There’s a spring, they say, somewhere in Turkey, afflicted with an ancient curse, though you’d never know by looking at it.
In ancient times, travelers weary from their voyage would stop to bathe, drink, and relax, little aware of the fate that awaited them.
A god, the old ones tell us, declared that all who approached the spring and felt the soothing embrace of its waters would be stripped of their masculine vigor, and emerge neither man, nor woman, but neither, and yet both.
But surely, that’s just a legend…
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Who Was Hermaphroditus?
Modern identities are a lot more specific than they used to be.
Trans women, drag queens, and crossdressers, for example, are distinctly different from each other.
There is some overlap in certain cases, like with Jiggly Caliente and Peppermint, two trans women who also happen to be drag queens.
But they’re not the same thing by definition, and in fact you might end up insulting someone by confusing them for the wrong identity.
If you’re a trans woman who’s ever gone to a drag show and had some drunk straight girl come up to you and tell you YOU’R SUCH ABEAUFUJTIL DRJAG WQUEN WILL HYO9UJ BE MJU GAHY BESTJ FERINED????? you know exactly what I mean.
The same goes for intersex people.
Some of them may consider themselves transgender, nonbinary, or both, but an intersex person is not either of those things just by virtue of their being intersex.
It’s a difference in anatomical development, and most people don’t consider it a gender identity.
But much like the previously mentioned labels, it’s become a more distinct identity, even a movement, largely in response to the persecution the community faces.
These identities, however, are a product of modern society, because gender is a social construct. The peoples of the ancient Mediterranean wouldn’t have understood these distinctions.
Which brings us to Hermaphroditus.
If this is your first time joining us in this series, welcome. I’m Sophie Edwards, and this is We Have Always Existed. We explore the body of evidence that exists for transgender people in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
Now, a modern reader might consider Hermaphroditus to be not transgender at all, but intersex.
YOU SAID THIS IS A SERIES ABOUT TRANSGENDER HISTORY NOT INTERSEX HISTORY YOU’RE NOT EVEN A PAGE INTO WRITING THIS SCRIPT AND YOU’RE ALREADY CONTRADICTING YOURSELF.
Look, it’s not my intention to try and claim Hermaphroditus as a trans icon instead of an intersex one, even though I think a lot of trans women see themselves in Hermaphroditus, for probably obvious reasons. But exploring their mythology can still give us some interesting insights into how the Greeks and later the Romans viewed both sex and gender, and what happened when someone transgressed them.
So far in this series, we’ve talked about the Enarees, the trans feminine priestesses of the Scythians, and about Elagabalus, the Roman Emperor who may have been transgender.
RELATED: The Enarees REMASTERED
RELATED: Exploring the Grave of an Enaree Priestess
Both of those are examples of history – a historical culture on one hand, and a historical transgender individual on the other. But this time, it’s different.
Hermaphroditus is a myth.
The goal this time isn’t to find out WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.
Instead, we want to understand what the stories of Hermaphroditus tell us about the cultural attitudes of the people who tell them, and how they might reflect any actual historical events that may have occurred.
And as we’ll start to see, the ancients had some pretty wildly varying views on Hermaphroditus and other intersex figures that it’s difficult to reconcile.
RELATED: Transgender Mythology
I’ll be referring to Hermaphroditus with changing pronouns, for reasons I hope will become clear the further we go into their tale.
Before we start, though, I want to apologize in advance to any intersex people who might be watching for the language used here.
The name Hermaphroditus bears a strong similarity to that old slur used against intersex people that shows up in scientific and medical literature even to this day. I made sure to remove all references to the actual slur and replace it with terms like intersex, and hopefully by pronouncing it “Hermaphrodeetus” – closer to the Greek – it will de-fang the word a little bit.
But the reality is Hermaphroditus is the name of the mythological character we’re talking about today, so it’s difficult to get around that.
It’s not the same word as the slur, but I recognize hearing the name might be triggering. So while it’s the reality of the material we’re working with, I do recognize that it’s a little unfortunate. So if you yourself are intersex, and this subject matter makes you feel uncomfortable, I understand if you want to step aside for this one.
But if it feels right, I do encourage you to push through that discomfort if you can, because I’ve dug up some stuff about intersex history here that you may not have heard before, and you might find pretty interesting.
I myself am not intersex, as far as I know, so I’m very much approaching this topic as an outsider, which is why I hired an intersex sensitivity reader to review this script before finalizing it.
Special thanks to Hans Lindahl, who was easy to work with and provided some great insights. When I was reviewing Hans’s notes, they revealed some of the societal prejudices against intersex people I’d picked up along the way without realizing. I suppose it shows we all have our blind spots, and even when we do our best we sometimes fall short, so I’m very grateful for Hans’s notes, and for how straightforward the entire experience was.
Here’s a link to Hans’s website, where you can see more of Hans’s work, including articles, comics, and other advocacy work.
I was able to pay Hans a fair rate because of the support I receive from all of you on Patreon. If you’re interested in supporting this channel, you’ll find a link to my Patreon in the description. I don’t want to monetize this channel with ads because they’re just a miserable experience, I hate them so much, and I know you do too, so Patreon is the only way I can use this channel to survive and support myself in this late capitalist hellscape. If you’re able, it starts at just a buck a month, and it really does make a difference.
With all that out of the way, let’s get started.
The Lives of Hermaphroditus
With the figures of the more central pantheon of classical mythology, there are so many stories written by so many writers, with so many different ways they contradict each other, that it’s much more difficult to establish any sort of canon.
To put this in modern terms, think about how many different people have written stories about Spiderman. It’s hard to make sense of it all.
WELL, ACKSHUWALLY, THE SPIDERMAN CANON HAS BEEN VERY WELL ORGANIZED, WITH THE EARTH-616 SPIDERMAN HAVING A CONSISTENT NARRATIVE SINCE THE 1960S, AND EACH OTHER ITERATION OF SPIDERMAN HAVING ITS OWN CANONICAL HISTORY
Yes that’s true, but it’s because Spiderman is the intellectual property of a single group that’s in control of the stories told about that character. Nobody owned Jupiter. Nobody owned Venus. There was no Classical Mythology LLC. that said what people could and couldn’t do with these characters.
That’s why Aphrodite was born from the castrated nads of Zeus’ father in one source, and was just the daughter of Zeus and Dione in another.
That’s why Prometheus’s mother is Clymene in one source, and Themis in another.
That’s why Zeus was born in Lyctus, Arcadia, Dicte, or Lydia, depending on who you ask.
These sort of contradictions pop up a lot, and that’s why scholars are generally not too concerned with canon when it comes to classical mythology.
Imagine if that was the case with Spiderman too, and all the other corporately owned characters that shape our mythologies today.
Imagine if there were no intellectual property laws, no monopolies on the stories we told that influence us as a culture, so anybody could tell whatever stories they wanted without fear of legal action.
Imagine Disney, Viacom, and the other massive media conglomerates didn’t exist, people didn’t have to waste their lives chasing money, and we were free to create in a way that actually benefited society at large, instead of a few rich guys.
Imagine we tore off the shackles of capitalism and created a world designed to maximize human happiness in a sustainable way.
Imagine–
*ahem*
It’s going to get a lot more complicated when we start getting into the stories of other gods with trans elements to their mythology, like Aphrodite or Cybele (spoiler alert). This is because for most mythological figures, there’s quite a bit of contradiction in their various stories. When it comes to Hermaphroditus, there’s a lot less material to work with, but the contradictions are still there.
RELATED: Introduction to Kybele and the Gallae
There are really only a handful of writers who mention Hermaphroditus in a way significant enough to make note of – the Greek writers Alciphron, Diodorus Siculus, and Theophrastus, and the Roman writers Ovid and Ausonius. We also know a Greek poet named Posiddipus wrote a comedy called Hermaphroditus, but only a couple lines of that survive, and they don’t tell us much. There were almost certainly more sources on Hermaphroditus, but today, this is what we have to work with.
But before we get to the stories about Hermaphroditus, let’s talk about the framework we’re going to use to understand them.
What Is Euhemerism? Reading Myths as History
What’s the point of mythology?
Why did the ancients tell these stories in the first place?
When it comes to interpreting myth, there are so many different schools of thought, and I’m not going to go into every single one of them because then this little presentation would be several hours long and we would really lose the plot. But there’s one I think is particularly interesting for our purposes today, called euhemerism.
Euhemerists proceed on the assumption that mythology is essentially just history in disguise, and that stories told about gods, demigods, and other supernatural figures were originally just stories told about humans that became more exaggerated over the centuries of having been told.
It’s sort of like that game of broken telephone you played in school, where your teacher started off by whispering “learning is fun” in one student’s ear, who whispered it in another, and another, etc and by the time the teacher asked the last student in line to repeat it they said “[DEADNAME REDACTED] is a queer” and you ran out of the class crying and hid in the bathroom stall for the rest of the day and ate your lunch there and didn’t make eye contact with anyone for the rest of the semester?
No? Just me?
This might seem a little silly on the surface – for example, how could the story of Ixion f*cking a cloud who then gave birth to the race of centaurs possibly reflect something that really happened? But taking this approach has actually led to some pretty important discoveries.
One of the best examples of this is with the Trojan War. For the longest time, historians figured the destruction of Troy by the Greeks was just a myth, but the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann believed it was based on actual events. Using the details he found in the Iliad and other ancient writings, he tracked down the actual location of the city of Troy in the late 19th century, and excavated it. Through carbon dating, we figured out that it was destroyed around the time the myths said it was, and we do know there were Greeks present when it all went down because we’ve found some Greek weapons there, though it’s unlikely they were solely responsible for its destruction.
Does that mean everything written in the Iliad is true? Of course not. The vast majority of it is exaggerated, made up entirely, or can’t be confirmed one way or another.
From what we can tell, there’s about a five hundred year gap between the destruction of Troy and Homer writing the Iliad. That’s a long game of broken telephone, so it’s understandable that a lot of distortions would show up.
But there’s a kernel of truth there, and that’s where Euhemerists get excited.
So what happens if we take a Euhemerist approach to the stories of Hermaphroditus?
Let’s get to know the stories first.
Ovid’s Myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis
Publius Ovidius Naso is his full name, but in English we call him Ovid to keep it simple.
Born in the year 43 BCE just outside of Rome in a town called Sulmo, Ovid became one of the most celebrated poets of his age along with his contemporaries Horace and Virgil, who lived and wrote during the reign of the emperor Augustus.
If you watched the video on the Scythians, we talked about someone named Ovid in that one as well. It’s the same guy. This isn’t the last time he’s going to help us out in this video series.
Quite a few of his poems survive, but the most famous one is the Metamorphoses, which also happens to be my favourite Latin poem.
It’s a 15 book experimental epic cataloging some of the stories of transformation in Roman mythology. It’s there that we find the most complete story of Hermaphroditus we have today.
According to Ovid, Hermaphroditus was the son of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite, hence his name. Other than the whole immortal deity thing, his birth was unremarkable, and there were no intersex traits at this point. He was raised near Mt. Ida on the west coast of Asia Minor just south of Troy, by naiads, who were sort of lesser deities like nymphs, but associated with water. He stayed there until he was 15, at which point he wandered south, ending up in Lycia and Caria, on the southern coast of Asia Minor. Once there, he came upon a particularly beautiful spring, and decided to rest and bathe himself there.
A nymph named Salmacis lived there. She should have been doing her womanly duties of hunting and racing along with Artemis and the rest of the nymphs. But instead, she’d just relax near the water and check herself out in its reflection and enjoy how beautiful she was.
She fell immediately in love with Hermaphroditus as soon as she saw him.
She threw herself at him, begging for his affection, but he rejected her, so she pretended to leave.
But instead of actually taking off she just hid behind a tree and stared at him like a creepy weirdo. Once he entered the water to bathe himself, she dove after him and embraced him.
While he struggled to free himself, she prayed to the gods that nothing would ever cause them to be apart from each other.
The gods granted her wish, uniting the two into a single body, which Ovid describes as “no longer man and woman, but neither, and yet both.”
After that, the newly fused Hermaphroditus declared that the spring would curse anybody who came upon it with the same fate, and I mean if you’re thinking of transitioning but you haven’t started yet, we know where the spring is, go jump in and see what happens, it’s right there on the map.
If we approach this story through the lens of literary analysis, there are a lot of roads we can head down. Ovid’s story tells us that when Hermaphroditus gave up his sexual power over Salmacis by not wanting to have sex with her, he lost his masculinity altogether.
On the other hand, Salmacis being assertive and pursuing Hermaphroditus caused her to lose her femininity as well, since women were supposed to be demure and submissive.
Viewed in this light, it’s a pretty strong piece in support of “traditional Roman values,” which were as made up during Ovid’s time as “traditional Christian values” are today. Part of Augustus’ jam was to hearken back to a time before degeneracy took control of society though (sound familiar?), so he would have loved it.
But that’s not why we’re here.
Diodorus Siculus on Hermaphroditus
The second longest story of Hermaphroditus we have comes from Diodorus Siculus – “longest” being definitely a relative term.
A Greek living in Roman-ruled Sicily during the 1st century BCE, Diodorus Siculus wrote the Bibliotheca Historica. This is a colossal work that covered what we might consider history in the modern sense, as well as mythological stories.
To put him in perspective, he died in the year 30 BCE, when Ovid would have been in his early teens.
Here is Diodorus Siculus’ entire passage about Hermaphroditus:
A birth like that of Priapus is ascribed by some writers of myths to Hermaphroditus, as he has been called, who was born of Hermes and Aphrodite and received a name which is a combination of those of both his parents. Some say that this Hermaphroditus is a god and appears at certain times among men, and that he is born with a physical body which is a combination of that of a man and that of a woman, in that he has a body which is beautiful and delicate like that of a woman, but has the masculine quality and vigour of a man. But there are some who declare that such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities, and coming rarely into the world as they do have the quality of presaging the future, sometimes for evil and sometimes for good. But let this be enough for us on such matters.
– Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book 4, chapter 6, section 5
Not a long passage, yeah? By comparison, Ovid’s story is about five printed pages long. But there’s still a lot we can pull out of it.
If you watched my video on the Scythians, you might notice a connection between the way Diodorus Siculus describes “creatures of two sexes” being able to tell the future and the role of the Enarees, a group of what we might consider today to be transgender women in Scythian society, as being able to divine the future.
And remember that while transgender women and intersex people are *not* the same thing, the Greeks and Romans wouldn’t have understood the distinction.
Interestingly, the Scythians believed this ability was given to the Enarees by Aphrodite as well, the mother of Hermaphroditus. The theme of people with a gender presentation or anatomy that didn’t fit the traditional binary being sort of magical creatures who had a deeper connection to the spiritual world comes up quite a bit.
This isn’t the last time we’ll encounter it in this series.
It’s also interesting to note that he mentions that “there are some who declare such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities” – which is, unfortunately, how the ancients seemed to have viewed them – we’ll get more into that in a moment – but it’s also how many medical professionals view intersex people even to this day. That’s beginning to shift, but of course, change never comes fast enough for the people most affected by the status quo.
Was Hermaphroditus Based on Real Intersex People?
Alright, let’s analyze Ovid’s and Diodorus Siculus’ stories from a euhemerist perspective.
Diodorus Siculus mentions that intersex bodies have a tendency of “coming rarely into the world”, and let’s unpack that one.
According to InterACT, a modern organization that advocates for intersex people, about 1.7% of the population is born intersex. As well, about 0.05% of babies (one in two thousand) has some sort of genital variation.
This is according to the Quigley Scale, which measures the spectrum of genital configurations, an image of which I am definitely not going to show because then this video would certainly be taken down. But you can google it to see what I’m talking about. These numbers are based on 90s data, however, and some intersex advocates today consider this to be a low estimate. As far as I know it’s the best estimate we have. Let me know in the comments if you know of a better data source.
There is some evidence that intersex people are more common in the modern world as a result of endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment that didn’t exist in the ancient world, but I’m no scientologist or anything so if somebody who’s actually trained in endocrinology wants to read the study I’ve linked in the description and tell me why it’s bunk I’m all ears, I will not die on this hill.
But even if endocrine disrupting chemicals are one of the factors that influence the occurrence of genital variation, they’re not the only one – that seems to be a consensus among legitimate researchers. And though it doesn’t seem like we have specific numbers on just how many genital variations can be linked with endocrine disruptors, even if 90% of them are, that still leaves 0.005%, about one in twenty thousand, as being related to another influencing factor.
That might not sound like a lot, until you read John D. Durand’s paper Historical Estimates Of World Population, and realize that the Roman Empire during the time of Augustus had a population of about 55 million, and it’s thought the Greek diaspora during its heyday was around 10 million. On top of that, the classical period of Mediterranean history spans for more than a thousand years, so there were bound to be at least a few hundred dozen intersex babies with genital variations showing up throughout that period.
The point is, there’s really no reason to believe that intersex people haven’t been around for a long time, regardless of how many endocrine disruptors are kicking around.
So okay, if we look at Diodorus Siculus’ story from a euhemerist approach, it’s pretty easy to see how this description of Hermaphroditus could be talking about people who were born with unique genitals. Maybe somebody had a baby who was intersex, and word of it got around until it eventually got to someone who was a particularly good storyteller, and Hermaphroditus became the mythological explanation.
Is this The Truth?
Is this What Really Happened?
It’s impossible to know without a time machine, but it’s also not entirely improbable, and that’s the nature of this type of mythological analysis, definitive answers are just not knowable.
But what about Ovid’s story?
He said Hermaphroditus became intersex around age 15. How could you possibly take a euhemerist approach to that?
How could it be that a person changes their sex without modern medical techniques?
Divine intervention aside, this is actually similar to how a medical condition called partial androgen insensitivity syndrome plays out.
I’m going to call it PAIS going forward because it’s way too long a phrase to say over and over again, and pee aeyy aye ess is just obnoxious.
PAIS is very much a wildcard condition – it can occur in babies regardless of their sex assigned at birth, and can affect development in a number of different ways. But as I already said, I’m not an endocrinologist, and this isn’t a video about all the different possible ways PAIS can present itself, so we’re going to focus on one possible presentation that’s relevant to the Hermaphroditus myth. If you want to learn more about PAIS, I’m sure there are better resources out there from people who are actually qualified to speak on it, instead of some random history nerd on YouTube.
When PAIS occurs in babies who are assigned male at birth, they have a reduced ability to respond to the testosterone their body produces. Now, all human bodies produce testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, so when a child with PAIS hits puberty, and their body can’t use the testosterone, the estrogen they have can take control.
Sometimes these babies have a genital variation, but not always. In many cases, they appear to be average cis boys who develop normally, until puberty hits. At that point, they may begin growing breasts, developing curves and softer skin, and the other signs of estrogen-driven puberty we’ve come to understand.
With the story of Hermaphroditus Ovid tells us, his transformation happened at age 15 – during the age of puberty for many cis boys. So could Ovid’s story of Hermaphroditus have been a way to explain PAIS?
For this to be possible, we need to consider whether PAIS was a condition during the Roman era. And obviously there are no medical records for cases of PAIS that far back, because endocrinology was not a thing back then. But there are some literary references that make us raise an eyebrow.
A.M. Greaves talks about this in his paper, Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome In The Roman World. In it, he mentions there were pretty clear protocols for dealing with a baby with genital variation. The Roman historian Titus Livius, for example, or just Livy in English, who lived around the same time Ovid did, mentions that they were viewed as a sign the gods were angry at humanity, and they would kill the child by either drowning or exposure – which basically meant leaving them alone in the forest, and hey, if the gods want that child to live they’ll make sure it does, it’s out of our hands. After all, Romulus and Remus were exposed and they went on to found Rome and do great things if anything I’m leaving my baby to a wonderful fate how dare you call me a baby killer I’m not a baby killer I would never–
However, the 4th and 5th century Roman writer, Julius Obsequens, mentions several other cases of children, from ages eight to sixteen, who were assigned male at birth, but ended up turning into women.
Greaves notes that it’s strange that these children would have lived to such an age when the standard practice was to kill intersex babies. But this would make sense if they were cases of PAIS.
PAIS isn’t the only possible explanation – but it’s one of the more plausible ones.
So if we take a euhemerist perspective when looking at these two myths of Hermaphroditus, and we pair them with some historical references and modern data, we can see that Ovid’s tale can potentially be interpreted as partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, and Diodorus Siculus’ tale genital variations.
Obviously nobody was testing hormone levels or any other more detailed medical data back then, but to me this seems like pretty strong evidence that intersex people have always existed.
Hermaphroditus in Ancient Art: Fertility Symbols
But okay, so it’s possible the myth of Hermaphroditus was a way to explain different types of intersex people.
But whether or not that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily have an influence on how Hermaphroditus was depicted in art. So even if it was a euhemerist story, the average Greek or Roman didn’t necessarily think that way. They looked at Hermaphroditus the same way they looked at other gods, like Cupid or Mercury or Herakles or Pan or Priapus or wow that’s a lot of dicks why are there so many dicks?
The surviving accounts we have of Hermaphroditus don’t describe their post-transformation appearance much in a literal sense. Ovid’s description is barely five lines of poetry, saying:
Hermaphroditus saw that the water had made him half a man, with limbs all softness. He held out his arms, lifted a voice whose tone was almost treble, pleading ‘O father and mother, grant me this! May every one hereafter, who comes diving into this pool, emerge half man, made weaker by the touch of this evil water!’
– Ovid – Metamorphoses, Book 4, page 93, translated by Rolfe Humphries
Meanwhile, Diodorus Siculus says Hermaphroditus had a:
body which is beautiful and delicate like that of a woman, but has the masculine quality and vigour of a man.
– Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book 4, chapter 6, section 5
So uhh, we know their arms were soft?
And we know they had a higher pitched voice?
When you think of the different ways one might combine the anatomical characteristics typical of cis men and women, there are plenty of possibilities.
Beard or no beard?
Boobs or no boobs?
Hairy chest or smooth?
Phallus, vulva, or a combination of the two?
Curvy or boxy figure?
The list goes on.
However, when the ancients depicted Hermaphroditus in art, they did so in almost always the same manner – a feminine, curvaceous body, with breasts, child bearing hips, a smooth face, and a phallus.
Take, for example, this statue of Hermaphroditus believed to have been from the 3rd century BCE in Pergamum, on the modern midwest coast of Turkey.
Or this fresco found in a house in Pompeii, thought to have been painted somewhere in the early 1st century CE. I know it’s damaged, but if you look closely you can see, or at least you would be able to if I didn’t have to put that silly eggplant emoji over the naughty bits to avoid YouTube censorship.
There are a bunch of others as well, and they all portray Hermaphroditus the same way.
Why?
Of course it’s possible that there were other descriptions of Hermaphroditus in other sources that go into their anatomy more specifically. But that answer relies on appealing to an unknown hypothetical document that we have no evidence for, which is not a very interesting approach.
Besides, there’s more to it than that.
When you begin to explore ancient art, it’s only a matter of time before you hear the phrase “fertility symbol”. And at first it seems like a lazy, half-assed way for scholars to be able to sound like they know what they’re talking about when it comes to iconography.
ARTEMIS WITH A THOUSAND BREASTS? THAT’S A FERTILITY SYMBOL
A LADY PLANTING PHALLUSES IN HER GARDEN? THAT’S A FERTILITY SYMBOL
A PAINTING OF THE GOD PRIAPUS WEIGHING HIS DONG AGAINST A BASKET OF FRUIT? IT’S DEFINITELY A FERTILITY SYMBOL
Why are there so many fertility symbols?
You might think of the word fertility in terms of being able to have kids or not, and that’s part of it, but to the ancients, the idea of fertility was just as important in terms of the land itself. Because look, if a single year of a bad crop harvest meant your entire village might starve to death, you’re going to do everything you can to ensure you grow enough food.
A minute ago I asked why there were so many dicks. And the answer is that, well, they’re a fertility symbol.
If you live in a city, like I do, it’s easy to forget where your food comes from originally. That’s even truer in the 21st century, where most of us barely give a thought to what goes into farming and food production. But even today, with modern farming science and equipment, a bad crop can spell disaster for a family who makes their living off the land.
So if you’re a farmer from 2500 years ago, and you don’t know anything other than what a farmer from 2500 years ago would know, how are you going to make sure your crops grow well? Yeah you’re going to plant the seeds, you’re going to water them, pull out weeds, all that stuff, but at a certain point you’ve done all you can from a material perspective.
But at the same time, you’re not going to just sit around and wait for your crops to grow. The stakes are too high for you to be idle here.
Instead, you’re going to beg nature to do its thing and take care of you.
And how are you going to do that?
Well, you’ll think of everything you can in relation to fertility, plenty, and abundance, and pack it all into the art you create in your spare time.
Dicks? Yeah, you make babies with those, that’s a fertility symbol! Boobs? Yeah, babies suck on them for food, that’s a fertility symbol! Lots of fruits and vegetables? Yeah that’s the whole point of farming in the first place we want lots of them! Babies? Yeah! All that stuff indicates fertility, plenty, and abundance.
This might seem difficult to wrap your head around at first, but think of it this way. Have you ever been to a boomer white lady’s Karen’s house and seen a bunch of live laugh love type stuff all around? They’ve got words like abundance, family, love, gather, cozy, etc all over the place? These themselves are, in a way, fertility symbols as well.
The ancients were just manifesting their best life, that’s all.
Katherine T. Von Stackelberg talks about this in her paper Garden Hybrids: [REDACTED] Images In The Roman House, where she points out that every time an image of Hermaphroditus has been discovered in a domestic setting and its location reliably documented before it’s moved, it’s been within arm’s reach of a garden. She suggests this may be related to the fact that gardens were one of the few spaces in a Roman house where the sexes had equal authority, but they could also be used as fertility symbols to help encourage a garden’s growth.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved urban farming…
Apotropaic Symbols: Aubergine Emojis in Ancient Art
So Hermaphroditus was a fertility symbol, yeah?
Well, there’s a little more to it than that.
Beyond fertility symbols, the next most common thing you’ll come across when analyzing ancient Mediterranean art is something called “apotropaic” symbols.
Apotropaic symbols are designed to ward off evil or harm, especially the evil eye, and they show up in a number of different cultures.
Italians call it malocchio (the evil eye), Turks call it Nazar, Arabs and Muslins call it ayn, but it’s a similar idea.
And such symbols show up quite a bit even in the modern world.
If you’ve ever been in a Sicilian’s car and seen a red horn dangling from their rear view mirror, that’s an apotropaic symbol to ward off the malocchio.
There are a number of different apotropaic symbols you’ll find in the ancient world, including wands, eyes, certain types of faces, and dicks.
In fact, throughout Athens, you can find statues called herms, which are essentially a block of stone with a head at the top, and an aubergine emoji about where it would be if the block of stone were a human body.
You might see that name and think it’s related to Hermaphroditus at first, but it’s not really.
It was either after the Attic Greek word ermata, which means “block of stone”, or because the most common head found at the top of such statues was that of the god Hermes.
However, they often had other heads, including Herakles, Anubis, Athena, Aphrodite, and even the politician Alcibiades.
One would rub a herm’s phallus as they walked by, which was thought to ward off evil.
These herms served as apotropaic symbols, being placed at important crossroads, outside of temples and houses, and other important places.
Earlier, I showed you a painting of the god Priapus, who was known for his colossal dong. That painting was discovered in Pompeii, and it was located right at the entrance of what modern scholars have called the House of the Vettii, after the Vettius family who we know owned it. And uhhh yeah there’s a lot going on here and it’s getting pretty hard to properly present this stuff without getting banned by YouTube so bear with me here.
First of all, the fact that such a painting was right at their front door might suggest to modern eyes that the Vettii were into some kinky stuff, but to the ancients it was very much an apotropaic symbol. Having such, mm, prodigious protection at the threshold of one’s home basically ensured that no evil would ever enter.
But taking a look at this painting, it’s clear that this was a fertility symbol too. After all, Priapus isn’t just standing there with his dong out, he’s using Libra scales to weigh it against a sack of money, while standing beside a basket of fruit. So it’s not one or the other, but both.
So, dicks were considered apotropaic, but vaginas were too, especially during menstruation, which brings me to the anasyrma gesture.
Anasyrma is an Attic Greek word that literally means “up skirt”, and it shows up quite a bit in ancient art. A statue in anasyrma pose is lifting up their dress to expose their naughty bits. It was used for laughs, in certain religious rituals, and of course, as an apotropaic symbol.
So, let’s talk about the apotropaic power of the menstruating vagina, which is a phrase I never thought I would say and I’m willing to bet you never thought you would hear. So, you’re welcome.
The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, who died in the destruction of Pompeii during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, wrote in his Natural History that menstruating women who did the anasyrma could ward off nasty weather and kill pests in wheat fields.
Seems valuable, right?
But on the other hand, the sheer number of phalluss that show up in ancient art compared to the relatively few vaginas suggests that the ancients considered them more powerful as both apotropaic symbols, and as fertility symbols.
Breasts, on the other hand, were very much fertility symbols, but not apotropaic.
So if you wanted your fertility symbol to be as fertile as you could, while also bringing along some apotropaic energy for good measure, you’d have a figure with breasts and an aubergine emoji – which is exactly how the ancients represented Hermaphroditus.
Now, I mentioned the anasyrma pose was sometimes played for a laugh, and that seems to be the case with Hermaphroditus as well.
In the wall painting from Pompeii I showed a moment ago, it shows Pan trying to get fresh with Hermaphroditus, until she raises her dress and he realizes what’s underneath.
There are a few anasyrma sculptures as well of Hermaphroditus, in a sort of surprised fashion, as though she herself wasn’t expecting what she found down there.
This makes no sense, of course.
Certain spicy drawings aside, women don’t just grow aubergine emojis all of a sudden.
But that’s what we’ve got, and hey, maybe there’s a bit of euhemerist analysis to be done there as well.
So unfortunately, the trope of women with aubergine emojis trying to trick straight men into being gay, you know, the one that we’ve pretty much all agreed is really f**king offensive, is a lot older than we think.
Hermaphroditus and Ancient Marriage
We also know that Hermaphroditus had an aspect of her worship that was related to marriage. That might come from her parents – both Hermes and Aphrodite were associated with marriage as well. But it might also be a result of her two-sexed nature, as the ancients called it. After all, marriage in ancient Greece was a union between a man and a woman, and what better way to symbolize that than a deity who was a literal union between a man and a woman?
But there’s an inscription we’ve discovered at the actual site of the spring of Salmacis. So we call it the Salmacis Inscription, very clever historians. If you recall, Salmacis is the name of the nymph, but it’s also the name of the spring where Ovid says the merging took place.
Here’s what it says:
Halicarnassus settled the delightful hill beside the stream of Salmacis, sung of as dear to the immortals, and her domain includes the desirable home of the nymph, she who once received our child in her kindly arms and reared Hermaphroditus the all-excellent, he who invented marriage and was the first to bind together married couples by his law, and she herself beneath the holy waters in the cave that she pours forth makes gentle the savage minds of men.
– The Salmacis Inscription
So hold on, Hermaphroditus actually invented marriage? This is a little different than how Ovid tells it.
What’s interesting too is that this inscription doesn’t mention any transformation at all. In fact, the only thing it tells us about the spring is that it “makes gentle the savage minds of men,” which is a far cry from turning them into women, unless you’re a weirdo alpha male type dude who thinks you’re going to turn into a beta male if you take a breath within six feet of a piece of tofu. This could imply that Hermaphroditus’ two-sexed nature was a later addition to the myth.
The Greek writer Alciphron mentions Hermaphroditus in the context of marriage as well, briefly. About Alciphron himself, we know very little. He wrote in a very refined form of Attic Greek, the dialect spoken in ancient Athens, so it’s probably safe to assume he was from there, or at least educated there. And because of some of the references in his writing, we know he wrote some time after the reign of Alexander, so after the 320’s BCE. He might have been a contemporary of the Roman satirist Lucian, who lived in the second century CE, since there are some similarities in their work that suggests they may have influenced each other. But that’s all we’ve got.
Alciphron’s work survives in a series of fictitious letters between various people. Letter 37 starts thusly, written from the perspective of a widow going to honour her deceased husband:
Having woven a garland of flowers, I was going to the temple of Hermaphroditus, intending to offer it in honour of him of Alopece.
– Alciphron – Letter 37
“Him of Alopece” is referring to her husband, who was deceased. Alopece is the part of town he was from – sort of like an ancient neighbourhood, the Athenians called them demes.
So she’s going to the temple of Hermaphroditus to honour her dead husband.
That tells us first of all that there was a temple of Hermaphroditus in Athens, and that there was some sort of link with married couples.
There isn’t a lot of information that survives about Hermaphroditus’ role in Greek married life, but it does seem like her role, whatever it was, was noteworthy enough to build a temple for her. It’s unlikely that temple was as elaborate as, say, the Parthenon, but then again that’s true of most ancient temples. We think of the Parthenon because it’s the most impressive, but there were a number of other temples throughout Athens dedicated to various other gods as well, of varying degrees of elaborateness.
Now today, if you’re religious, it’s likely there’s only one religious site you visit with any degree of regularity.
You have your church, mosque, synagogue, mandir, temple, or whatever, and that’s the place you go, other than maybe for weddings or funerals, or if you’re on vacation somewhere.
But to the Athenians, religious life was a bit more complicated. There were a number of different gods, and one would work to curry favour with all of them. Athens itself, in fact, would hold a number of different festivals each year dedicated to honouring all the various important figures to make sure the city remained prosperous.
Christianity, on the other hand, also has a bunch of important events on the calendar.
Christmas, Easter, Lent, Epiphany, Pentecost, Candlemas, etc.
There are feast days for saints as well, like Saint Pelagius of Antioch (Pelagia), but they’re still mainly honouring Christ.
On the other hand, however, there were a number of different temples dedicated to different gods.
One would make sacrifices to each of them for different reasons.
So when this woman goes to the temple of Hermaphroditus to honour her dead husband, she would likely have attended other temples for other reasons as well.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge this is the only reference we have to the Temple of Hermaphroditus.
We don’t know what it looked like, where it was in Athens, when it was built, or any other aspects of worship that may have happened in there.
But there were other temples to gods outside the twelve main Olympians in Athens as well.
That includes the Temple of Asklepios and the Anakeion temple dedicated to Castor and Pollux, so it’s not unrealistic to imagine that Hermaphroditus had their own temple as well.
What Hermaphroditus Says about Life as an Ancient Intersex Person
When it comes to intersex people in the classical Mediterranean, on one hand you have Hermaphroditus, worshipped as a god. Temples were built to them, mythological stories were written about them. They presided over marriages, a very important part of Greek and Roman society. They were the subject of high art of the period. They adorned the walls of those wealthy enough to afford wall paintings. They were a symbol of fertility, of protection. They could tell the future.
On the other hand, intersex children who may have displayed physical traits similar to Hermaphroditus were killed because they were viewed as a sign the gods were angry at humanity, or at the child’s parents.
These are wildly varying views, and it’s difficult to reconcile them.
Intersex people have always been around, but because they’re considerably less common than the two binary sexes, it shouldn’t be a surprise that most people wouldn’t have encountered one, at least knowingly. So when an intersex birth did occur, they might be – a little confused might be an understatement. And, in their attempt to explain the situation, the ancients created elaborate and fascinating mythologies. They looked to intersex people as signs of plenty, signs of protection, signs of fertility, and signs the gods were angry.
In the Salmacis Inscription, the writer talks about how Hermaphroditus was raised by Salmacis the nymph, and not their mother Aphrodite.
Allen J. Romano addresses this in his work “The Invention Of Marriage: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis at Halicarnassus and in Ovid”.
In it, he compares it with the god Hephaestus, who was similarly abandoned by his parents Zeus and Hera, left to be raised by nymphs and only invited back into the fold begrudgingly when they discovered his skill at metallurgy was useful. Similarly, he suggests Hermaphroditus may have been left to die of exposure as a baby, like the common ancient practice with intersex babies, raised by a nymph, and welcomed back by their mother when she discovered they had invented this useful thing called marriage.
Regardless, a lot of this paints a fairly dark history for intersex people. And the implications this has for transgender people isn’t terribly optimistic either. But it does paint a history nonetheless.
People today shout about environmental factors being the cause of intersex, and there may or may not be some truth to that – don’t look to me for medical arguments, I’m a transgender history researcher, not an endocrinologist, I’m not getting into the controversy there. But whether or not that’s true, it’s clear from reading the history that intersex people existed at least as far back as classical Greece, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any triclosan or bisphenol-A in the water supply back then.
So if you’re intersex, I hope you take heart in the idea that your existence is nothing new.
People like you have existed, at least in the Mediterranean, for more than two millennia.
Just like transgender people, intersex people have always existed.
And so long as humanity continues to endure, so too shall we both.
Ancient Sources:
►Diodorus Siculus. “Biblioteca Historica”. Translated by C.H. Oldfather. London: W. Heitemann, 1935.
►“The Salmacis Inscription. In Praise Of Halikarnassos”. Translated by H. Lloyd-Jones. 1999.
►Ovid. “Metamorphoses”. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1964.
►Plato. “The Symposium”. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford University Press, 1892.
►Theophrastus. “The Characters”. Translated by J. M. Edmonds. Loeb Classical Library. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1929.
Modern Sources
►Durand, John D. “Historical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation.” Population and Development Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 1977, pp. 253–96. JSTOR.
►Graumann, Lutz Alexander. “Monstrous Births and Retrospective Diagnosis: The Case of Hermaphrodites in Antiquity.” Disabilities in Roman Antiquity, BRILL, 2013.
►Greaves, Alan M. “Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (Reifenstein’s Syndrome) in the Roman World.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, 2012, pp. 888–92.
►InterACT. “Frequently Asked Questions”. InteractAdvocates.org, 2021.
►NORD: National Organization for Rare Diseases. “Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome”. Rarediseases.org, 2019.
►Quigley, C A et al. “Androgen receptor defects: historical, clinical, and molecular perspectives.” Endocrine reviews vol. 16,3 (1995): 271-321.
►Rich, Alisa L et al. “The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals.” Environmental health insights vol. 10 163-71. 8 Sep. 2016.
►Romano, Allen J. “The Invention of Marriage: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis at Halicarnassus and in Ovid.” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 2, 2009, pp. 543–61.
►Von Stackelberg, Katherine T. “Garden Hybrids: Hermaphrodite Images in the Roman House.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 395–426.
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