Non-binary
Dualistic goddesses/gods
And yes, a link to Lynn Margolis' work as described yesterday.
Portions of substack article by Sophie Strand
"Aphrodite, as the syncretic Greek version of the older Sumerian and Babylonian Astarte and Inanna, has never been a strictly female goddess. They have always occupied a place that, using the lens of queer theory, we can now label as somewhere between trans, non-binary, and intersex. Of course, each of these identities is quite distinct from the other. To be born intersex is NOT to be trans. To be trans is not to be non-binary. This terminology is modern and was not available 4,000 years ago when the female poet Enheduanna was composing the first poems to one of Aphrodite’s earliest avatars: Inanna. No one in the ancient world would have recognized these terms. But that does not mean that what they denote did not exist. This does not mean that in the ancient world where Aphrodite was worshipped and updated for thousands of years, gender – sacred and secular – was simplistically binary. In fact, archeological, textual, and iconographic evidence suggest that it may have been quite fluid. "Although Aphrodite is a late addition to the Greek Olympic pantheon (popping up around the 8th century BCE with one of her first mentions by Homer in the Iliad) this is not because they are a latecomer. In fact the worship of Aphrodite may predate the Olympic pantheon by several thousand years. Scholars have widely agreed that Aphrodite is a development of older love goddesses who share dominion of love, beauty, adornment, marriage, procreation, doves, the sea, and warfare. If myths are like mushrooms, above ground fruit that only superficially look like individuals, while originating from a larger fungal system below ground, then Aphrodite is a “mushroom” of a much deeper mythic mycelium. One that dates back at least 4,000 years to the eastern Semitic goddess Astarte and then, on the same rhizomatic continuity, to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, associated with early city of Uruk and the Mesopotamian Ishtar. Variations of this love goddess are inherited and adapted by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Phoenicians. As happens with popular gods and goddesses, they are too popular to erase. Instead they must be syncretized and translated into new pantheons. "As the Sumerian goddess of love, justice, war, and procreation Inanna, we can see behind the bad paintjob of stable femininity. Inanna is no simpering goddess. In some of the earliest written poetry in the world, composed by the Akkadian high priestess of the moon of the city of Ur Enheduanna somewhere between 2285 and 22250 BCE, we hear Inanna called the “goddess of fearsome power”. Enheduanna writes: “ To destroy, to create, to tear out, to establish are yours, Inanna. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.” Similar to Innana, we are told in the Babylonian Epic of Erra that the goddess Ishtar’s priestly retinue is composed of kurgarra and assinu “whose maleness Ishtar turned to female, for the awe of the people.” Innana’s servants were also sacred in that they had been “turned” by her. This was no curse. It was the ultimate divine blessing. For thousands of years Innana’s worship was presided over by a class of priestesses called “Gala” who were, for all modern terminology, identified somewhere between trans and non-binary. Men would “become” women and live as women in their role as a priestess of Inanna. They were seen as particularly “potent” beings – transcending binaries. They could undo evil, heal the sick, channel prophecy, and it was considered especially good luck to have sex with a member of the Gala according to an Akkadian omen text.  "This to me is the great gift of the goddess. Not to change you into the opposite gender, once again fully legible, but to place you in the fertile realm of blended “bothness” where you had the ability to adapt, change, and draw wisdom from multiple nodes of experience. Inanna themselves refuses to be fully defined. And isn’t that what it means to be a deity? To transcend? To transform? To transition? To live interstitially, inside the intelligence of relationships, rather than in the limited perspective of a circumscribed identity. Nowhere does this seem better demonstrated than in the early cult of Aphrodite, worshipped on the island of Cyprus. The Aphrodite of Cyprus is fully both, most often depicted smiling coyly with their skirts raised to reveal an erect phallus. "The legend goes, according to Hesiod’s theogony, that Aphrodite was born from a profound “mixing”. This not heterosexual copulation. Instead her father Uranus’ testicles are severed and thrown into the ocean. Blood, semen, and seawater churn into a opalescent foam, and from this something equally mixed and indefinable is born: Aphrodite of Cyprus. Contemporaneous reports of Aphrodite’s worship tell us that they were worshipped by festivals of societal inversion, similar to the Twelfth night festivities of medieval Europe.  "As I have been researching Aphrodite, I’ve been simultaneously reading about the symbiotic origins of multicellular life in the work of biologist Lyn Margulis. One of my favorite ways to write is to pay attention to the moment when two seemingly unrelated passions begin to intertwine and fuse into a fresh narrative. As I’ve been following both of these separate strands I’ve been increasingly aware that Aphrodite, to me, seems less the goddess of human lovemaking, and more the goddess of the symbiotic fusions between species that create biological novelty. Aphrodite presides over a romance that transcends anthropocentrism. Or perhaps predates it. The fusions of simple prokaryotic cells, driven by hunger and desire to connect, to create the complex nucleated cells that build our very bodies today. Margulis describes, “In the great cell symbioses, those of evolutionary moment that led to organelles, the act of mating is, for all practical purposes, forever.” Life is driven by these complicated and surprising “interweavings” that seem to embody Eros without strictly mapping onto a human narrative of copulation. Lovemaking that doesn’t result in a couple. But in a new being entirely. "It is interesting to note that just as our microorganism ancestors emerged from seawater and made it onto dry land, so does Aphrodite emerge from the ocean, too, one foot in liquid microbial prehistory, the other in solid ground mammalian existence. In her book Symbiotic Planet, Lyn Margulis explains, ““Symbiogenesis was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” And if Aphrodite is the moon. Then Aphrodite is the moon of symbiotic mergers. Like meiotic sex, the kind we as humans engage in, must have at some point originated from another simpler form of sex, not involving two genetically different partners, so does Aphrodite emerge not from a heteronormative conjugal act, but from a splicing off, an accidental castration. They spring from the spermal foam of their father’s castrated member. The goddess of divine lovemaking comes from an act that is more anarchic than sexual fusion. It harkens back to those prebiotic days, greasy lipid bubbles accidentally sequestering polymers and chemical reactions, before dehydrating and breaking open, releasing matter. In and out. Academic and Neuroscientists Terrence Deacon and biologist Lyn Margulis both muse that it was these early “grease bubbles” that first imitated the semi-porous container of a cell. For life is, at its most basic, a cell. A semi-permeable container that constitutes difference: inside and outside. Self and environment. How these bubbles became sentient and began to self-replicate, how they eventually integrated into multicellular beings capable of terraforming the earth, is another problem entirely. But at its most basic we can think of Aphrodite as being the exultant, non-sexual offspring, of one of these early cells rupturing and reproducing accidentally as it accommodates shifting climatological pressures.  "Aphrodite seems to me to be a useful deity for moments of transition: personal, political, and ecological. The fiction of a stable identity will not save us in a moment of climate collapse and mass extinction. The idea of a stable species is fictional if you look through a wide enough lens. We are always adapting, evolving, changing, fitting into shifting ecological niches. And the most useful tool we may have moving forward may be that of “bothness”. Of liminality. Of being able to fuse and merge and embody multiplicities. Source: "Aphrodite Beyond Binaries, Saint of Symbiogenesis" by Sophie Strand, Make Me Good Soil, Jan 16, 2026 --------------------------Gender identity has become quite interesting these days, and yet it makes many people uncomfortable to consider, to talk about, and respect those who have chosen non-binary self-identities. I like to think that each person has a unique way of loving on this earth, and no matter how they identify or choose who they cherish, that is the fundamental best thing that humanity has to offer. Just one elder woman's opinion here. |
