At Least We Have Aristophanes

He’s the famous Athenian comic poet, the only one whose work survives. We’ve got eleven of his forty plays complete, as well as fragments of others.

One of my favourites of his plays is the Lysistrata, which is about a woman who convinces the women of both Sparta and Athens to withhold sex from their husbands until they all agree to end the Peloponnesian War.

I sometimes wonder if that sort of strategy might work in parts of the world where conservative men are consistently rolling back women’s rights, but hey, I’m already boycotting sex with men by being a lesbian so I guess I’m not really one to be suggesting such ideas am I? 

I’m doing my part!

Anyway, Aristophanes refers to her as Aphroditos in the play Heroes (Ar. Fragments 265), which is the masculine form in Greek.

I’m not digging into the linguistics of this one here; we’ve done enough of that, and I’m nowhere near as familiar with Greek as I am with Latin. Just take my word for it.

But unfortunately, Heroes is not one of Aristophanes’ surviving plays.

All we’ve got is the bit that Macrobius mentions, and a few other fragments.

Is There Anyone Else?

I gather that Photius, a 9^th century Byzantine writer, mentions it as well, but I’ve had a difficult time finding decent translations of his work.

And besides, it’s not a terribly important point.

So, what we’re left with here is a whole bunch of tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfying literary references to the ancient worship of a gender nonconforming deity, and a bunch of transy behaviour surrounding it.

Is this all we’ve got?

Certainly not.

Macrobius also said there was a statue of Venus Barbata on Cyprus. We’re also told about that by another writer, Servius. He was born somewhere around the middle of the fourth century CE, which makes him roughly contemporary with Macrobius. He was a grammarian held in fairly high regard by his contemporaries, so much so that Macrobius actually included him as a character in the earlier part of the Saturnalia. He seems to have been a pagan and a Platonist. And that’s really all we know about him (Taylor 2-3).

In his Commentarii in Vergilium, he tells us, quote:

There is also on Cyprus a statue of a bearded Venus, in a woman’s body and clothing, with a sceptre and man’s genitals, which they call Aphroditos, to whom men make sacrifice in women’s clothing, and women in men’s.

– Servius, Commentarii in Vergilium 2.632 (as quoted in Christou, 1)

Both Macrobius and Servius are telling us Cyprus is the place to look, so let’s head there. Today it’s a sovereign state – mostly, sort of, it’s complicated, I’m not gonna get into the modern politics of the place.

But our journey today is going to take us back to long before the idea of the state even existed.

Sounds awesome.

Chapter III: Stone Age Cyprus

In the classical Mediterranean, one of the most famous centres of worship for Aphrodite was the island of Cyprus.

Greeks or Romans who were particularly devoted to her and could afford it would make pilgrimages to the island to pay tribute to her.

After all, that’s where she was born, sort of.

But did they always worship a bearded version of Aphrodite?

And if they did, what does that mean?

To get an answer to those questions, we need to go a lot further back in time than the Romans or Greeks.

In fact, we’re going back to some of the earliest human activity on Cyprus altogether – the Stone Age.

History is, by definition, things people wrote down. And, so far as we can tell, the people of stone age Cyprus didn’t have any system of writing.

So this isn’t history anymore – it’s prehistory.

You might have heard the term “prehistoric” in terms of things like velociraptors or trilobites or megalodons or the other cool stuff you see in museums or Steven Spielberg movies. But anatomically modern humans had our prehistoric age as well.

We just didn’t write any of it down, because once we did it wasn’t prehistoric anymore. It was historic.

That’s the difference between the two. History is written, prehistory is not.

We call it the Stone Age because stone was the most common material humans used to make tools and stuff.

It makes sense for humans to start there. After all, you can find stone pretty much everywhere.

If you need to squish something, it’s easy to just use a nearby rock, even chimpanzees do this.

And if you need to squish something more betterer, it’s easy to tie a rock to a stick with some vine or animal sinew.

If you need a shelter, it’s easy to pile rocks on top of each other with some mud to make walls, and then build a thatched roof on top of it.

You get the idea.

The Stone Age was by far the longest era of humanity.

The earliest evidence we have of Stone Age human activity is some tools found in modern day Kenya that are more than 3 million years old (Harmand Et Al.).

In fact, 99% of humanity’s existence was spent in the Stone Age.

But we tend to focus on history over prehistory, since that’s when we get to know actual individuals, and to many of us that’s more relatable.

Today we’re going to look at the late Stone Age. It’s called the Neolithic Age.

During the Neolithic, humans started to practice agriculture, which allowed us to stick around in one place rather than wander.

This is when the first permanent human settlements began to emerge, including on Cyprus.

And it’s all been downhill since then…

The first Stone Age site in Cyprus we’re going to visit is Khirokitia.

It was rediscovered in 1934 by archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios, who believed it was from around 4000 BCE (Dikaios 1953:333), but carbon 14 dating later showed us it was occupied around 7000 BCE or possibly earlier (V. Karageorghis 1982:16).

We used to think this was the earliest human activity on Cyprus, but we’ve since found evidence at a site called Ayia Varvara-Asprokremnos from about 2000 years earlier. But we’re not going to get into that site (Lazaro).

Khirokitia is far older than anything we’ve looked at in this series so far.

For reference, Homer and Hesiod did their thing in the 8^th century BCE.

Herodotus wrote about the Scythian Enaree priestesses during the 5^th century BCE.

The Romans brought the Kybele stone to Rome in the 3^rd century BCE.

Hypsikrates and Mithradates and Mithradates lived during the 1^st century BCE.

The Gospel of Matthew was likely written some time during the late 1^st century CE.

The Enaree grave we explored is from some time between those last two.

The Galla portrait we looked at to understand the rituals of the Gallae priestesses was from around the same time.

Lucian wrote his Dialogues of the Courtesans in the 2^nd century CE.

Elagabalus’ reign was during the 3^rd century CE.

And Saint Pelagius the Harlot of Antioch lived during the 5^th century CE.

Meanwhile, today we’re looking at the 71^st century BCE.

The point is, it’s old.

In fact, timeline wise, Homer’s and Hesiod’s writings are far closer to us, than Khirokitia is to them. It’s easy to lose sight of just how long human activity has been around for.

The point is, we’re old.

What about the broader strokes of history?

For those of you who haven’t watched any of the previous videos on this channel, let’s look at some of those.

According to the Romans themselves, their city was founded on April 21^st, 753 BCE.

People started settling the area that would become Athens around 3000 BCE (Vanderpool & Ehrlich).

The Minoan culture of Crete began around the same time (Britannica).

The Ancient Egyptian state, arguably the first ever centralized state, coalesced around 3100 BCE (Murnane).

We’re going a lot further back than any of those, so if, like me, your main historical interest is in the classical era, you won’t find much at this point you’re familiar with.

It’s also going to be a long time before anything we might actually recognize as Venus shows up.

We’re going to be looking at a bunch of different figures in this next section, and none of them are actually Venus Barbata, but I promise this isn’t a bait and switch, it’s going to come together.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself at this point in writing the script for this video.

Is it actually going to?

Let’s find out together.

Khirokitia is an archaeological site near the southern coast of Cyprus, about 6.5 km inland, on a hill near a bank of the Maroniou River.

This gave them access to clean drinking water (Knapp 124, V. Karageorghis 1981:10).

The people of Khirokitia farmed wheat, barley, lentils, peas, horse bean, and vetch, foraged olives, flax, figs, pistachios, plums, and pears, herded sheep, pigs, and goats, and hunted deer (Knapp 17, Winbladh 12, V. Karageorghis 1981:12).

It was occupied around 7000 BCE, as mentioned earlier.

The site is incredibly well preserved for something as old as it is, and gives us some interesting insight into what daily life was like in Stone Age Cyprus.

They lived in circular huts between 3 and 8 metres in diameter, with a foundation of river stones below walls of mudbrick. They were arranged in sort of semicircle patterns, around an uncovered courtyard (Knapp 124-5).

It’s a really special place, because it’s one of the oldest and best preserved examples of an actual collective human settlement.

The people of Khirokitia worked together to sustain and protect themselves in a way that hasn’t been seen in earlier settlements on the island. We’ve dug up a number of different artifacts, including dozens of these houses.

It was lying on the floor in one of the houses (V. Karageorghis 1981:19).

What do you see there?

Yeah, it’s a person, but there’s more going on than that.

The figure’s head is clearly phallic, and at the bottom it’s cut to look vulvic. This is the general consensus among those who understand neolithic Cypriot archaeology (Christou 15, Knapp 130).

This sort of thing is referred to as “sexually ambiguous” (Knapp 130) and “bisexual” (Winbladh 10) – bi as in two, sex as in, uhh, sex – as in, with the characteristics of two sexes.

But of course, the word bisexual doesn’t have the same meaning anymore, though I don’t think intersex quite fits here either. So let’s go with sexually ambiguous.

It’s about 19 centimetres tall, and dates to between 7000 and 5300 BCE (Knapp 130).

For comparison, the Stonehenge megalith was built around 2500 BCE (British Museum), and the Great Pyramids of Giza were built around the same time (Handwerk) – this is far older than both.

IT’S THE TRANSGENDER VENUS!!!

No, of course it isn’t. It’s just a little stone carving.

On its own, it might seem like a bit of a stretch to claim it’s a transgender motif.

But take a look at the progress bar and you’ll see we’ve barely gotten started.

Porphyrios Dikaios dug up another site as well, Sotira-Teppés.

This is west of Khirokitia, but still on the southern coast of Cyprus.

It’s newer than Khirokitia as well. It dates to somewhere in the 4000’s BCE. That’s about 2000 years later (Dikaios 1948).

And you know what’s neat?

We’ve found a bunch of these, across the millennia.

The next ones we’ll be looking at belong to the Chalcolithic Age.

This is a different period than the Neolithic, but it’s still considered the Stone Age.

At this point, Cypriots had begun to use copper, but hadn’t yet figured out how to combine it with tin to create bronze. Most things were still made of stone, though.

The next one comes from the Kissonerga-Mosphilia site, on the west coast of the island.

Back to Sotira – here’s something a little different.

Looking at the different angles, it’s clear that it’s meant to look different depending on the angle from which you view it.

Maybe it’s a seated lady with long legs?

Maybe it’s a phallus?

Maybe it’s a vulva?

Who can say?

It’s 16 centimetres tall (Christou 17).

Alright, let’s jump to another site.

The next one is on the other side of Cyprus. It’s called Lemba, which dates to the 4^th or 3rd millennium BCE (Knapp 211), around the same time as the Kissonerga-Mosphilia site.

What do you see there?

Pendulous breasts and an obvious vulva, yes, but in place of her head and neck, it looks quite phallic, doesn’t it?

This was first noticed back in the 70s (Peltenburg 142, as cited in Knapp 240).

She’s crouching too, and looks pregnant, which suggests she may be giving birth (Christou 28).

This pose is called “cruciform”, meaning in the shape of a cross, and it shows up quite a bit in Stone Age Cypriot art.

We know they were worn as necklaces, because some of the figures have a hole through the neck (Winbladh 15).

In case that wasn’t clear enough, some of these figures themselves are sculpted as wearing smaller necklaces of a similar shape (V. Karageorghis 1981:26). How meta.

And yes, these ones look more person-shaped, but they’re also still pretty phallic.

I mean, nobody has a neck that long.

Even the Kayan women of Myanmar, who use brass coils to stretch their necks out, don’t even come close to this (Korshov & Kovalenko).

And again, look at the top. It’s less glans-y than some of the previous objects, but it’s still not really shaped like a human head.

There are a whole lot more of these figures, and I’m not going to do a dive into each of them.

These figures are all different of course, but they all display elements of both binary sexes.

This motif shows up over and over, across the millennia and in all different locations in Stone Age Cyprus.

This tells us there must have been significant contact between the different settlements on Cyprus (Christou 29).

On one hand, it’s easy to just jump into speculation about ancient transgender people, but is that what’s going on here?

What were these figures for?

What Were These Figures For?

The answer is complicated.

From what we can tell, these cultures were illiterate, so there’s so much we don’t know about them.

The answers sometimes are, and might forever be, we don’t know.

However, we do have some ideas.

A lot of the cruciform figures we’ve found come from Kissonerga-Mosphilia or Lemba, and they’re often associated with pregnancy – either someone who’s pregnant or who’s giving birth.

Giving birth was a pretty high risk activity in the prehistoric world. In many ways, it still is, but dying during childbirth was much more common in prehistoric Cyprus than it is today.

Life expectancy for women who bore children was short, but so was life expectancy for everyone else.

Based on the human remains we’ve found, a lot of people died during childbirth or while out hunting.

Infant mortality was high as well. We found a grave with twenty five infants in it at Khirokitia (V. Karageorghis 1969:104). Living past age 30 seems rare (Winbladh 13).

How do you deal with such a brutal existence?

Well, if you only know what somebody from several thousand years ago might know, you’re going to do everything in your power to appeal to the forces of nature at whose mercy you’ve found yourself.

And yeah, that includes tending to your crops, hunting, building the strongest shelters you can muster, building tools, weapons, and walls, and so on.

And of course, they did all that. Khirokitia has walls that were 2.5 metres thick in some spots (Knapp 125), and we’ve found plenty of arrowheads and stone tools as well.

But at a certain point, you’ve done all you can from a material perspective.

So, what are you going to do in your leisure time?

Well, you might create art, like a lot of cultures do.

But you’ve constantly got the creeping spectre of death looming over you as well.

We’ve discovered the remains of about 65 structures at Khirokitia (Knapp 124). That seems like a pretty small settlement to modern ears, but the human population of the entire world at the time is estimated at less than ten million (Durand, 285).

So for the time, Khirokitia was a decent sized town.

But with a population that size, and with such a short average lifespan, it’s not unrealistic to assume that at any given time, you’d have known somebody who recently died, or you at least knew somebody who knew somebody.

How might that influence the art you create?

One option is to indulge in the worship of death, which comes up quite a bit around the world.

Most mythological traditions have some sort of figure associated with the personification of death. The grim reaper, or something similar, shows up separately in mythologies from China, Korea, Japan, India, across Europe, and even in what we can tell of Aztec and Mayan mythologies. Even in Abrahamic religions, Judaism has Samael, Christianity has the archangel Michael, and Islam has Azrael.

A friend of mine once told me she believes this is because death is the closest thing to a provable god we have. Everything we do is designed to appease it, in one way or another, to stop it from coming for us. But sooner or later, it comes for us all.

From the mightiest of rulers to the poorest of the poor, death will eventually come. So far as we can tell, it’s inescapable, in spite of how much money Silicon Valley tech bros have dumped into researching how to avoid it.

The people of prehistoric Cyprus could have done this. And to a certain extent they did.

We know quite a bit about their funerary rites, like with most prehistoric cultures, since stuff that’s buried in the ground tends to be preserved better.

We know, for example, they often placed boulders on top of their dead when they buried them under their houses (Le Brun 2001:116).

But in terms of their art, it seems like a lot of it revolved around fertility.

We talked about fertility symbols already in the Hermaphroditus video. If you’ve already watched that one, just bear with me while I take a moment to play catch up with the naughty students who’ve been cutting class.

The idea of fertility symbols comes up quite a bit in basically every ancient Mediterranean culture, and probably other ones too, though I don’t know enough to make such a sweeping statement. And it’s because fertility was essentially the only thing keeping anybody alive.

Still is, though we don’t think of it as much anymore.

But in the ancient world, if you had a bad crop yield, it meant you, your family, and everybody you’ve ever known would die slow, painful deaths.

So, fertility was pretty important.

You’d spend a lot of your time tending to your crops, fending off pests, watering, irrigating, and doing everything else you could to make sure your crop yield was good.

But there’s only so much you can do.

Eventually, all the work will be done.

What will you do in your spare time?

Rest, create art, play games, or make babies.

What else is there to do?

But we’re talking about the art right now.

Knowing that death had surrounded you for your entire life, the art you create might involve what you associate with fertility, in the hopes that you might be able to use it to inspire the land around you to be fertile too.

After all, you know the opposite of death is fertility, because barrenness brings death, while fertility gives you and your family life.

But fertility of the land was intimately connected with fertility of the person as well.

When the land is fertile, it allows you yourself to be fertile.

So if you’re pregnant, it might be a time that’s as frightening as it is exciting.

You’d know some happy parents, but you’d almost certainly also know somebody who lost their baby during childbirth, who didn’t survive it themselves, or perhaps even both.

So when it comes time to actually give birth, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine you might want to seek some sort of divine protection while it happened.

That divine protection might be related to fertility.

In fact, you might start to see fertility as a protective force against death.

After all, it helped you survive pregnancy.

Hesiod, whom we talked about earlier, says that when Aphrodite first set foot on Cyprus, plants sprouted up beneath her feet.

Hesiod wrote much later than the Stone Age, of course, but it’s still worth noting that Aphrodite was always associated with fertility (J. & V. Karageorghis 2001:264).

Okay, so we talked about one of the possible explanations for where these themes came from. The old “fertility symbol” yarn.

And that’s certainly a through line in the Cypriot art we’ll be looking at from here.

But could there be more to it?

Nope, that’s it. Thanks for watching, don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe, thanks to all the channel’s patrons who- 

Yes of course there’s more to it.

Chapter IV: Bronze Age Cyprus

Prehistoric Mediterraneans had been using copper for quite some time (Muhly and Kassianidou 119, Hemingway and Hemingway).

But at some point, somebody figured out that mixing copper with tin created bronze.

This was a much harder and more versatile metal than copper on its own, and a major improvement over banging sticks and rocks together.

And from there, the Bronze Age began.

Around 3300 BCE, Cypriots started to mix copper and tin to create bronze, which they used to build axes, swords, shields, armour, and other useful tools and weapons.

But of course, you’ve gotta find those metals before you can do anything with them.

Copper isn’t a problem. There’s a lot of it on Cyprus.

Throughout Cyprus’ history up until the 20^th century, copper mining was a big part of the island’s economy.

There was copper in other areas as well, of course. You’ll see some of the different locations on the map below (Muhly).

But Cyprus was such an important source of copper for the ancient world that the English word copper itself comes from the Latin “cyprium aes”, which means “Cyprus metal” (Merriam-Webster).

Tin, on the other hand, is a lot harder to come by.

It only forms alongside granite rock, and there’s no granite on Cyprus, so there’s no tin either (Muhly, 277).

It’s weird to think about, but copper and tin was as important to Bronze Age societies as petroleum is today, and as rare.

And much like today, a robust system of trade during the bronze age emerged around this important resources, and if you had access to them, it would make you wealthy.

We don’t really know where the Cypriots got their tin from, but some of the possible sources include Egypt, western Iberia, France, and even as far as Cornwall, in Britain (Muhly 1985, 276). The important thing to know, though, is that they clearly did get their hands on some tin, somehow.

So they’ve got the ingredients, but it’s not as simple as smacking two different metals together and getting a sword. You need the proper facilities to make bronze.

So the ancient Cypriots built them.

The Twin Temple Gods of Kition and Enkomi

Now, when you think of metallurgy, you probably don’t think of religion.

But that’s a modern distinction.

In the premodern world, there was no such thing as spiritual and secular life.

There was just life, and spirituality filled every bit of it (MacLachlan, 368).

So it wasn’t surprising to archaeologists when we discovered the metallurgy facilities at Kition, on the southeast coast, and Enkomi, northeast of Kition, seemed to have spiritual aspects.

The city was surrounded by cyclopean walls – walls made of boulders so large that later Greeks couldn’t believe humans built them and assumed they were built by the giant cyclopes.

But they couldn’t escape the Bronze Age Collapse any more than the rest of the Aegean, and the city fell into disrepair (V. Karageorghis 1969:144-7). 

The site was reoccupied later, and has the remains of structures built by several different cultures.

We’ve got a Phoenician necropolis (Hadjisavvas 1), Egyptian goods, Roman sculptures, and more (Lendering).

We even found a stele of Sargon from 707 BCE (V. Karageorghis 1976:19).

No, not that bozo, an actual real person named Sargon.

This is Sargon the second, ruler of the Neo Assyrians – named in honour of their predecessors, the Assyrians, and in honour of their favourite character from The Matrix, which is actually a trans allegory itself if you – NO, FOCUS SOPHIE.

This is around the time we see the first evidence of Greeks on the island as well.

We’ve found a piece of bronze that dates to around the 11^th c BCE inscribed with the Greek name Οϕέλτας (Ofeltas) (Iacovou 248).

So if your main area of historical interest is in the Classical period of the Mediterranean, congratulations – we’ve finally found some Greeks.

We can tell they were temples because we’ve found altars in them, and we can tell they were metallurgical workshops because we’ve found copper slag and traces of furnaces.

Based on this layout, you can see it would be easy to walk from either temple to the workshops (V. Karageorghis 1976:62-3). And we don’t think this was a coincidence.

At Enkomi, another site northeast of Kition, there is evidence of twin divinities – one male, one female – who served as divine protectors of copper mining and smelting.

Pair that with the twin temples at Kition, and it seems like this sort of worship was widespread across the island (V. Karageorghis 1976:75-6, MacLachlan 368-9).

Although the style of each is different, the fact that they’re both standing on bronze ingots is the telltale sign here.

An ingot, by the way, is a block of some type of precious metal.

You might think the ingot they’re standing on is just a platform for better balance, but the way both are designed, it wouldn’t really help with that. Other statues on Cyprus had pegs on the bottom of their feet that would have attached them to a piece of wood, and that would have worked much better (Papasavvas 4).

So what does this have to do with our themes of sexual ambiguity in Cypriot art?

Let’s take a moment to gather a few facts here.

Aphrodite is the goddess of love, but she married Hephaestos, the god of forging, and had a lot of sex with Ares, the god of war.

And it’s easy to see the themes associated with all three of those figures represented here on the bronze age metallurgical temple workshops on Cyprus.

According to the ancient geographer Strabo, Venus was worshipped in the Roman era in gardens on Cyprus (Str. Geo. 14.683-4), and the temenos areas we saw in the diagrams earlier were basically sacred gardens. 

Could the worship of these twin deities have just been mixed together into a single figure, which became the gender blended Venus?

Perhaps, but that seems like a stretch at this point.

It’s still not quite coming together yet.

There are some examples of Venus being depicted with a spear, which we’ll talk about later, but that’s still a far cry from proof of a transgender goddess on Cyprus.

Of course, there’s more…

This Isn’t Going To Become One Of Those Annoying YouTube Plankster Videos Is It?

Remember planking?

That weird trend from the late aughts where weirdos would lie across different objects as though they were a plank of wood and it was very zany and wacky and full of so much awesomesauce and epic win that we all rofl’d and lmao’d and asked if we can has cheezburger so we could nom nom nom?

Yeesh, I need to have a shower after that.

Turns out that trend is a lot older than the very cringe internet influencers of yore thought.

“Plank figure” is a name we gave to an art style found in Cyprus in the early to middle bronze age, around 2000-1600 BCE.

These were highly sought after by collectors, so we don’t know where a lot of them actually came from (Morris 135-6).

What we do know, though, is that they mostly come from the north of Cyprus, around Lapithos (Talalay and Cullen 184).

They got that name because they’re all flat and rectangular, like planks, get it?

It’s a common scholarly opinion that they were introduced to Cyprus by people from Anatolia. However, there’s no real analog to plank figures in Anatolia, so it seems just as likely they were a natural evolution of the cruciform figures we looked at earlier from the Stone Age (Talalay and Cullen 183, Morris 186).

They’re an average of about 25 centimetres tall (Webb 242), with the smallest one being 10 cm and the largest being 70 (Talalay and Cullen 184). Here are some below.

Plank figures often show up in burials, but there’s no real evidence they were specifically made for funerary reasons. In fact, less than 10% of Cypriot tombs from around that time have them (Talalay and Cullen 185).

With many societies, the artifacts we have are from burials, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re related to burial practices.

It’s just that they’re more likely to be preserved when they’re buried, so it makes sense that they’d show up more often in burials.

So archaeologists always need to be wary of jumping to the conclusion that things had funereal purposes. That’s not always the case. Besides, we’ve found some plank figures in houses too.

But here, take a look at these things.

They’re clearly supposed to represent humans, but if you’re having trouble figuring out what gender they’re supposed to be, you’re not alone.

Scholarship over the years has tried to insist plank figures are all ladies.

The only real evidence we have for that, though, is that some of them have holes in their ears where they would have put earrings.

There are a few that have breasts, and sure that might be more obvious, but that doesn’t mean all plank figures are supposed to be women, and a lack of obvious breasts doesn’t mean they were not women.

After all, it’s not like we don’t have a precedent for gender ambiguity in the art from Cyprus so far.

In fact, scholars Lauren E. Talalay and Tracey Cullen argue that focusing on the idea that all plank figures were meant to be female causes us to lose sight of nuance.

The ambiguity might have been the point. 

The ability to work with bronze brought a rapid shift in technology on Cyprus.

Things like farming ploughs, cattle, and mud-brick rectangular buildings might not seem like a big deal today, but remember what they had to work with in the Stone Age.

That’s a big shift.

Along with that shift came an emerging aristocratic class.

And what do aristocrats like to do?

Establish their ancestry and legacy, and show off their wealth, of course. 

Many of the graves we’ve found from around the time were collective.

Some seemed to have been buried together all at once, while others were, ahem, added to over time.

This suggests people were buried with their family members, rather than in individual plots.

Graves where we’ve found plank figures tend to have an average of anywhere from four to ten bodies in them.

So the inclusion of plank figures in a grave might have tied these family graves together, connecting them with their ancestors and establishing a familial identity.

And in that case, it makes sense for them to be androgynous.

The fact that we sometimes find them in homes instead of graves doesn’t negate that idea, but instead lends it strength.

The androgynous plank figures represented one’s family legacy in death, and in life (Talalay & Cullen 186).

Scholar Anna Laetitia Campo has suggested that, based on comparison with other Cypriot art of the time, plank figures are probably female unless they have legs (147-8, as cited in Christou 36).

So in that case, this be-bearded, be-boobed one’s legs are another masculine feature. It also has a cape on its right shoulder, which is also a feature of more distinctly female plank figures.

Breasts and a beard.

This is starting to sound more like the Venus Barbata that Macrobius described.

But this one is pretty small. It’s just 34 centimetres tall. Hardly something you’d build a festival of worship around.

So no, this is not the bearded Venus, but it is another step in the evolution of transgender art on ancient Cyprus.

Of course, there was plenty of art that didn’t show these themes as well. I’m giving a very much skewed account, I know.

But this is about transgender history, so that’s where we’re focusing.

But the fact that ambiguously gendered themes show up over and over, around the island, and across the millennia, shows us that it was an important motif for them.

It wasn’t just like, one guy who thought it would be funny or something.

Besides, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet…

Chapter V: Iron Age Cyprus

Bronze is great.

It’s a major shift from stone as a material, and led to some significant advances.

Besides, nothing glistens in the sun quite like polished bronze.

And could you imagine rushing into battle with a helmet on your head made of stone? Brutal.

Bronze also made Cyprus into a pretty important spot in the eastern Mediterranean.

Those wonderful Bronze Age palaces on Crete wouldn’t have been possible without Cypriot copper, since there’s really no copper on Crete to speak of (Liard 51).

But like all good things, the Bronze Age came to an end.

Toward the end of the Bronze Age, there was a major societal collapse we see across the Aegean, which we call the Bronze Age Collapse, how clever.

During this time, Mycenean Greece, Minoan Crete, and the Hittite Empire all collapsed, while the Egyptians and Assyrians barely held it together.

Cyprus didn’t fare much better.

This is around the time of the Trojan War, and the destruction of Troy, as well.

What happened?

One of the more popular theories is a group called the Sea Peoples migrated to these areas, raiding and destroying different cities while looking to settle somewhere.

We also know the volcano on the island of Santorini erupted in the late Bronze Age, which may have been what pushed these Sea Peoples to migrate in the first place.

But the Sea Peoples might not have been as destructive as we think, and the Bronze Age Collapse might not have had a single cause.

It’s a fascinating topic, one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world, and we don’t really know the answer to what happened (Millek).

Both Enkomi and Kition were destroyed by invaders during the Bronze Age Collapse, who may have been the Sea Peoples.

We also see evidence of an earthquake in Enkomi, which may be linked with the eruption at Santorini. The temple of the ingot god was still in use at Enkomi as late as 1050 BCE, but the city in general was in decline.

Over the course of a quarter century or so, it was gradually abandoned (V. Karageorghis 1982:115).

Life went on, but archaeologically speaking, the next couple of centuries were relatively quiet.

We don’t see much in terms of ambiguous gender in art motifs, because we don’t see much in terms of art, period.

But eventually, we see Cypriot culture begin to reemerge (V. Karageorghis 1969:64-66, Christou 67).

This is the beginning of Iron Age Cyprus.

We call it the Iron Age because iron became the main metal used to make tools and weapons.

Is iron better than bronze? In most ways, no it’s not.

Iron is actually softer and not as durable as bronze.

It’s also harder to extract from ore than copper and tin are, and it’s harder to work with.

But on the other hand, it’s the most abundant metal on earth (Frey & Reed).

It has the benefit of occurring on its own, while bronze takes two metals to create, and they’re not usually found near each other.

After the Bronze Age Collapse, it became harder for people with copper to get tin, and vice versa. So instead, they turned to iron.

That’s why the iron age is sometimes associated with a period of cultural decline.

We’re not yet sure where the Cypriots got their iron, but there’s a convincing case to be made that they produced it themselves (Kassianidou 2012:237-9).

But just like with tin, the specifics don’t matter as much for our purposes today.

One way or another, the Cypriots got the iron they needed.

During this era, we see a lot of immigration to Cyprus, from the Levant and mainland Greece.

Mythologically speaking, this is a result of Achaean Greeks settling there after the Trojan War.

The Greek hero Teucer supposedly led a group to Cyprus where he established the city of Salamis, named after his homeland, the island of Salamis off the coast of Athens (V. Karageorghis 1969:65).

Another Greek hero, Agapenor did the same, leading the Arcadian fleet to Cyprus instead of going home.

They settled at Paphos, which is an important city we’ll be taking a closer look at later.

We also understand that the island was divided into kingdoms during this era.

An inscription on a prism by the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, grandchild of Sargon II, lists ten different vassal kingdoms on the island. We know what most of these sites refer to, and they include most of the important sites of the time (Buitron-Oliver & Herscher 1-3). We also know now that there were actually 12 kingdoms during this era (Rupp 347).

But despite how thoroughly Greek this period was, they still retained a distinctively Cypriot style, including sexual ambiguity in their art.

Let’s take a look at some of it.

The Woke Mob Is Out Of Control, Even The Minotaur Is Trans Now! Is There No End To Their Depraved Lunacy?

On the northern coast of Cyprus is the sanctuary at Ayia Irini.

It was originally settled in the late Bronze Age around 1200 BCE, and was destroyed and rebuilt several times before being abandoned around 500 BCE after some massive flooding.

It was reoccupied around the Hellenistic era, steadily declining until it was finally abandoned during the 1^st century CE (Christou 53).

In the 1930s, the site was excavated by what’s come to be known as the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, and among other things, they found an incredible trove of more than 2000 ancient terracotta figures that date to the 600’s-500’s BCE (V. Karageorghis 1969:168-9, Carvajal). Here they are.

I look at the collection of these figures, and what it might have felt like to be the first person to rediscover them.

To enter the grotto, breathing in the stale ancient air, turning on your flashlight only to find thousands of stone eyes staring at you.

Stone eyes formed by long dead hands

Stone eyes that haven’t seen the light in millennia.

Just, wow.

I’m not sure if this is how it happened but I don’t care. It’s exciting to me to imagine it. Just let me have this, alright?

We think it worked like this: you would make a sculpture and leave it at the altar as sort of a stand in for yourself, as a way to make sure you continuously worshiped the sacred stone.

The animals, on the other hand, might have represented animal sacrifices, and the minotaurs might have been a mix of the two (Winbladh 45).

This is awesome in its own right, but how does this fit in with this video’s theme?

Let’s take a closer look at some of these figures.

Of the reverse minotaurs we’ve found at Ayia Irini, seven of them have the sexually ambiguous motifs we’ve come to know and love from Cyprus (Christou 53). Here are three of them below.

Notice that they have pretty clear breasts, as well as either a phallus or a beard, sometimes both.

Leave a comment below if you have archaeological evidence of how centaurs wore pants.

It’s hard to see the beard in some cases, but closer analysis has shown the remnants of paint that corresponds to a bearded shape, and the jawline is significantly larger than the others (Winbladh 55, Christou 57).

So, why did the ancient Cypriots make transgender reverse minotaurs?

Many people are asking this.

I’m hearing it all over.

The great question of our age.

It’s thought that the bull motifs were brought to Cyprus from Crete, and if you know anything about the Minoan culture that’s probably not surprising.

We talked about them in the video on Siproites, but you might also recognize them if you’ve played Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey.

RELATED: The Transgender Myth of Siproites

In that game, you can explore a really cool and elaborate but not entirely accurate reconstruction of the palace at Knossos.

Now, we know the Minoans had a massive trade network.

They traded with Egypt, Syria, the Greek mainland, Italy, Sardinia, and, of course, Cyprus, where we think they got a lot of their copper.

So it’s not surprising that in the process, some bull-related art would make its way over to Cyprus as well.

But transgender reverse minotaurs seem to be a distinctly Cypriot style.

We see centaurs, bull motifs, and transgender art in other areas, but nobody mixed them together consistently the way the Cypriots did (Winbladh 44).

So, way to go Cyprus!

But that doesn’t mean they were limited to Ayia Irini.

And here’s another one, with an unknown provenance.

It’s got what we’re looking for as well.

It’s also a lot smaller – this one’s 11.8 cm tall.

I know some of the stuff we’ve looked at up to this point might be considered a little ambiguous.

Like, you might have to squint and tilt your head a bit before you recognize the Lemba Lady as a sexually ambiguous artistic motif, I get it.

But these are the real deal. Breasts and a phallus or a beard, it doesn’t get much clearer than that.

But in case you’re still not convinced, because these sculptures aren’t fully human, FINE.

Let’s keep looking.

The Part Where We Look At Something That’s Actually Called The Bearded Goddess I Can’t Believe She Buried The Lede For This Long

I’ve not been able to find a photo of the back of this statue, but I’m told there’s a snake winding up her back, with its head peeking over her left shoulder.

The snake’s head is in the shadow of this photo, so it’s hard to see, but it’s there in other photos (Winbladh 53-4, Christou 55-56).

Is this the statue Macrobius was talking about?

Have we found Venus Barbata?

Again, probably not.

Macrobius told us his Venus Barbata held a scepter, and there’s no evidence the Bearded Goddess was ever holding anything.

He also specifically said you could see the statue’s phallus, which is obviously not the case here either.

This statue would also have been at least a thousand years old by Macrobius’ time, and was found among thousands of other statues, which would still have been buried during Macrobius’ life.

But still, we’ve got a statue of a human – and she’s fully human this time, I don’t want to hear any quibbling about that – with breasts and a beard, placed in a religious context.

That’s pretty close, right?

And again, this statue is unambiguously ambiguously gendered.

We’ve actually found some precursors to the Bearded Goddess as well. Let’s take a look.

Like the bearded goddess, they’ve all got breasts, a beard, and upraised arms as well.

So, what’s with the upraised arms thing?

It’s another motif the Cypriots got from Crete (Winbladh 52).

You’ve probably seen this statue passed around the internet with the caption “mood” or something like that. It’s called the Snake Goddess.

Now, the snake means different things in different areas. Obviously Abrahamic religions associate it with Satan, but, and I know this is hotly contested, the original five books that make up the Torah might not have even been written by the time the Snake Goddess was made (Griefenhagen 206-207).

So that might not have been its purpose.

Back to the Bearded Goddess.

She had a snake on her back too, remember?

At Ayia Irini, it seemed to have been a symbol of farming and harvest, of continuous rebirth.

Maybe that has to do with a snake’s habit of shedding its skin (Winbladh 52).

But let’s take a look at some other art from the era, aside from the transy stuff.

We’ve got bulls, lots of bull-related stuff.

We’ve got chariots, and people riding horseback.

And of course, we’ve got figures holding weapons.

It seems like they were worshipping a deity related to both war and fertility.

Just like the twin temple gods were related to both war and fertility.

We’re getting closer…

(come up with a clever name for this)

Another site that provides us with transgender artistic motifs is that of Amathus.

It’s on the southern coast of Cyprus, a bit southwest of Khirokitia, the first Stone Age site we looked at, and pretty much directly south of Ayia Irini.

Relatively speaking, Amathus shows up pretty late in the archaeological record.

There does seem to have been some Neolithic human activity there, but it had been abandoned for millennia.

After that, we’ve found only a single item there that dates to the Bronze Age.

In fact, we can’t securely date any human activity to the area until about 1100 BCE.

But analysis of the goods they left behind tell us the early settlers of Amathus were likely native Cypriots from other areas, as opposed to the Greeks, Phoenicians, and other groups who showed up around this time.

We think that after the Bronze Age Collapse and the migration of different peoples to Cyprus, the native Cypriots withdrew and regrouped in an area that wasn’t occupied during the Bronze Age (Aupert 19-22). 

Mythologically speaking, Amathus was founded by Kinyras, an early king of Cyprus, who came from Paphos, another site on the west coast of the island.

But there’s some truth to this as well.

There are some inscriptions we’ve found at both sites, written in a language we don’t understand, but we can tell it’s the same language based on its letters. We’ve called this mystery language Eteocypriot. Here’s an example of it.

So there’s clearly a connection between these two places (Aupert 19-22).

And naturally, we wouldn’t be talking about them today if we didn’t find some gender, so here we are.

If you wanted, you could read this as evidence of prehistoric trans women breastfeeding their babies on Cyprus, and I think that’s a bit of a stretch but you do you babe (Christou 59).

Vassos Karageorghis, who’s written so much on Cypriot archaeology that everything I read on the subject had him in the bibliography several times over, compares this Bearded Aphrodite to depictions of Astarte (V. Karageorghis Et Al. 2000:145).

She was a Hittite goddess of love and destruction. Sound familiar?

The Akkadians called her Ishtar, and associated her with the planet Venus.

We looked at that earlier in this when exploring what it may have meant that Venus had a beard, remember?

I know it’s been awhile.

Admittedly, Karageorghis is skeptical of the idea that this is a dual sexed figure, but I mean, if not for the beard, what would make you say this looks like a man?

It’s on the southwestern coast of Cyprus.

There’s also a statue of Venus on Cyprus that’s bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female.

To fit the bill, she needs to be:

• Bearded
• Dressed like a woman
• With a visible… mmhmmhmm
• Holding a scepter

We’re checking some of the boxes here, to be sure. She’s bearded, shaped like contemporary statues of ladies would be, and her downstairs is visible for the world to see.

The only thing missing is the scepter.

Let’s keep looking.

The Priest With A Dove

See? There’s a throughline to my work. I’m not just chasing whatever flights of fancy I happen to be into at the time. I’m a real writer and people should take me seriously, damn it!

Anyway, Cesnola was later part of a prisoner exchange, being released from Libby Prison in exchange for a personal friend of Jefferson Davis.

I bet you were wondering where I was going with this – after the war, he served as part of the United States consulate in, you guessed it, Cyprus (Encyclopedia Britannica).

While in Cyprus, he led excavations of a number of different archaeological sites, which brought to light an incredible number of treasures, tens of thousands of them.

The collection was purchased by the MET in New York, and today it’s called the Cesnola Collection.

Among these sites is Golgoi, which is a bit north of Kition.

Its ruins today lie near the modern Cypriot village of Athienou, which is in the UN buffer zone between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

As you can see, it has a beard, and a boxy figure with broad shoulders. In that regard, it’s clearly masculine.

But it also has pretty distinct breasts and long hair.

Now, plenty of kouroi are shown with long hair, it’s true, but the Priest with a Dove’s hair is in a feminine style, which we’ll take a closer look at in just a moment.

Is this Venus Barbata?

John L. Myres, who published a handbook on the MET’s Cesnola Collection, doesn’t seem to think so.

Comparing it with a few other statues from the island, he suggests this is just part of the art style from Cyprus (Myres 214-218).

But I’m not alone in thinking there’s more to it than that. 

In her master’s thesis, Irene Czako compares the Priest with a Dove statue with two other 6^th century BCE korai, pictured below.

The first was created by the Athenian sculptor Antenor, and the second’s sculptor is unknown, but it’s called the Lyon Kore because half of it is in a museum in Lyon.

The other half is in Athens, where the rest of it should be too (Czako 26). Give Greece their artifacts back, ya jerks!

Like the Priest with a Dove, these korai have small, separated breasts and relatively broad shoulders.

As well, take a look at their hair. The coiled strands go behind the statue’s ears, before cascading over their shoulders and down their chest.

That’s not what we see in the kouroi, as you can see below, but it is what we see on the Priest with a Dove.

And the Lyon Kore is even holding a dove as well.

So, let’s take a look at these three statues together.

Yes, one of them has a beard. Put that aside for a moment. Again, imagine we’d found this statue with its head broken off.

Is there anything else that would lead you to question the Priest With A Dove’s gender?

Czako thinks it fits right in with these other two, and so do I (Czako 27).

But wait, there’s more.

On the Priest with a Dove’s shoulder is an inscription in Greek.

It may read “ταϛ παφιαϛ”, or “Of the Paphian Goddess”, (Christou 61) though it’s not conclusive.

The inscription is in pretty bad shape, and other interpretations are certainly possible (Hermary).

The Paphian Goddess is, of course, Aphrodite. Her sanctuary at Paphos, on the west coast of Cyprus, was considered the main centre of her worship for the entire Mediterranean.

This sanctuary was built on the spot where it was said Aphrodite first set foot on Cyprus after being born from Ouranos’ foaming nads (UNESCO, Paphos).

And we know it was around when the Priest with a Dove was created, because Homer mentions it in The Odyssey. In Book 8, he says:

Straightway, the two of them, when they were set free of the fastening, though it was so strong, sprang up, and Ares took his way Thraceward, while she, Aphrodite lover of laughter, went back to Paphos on Cyprus, where lies her sacred precinct and her smoky altar, and there the Graces bathed her and anointed her with ambrosial oil, such as abounds for the gods who are everlasting, and put delightful clothing about her, a wonder to look on.

– The Odyssey, Book VIII, CCCLIX-CCCLXVI

This is mentioned in the Homeric Hymns as well, a collection of poems that were attributed to Homer but probably not written by him yadda yadda. Homeric Hymn 5 is dedicated to Aphrodite, which mentions the importance of the temple at Paphos, quote:

She went to Cyprus, to Paphos, where her precinct is and fragrant altar, and passed into her sweet-smelling temple.

– Homeric Hymn 5, 53-55

So, why is it dedicated to the Paphian goddess if we found it in Golgoi?

In fact, we have a literary reference here that can help.

We get it from Pausanias, a Greek writer from the 2nd Century CE, which was the Roman era.

He wrote a sort of travel guide to Greece of his day, talking about some of the interesting things he saw along the way.

It’s an incredibly useful work.

In book 8 of his Descriptions of Greece, he says, quote:

After the capture of Troy the storm that overtook the Greeks on their return home carried Agapenor and the Arcadian fleet to Cyprus, and so Agapenor became the founder of Paphos, and built the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Palaepaphos (Old Paphos). Up to that time the goddess had been worshipped by the Cyprians in the district called Golgi.

– Pausanias, Descriptions of Greece, 8.5.2

Doves were sacred to Aphrodite as well.

In book 13 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid refers to them as “Doves, the birds of Venus” (Ov. Met. XIII.DCLXXIII), and in Book 14 he says “Venus rejoiced, gave thanks to Jove, soared high through the light air, borne by her doves, and came to the Laurentian coast” (Ov. Met. XIV.DXCV-DXCVII).

That’s a reference to her chariot, which is sometimes said to be pulled by doves.

So, is THIS Venus Barbata?

Again, she checks some of Macrobius’ criteria, but not all of it.

She’s bearded, and shaped like contemporary statues of ladies would be.

She’s not holding a scepter though.

But though it’s hard to see based on these photos, we do know the arms on this statue were broken off and replaced later on.

They’re still from antiquity, but it’s hard to know whether they’re the original ones (Christou 61, Myres 217, Czako 25). 

If they aren’t, we don’t know what they would have held.

But the helmet she’s wearing does resemble one that might be used in war, so it’s not impossible to imagine she might have been holding a scepter, a spear, or something similar.

The fact that she’s wearing a helmet is reminiscent of Athena, who was often depicted with a helm and spear, the defender of Athens (Czako 27-28).

But it’s also reminiscent of those ingot gods we looked at before.

A goddess of fertility and destruction, of security and chaos, all wrapped into one.

Now, this explanation isn’t bulletproof.

First off, we can’t see up her peplos.

But also, it’s been noted that male sculptures from around the same time and area also have a similar plaited hairstyle. And yeah, the boobs are pretty small (Christou 61).

But at very least, this is a sculpture of a devotee of Aphrodite, and its gender, like many archaic sculptures on Cyprus, is ambiguous.

Chapter VI: How Was Venus Barbata Worshipped?

So, I know this has been a lot so far.

It’s a lot for me to research and write it, too.

But all this evidence points to a very long tradition of transgender iconography on Cyprus – more than six thousand years of it – culminating in the worship of a transgender goddess.

What might this worship have looked like?

That’s the part that really sucks. We don’t actually know much.

Why not?

This has to do with the nature of pagan religions in the ancient Mediterranean.

In the video on the worship practices of the Gallae, we talked a bit about mystery cults, but we didn’t go too deep into detail on them.

We didn’t need to for our purposes there, but let’s take a closer look now. 

Ancient Mystery Cults

So, what is a mystery cult?

A mystery cult is a religious practice in the Greco-Roman pagan tradition that took place separate from the population at large. These practices were open to initiates only.

Sometimes they’d take place alongside religious festivals, but not always.

But religious festivals had a certain flavour to them.

They took place during the day, out in the open, and were often limited only to citizens of that city.

They might include processions, performances of theatre, music, and other things, and sacrifice of animals and other offerings.

You’d do so at the god’s sanctuary, which might have been the area outside a big elaborate temple, or it might have been something smaller in the countryside for pastoral festivals (Bowden 15).

On the other hand, mystery practices tended to happen in secret, and at night.

They could be disorienting, and sometimes even frightening.

You’d be subject to loud music and noise, a rapid shifting from light to dark, and other ways to overload your senses.

And you probably didn’t have any inkling of what you were getting into beforehand.

In fact, you might even have been blindfolded first (Bowden 15).

These practices were open to anyone who wanted to participate, but the details of their practice were never revealed to the uninitiated.

As a result, there’s a lot about them we don’t know.

In fact, ancient writers will sometimes even tell us that they won’t tell us.

Let’s come back to Pausanias, the 2nd century CE Greek writer. We talked about him just a moment ago.

At one point, he tells us he was going to describe the contents of the sanctuary to Demeter at Athens, but he was visited in a dream and told not to (Paus. 1.14.3, as cited in Bowden 22), quote:

After I had intended to go further into this story, and to describe the contents of the sanctuary at Athens, called the Eleusinium, I was stayed by a vision in a dream. I shall therefore turn to those things it is lawful to write of to all men.

– Pausanias, Description of Greece, 1.14.3

After all, that information was on a need to know basis, and if you’re reading Pausanias, you don’t need to know.

This is what you do when you respect the religion you’re writing about, and it’s why, in the video on the Gallae rituals, when we talked about later Christian writers revealing some of the rites of the Gallae in their writing, it was such a big deal.

This was a sign of deep disrespect.

Anyway, the cults we know the most about are the Eleusinian Mysteries. Let’s talk a bit about them.

The ancient Greeks used stories about the gods to explain the world around them. That included big things, like lightning and earthquakes, but what about more benign natural phenomena?

How might you explain, for example, the changing of the seasons?

As usual, there’s a god for that. In fact, there are several involved.

The story we’re about to explore shows up in plenty of different sources, but the oldest and best source we have comes from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

It’s a full epic poem on its own, just shy of 500 lines of poetry. I’ll do my best to sum up the story here.

Zeus and Demeter did some holy business together, and had a daughter, Persephone.

One day, Persephone was out with a bunch of other goddesses gathering flowers, and enjoying a lovely day.

When suddenly, the earth yawns, and Hades emerges, in a chariot pulled by his “immortal horses”. He kidnaps Persephone and drags her off to the underworld.

Demeter, meanwhile, freaks out, because she can’t find her daughter.

After ten days of searching, Hekate leads her to Helios, who tells her what happened.

He also tells her Zeus had promised one of his daughters to Hades in marriage, so this is all just part of the deal.

Demeter is really not happy about this, so she leaves Olympus altogether and disguises herself as an old woman.

She finds work as a nursemaid among the royal family of Eleusis, and really dotes on this one baby.

She anoints him with ambrosia and puts him in a fire. I guess when a god does this, it burns away the mortal parts and makes you immortal.

Anyway, someone catches her doing this, and freaks out at the sight of a baby in a fire. Understandable.

So she reveals herself as the goddess and explains what’s going on, then commands the people to build her a temple and a sanctuary.

They did, but Demeter was still miserable. She really loved her daughter.

Now, Demeter is the goddess of the harvest, and since she left Olympus, the harvest has been poor.

Crops just wouldn’t grow. It was getting pretty bad.

Zeus noticed, not because he cares that much about humans, but because he wasn’t receiving sacrifices anymore, and the gods run on ego.

So, he sends Iris to change her mind.

She wouldn’t budge.

So, he sends Hermes to Hades, and convinces him to let Persephone go.

He does, but before she leaves, he gives her a pomegranate seed to eat, which I guess means she has to return to the underworld.

Then, the mother of Zeus and Demeter, Kybele – yes, that Kybele – comes to Demeter and explains the situation.

Persephone would have to spend a third of the year in Hades, but the other two-thirds of the year she could live on Olympus with the other gods.

When Persephone is in Hades, Demeter mopes about, and her grief causes the world to grow cold.

But when she returns, it marks the beginning of spring.

So the moral of this story is that Demeter would rather kill all of humanity than deal with her codependency with her daughter. Girl, that’s not healthy.

But also, the moral of the story is that those with great power buckle when you deprive them of their ego-strokers.

Why can’t those with great power just go to therapy instead of making their issues everyone else’s problem?

But also, Persephone isn’t a willing participant here, and has no agency.

You’re really not safe from the libido of the gods, even if you’re a goddess…

But we won’t get too much into that, it’s just depressing.

Anyway, Eleusis was a city in Attika, the polis of Athens, which we talked about earlier.

It was 20km or so west of Athens, near the border with Megara.

It was permanently settled in the 8^th century BCE, and the festival worship began in the 6^th century BCE.

It involved a procession from Athens to Eleusis.

There was a public festival, but amid that there was also a celebration in the Hall of Initiations, called the Telesterion.

Here, the high priest would reveal the sacred rites to the initiates – the Eleusinian Mysteries (Burkert 2-5).

What were these rites?

We know they had something to do with hope for a joyful afterlife, and they may have had something to do with grain, since that’s Demeter’s domain.

But otherwise, yeah, we don’t know.

That’s the nature of mystery cults, unfortunately.

As a result, there is a lot about cult worship that we just don’t know when it comes to pagan religions in the ancient Mediterranean.

This stuff wasn’t written down.

But there are still some things we can glean from this.

In particular, we’ll be looking at two different factors from here.

We’ll look at the worship practices themselves, and what the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos was like, since we know that was the place to be for Aphrodite maniacs.

Aphrodisiacs?

Wait no, that’s a different thing.

The Temple to Aphrodite at Paphos

We know the temple to Aphrodite at Paphos was an important one, and for a long time.

Even Homer knew about it.

In The Odyssey, Demodokos sings about the love affair between Ares and Aphrodite, where he says, quote:

Straightway the two of them, when they were set free of the fastening, though it was so strong, sprang up, and Ares took his way Thraceward, while she, Aphrodite lover of laughter, went back to Paphos on Cyprus, where lies her sacred precinct and her smoky altar, and there the Graces bathed her and anointed her with ambrosial oil, such as abounds for the gods who are everlasting, and put delightful clothing about her, a wonder to look on.

– The Odyssey VIII.CCCLIX-CCCLXVI

There was already a long tradition of worship of the great goddess of Cyprus at Paphos, but it really coalesced around the 12^th and 11^th centuries BCE.

Around that time, Agapenor and his people arrived from Arcadia, in Greece, to Paphos.

He became ruler of Paphos, though by what means we don’t know.

Perhaps in order to help subdue the local population and secure his new position, he built a magnificent new sanctuary to the Cypriot goddess (J. & V. Karageorghis 2001:274-275).

What remains of the temple to Aphrodite at Paphos?

Not much.

Unfortunately, most of the temple has been destroyed.

The Romans built their own temple to Aphrodite on top of it, and then they plopped a sugar refinery on the site in the medieval era.

So what we have today is only a bit of the westernmost structure.

As a result, what we know about the temple is largely speculative (Budin 2000:241-242).

But here’s what we do know.

Its walls were built from large blocks of stone, and there may have been some rectangular stone pillars in an area that looks like a courtyard. We’ve also found evidence of metallurgy there, like the twin temples we looked at in Kition (V. Karageorghis 1981:66). 

As well, we’re told that the shrine to Venus itself was in the open air, but that rain never falls on it (Young, 24-25). How does that work? I don’t know.

Anyway, there are some lovely photos of it, which you can see here.

But there’s a whole lot about the temple we unfortunately don’t know.

Worship of Cyprian Aphrodite

You know Theseus, right?

The whole Minotaur thing, with King Minos, and the Labyrinth, all that stuff?

We just talked about minotaurs earlier, though I’m pretty sure the minotaur Theseus fought wasn’t trans.

Anyway, Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos, and helped Theseus escape her father.

Then Theseus, being the complete jerkface he was, abandoned Ariadne on Cyprus, what a douche.

So she hanged herself on a tree, and was buried in a grove near Amathus, which they called Ariadne Aphrodite.

Later, during a festival in the area to the goddess, they’d have a young boy dress up like a woman and cry out as though he was in distress (Farnell 634-5).

Was this related to Venus Barbata?

Maybe.

We did look at some transgender iconography found at Amathus earlier, and it does seem to mesh with Macrobius’ quote. Here it is again, as a refresher.

Philochorus, too, states that she (Aphrodite) is the Moon and that men sacrifice to her in women’s dress, women in men’s, because she is held to be both male and female 

– Macrobius, Saturnalia III.VIII.III

Hazel Thurston, author of a travel guide for Cyprus, talks about the worship of Aphrodite at Paphos as well.

She says, quote:

The great spring festival of Aphrodite was celebrated by the pilgrims in various ways according to their degree of initiation. There were games for the populace on the first day, purification ceremonies and sea bathing on the second, and bloodless sacrifices to the goddess on the third, culminating in presentations of ritual cake, the Pyramous, by the high priest. In the second degree, the rites of Adonis comprised acts of mourning for the premature death of the golden youth. This was followed by a triumphant and orgiastic celebration of his resurrection. The third degree underwent initiation into the mysteries of both cults, with doves, an obelisk (pillar) and the image of a bearded goddess as the chief symbols. The culmination was the presentation of salt symbolizing Aphrodite’s birth from the sea, together with phallic symbols to denote fertility. These were acknowledged by the pilgrims by payment in coin.

Hazel Thurston – A Traveller’s Guide to Cyprus 268.

This all sounds fairly reasonable based on what we know about ancient Cyprus so far.

But here’s the thing, and it’s absolutely infuriating: Hazel Thurston doesn’t cite any sources.

I have no idea if this passage is based on scholarly research, or pure fantasy.

I know I wasn’t the best at citing my sources in earlier videos, but I’ve learned my lesson now, and I really do try to be diligent in it now.

Thanks to Zoe Baker, by the way, and her video on the importance of citing your sources for YouTube historians for helping snap my research into shape. It’s been awhile since I was in academia.

Anyway, can we confirm any of this?

Actually, yeah.

Originally a pagan philosopher, he converted to Christianity and traveled around the Roman Empire, learning about the faith from various holy guys.

Then, he returned to Alexandria and became head of the catechetical school there.

He continued to teach until the Christian persecutions of the emperor Septimius Severus in 202 CE, where he left Alexandria.

Eventually, he ended up in Jerusalem and Antioch, and died around 220 CE (Wilson 11-12, Benedict).

Three major works by him survive, but we’re most interested in his Exhortation to the Greek Heathen.

It’s a work geared toward converting pagans to Christianity.

In chapter II, he spends time talking about all the nasty and licentious acts done in the worship of different gods.

About Aphrodite, he says, quote:

There is then the foam-born and Cyprus-born, the darling of Kinyras – I mean Aphrodite, lover of the virilia, because sprung from them, even from those of Uranus, that were cut off – those lustful members, that, after being cut off, offered violence to the waves. Of members so lewd a worthy fruit – Aphrodite – is born. In the rites which celebrate this enjoyment of the sea, as a symbol of her birth a lump of salt and the phallus are handed to those who are initiated into the art of uncleanness. And those initiated bring a piece of money to her, as a courtesan’s paramours do to her.

– Clement of Alexandria – Exhortation to the Greek Heathen II pg. III

Tag yourself, I’m “so lewd a worthy fruit”.

Comparing that with Hazel Thurston’s bit, it pretty closely matches what happens on the third day of the festival, if you’re initiated into the cult of Aphrodite.

The Roman historian Tacitus also tells us that it was not permitted to shed blood on the altar to Aphrodite (Tac. Hist. 2.3).

This is notable, since lots of other gods demanded blood sacrifice.

This was in the form of animals, usually, but occasionally human blood, as we saw with the cult of Kybele.

We do also know that some gods’ cults required initiation, and that sometimes required payment among other things (Karoglou).

So, we can confirm some of what Thurston says.

But she’d have saved me a whole lot of work here if she’d just CITED HER SOURCES.

There’s not a whole lot more we know about the worship of Aphrodite on Cyprus.

I know a lot of you were hoping that I’d dig up a new sect of trans feminine priestesses you’d never heard of before, but I haven’t found any evidence for that.

That said, we are told by a Byzantine source, Joannes Lydus, that a bearded Aphrodite was worshipped in Pamphylia as well (Farnenll 628).

Pamphylia is in southern Asia Minor, across from Cyprus.

It’s also not too far west of Halikarnassos, where we found the Salmakis inscription that describes Hermaphroditus as inventing the rite of marriage (Isager 8, 12).

All that suggests the worship of Venus Barbata extended further than Cyprus itself.

Now, let’s think back to what Herodotus told us about the Enarees, the Scythian trans feminine priestesses, quote:

When the Scythians came on their way to the city of Ascalon in Syria, most of them passed by and did no harm, but a few remained behind and plundered the temple of Aphrodite Ourania… and all their descendants after them, were afflicted by the goddess with the female sickness, and so the Scythians say that they are afflicted as a consequence of this.

– Herodotus, Histories, I.CV

Ascalon is on the southern coast of the Levant, just north of Gaza (free Palestine).

It’s also off the coast of Cyprus, though admittedly a bit further away than Pamphylia.

But it gets better.

We’ve actually found one of those transgender reverse minotaurs nearby.

Perhaps there’s a connection between the Kyprian Aphrodite (the bearded goddess) and the Aphrodite of the temple at Ascalon, who had the power to feminize men.

If there were, we could draw some parallels between the limited knowledge we have of the rituals of the Enarees, and potential worship practices of the cult of the Kyprian Aphrodite.

But the evidence for such a connection is tenuous.

We also know Aphrodite was represented armed in places other than Cyprus.

Remember back near the beginning of this video, where we talked about the journey of Ouranos’ castrated nads through the Mediterranean?

Before they washed up on the shore of Cyprus, they passed by the island of Kythera, south of Sparta.

That place, too, is a holy site for Aphrodite.

It’s the oldest Greek temple to her, if Pausanias is to be believed.

Pausanias also tells us the goddess is represented armed, and made of wood (3.23).

So the worship of Aphrodite may have spread from Kythera to Cyprus, blending with the millennia of gender ambiguous iconography on the island.

In that case, the story Hesiod tells us about the voyage of the SS Orchiectomy could be a sort of euhemerist interpretation of the spread of that cult.

Of course, that cult would have spread into the rest of Greece, so we can draw some conclusions from those worship practices as well.

In particular, we know Aphrodite Ourania was worshipped in Athens.

She had a temple in the Kerameikos district, which we talked about in the video analyzing Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans.

It’s the part of Athens where most of the brothels were (Farnell 631).

We’re also told there was a herm statue of Aphrodite in Athens, and these things are pretty interesting.

We talked about them in the Hermaphroditus video too.

We’ve found herms all throughout Athens, and in a bunch of other places too.

They’re essentially a block of stone with a head at the top, and a phallus about where it would be if the block of stone was a human body.

You’d rub the phallus as you walked by, as a source of good luck and to ward off evil (Farnell 637).

Now, to be fair, not every herm had a phallus.

Sometimes, it was because they were broken off.

We know there was a big kerfuffle in Athens in 415 BCE where someone broke all the phalluses off just before an important military expedition to Sicily (Osborne 65).

There were court cases trying to get to the bottom of who broke all the dicks, incredible stuff.

However, it also seems like some herms never had one to begin with.

Let’s head a bit south of Athens, to the city of Argos.

There, they had a festival called the Hybristika, a feast in honour of Aphrodite where men would dress like women, and women like men (Farnell 635).

That sounds a lot like the worship Macrobius tells us that Philochorus tells us about.

Here’s the quote again, to refresh your memory:

Atthis’ Philochorus, too, states that she is the Moon and that men sacrifice to her in women’s dress, women in men’s, because she is held to be both male and female.

– Macrobius, Saturnalia III.VIII.II-III

So we’re beginning to piece together a few different bits about what the worship of Aphrodite might have looked like on Cyprus.

But just like the specifics of most worship practices in the ancient Mediterranean, we’re left with a lot of questions.

And these are questions we may never have answers to.

But what we do know is that the holy shrines to Aphrodite on Cyprus were in use for a very long time.

The sanctuary to Aphrodite at Paphos was established in the 12th century BCE.

That’s not the oldest thing we’ve looked at in this video, but certainly older than anything else we’ve looked at in any other videos.

In case you’re the type to get confused by century dating like I am, this would have been the 1100’s BCE.

I know it would be weird, but why didn’t we just make it so they match?

This should be the 20^th century, because everything starts with 20.

It would be so much easier to remember.

BuT wHaT aBoUt ThE cUrReNt FiRsT cEnTuRy???

Easy – it’s the 0^th century.

I like doing simple math in my head, but small stuff like this, and figuring out time zones, that sort of thing always messes me up.

Leave a comment below if you know an easy way to remember stuff like that.

Anyway, the worship of Aphrodite at Paphos began in the 1100’s BCE.

And we know the Romans still thought of it as a holy site devoted to Aphrodite, since contemporary sources talk about the worship activities that took place there as late as the 1^st century CE (Strabo XIV VI.III).

And of course, Macrobius was talking about it as late as the fifth century CE.

And as we’ve seen, transgender iconography in Cypriot art is much older than even that.

But based on the fact that it shows up in some of the earliest artistic representations on Cyprus and has remained consistent throughout the island’s art history, and that what we understand to be the Aphrodite of Cyprus is a blend of the Greek Aphrodite and the fertility goddess indigenous to Cyprus, it seems reasonable that the worship of Aphrodite on Cyprus would more often than not have included transgender iconography, or at least did so soon after the cult arrived on the island.

What this tells us is that a transgender Aphrodite was worshipped on Cyprus for at least a thousand years. Perhaps longer.

But of course, all good things must come to an end…

Chapter VII: When Did It End?

Cyprus changed hands a number of times over the years.

It became a Roman province in 58 BCE (V. Karageorghis 1969:170, 199-200).

The people of Cyprus seemed to welcome Roman rule, since they were unhappy with the Ptolemies.

The Romans divided it into four districts: Paphos, Salamis, Amathus, and Lapithos.

However, Paphos was considered the main city of the island, particularly favoured by the emperors.

As a result, the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos became even more important than it was before.

This could only have been a good sign for the worship of Venus Barbata.

But even if Roman rule did turn out to be fairly oppressive, with emperors extracting a lot of wealth from the island, they still largely took care of the island.

When severe earthquakes caused widespread destruction in 15 BCE and 76 CE, the Roman state led the reconstruction effort (J. Karageorghis 1987:89).

Now, geologically speaking, Cyprus lies along a complex fault line.

The Eurasian and African tectonic plates grind together in the eastern Mediterranean, and the part where Cyprus lies is considered to be the most geologically active part of it currently (Papadimitriou and Karakostas 61).

As a result, the island has seen a lot of earthquakes over the years. The most recent major one was in 2021 which was magnitude 6.5 (Ali & Elkhouly abstract), but they seem to have magnitude 5 or less earthquakes pretty regularly.

So, things have been shaken up quite a bit on Cyprus over the years.

This was true in antiquity as well, which has caused a lot of destruction.

It also means it’s quite the miracle that we have the wealth of archaeological knowledge on the island that we do.

All these earthquakes may be part of the reason why, under the Romans, Cyprus lost a lot of its cultural individuality.

As the old was destroyed, the new was built in newer styles.

So, the art of Cyprus under the Romans is very much rooted in Roman norms.

But even if the Romans cared for the island earlier in their rule, as the Empire dragged on, it became less and less able to effectively tend to its territories.

So when a couple of earthquakes in 332 and 342 devastated the city of Salamis, the Romans were less capable of rebuilding.

As we can see in the archaeological record, these earthquakes destroyed the gymnasium, theatre, and aqueduct.

As a result, the city was left abandoned for some time, and rebuilt much later as Constantia, a Christian city, named after the emperor.

They restored the aqueduct, and used parts from the theatre to rebuild the gymnasium, and while they did so they destroyed some statues of gods.

A few of them they left as decorations, but others were thrown into ditches or broken down for use as building materials (V. Karageorghis 1969:200-201, 224-226).

Kourion, too, had its aqueduct destroyed around the same time (Ibid. 226).

Now, Cyprus was also a fairly early adopter of Christianity in the empire.

We’re told St. Paul the Apostle came to Salamis in 45 CE from Antioch, along with St. Barnabas, who was a native of Cyprus and a Christian Jew.

When the Roman governor, a proconsul named Sergius Paulus, saw Paul strike blind another Jew hostile to Christianity, this was good enough for him to convert to this new religion.

This gives Cyprus the distinction of having the first Christian governor of a Roman province, and no doubt many others converted around the same time.

Even still, the island remained strongly pagan as well, but we aren’t told about any violence between these two communities.

In particular, we see a lot of Roman art of the time with clear pagan themes.

This includes Theseus, and Pyramus and Thisbe. That’s what we saw in the mosaics we looked at earlier.

As well, the worship of Aphrodite continued.

But Christianity did steadily grow in influence across the island (J. Karageorghis 1987:89-90).

That said, non-Christian Jews started an intense rebellion in Cyprus, where they are said to have slaughtered all the non-Jews in Salamis, 200,000 of them (J. Karageorghis 1987:90).  Yeesh.

The Romans suppressed this, but this would certainly have done significant damage to the pagan community on the island.

So, by the time we saw those earthquakes destroy parts of Salamis, Christianity was even more of a cultural force on the island.

Combined with its rebuilding being funded and led by Constantius II, a thoroughly Christian emperor, and many historians use this as a symbolic end to paganism on Cyprus (J. Karageorghis 1987:89-90).

In fact, by the First Council of Nicaea in 325, the Christian church on Cyprus was large enough to be represented by three separate bishops (Christou 73).

One could imagine the worship of Cyprian Aphrodite continued after this time, just as the worship of Christ existed during the era of Pagan supremacy in Rome.

Besides, when Macrobius talks about the statue of Venus Barbata, he talks about it in the present tense, and again, he lived in the 5^th century CE.

So we can assume worship of the goddess continued on into the Christian era.

But in terms of the fame, grandeur, and majesty of the cult of Venus Barbata, the 4^th century earthquakes signify the beginning of the end.

Chapter VIII: What Does All This Mean?

So, let’s come back to our goal here. It’s to find the Venus Barbata.

Macrobius is our guide, and in that light he gives us some pretty specific criteria to look for.

We know the Venus Barbata statue is:

• Bearded
• Dressed like a woman
• With visible downstairs
• Holding a scepter

Did we find anything that meets that criteria?

No, not specifically.

We’ve seen plenty of each of the above, but no single statue that has all four traits. So, where does that leave us?

There are a few possible options.

It could be that the Venus Barbata statue was destroyed.

We saw earlier that Christians destroyed many pagan statues on Cyprus. Venus Barbata could have been one of them.

Or, it could have been destroyed in one of the many earthquakes that plague Cyprus.

It could also be that Macrobius hadn’t seen the statue for himself, but rather someone told him about it, and he got a couple of the details wrong when writing it down.

Considering how much he praises Vergil for his precise and meticulous use of language, I think this is less probable, but still.

It could also still be buried somewhere on Cyprus, just waiting for an archaeologist to unearth it.

Whatever the case, we haven’t yet found the Venus Barbata.

So in that regard, this search was a failure.

But even if that’s true, what we did find is transgender and gender nonconforming iconography on the island that spans several millennia.

At its earliest, we’ve found Stone Age items that give us the beginnings of this representation. The “bisexual fetish stone” from Khirokitia, from 7000-5300 BCE.

Beginning with the Neolithic and Chalcolithic, we explored the many carvings with sexually ambiguous themes.

Two from Khirokitia, two from Sotira, two from Erimi, and one each from Kissonerga-Mosphilia and Lemba.

That evolved into the cruciform style we saw later, which still kept the sexual ambiguity of the previous style (Christou 13-31).

From there, we explored what these figures were for, and their meaning as fertility symbols as well as symbols of protection.

After, we jumped forward to the Bronze Age, where we looked at the twin temple gods at Kition and Enkomi, and its connection to the myths of Aphrodite.

Then the plank figure tradition, analyzing what these unusual figures might have represented.

Then, the Iron Age.

We explored the fantastic collection of figures discovered at the sanctuary of Ayia Irini, several of which showed clear transgender themes.

Among them, we found the Bearded Goddess, a statue with breasts and a beard.

We also found the Priest with a Dove statue, which is about the closest thing we got to Venus Barbata, the figure from Pissouri, and the terracotta bearded goddess from Amathus.

Believe it or not, this isn’t even all the transgender art we’ve found on the island.

We didn’t even cover the Cypro-Geometric era terracotta sculptures that have breasts and beards (Christou 50-53), or some of the cruder stone age stuff that didn’t illustrate the point as well.

We also didn’t talk about the clear connection between Hermaphroditus and Venus Barbata, or between Venus Aphrodite and eastern goddesses like Innana and Ishtar, which I’m sure we’ll look at in a future video.

Yeah, BELIEVE IT OR NOT this isn’t completely comprehensive despite being this bloody long.

What can we take away from all this?

Well, let’s start with what NOT to take from it.

It’s NOT true that Cypriot art is defined by its gender ambiguous motifs.

Yes, we looked at a lot of pieces today that clearly display these themes. But I deliberately sampled this stuff because that’s what this piece is about.

But the figures from Ayia Irini are a good microcosm of Cypriot art overall. There are over 2000 figures found there, and eight of them have ambiguous genders.

There’s A LOT of Cypriot art that doesn’t display these themes.

But there’s also a lot that does, even if it’s a tiny fraction of the whole.

I’m also not making the argument that Venus Barbata is transgender in the same way that modern day trans people are.

That, too, would be foolish.

When I use the word “transgender” I’m using it in the historical sense, as defined by Susan Stryker as, quote:

[P]eople who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain their gender.

– Susan Stryker – Transgender History pg. 1

I’ve said that in most of my work, but occasionally I forget and an avalanche of CHUDs show up in the comments to cry about it.

So, here you are CHUDs. Happy?

Go back to your subterranean caverns in the depths of the sewers of New York and feast on human remains.

It’s also not true that the existence of Venus Barbata implies that Venus was always viewed as a transgender figure.

The Roman emperor Augustus, for example, claimed descent from Aeneas, and therefore from Venus. She was honoured in his family, the Julio-Claudian family, as Venus Genetrix, or Venus the Mother.

But there’s no evidence they thought of Venus as a transgender figure.

And yes, I know trans women can have children and be mothers, I know a whole bunch personally.

But nowhere is it mentioned that someone else carried these children.

In fact, The Roman writer Apuleius specifically refers to Venus as “giving birth” to Cupid (Apul. Met. 11.2). And she had a bunch of other kids too.

So, I’m not making the argument that the Greeks and Romans always worshipped a transgender Venus Aphrodite. That would be silly.

That said, the idea that the goddess that was to become Venus Aphrodite had its origins in Cyprus and places further east, before making its way to Greece is fairly widely accepted among scholars.

And while every detail of Venus Barbata clearly didn’t leave the island, elements of her gender ambiguity clearly did.

We see that in the rituals of Athens and Argos which relate to crossdressing.

But friends, even if the specific Venus Barbata statue Macrobius refers to never existed, what’s abundantly clear is that gender ambiguity was an important part of Cypriot religious life.

This gender ambiguity culminated in the creation of a goddess, Venus, who displayed both masculine and feminine characteristics in her iconography.

And look, I know this is a LONG piece. But I hope you’ll agree with me that everything we covered – the long, complicated timeline we went through – was worth it to discover that conclusion.

When trans people talk about how we were venerated in the past – worshipped as goddesses or revered as high priestesses – it’s truer than you know.

You may have drawn hope from the Enarees and their revered role in Scythian society, or from the Gallae who, though they were generally maligned by Roman culture at large, served such an important and indispensable role in their society that it was not only undesirable, but even blasphemous, to mistreat them.

I have too.

Some of you have even expressed that their stories brought you to tears, which I’m grateful for because it means I’ve properly conveyed the beauty, majesty, and wonder I felt as I researched these topics.

But while each of these sects were honoured in their own way, neither was worshipped.

But friends, the ancient Cypriots looked at someone who represents the convalescence, and transcendence, of gender, and worshipped them. Built temples to them. Built a notable part of their religious life around them.

Is that not amazing?

Once upon a time, my trans sibling, we were revered.

Perhaps one day soon, we will be once more.

We have always existed.

And so long as humanity continues to endure, so too shall we.

Ancient Sources:

►Apuleius. “Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass”. Translated by E. J. Kennedy. Toronto, Penguin Books, 2004.

Aristophanes. “Fragments.” Translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library 502. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008. 

►The Atthidographers. “The Story of Athens : The Fragments of the Local Chronicles of Attika.” Translated by Phillip Harding. London, Routledge, 2008.

►Clemens, Titus Flavius. “Exhortation to the Greek Heathen”. Translated by Rev. William Wilson. Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1867.

►Gellius, Aulus. “Attic Nights”. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1946. 

►Hesiod. “The Theogony”. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. University of Michigan Press, 1959.

►Homer. “The Iliad”. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. University of Chicago Press, 1951. 

►Homer. “The Odyssey”. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York, HarperCollins, 1967. 

►“The Homeric Hymns.” Translated by H.G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.

►Horace. “The Works Of Horace”. Translated by C. Smart. Cambridge, 1836. 

►Livy. “The Early History Of Rome”. Translated by Aubrey De Sélincourt. Toronto, Penguin Classics, 2002. 

►Macrobius. “The Saturnalia”. Translated by Percival Vaughan Davies. New York, Columbia University Press, 1969. 

►Ovid. “Metamorphoses”. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Indiana University Press, 1955. 

►Pausanias. Description of Greece. Translated by Jones, W. H. S. and Omerod, H. A. Loeb Classical Library Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918.

►Plato. “The Symposium”. Translated by R.E. Allen. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1991. 

►Polybius. “Histories”. Translated by W.R. Paton. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1927.

►Strabo. “Geography”. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones. Loeb Classical Library V. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1928.

►Suetonius. “On Grammarians”. Translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1914.

►Unknown. “A Hymn To Ishtar K. 1286”. Translated by Theophile James Meek. The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, 1910.

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Modern Sources:

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