{"id":102,"date":"2023-02-02T15:15:59","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T15:15:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sbedwards.co\/staging\/9372\/?p=102"},"modified":"2025-12-04T22:22:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T22:22:20","slug":"myths-of-hermaphroditus-transgender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sbedwards.co\/staging\/9372\/myths-of-hermaphroditus-transgender\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myths Of Hermaphroditus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Myths Of Hermaphroditus | Ancient Transgender Mythology\" width=\"1290\" height=\"726\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/H6Eotz-MbJA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-419f2a06790d5d43cfd6b4e0932341ea\">There\u2019s a spring, they say, somewhere in Turkey, afflicted with an ancient curse, though you\u2019d 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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-32dd6b50c416de9413af6a6a02a08e27\">But surely, that\u2019s just a legend\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<nav class=\"wp-block-stackable-table-of-contents stk-block-table-of-contents stk-block stk-a7ec141\" data-block-id=\"a7ec141\"><p class=\"stk-table-of-contents__title\">Table of Contents<\/p><ul class=\"stk-table-of-contents__table\"><li><a href=\"#introduction-to-hermaphroditus\">Introduction to Hermaphroditus<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-1-the-lives-of-hermaphroditus\">Chapter I: The Lives Of Hermaphroditus<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-2-understanding-euhemerism\">Chapter II: Understanding Euhemerism<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-3-ovids-hermaphroditus\">Chapter III: Ovid\u2019s Hermaphroditus<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-4-diodorus-siculus-hermaphroditus\">Chapter IV: Diodorus Siculus\u2019 Hermaphroditus<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-5-a-euhemerist-approach-to-hermaphroditus\">Chapter V: A Euhemerist Approach To Hermaphroditus<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-6-fertility-symbols\">Chapter VI: Fertility Symbols<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-7-apotropaic-symbols\">Chapter VII: Apotropaic Symbols<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-8-hermaphroditus-and-ancient-marriage\">Chapter VIII: Hermaphroditus and Ancient Marriage<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#chapter-9-life-as-an-ancient-intersex-person\">Chapter IX: Life as an Ancient Intersex Person<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#ancient-sources\">Ancient Sources:<\/a><\/li><li><a href=\"#modern-sources\">Modern Sources<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"introduction-to-hermaphroditus\">Introduction to Hermaphroditus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-b4a1969db8bd5be1c006a7f9e0c79a22\">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\u2019re not the same thing by definition, and in fact you might end up insulting someone by confusing them for the wrong identity. If you\u2019re a trans woman who\u2019s ever gone to a drag show and had some drunk straight girl come up to you and tell you YOU\u2019R SUCH ABEAUFUJTIL DRJAG WQUEN WILL HYO9UJ BE MJU GAHY BESTJ FERINED????? you know exactly what I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-eeb4733311b0506923c86372961cb20b\">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\u2019s a difference in anatomical development, and most people don\u2019t consider it a gender identity. But much like the previously mentioned labels, it\u2019s become a more distinct identity, even a movement, largely in response to the persecution the community faces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-1be9801aaac059393821b2a22476cb9d\">These identities, however, are a product of modern society, because gender is a social construct. The peoples of the ancient Mediterranean wouldn\u2019t have understood these distinctions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-c16592002dfaa72b7a0baf54d1638f12\">Which brings us to Hermaphroditus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5a7434d71b9d368e799968aa51bb3ef6\">If this is your first time joining us in this series, welcome. I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-46bfe731d4578fb4c845b44c0e9f3c7b\">Now, a modern reader might consider Hermaphroditus to be not transgender at all, but intersex.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-142a62013672fa2966123f6cc2d51801\">YOU SAID THIS IS A SERIES ABOUT TRANSGENDER HISTORY NOT INTERSEX HISTORY YOU\u2019RE NOT EVEN A PAGE INTO WRITING THIS SCRIPT AND YOU\u2019RE ALREADY CONTRADICTING YOURSELF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-09547e5229b8f146aa263fa5c44b4745\">Look, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9f4b1d42d3adade45e4975d2fc56da8e\">So far in this series, we\u2019ve talked about the <a href=\"\/category\/we-have-always-existed\/enarees\/\">Enarees, the trans feminine priestesses of the Scythians<\/a>, and about <a href=\"\/transgender-roman-emperor-elagabalus\/\">Elagabalus, the Roman Emperor who may have been transgender<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-cfcb11bd53d9c2988063c7cc91c6eba6\"><strong>RELATED: <a href=\"\/the-enarei-scythian-transgender-priestesses-remastered\/\">The Enarees REMASTERED<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9fb086526be2ef26f8726f2dc03d31fb\"><strong>RELATED: <a href=\"\/exploring-the-remains-of-an-enaree-priestess\/\">Exploring the Grave of an Enaree Priestess<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-12910b3f03a870b6f1ed64cbb4e74056\">Both of those are examples of history &#8211; a historical culture on one hand, and a <a href=\"\/category\/we-have-always-existed\/transgender-historical-individuals\/\">historical transgender individual<\/a> on the other. But this time, it\u2019s different. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4b90cdf6887cb5fceaf205b78c58f2c1\">Hermaphroditus is a myth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-f26172aa6ac844fde343509a4809ec6f\">The goal this time isn\u2019t 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\u2019ll start to see, the ancients had some pretty wildly varying views on Hermaphroditus and other intersex figures that it\u2019s difficult to reconcile.<strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fa7e931d6dbc2ec18c66fb0358df5679\"><strong>RELATED: <a href=\"\/category\/we-have-always-existed\/transgender-mythology\/\">Transgender Mythology<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-53dbd01dd6fa7caf657b6a2076e15bb0\">I\u2019ll be referring to Hermaphroditus with changing pronouns, for reasons I hope will become clear the further we go into their tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-082d8bf75adee8afdbf8be2495ae40cd\">Before we start, though, I want to apologize in advance to any intersex people who might be watching for the language used here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6447c36dd53f839f7f0e89ba0eea0bce\">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 \u201cHermaphrodeetus\u201d \u2013 closer to the Greek \u2013 it will de-fang the word a little bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-37a02ff190140196ef2ef10c94ec2f08\">But the reality is Hermaphroditus is the name of the mythological character we\u2019re talking about today, so it\u2019s difficult to get around that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d5d94038924c000aeeccafe0bd967b62\">It\u2019s not the same word as the slur, but I recognize hearing the name might be triggering. So while it\u2019s the reality of the material we\u2019re working with, I do recognize that it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3e8023ab262f43176528e6ebccca6274\">But if it feels right, I do encourage you to push through that discomfort if you can, because I\u2019ve dug up some stuff about intersex history here that you may not have heard before, and you might find pretty interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-53234a08696f295418b77d8debac7d30\">I myself am not intersex, as far as I know, so I\u2019m very much approaching this topic as an outsider, which is why I hired an intersex sensitivity reader to review this script before finalizing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-aebb7b2919445626f64111145474c25e\">Special thanks to Hans Lindahl, who was easy to work with and provided some great insights. When I was reviewing Hans\u2019s notes, they revealed some of the societal prejudices against intersex people I\u2019d 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\u2019m very grateful for Hans\u2019s notes, and for how straightforward the entire experience was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-057a45848060f807e78caf8bc1ad3529\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hanslindahl.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Here&#8217;s a link to Hans\u2019s website<\/a>, where you can see more of Hans\u2019s work, including articles, comics, and other advocacy work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-f7b27ca589d2807002a8514f9090dcac\">I was able to pay Hans a fair rate because of the support I receive from all of you on Patreon. If you\u2019re interested in supporting this channel, you\u2019ll find a link to my Patreon in the description. I don\u2019t want to monetize this channel with ads because they\u2019re 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\u2019re able, it starts at just a buck a month, and it really does make a difference. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-a89b3969 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Support The Channel On Patreon<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6ea72f572a48f78cf10a8c7f70cc69ee\">With all that out of the way, let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-1-the-lives-of-hermaphroditus\">Chapter I: The Lives Of Hermaphroditus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5e9bb1b46ea53e9d4f743cf8639ddab5\">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\u2019s much more difficult to establish any sort of canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-714c2326056bffe96893013c2e89887c\">To put this in modern terms, think about how many different people have written stories about Spiderman. It\u2019s hard to make sense of it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a02f3daf34f3bb893b9a9a0487f17cc6\"><em>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<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fac5d069a3b6202d8fda61723996150f\">Yes that\u2019s true, but it\u2019s because Spiderman is the intellectual property of a single group that\u2019s 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\u2019t do with these characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-54471c15b40b1fd1a071b72d8fcbecf2\">That\u2019s why Aphrodite was born from the castrated nads of Zeus\u2019 father in one source, and was just the daughter of Zeus and Dione in another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-49aa03e1d0c46060d569d819077c0aa9\">That\u2019s why Prometheus\u2019s mother is Clymene in one source, and Themis in another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-8ed1eecbd8c39d3c82b47369b241698b\">That\u2019s why Zeus was born in Lyctus, Arcadia, Dicte, or Lydia, depending on who you ask.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3127c04064eeead5e7164ccb2eca5a96\">These sort of contradictions pop up a lot, and that\u2019s why scholars are generally not too concerned with canon when it comes to classical mythology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-12d80508cf130a8464c51af7a03d1433\">Imagine if that was the case with Spiderman too, and all the other corporately owned characters that shape our mythologies today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6c92be034418556aa8077068222e3bbe\">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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-109684a9f015869daa02f6a1cfe845c2\">Imagine Disney, Viacom, and the other massive media conglomerates didn\u2019t exist, people didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-cbf9d8bc186d991f242ba1d241e9dbf4\">Imagine we tore off the shackles of capitalism and created a world designed to maximize human happiness in a sustainable way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-7d06b8a6de2ac15a394ef02ac2658137\">Imagine&#8211;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-03a521f73a10cee41138c2e3f8e3e3f7\"><strong>*ahem*<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e4ba4170a74c640bd6b136835783b74c\">It\u2019s 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\u2019s quite a bit of contradiction in their various stories. When it comes to Hermaphroditus, there\u2019s a lot less material to work with, but the contradictions are still there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d51fe228c8c5a140ff38da7bfce80bec\"><strong>RELATED: <a href=\"\/kybele-and-the-gallae\/\">Introduction to Kybele and the Gallae<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-51cdbce9e5852d89a5e1ffbaea971ee8\">There are really only a handful of writers who mention Hermaphroditus in a way significant enough to make note of \u2013 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\u2019t tell us much. There were almost certainly more sources on Hermaphroditus, but today, this is what we have to work with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3d839429f0ce4901eac74843ea0ee785\">But before we get to the stories about Hermaphroditus, let\u2019s talk about the framework we\u2019re going to use to understand them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-2-understanding-euhemerism\">Chapter II: Understanding Euhemerism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-ae76f4df7badda1a2013ae5107483773\">What\u2019s the point of mythology?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-86c6317fe0a148b69d18da621c557c92\">Why did the ancients tell these stories in the first place?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-789620f37f5e3266a8503c92d86a9722\">When it comes to interpreting myth, there are so many different schools of thought, and I\u2019m 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\u2019s one I think is particularly interesting for our purposes today, called euhemerism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-0fb0ecaf52d2ce52d6b4e4eafdf8278e\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-75cff78a68645a0e743c36adb85f8347\">It\u2019s sort of like that game of broken telephone you played in school, where your teacher started off by whispering \u201clearning is fun\u201d in one student\u2019s 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 \u201c[DEADNAME REDACTED] is a queer\u201d 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\u2019t make eye contact with anyone for the rest of the semester?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9160cf0985bbee7d49593975f4de15db\">No? Just me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-0a7a3fff42b391dfc604f8c19733045b\">This might seem a little silly on the surface &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-30f7ad4e31db0c0f2a2c96a22c881229\">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,\u00a0he tracked down the actual location of the city of Troy in the late 19<sup>th<\/sup> 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\u2019ve found some Greek weapons there, though it\u2019s unlikely they were solely responsible for its destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4538630711d402f225f543cea95f9295\">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\u2019t be confirmed one way or another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3f5ac11dcab5123fcc8daf82aa7846c4\">From what we can tell, there\u2019s about a five hundred year gap between the destruction of Troy and Homer writing the Iliad. That\u2019s a long game of broken telephone, so it\u2019s understandable that a lot of distortions would show up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-38ced900280bcb85e9efd3ef6cf921b6\">But there\u2019s a kernel of truth there, and that\u2019s where Euhemerists get excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-dd9a9f522a8409974590deda7a141de0\">So what happens if we take a Euhemerist approach to the stories of Hermaphroditus?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4e17a1fb34f6484c87038311af6332c0\">Let\u2019s get to know the stories first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-3-ovids-hermaphroditus\">Chapter III: Ovid\u2019s Hermaphroditus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-78a416e5fca24ba452853a78cbbaa32b\">Publius Ovidius Naso is his full name, but in English we call him Ovid to keep it simple. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4533030e98b817dc79b90f6039b114c8\">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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5cb07757ca638592cbe521155102fd9d\">If you watched the video on the Scythians, we talked about someone named Ovid in that one as well. It\u2019s the same guy. This isn\u2019t the last time he\u2019s going to help us out in this video series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-b779889fefc6e24fcb9ee5e688bff4d1\">Quite a few of his poems survive, but the most famous one is the <em>Metamorphoses<\/em>, which also happens to be my favourite Latin poem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-502dc33956cb0936a5d0d2a40eda2fd5\">It\u2019s a 15 book experimental epic cataloging some of the stories of transformation in Roman mythology. It\u2019s there that we find the most complete story of Hermaphroditus we have today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-edbbfaa078c73f20f333fb2f8d5688b4\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-913efe3b2e27b79918fa8c882284a1a2\">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\u2019d just relax near the water and check herself out in its reflection and enjoy how beautiful she was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d978266a23544e120ecae3847629f1d4\">She fell immediately in love with Hermaphroditus as soon as she saw him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-73b36671c02d814b7bc21ea9760cdef1\">She threw herself at him, begging for his affection, but he rejected her, so she pretended to leave. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-0c77610c000470d7a0499031c1056067\">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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-8e612531e2449394c566158c2bc211b8\">While he struggled to free himself, she prayed to the gods that nothing would ever cause them to be apart from each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-635a0a6a53053d7af943552f71458b93\">The gods granted her wish, uniting the two into a single body, which Ovid describes as \u201cno longer man and woman, but neither, and yet both.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-dc234d5826435a3d31a73032607dd0a4\">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\u2019re thinking of transitioning but you haven\u2019t started yet, we know where the spring is, go jump in and see what happens, it\u2019s right there on the map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-35ac58c02682004bccc70f0613465c32\">If we approach this story through the lens of literary analysis, there are a lot of roads we can head down. Ovid\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-38bc6352d5a8b3e5b54a4374e3bc48a0\">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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-bba14e72fb2f39bc6358a590a6e34b4f\">Viewed in this light, it\u2019s a pretty strong piece in support of \u201ctraditional Roman values,\u201d which were as made up during Ovid\u2019s time as \u201ctraditional Christian values\u201d are today. Part of Augustus\u2019 jam was to hearken back to a time before degeneracy took control of society though (sound familiar?), so he would have loved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-db7757d068318a321015b0adbb692823\">But that\u2019s not why we\u2019re here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-a89b3969 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Support The Channel On Patreon<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-4-diodorus-siculus-hermaphroditus\">Chapter IV: Diodorus Siculus\u2019 Hermaphroditus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-668c69610ff57632c1ad6dea8dcb816a\">The second longest story of Hermaphroditus we have comes from Diodorus Siculus \u2013 \u201clongest\u201d being definitely a relative term.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-f28ee019bde2b6554b2752a3a15434df\">A Greek living in Roman-ruled Sicily during the 1<sup>st<\/sup> century BCE, Diodorus Siculus wrote the <em>Bibliotheca Historica<\/em>. This is a colossal work that covered what we might consider history in the modern sense, as well as mythological stories. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-db4ae34b131e79d7feab1425890e554f\">To put him in perspective, he died in the year 30 BCE, when Ovid would have been in his early teens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-ca4797039ac1d763382e11f023618e31\">Here is Diodorus Siculus\u2019 entire passage about Hermaphroditus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-3-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2e12b81f559b5b08ca9f9d491740d3bf\"><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-b505dae0f38b54187161c76959ce81cb\"><em>\u2013 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book 4, chapter 6, section 5<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a82abfd5de5606145413e8aefd32ec5a\">Not a long passage, yeah? By comparison, Ovid\u2019s story is about five printed pages long. But there\u2019s still a lot we can pull out of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-392967bd88cce78ccd81d47b12c11578\">If you watched my video on the Scythians, you might notice a connection between the way Diodorus Siculus describes \u201ccreatures of two sexes\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fd883f373c82eca37dcde3b7c604bdf9\">And remember that while transgender women and intersex people are *not* the same thing, the Greeks and Romans wouldn\u2019t have understood the distinction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-15ff0d0a29e11bfaae2b3f1b7cc40641\">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\u2019t fit the traditional binary being sort of magical creatures who had a deeper connection to the spiritual world comes up quite a bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-df183ed4bb9651c1b1df2ae092ab0845\">This isn\u2019t the last time we\u2019ll encounter it in this series.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-de624db43ae20ba7b1738a1f47e59994\">It\u2019s also interesting to note that he mentions that \u201cthere are some who declare <em>such creatures of two sexes are monstrosities\u201d<\/em> &#8211; which is, unfortunately, how the ancients seemed to have viewed them \u2013 we\u2019ll get more into that in a moment \u2013 but it\u2019s also how many medical professionals view intersex people even to this day. That\u2019s beginning to shift, but of course, change never comes fast enough for the people most affected by the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-5-a-euhemerist-approach-to-hermaphroditus\">Chapter V: A Euhemerist Approach To Hermaphroditus<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-11da2a73b81b11ff2e5e84b5661a2a4f\">Alright, let\u2019s analyze Ovid\u2019s and Diodorus Siculus\u2019 stories from a euhemerist perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9c58a2003d854098f32dbe94f08e0c56\">Diodorus Siculus mentions that intersex bodies have a tendency of \u201ccoming rarely into the world\u201d, and let\u2019s unpack that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-14fc578636c3eb97d1f4a58d74ee8671\">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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-35456b64e2a9693a609356dbfcccb261\">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\u2019m 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\u2019s the best estimate we have. Let me know in the comments if you know of a better data source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-293257765336a36a0768d285d8ef12f8\">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\u2019t exist in the ancient world, but I\u2019m no scientologist or anything so if somebody who\u2019s actually trained in endocrinology wants to read the study I\u2019ve linked in the description and tell me why it\u2019s bunk I\u2019m all ears, I will not die on this hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-b7310cce5a10dc20ba7b74279acdf451\">But even if endocrine disrupting chemicals are one of the factors that influence the occurrence of genital variation, they\u2019re not the only one \u2013 that seems to be a consensus among legitimate researchers. And though it doesn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-ef9c18286957ff9fbb7f757092884041\">That might not sound like a lot, until you read\u00a0John D. Durand\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-648797658bbbcbeaa45f3a542a700ccb\">The point is, there\u2019s really no reason to believe that intersex people haven\u2019t been around for a long time, regardless of how many endocrine disruptors are kicking around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-24b5516f075f07d491cca314b66cece0\">So okay, if we look at Diodorus Siculus\u2019 story from a euhemerist approach, it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9d5533a876528f9e970b64a5f9a7793d\">Is this The Truth? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-78dc2d30f420446266597b1707a48368\">Is this What Really Happened? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-48130458975f02b0146ff32ed380395e\">It\u2019s impossible to know without a time machine, but it\u2019s also not entirely improbable, and that\u2019s the nature of this type of mythological analysis, definitive answers are just not knowable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-f68f8801851aac6cd479724b609a8bdd\">But what about Ovid\u2019s story?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-889388aaa389a46af8094fccd4bfce54\">He said Hermaphroditus <em>became<\/em> intersex around age 15. How could you possibly take a euhemerist approach to that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fc26f24c218f8879abd32dc39e7d27b4\">How could it be that a person changes their sex without modern medical techniques?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e2f640b67e54a2dec999715cbb75d430\">Divine intervention aside, this is actually similar to how a medical condition called <a href=\"https:\/\/rarediseases.org\/rare-diseases\/androgen-insensitivity-syndrome-partial\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">partial androgen insensitivity syndrome<\/a> plays out. I\u2019m going to call it PAIS going forward because it\u2019s way too long a phrase to say over and over again, and pee aeyy aye ess is just obnoxious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-dc054b09db8062de3198f562938a76e3\">PAIS is very much a wildcard condition &#8211; 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\u2019m not an endocrinologist, and this isn\u2019t a video about all the different possible ways PAIS can present itself, so we\u2019re going to focus on one possible presentation that\u2019s relevant to the Hermaphroditus myth. If you want to learn more about PAIS, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-82944625018b6da0a3e69184c3714b66\">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\u2019t use the testosterone, the estrogen they have can take control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6a4d36efd4ac8233e17b69b40f8889d4\">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\u2019ve come to understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a567752280f6f223d32bf3184c776a36\">With the story of Hermaphroditus Ovid tells us, his transformation happened at age 15 \u2013 during the age of puberty for many cis boys. So could Ovid\u2019s story of Hermaphroditus have been a way to explain PAIS?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6dfe776be43dbd8318c77a0b8845ef08\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fa59d22f701d573c15f6d4c011a2aaac\">A.M. Greaves talks about this in his paper,&nbsp;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 \u2013 which basically meant leaving them alone in the forest, and hey, if the gods want that child to live they\u2019ll make sure it does, it\u2019s 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\u2019m leaving my baby to a wonderful fate how dare you call me a baby killer I\u2019m not a baby killer I would never&#8211;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e9f56f3e57e1d2681e5a47e98a31e7fe\">However, the 4<sup>th<\/sup> and 5<sup>th<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3b5f08fcab7eea49d20b71368d393fe3\">Greaves notes that it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6775b754e8911e7f497b8e8cab9c47b3\">PAIS isn\u2019t the only possible explanation \u2013 but it\u2019s one of the more plausible ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-add41f07ae6fcd3c6fc5353d8aa3f1fe\">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\u2019s tale can potentially be interpreted as partial androgen insensitivity syndrome, and Diodorus Siculus\u2019 tale genital variations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5d6a98c753024e0af1c6383124df844c\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-6-fertility-symbols\">Chapter VI: Fertility Symbols<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-93cb85f3af284acafb27615465478b4c\">But okay, so it\u2019s possible the myth of Hermaphroditus was a way to explain different types of intersex people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-66754b1d33047d602f0a161a5187d28b\">But whether or not that\u2019s true, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t necessarily think that way. They looked at Hermaphroditus the same way they looked at other gods, like Cupid or&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Mercury or Herakles or Pan or Priapus or wow that\u2019s a lot of dicks why are there so many dicks?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2e1c40305f14cc0f50c17b7e89caa2bf\">The surviving accounts we have of Hermaphroditus don\u2019t describe their post-transformation appearance much in a literal sense. Ovid\u2019s description is barely five lines of poetry, saying:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-3-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a917483b3b3d21ad713aef865c4831bb\">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 \u2018O 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!\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4de807bf54aeaa01c84a553b06ee9c0e\">\u2013 <em>Ovid \u2013 Metamorphoses, Book 4, page 93, translated by Rolfe Humphries<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-96833ce017e983d0894ada728553b659\">Meanwhile, Diodorus Siculus says Hermaphroditus had a:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-3-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2641900269899ff55183aeea8d82d68e\">body which is beautiful and delicate like that of a woman, but has the masculine quality and vigour of a man.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-299b9a9f3b41e040ba9f0e0ea961043b\"><em>\u2013 Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, Book 4, chapter 6, section 5<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-43dc7b87ab3c195df27dd24cfeb22e57\">So uhh, we know their arms were soft? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-21129aca87f6b9331c10646cc6c61328\">And we know they had a higher pitched voice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3d0660d9baf57c3f6a70113b885dfcc9\">When you think of the different ways one might combine the anatomical characteristics typical of cis men and women, there are plenty of possibilities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-ab31a01f491fcfc07e6e948431b25be0\">Beard or no beard? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-695c023f79fb1a888aafbfd60e154730\">Boobs or no boobs? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-019109ed51a0a7270997719deab6513d\">Hairy chest or smooth? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-efe8df538587569decb2dba5567eeaa3\">Phallus, vulva, or a combination of the two? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-78e7c3ecad66e06fbebd1b0026372b90\">Curvy or\u00a0boxy figure? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e7a135663f147de1ea7a14f86e013c6e\">The list goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6978b4496a815f85e41b05551908ef7f\">However, when the ancients depicted Hermaphroditus in art, they did so in almost always the same manner \u2013 a feminine, curvaceous body, with breasts, child bearing hips, a smooth face, and a phallus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6e2cc961c2496d85b72025a58f2581e7\">Take, for example, this statue of Hermaphroditus believed to have been from the 3<sup>rd<\/sup> century BCE in Pergamum, on the modern midwest coast of Turkey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2a1446d9db2a8c63670bfb4da6bc0f68\">Or this fresco found in a house in Pompeii, thought to have been painted somewhere in the early 1<sup>st<\/sup> century CE. I know it\u2019s damaged, but if you look closely you can see, or at least you would be able to if I didn\u2019t have to put that silly eggplant emoji over the naughty bits to avoid YouTube censorship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3d5d7fc0de43619e2357a853e0ce6eda\">There are a bunch of others as well, and they all portray Hermaphroditus the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-05f9922ed8a172edfff8bfed03d34684\">Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-dc2859ac9290148c7b72d05b0325cc52\">Of course it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-8ef9a8df1b7cb669889943f991f6e7ff\">Besides, there\u2019s more to it than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-970ac86defb4dced74853e0671e12510\">When you begin to explore ancient art, it\u2019s only a matter of time before you hear the phrase \u201cfertility symbol\u201d. And at first it seems like a lazy, half-assed way for scholars to be able to sound like they know what they\u2019re talking about when it comes to iconography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2d6c1915c8e781b2ac03a4bc93198c6a\">ARTEMIS WITH A THOUSAND BREASTS? THAT\u2019S A FERTILITY SYMBOL<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2528ec3feea81f4da618858ca6e9ba4f\">A LADY PLANTING PHALLUSES IN HER GARDEN? THAT\u2019S A FERTILITY SYMBOL<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5711492ad53abfb903d1df5675cca71e\">A PAINTING OF THE GOD PRIAPUS WEIGHING HIS DONG AGAINST A BASKET OF FRUIT? IT\u2019S DEFINITELY A FERTILITY SYMBOL<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3212a823810b0f1f7b0b706d4beefe8a\">Why are there so many fertility symbols?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a6db3d8fbd4d9567d65fb264acb74d10\">You might think of the word fertility in terms of being able to have kids or not, and that\u2019s 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\u2019re going to do everything you can to ensure you grow enough food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-7a910e0f6c83f8bb2a4d64472c509773\">A minute ago I asked why there were so many dicks. And the answer is that, well, they\u2019re a fertility symbol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-8a601fdc6439e64d1624258bc240d678\">If you live in a city, like I do, it\u2019s easy to forget where your food comes from originally. That\u2019s even truer in the 21<sup>st<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d258c8ed4e50f79aec9088f9702e34e1\">So if you\u2019re a farmer from 2500 years ago, and you don\u2019t 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\u2019re going to plant the seeds, you\u2019re going to water them, pull out weeds, all that stuff, but at a certain point you\u2019ve done all you can from a material perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e357b8e755abe640e1b620843cbffbc6\">But at the same time, you\u2019re not going to just sit around and wait for your crops to grow. The stakes are too high for you to be idle here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-25faa813ff2c54caa906a37c0a0193c7\">Instead, you\u2019re going to beg nature to do its thing and take care of you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-bbbcddd69777f7181cf5ddbecfd37780\">And how are you going to do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9ef07446d8be7b775b0270394fb1a2ef\">Well, you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-eb123201daa592320d55ebf1bc8fe2e2\">Dicks? Yeah, you make babies with those, that\u2019s a fertility symbol! Boobs? Yeah, babies suck on them for food, that\u2019s a fertility symbol! Lots of fruits and vegetables? Yeah that\u2019s the whole point of farming in the first place we want lots of them! Babies? Yeah! All that stuff indicates fertility, plenty, and abundance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fd600adcda8577b79792d83437a12134\">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\u2019s Karen\u2019s house and seen a bunch of live laugh love type stuff all around? They\u2019ve got words like abundance, family, love, gather, cozy, etc all over the place? These themselves are, in a way, fertility symbols as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-507d1dbbce420d26e040f1e48cbabe35\">The ancients were just manifesting their best life, that\u2019s all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-7f5293a865f5467ec4d2b5d3f500b7af\">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\u2019s moved, it\u2019s been within arm\u2019s 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\u2019s growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4aa5458379cdcf0572c0a52a65086051\">Maybe that\u2019s why I\u2019ve always loved urban farming\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-7-apotropaic-symbols\">Chapter VII: Apotropaic Symbols<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-1600c38f8efad2bf6dc5b27b08e4fd77\">So Hermaphroditus was a fertility symbol, yeah? Well, there\u2019s a little more to it than that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-bcabd6df647cbc836d4a52ccdf4f3395\">Beyond fertility symbols, the next most common thing you\u2019ll come across when analyzing ancient Mediterranean art is something called \u201capotropaic\u201d symbols.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-75d86d299c92102c7c8c9d262565d4a3\">Apotropaic symbols are designed to ward off evil or harm, especially the evil eye, and they show up in a number of different cultures. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.radicisiciliane.com\/blog\/malocchio-a-brief-understanding-and-offering\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Italians call it malocchio (the evil eye)<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.turkishtextbook.com\/nazar\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Turks call it Nazar<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/alruqya.com\/evil-eye-and-envy-ayn-and-hasad\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Arabs and Muslins call it ayn<\/a>, but it\u2019s a similar idea. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4dc45557236ca1691662757713636abd\">And such symbols show up quite a bit even in the modern world. If you\u2019ve ever been in a Sicilian\u2019s car and seen a red horn dangling from their rear view mirror, that\u2019s an apotropaic symbol to ward off the malocchio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-bcc044fc70ea5a410ff6bd110646776a\">There are a number of different apotropaic symbols you\u2019ll find in the ancient world, including wands, eyes, certain types of faces, and dicks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-8a9d606768a036d3673826ccbffd33a6\">In fact, throughout Athens, you can find statues called herms, which are essentially a block of stone with a head at the top, and a dick about where it would be if the block of stone were a human body. You might see that name and think it\u2019s related to Hermaphroditus at first, but it\u2019s not really \u2013 it was either after the Attic Greek word <em>ermata<\/em>, which means \u201cblock of stone\u201d, or because the most common head found at the top of such statues was that of the god Hermes, though they often had other heads, including Herakles, Anubis, Athena, Aphrodite, and even the politician Alcibiades. One would rub a herm\u2019s phallus as they walked by, which was thought to ward off evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3c74e36367f8c8a59f0ef72d7f0b87e6\">These herms served as apotropaic symbols, being placed at important crossroads, outside of temples and houses, and other important places.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-316ccbcc9ab3c173bd92ed0e8ef813cd\">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 <a href=\"https:\/\/smarthistory.org\/pompeii-house-of-the-vettii\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">House of the Vettii<\/a>, after the Vettius family who we know owned it. And uhhh yeah there\u2019s a lot going on here and it\u2019s getting pretty hard to properly present this stuff without getting banned by YouTube so bear with me here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-781fafedf958cce40c5d530990728961\">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\u2019s home basically ensured that no evil would ever enter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6f7faaf04cedf30e23028339ef2c80b3\">But taking a look at this painting, it\u2019s clear that this was a fertility symbol too. After all, Priapus isn\u2019t just standing there with his dong out, he\u2019s using Libra scales to weigh it against a sack of money, while standing beside a basket of fruit. So it\u2019s not one or the other, but both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-0dd0db2d9d568d829737a597ea75b638\">So, dicks were considered apotropaic, but vaginas were too, especially during menstruation, which brings me to the <em>anasyrma<\/em> gesture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-b0447d4191e7c95a9111e1615133382e\">Anasyrma is an Attic Greek word that literally means \u201cup skirt\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-1eb96bccc2a0e7c9f6d9347fdd5cf9d5\">So, let\u2019s talk about the apotropaic power of the menstruating vagina, which is a phrase I never thought I would say and I\u2019m willing to bet you never thought you would hear. So, you\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5b7213852c23cbc63b8170cbffabe425\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-69dbed485fc05ccd768ff7e67ade4abe\">Seems valuable, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e89698782b62aba48daaad42046127cf\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-069cd06a4e5f434be5582f96ea797039\">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\u2019d have a figure with breasts and a dick \u2013 which is exactly how the ancients represented Hermaphroditus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2303d63d118128b1806daa17de82bce1\">Now, I mentioned the anasyrma pose was sometimes played for a laugh, and that seems to be the case with Hermaphroditus as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-8858c0a139252e05fa3f69009d8374a8\">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\u2019s underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a02eae929ae9f6a6047f98c92588d2cb\">There are a few anasyrma sculptures as well of Hermaphroditus, in a sort of surprised fashion, as though she herself wasn\u2019t expecting what she found down there. This makes no sense, of course \u2013 hentai aside, women don\u2019t just grow dicks all of a sudden. But that\u2019s what we\u2019ve got, and hey, maybe there\u2019s a bit of euhemerist analysis to be done there as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-076ee8649234be0fea218b85f76ef319\">So unfortunately, the trope of women with d**ks trying to trick straight men into being gay, you know, the one that we\u2019ve pretty much all agreed is really f**king offensive, is a lot older than we think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-8-hermaphroditus-and-ancient-marriage\">Chapter VIII: Hermaphroditus and Ancient Marriage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-23b462a3e2210bfedd992072fa790284\">We also know that Hermaphroditus had an aspect of her worship that was related to marriage. That might come from her parents &#8211; 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-124fc637006385daf8c788c2a1176b2a\">But there\u2019s an inscription we\u2019ve 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\u2019s also the name of the spring where Ovid says the merging took place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d5a3cfaf310b7c702b39cc4ab2ec09c3\">Here\u2019s what it says:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-3-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-aa463f18ff76b43915231369162aa178\">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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-421bbcf84690aa480dce5d7b30e80402\">\u2013 The Salmacis Inscription<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-e0eb75e9dbef3898eb87ece64ed2068c\">So hold on, Hermaphroditus actually invented marriage? This is a little different than how Ovid tells it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-dd935105f424538678f3aa2c7409f508\">What\u2019s interesting too is that this inscription doesn\u2019t mention any transformation at all. In fact, the only thing it tells us about the spring is that it \u201cmakes gentle the savage minds of men,\u201d which is a far cry from turning them into women, unless you\u2019re a weirdo alpha male type dude who thinks you\u2019re 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\u2019 two-sexed nature was a later addition to the myth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2a225e055b63c773da5c7c04cd999a17\">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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s all we\u2019ve got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fedfb7d1b5081eed41e62f94d67711de\">Alciphron\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-3-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3617b50c57cccb9875bc30aedc26acd9\">Having woven a garland of flowers, I was going to the temple of Hermaphroditus, intending to offer it in honour of him of Alopece.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-c99e08e86559de2d1a46350ed379e488\">\u2013 Alciphron \u2013 Letter 37<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-1129b96e16bd346133631f2957c724f9\">\u201cHim of Alopece\u201d is referring to her husband, who was deceased. Alopece is the part of town he was from \u2013 sort of like an ancient neighbourhood, the Athenians called them <em>demes.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-80b74dd5af6c067c1c666ccf28dee7c3\">So she\u2019s going to the temple of Hermaphroditus to honour her dead husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6147fb84808f32018334e252d2757f55\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-0417c1690b5ee9804aa782fe6e73a8b3\">There isn\u2019t a lot of information that survives about Hermaphroditus\u2019 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\u2019s unlikely that temple was as elaborate as, say, the Parthenon, but then again that\u2019s true of most ancient temples. We think of the Parthenon because it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-7029911b51cf3270d7e1a2df2d99a2d8\">Now today, if you\u2019re religious, it\u2019s likely there\u2019s only one religious site you visit with any degree of regularity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-568428110fd9a4445c94b8cd75b682df\">You have your church, mosque, synagogue, mandir, temple, or whatever, and that\u2019s the place you go, other than maybe for weddings or funerals, or if you&#8217;re on vacation somewhere. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-147a3d32082b94de0d163bb4ab583482\">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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-a286c3dba4e403c4382fa17ebf431ba9\">Christianity, on the other hand, also has a bunch of important events on the calendar \u2013 Christmas, Easter, Lent, Epiphany, Pentecost, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/cathen\/03245b.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Candlemas<\/a>, etc. There are feast days for saints as well, like <a href=\"\/pelagius-the-transgender-saint\/\">Saint Pelagia of Antioch (Pelagius)<\/a>, but they\u2019re still mainly honouring Christ. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9e673736f9a0bd51aecd850fcbd6738a\">On the other hand, however, there were a number of different temples dedicated to different gods, and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-94f7827c927efe76d297535f5f13a7b2\">Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge this is the only reference we have to the Temple of Hermaphroditus. We don\u2019t 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 \u2013 including the Temple of Asklepios and the Anakeion temple dedicated to Castor and Pollux, so it\u2019s not unrealistic to imagine that Hermaphroditus had her own temple as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"chapter-9-life-as-an-ancient-intersex-person\">Chapter IX: Life as an Ancient Intersex Person<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-04def363c09186e977daf982653ae4fe\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-fcfff565f3d693434a222a4e15c7dd61\">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\u2019s parents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d6ccd0fc038fa60fc403badd45e1c555\">These are wildly varying views, and it\u2019s difficult to reconcile them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2f097505f15a91aadc65a58fdfa7a107\">Intersex people have always been around, but because they\u2019re considerably less common than the two binary sexes, it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise that most people wouldn\u2019t have encountered one, at least knowingly. So when an intersex birth did occur, they might be \u2013 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.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-ade1ac4b0d2c28ad98d9f0af64d7b9b1\">In the Salmacis Inscription, the writer talks about how Hermaphroditus was raised by Salmacis the nymph, and not their mother Aphrodite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4be573e97b471f2db00c8cfba52acf99\">Allen J. Romano addresses this in his work \u201cThe Invention Of Marriage: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis at Halicarnassus and in Ovid\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-808ed12483edf0a3107bd6172e057406\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-9307f7c9073845c3440540ecbd4385a2\">Regardless, a lot of this paints a fairly dark history for intersex people. And the implications this has for transgender people isn\u2019t terribly optimistic either. But it does paint a history nonetheless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-af05fae66688b5d6b1ed75d6ac46cd4b\">People today shout about environmental factors being the cause of intersex, and there may or may not be some truth to that \u2013 don\u2019t look to me for medical arguments, I\u2019m a <a href=\"\/transgender-history\/\">transgender history<\/a> researcher, not an endocrinologist, I\u2019m not getting into the controversy there. But whether or not that\u2019s true, it\u2019s clear from reading the history that intersex people existed at least as far back as classical Greece, and I\u2019m pretty sure there wasn\u2019t any <a href=\"https:\/\/davidsuzuki.org\/living-green\/dirty-dozen-triclosan\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">triclosan<\/a> or bisphenol-A in the water supply back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-76d466e4ce2cf882a6a06a2e89329187\">So if you\u2019re intersex, I hope you take heart in the idea that your existence is nothing new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d77c611d4529673fedd089bfa4c0a4d8\">People like you have existed, at least in the Mediterranean, for more than two millennia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-d28c2e4cc868580ea462e569ad8c077c\">Just like transgender people, intersex people have always existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-cb7b191b790550327713e19078ecfae8\">And so long as humanity continues to endure, so too shall we both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-a89b3969 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Support The Channel On Patreon<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"ancient-sources\"><strong>Ancient Sources:<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-2713ad2501035459e04fa6582ed664c0\">\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/penelope.uchicago.edu\/Thayer\/E\/Roman\/Texts\/Diodorus_Siculus\/home.html\">Diodorus Siculus. &#8220;Biblioteca Historica&#8221;. Translated by C.H. Oldfather. London: W. Heitemann, 1935<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/www.attalus.org\/docs\/seg\/s48_1330.html\">&#8220;The Salmacis Inscription. In Praise Of Halikarnassos&#8221;. Translated by H. Lloyd-Jones. 1999<\/a>. <br>\u25baOvid. &#8220;Metamorphoses&#8221;. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1964.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/oll.libertyfund.org\/titles\/plato-the-dialogues-of-plato-in-5-vols-jowett-ed\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Plato. &#8220;The Symposium&#8221;. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford University Press, 1892<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/charactersofthe00theouoft\/mode\/2up\">Theophrastus. &#8220;The Characters&#8221;. Translated by J. M. Edmonds. Loeb Classical Library. New York, G. P. Putnam&#8217;s Sons, 1929<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"modern-sources\"><strong>Modern Sources<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-palette-color-8-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-468c567cef131085060a184dbf491718\">\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/1971891\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Durand, John D. \u201cHistorical Estimates of World Population: An Evaluation.\u201d <em>Population and Development Review<\/em>, vol. 3, no. 3, 1977, pp. 253\u201396. <em>JSTOR<\/em><\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/www.academia.edu\/87255687\/Monstrous_Births_and_Retrospective_Diagnosis_The_Case_of_Hermaphrodites_in_Antiquity\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Graumann, Lutz Alexander. \u201cMonstrous Births and Retrospective Diagnosis: The Case of Hermaphrodites in Antiquity.\u201d Disabilities in Roman Antiquity, BRILL, 2013<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/23470154\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Greaves, Alan M. \u201cPartial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (Reifenstein&#8217;s Syndrome) in the Roman World.\u201d The Classical Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 2, 2012, pp. 888\u201392. <em>JSTOR<\/em><\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/interactadvocates.org\/faq\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">InterACT. &#8220;Frequently Asked Questions&#8221;. InteractAdvocates.org, 2021<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/rarediseases.org\/rare-diseases\/androgen-insensitivity-syndrome-partial\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">NORD: National Organization for Rare Diseases. &#8220;Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome&#8221;. Rarediseases.org, 2019<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/7671849\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Quigley, C A et al. \u201cAndrogen receptor defects: historical, clinical, and molecular perspectives.\u201d\u00a0<em>Endocrine reviews<\/em>\u00a0vol. 16,3 (1995): 271-321<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/27660460\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Rich, Alisa L et al. \u201cThe Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals.\u201d\u00a0<em>Environmental health insights<\/em>\u00a0vol. 10 163-71. 8 Sep. 2016<\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/20616705\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Romano, Allen J. \u201cThe Invention of Marriage: Hermaphroditus and Salmacis at Halicarnassus and in Ovid.\u201d <em>The Classical Quarterly<\/em>, vol. 59, no. 2, 2009, pp. 543\u201361. <em>JSTOR<\/em><\/a>.<br>\u25ba<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/10.1525\/ca.2014.33.2.395\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Von Stackelberg, Katherine T. \u201cGarden Hybrids: Hermaphrodite Images in the Roman House.\u201d <em>Classical Antiquity<\/em>, vol. 33, no. 2, 2014, pp. 395\u2013426. <em>JSTOR<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-a89b3969 wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Support The Channel On Patreon<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-social-links has-normal-icon-size is-style-default is-horizontal is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-social-links-is-layout-02fc785b wp-block-social-links-is-layout-flex\"><li class=\"wp-social-link 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with an ancient curse, though you\u2019d 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[183,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transgender-mythology","category-we-have-always-existed"],"blocksy_meta":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Myths Of Hermaphroditus - Sophie Edwards<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sbedwards.co\/staging\/9372\/myths-of-hermaphroditus-transgender\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Myths Of Hermaphroditus - Sophie Edwards\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There\u2019s a spring, they say, somewhere in Turkey, afflicted with an ancient curse, though you\u2019d 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. 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