𝖕𝖔𝖓𝖟𝖔𝖓𝖞𝖊𝖗𝖆

Discussing Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminism and the views of the Gods is not "speaking for the Gods,"—it is looking at facts and information and drawing completely reasonable conclusions that squarely put the foundations of trans-exclusion in opposition to the Gods.

(definitely not audio proof read, sorry for the dyslexia)

🌿Aphrodite & Venus🌿

Aphroditos (or Aphroditus) is Aphrodite with male characteristics including a penis and/or beard.

A cult of Aphrodite included a bearded Aphrodite at Amathus, Cyprus on a high cliff temple. [Wikipedia citing Macrobius, Saturnalia III]

Her relationship with bisexuality (referring to being dual sex not sexual orientation in this paper), androgyny, and transvestism is also documented in Cyprus:

— Aphrodite in the Theogony by William Sale in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association Vol. 92 X

(Sorry for the shitty screenshot JSTOR did not want to work with me)

This worship of Aphrodite with a penis was also seen as equal to Venus:

There's also a statue of Venus on Cyprus, that's bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditus, and Laevius says: Worshiping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is male or female, just as the Moon is a nurturing goddess. In his Atthis Philochorus, too, states that she is the Moon and that men sacrifice to her in women's dress, women in men's, because she is held to be both male and female." — Macrobius (c. 400s AD), Saturnalia 3.8.2

🌿Hermaphroditos🌿

There is also the "intersex child of Aphrodite & Hermes" named Hermaphroditos.

I have seen many use Hermaphroditos as an excuse to wipe away the Goddess Aphrodite with a penis that the ancients worshipped. Which doesn't even make sense because I hate to break it to you— Hermaphroditos also opposes TERF ideology by its nature. A God existing as intersex/bisexed/dual-sex/bigender (however you'd like to word it) negates the idea that the Gods somehow support the ridged biological essentialism and gender binary that TERF ideology necessitates.

There are different accounts of Hermaphroditos' creation but one, Ovids, tells of him merging with a nymph and then asking his parents to make the water transformative causing men to have thr effeminate bodies like women:

Her prayer found gods to hear; both bodies merged in one, both blended in one form and face. As when a gardener sets a graft and sees growth seal the join and both mature together, thus, when in the fast embrace their limbs were knit, they two were two no more, nor man, nor woman--one body then that neither seemed and both. So when he saw the waters of the pool, where he had dived a man, had rendered him half woman and his limbs now weak and soft, raising his hands, Hermaphroditus cried, his voice unmanned, ‘Dear father [Hermes] and dear mother [Aphrodite], both of whose names I bear, grant me, your child, that whoso in these waters bathes a man emerge half woman, weakened instantly.’ Both parents hears; both, moved to gratify their bi-sexed son, his purpose to ensure, drugged the bright water with that power impure." — Ovid, Metamorphoses 4. 28 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.)

🌿More on Aphroditos vs Hermaphroditos read @theoi-crow's excellent post about them here.

Also some lovely statues:

Marble copy statue from a fresco at Herculaneum, Italy. X (left)

Statue from Pergamum, Turkey. X (center)

Statue from Nymph Sanctuary in Lacori, Italy X (right)

Statue from Pompeii, Italy X

🌿Inana & Ishtar🌿

From a hymn to Inana

To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak, are yours, Inana. To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inana. To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inana. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana. Desirability and arousal, goods and property are yours, Inana. Gain, profit, great wealth and greater wealth are yours, Inana. Gaining wealth and having success in wealth, financial loss and reduced wealth are yours, Inana. Observation (1 ms. has instead: Everything), choice, offering, inspection and approval are yours, Inana. Assigning virility, dignity, guardian angels, protective deities and cult centres are yours, Inana. — A Hymn to Inana (Inana-C) ETCSL 4.07.3 in Lines 115-131.

This shows:

Inana has the power to change a person's gender/sex .... which means people can change gender/sex

This is listed among other normal things such as journeys, wealth, settlements so on. Suggesting that it wasn't super special, it was a part of Sumerian society that Inana was given power over.

This was written by Enheduanna High Priestess of Nanna, Ur's city God, and Inana. Inana was a popular Sumerian deity and Enhenduanna's father, Sargon of Akkad's, personal deity was Ištar. One of Enhenduanna's goals as a priestess was to conflate the popular Sumerian deity Inana with her father's Akkadian personal Goddess Ištar. Then raise Inana (and thus her father's personal Goddess Ištar) to an extremely high place in cosmology and explain just how much control she had in society— including over sex/gender.

Also from @sisterofiris's post on Inana's queer priests here.

🌿Nanaya🌿

In later times Inana/Ištar was equated with Nanaya but in earlier times they were worshipped side by side as separate deities. While Inana's hymn gives her rule of gender. Edit: actually in literature of Inana she also describes herself as woman and young man

[Inana says] When I sit in the alehouse, I am a woman, and I am an exuberant young man — Line 16

A Nanaya hymn has her directly declaring she has breasts in Dadumu and a beard in Babylon. Leick also mentions here that Ištar was worshipped in both genders.

—Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology by Gwendolyn Leick. Page 125.

🌿Asūšunamir with Ereškigal🌿

In Ištar's Descent (not Inana's) Ea's plan to distract Ereškigal and get her to bring Inana back to life is to make a beautiful being. Ea makes an incredibly beautifully brilliant being that's mere aesthetic presence will make Ereškigal happy and let her defenses down. And Asūšunamir's beauty works..... and he is an eunuch, an effeminate male, potentially queer from the ancient's eyes. And yet he is so beautiful he distracts a Goddess.

— The Ancient Near East and Anyhology of Texts and Pictures, edited by Pritchard. Ishtar Descent translation by E.A Speiser. Page 80.

🌿Eštan / Ištanu🌿

The Anatolians (Hittite in particular) loved to both mix deities and keep them entirely dependent like 8 solar deities and 50 storm Gods. But sometimes Hittite, Hurrian, Hattic, Indo-European, Mesopotamian all meld together making the identification of gender ambiguous or even interchangeable.

Eštan is one example (who has numerous equatings):

—A Handbook of Gods and Goddesses of The Ancient Near East by Frayne & Stuckey. Page 105

You can also learn more about the Ištanu and the Sun Goddess of Arinna and her gender from @sisterofiris in a post here.

__

I'm sure there are more! But this was my quick round up and sources I could put together. To all the intersex, trans, & non-binary polytheists out there, you aren't abnormal and the Gods see you for who you truly are.

Edit: I wrote this in regards to gender originally because it was a response to an uptick in TERF posts. But this can equally be viewed from the lens of intersex experience, and I want to explicitly mention that now. Intersex, Trans, and Non-Binary people should share solidarity with one another against gender essentialism, against TERFs, and our sometimes unique sometimes shared experiences.

Δημήτηρ Μέλαινα🐍🌾🐴

Mount Elaios is some thirty stades away from Phigalia [in Arkadia] and has a cave sacred to Demeter surnamed Melaina (Black). The Phigalians accept the account of the people of Thelpousa about the mating of Poseidon and Demeter, but they assert that Demeter gave birth, not to a horse, but to Despoine (the Mistress), as the Arkadians call her. Afterward, they say, angry with Poseidon and grieved at the rape of Persephone. She put on black apparel and shut herself up in this cavern for a long time. But when all the fruits of the earth were perishing, and the human race dying yet more through famine, no god, it seemed, knew where Demeter was in hiding, until Pan, they say, visited Arkadia. Roaming from mountain to mountain as he hunted, he came at last to Mount Elaios and spied Demeter, the state she was in, and the clothes she wore. So Zeus learnt this from Pan, and sent the Moirai (Fates) to Demeter, who listened to the Moirai and laid aside her wrath, moderating her grief as well. For these reasons, the Phigalians say, they concluded that this cavern was sacred to Demeter and set up in it a wooden image. The image, they say, was made after this fashion. It was seated on a rock, like to a woman in all respects save the head. She had the head and hair of a horse, and there grew out of her head images of serpents and other beasts. Her tunic reached right to her feet; on one of her hands was a dolphin, on the other a dove. Now why they had the image made after this fashion is plain to any intelligent man who is learned in traditions. They say that they named her Melaina (Black) because the goddess had black apparel. They cannot relate either who made this wooden image or how it caught fire. But the old image was destroyed, and the Phigalians gave the goddess no fresh image, while they neglected, for the most part, her festivals and sacrifices until the barrenness fell on the land Then they went as suppliants to the Pythian priestess and received this response :

‘Azanian Arkadians, acorn-eaters, who dwell in Phigaleia, the cave that hid Deo, who bare a horse, you have come to learn a cure for grievous famine, who alone have twice been nomads, alone have twice lived on wild fruits. It was Deo who made you cease from pasturing, Deo who made you pasture again after being binders of corn and eaters of cakes, because she was deprived of privileges and ancient honors given by men of former times. And soon will she make you eat each other and feed on your children, unless you appease her anger with libations offered by all your people, and adorn with divine honors the nook of the cave.’

When the Phigalians heard the oracle that was brought back, they held Demeter in greater honor than before, and particularly they persuaded Onatas of Aigina, son of Mikon, to make them an image of Demeter at a price" - Pausanias, Description of Greece 8. 42. 1-13

My favourite part in this account recorded by Pausanias is the oracle's message to the Phigalians. To me, it's metal as hell.

(This draws very heavily from pagan-Platonism and chthonic magical practices)

The Moon Goddess

Hekate as a Goddess is most simply understood as one who presides over the triple realms and phases of the Universe - she is a Goddess who is at once hypercosmic, cosmic, and worldly - presiding over the As Above and the So Below, while existing also as a third unmentioned kind in the cosmic formula; the mediation between. This among other reasons why she is Prothyraia (before the threshold or literally ‘by the door’) - the divine membrane separating, cohering, and defining all things.

The Gods are transcendent beings, but they also encompass and manifest themselves across all of existence. Proclus in his six books on the theology of Plato notes that of the Mundane Gods (the Gods who shape the physical universe, including the 12 Olympians) there of two divisions; the Celestial (heavenly) and Sublunar (terrestrial). And of the Gods manifesting in the terrestrial world, the Moon is their monad, their sovereign and summit and the principle ordering power down here at the lowest circle of reality. Therefore the world of embodying is itself a kind of Underworld, the world under the Moon, which is directly tied to the earth itself. And the Moon is none other than Hekate, the lunar pantheistic Goddess and synectic power of the (sub)lunar Gods. She is the mistress of Fate, its chief spinner and apportioner (as the magical papyri call her Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos), the cause of all generation and corruption. She is also a co-sovereign with the Sublunar Demiurge, but we will not elaborate on him here.

Her epiclesis Prothyraia ties her to Eileithyia not just by association from the Orphic hymns, but also directly. In an oracle attributed to Hekate herself recorded by Porphyry the Goddess declares she is both light-bringing Eileithyia and unmarried Phoebe, the generatrix of birth and life who accepts souls into the world, brings them to the light as there born, nourishes and finally devours them in death. And this is at the heart of understanding the principle manifestation of Hekate in our world, whose three phases reflect her triple powers of birth, life, and death. Her invocations in the magical papyri speak of her womb as being covered in the coils of serpentine scales, the serpent is a chthonic animal who sheds its skin as a universal emblem of life, death, and regeneration. So not just a portion, but the entire sensible universe itself, the generated Cosmos, is the dragon womb of Hekate. Our sphere being the lowest reflection of the highest circle also carries the same nature, the terrestrial world is a womb filled to the brim with perpetual generation.

The Cosmic Gorgon - Medusa Unveiled

Generation is the physical part of the process of emanation that gives rise to everything. Simply put, generation in the world is the constant engendering of phenomena - it’s gathered, cohered, torn apart and regenerated successively in one giant, Bacchic frenzy like the body of Zagreus himself. This is symbolically represented in mythic theology as the sparagmos of Zagreus, which gave birth to humanity and the potential salvation of the human soul itself. The Orphic myth also relates to Hekate because Hekate is the Mother of Gods and Necessity (Ananke), and we identify her with the platonic khôra of Timaeus and it as Chaos, the foundational realm that contains the primordial substance for creation. But Necessity appears like the Intellect of Chaos herself, she must be contended with on her own terms and the resulting dialectic is what enables the great work of the cosmic demiurge (Zeus). Chaos receives the Eternal into Becoming like a vessel receives water, but the vessel is not passive for it contains and constrains the liquid. Consequently the liquid takes its shape according to whatever limits the vessel imposes, and that constraint is Necessity in the world.

Necessity in the world is limit of creation, things are created according to what is necessary, not according to absolute perfection. This is what’s required for Nature to function, manifesting her three powers of birth, growth, and dying to create a beautiful ordered whole. But none of these powers are actually separated, although it appears that way to human eyes, rather they are each happening all-at-once. When it comes to the new age imagery of the triple Goddess that’s blended into the general witchy zeitgeist this is where you’d hear about the beautiful magical harmless creative empathetic supportive divine feminine nursery of the menstruating maiden-birthing mother-menopausal crone, but sorry, the buck stops here. In as much as things are Becoming, they are not absolutely perfect, all is suffering, we decay and die and feel pain, and for all the wonder and beauty of the world its also a place where baby deer get torn apart by wolves.

Hekate, Ananke, Phoebe, Eileithyia, Nature, Moon, Fate, her power is the triple union of generation, corruption and regeneration that bodies experience all at once. Being born is not cute, it’s a bloody and brutal affair and is eminently wild and dangerous, within the womb of the Goddess is a coiling brood of poisonous serpents - growing and rotting simultaneously as the multiply without end. In Orphic myth the dead bodies of the Titans become humanity to symbolically represent this aspect of Becoming, it is awe-inspiring and bloody and frankly insane, we are emerging from an ocean of blood, dead bodies mired together in the black earth of the Great Mother. And what becomes of this orgy of death, growth, decay, birth? It all mixes together and returns to the chalice of the Earth - whom Servius identified as Hekate, the blood-drinking, corpse and filth eating Goddess of the magical papyri. Indeed, this is why the far-off daemons who emanate from her order - Lamia, Empousa, Mormo, are blood drinking vampires who target the newly born or young men, life is the marriage of birth and death.

This fact terrified even the philosophers and the composers of the Chaldean Oracles, who dreaded the chthonic daemons of Hekate who took the form of shaggy black dogs said to lead the Theurgists astray. The body was often feared and reviled in later strains of pagan-Platonism, but hatred of the material itself devolves into a distraction from the Great Work. Orphic fragments speak of a terrible dragoness born directly of the womb of her father Phanes - with the face and upper body of a beautiful girl, a nest of writhing serpents for hair, and the lower half of a giant serpent. This clearly corresponds to the appearances of Hekate given by later oracles - a Gorgon, beautiful and terrible, covered in coiling serpents. Her apparitions were also known to be gigantic and serpentine, and she is one of the few Goddesses of Hellenic polytheism who appears in genuinely monstrous forms. This is not a sign of evil or maliciousness, it is radical truthfulness about Nature herself. Stones signify material and spiritual heaviness, and if your ego cannot bear looking upon the face of the Gorgon you will turn to stone, forever weighed down by your own delusions of the world. Her epiphanies also evoke Ekhidna, the mother of a brood of calamitous monsters just as lunar Hekate is the mother of all the poisons and daemons of life.

But the blood of the Gorgon Medusa was both poisonous and healing, and so too does the Goddess hold the keys to our salvation. For in the Demiurgy Chaos is the receptacle of all Becoming, receiving and expressing the eternal in the mortal as the Gods sowed their signatures in Creation. The pathway back to the Infinite is also held within the Finite, so the mystery of Chaos is the expression of the primordial formlessness mediating between divine eternity and all mortal becoming, which we call the cosmic Now of Eternal-Becoming. The fact that we are the children of earth and starry Heaven, the Gods are our siblings and the Great Mother is our mother too.

And that is what enables Theurgy and Magic itself, total union with the divine through the ritual activation of its own direct continuity in the Gods. And as much as the trials of fortune and Nature can hinder our progress, she is our savior (Soteira) - the implacable triple formed virgin Goddess of boundless Empyrean fire, with the heads of bulls, lions, and horses, a snake haired drakaina covered in writhing vipers, girdled by dragons. She carries keys to open all the fetters that bind us and all the gates, she carries torches to illuminate all realities, she holds a whip to dominate all the spiritual obstacles to liberation, and she carries a sword so that any obstinate power is destroyed and cast to the depths of Tartarus.

On a cosmic level that is as much a sign of the boundless divine light and love she radiates as it is a warning on the sublunary level. In mysticism the spiritual significance of the Moon is sometimes portrayed as being a passive, submissive receptacle of the Sun. This is completely wrong, it is the lack of her own light that is emblem of all the luciform natures of the Sublunary Gods. Lacking her own light, she dwells in pure tenebrious darkness, not merely accepting the solar light but actively reflecting it back - as said by Iamblichus the Sublunar Gods unfold themselves into light, emerging from the depths of Erebus, it is the very act of creation itself. In the magical papyri she is called “the bender of proud necks” and Pasikrateia “the All-dominating” and for good reason. Nature and the material is not an evil prison meant to be trampled on, as the Eternal Becoming it is the locus of all radical spiritual awakening and activities - you cannot achieve Henosis without first being embodied. And anybody who attempts to side step their own embodying, denigrate Nature, and bemoan the humiliation of having a body is in for a very rude awakening. Because she is the gatekeeper of all the realms of the Cosmos, and nothing can progress without her say. Writ upon the iron-gates of the world below the Moon is this; “Abandon ego, all ye who enter here. You are not above me,” and if you think you are she will bend your proud neck until it snaps, drag you until you are kissing the earth, all while extending her hand to raise you up to the truth of the divine within the all.

🌱🌾Demeter, 𐀯𐀵𐀡𐀴𐀛𐀊🌾🌱

"As the Basket comes, greet it, ye women, saying “Demeter, greatly hail! Lady of much bounty, of many measures of corn.” As the Basket comes, from the ground shall ye behold it, ye uninitiated, and gaze not from the roof or from aloft, child nor wife nor maid hath shed her hair, neither then nor when we spit from parched mouths fasting. Hesperus from the clouds marks the time of its coming: Hesperus, who alone persuaded Demeter to drink, what time she pursued the unknown tracks of her stolen daughter.

Lady, how were thy feet able to carry thee unto the West, unto the black men and where the golden apples are? Thou didst not drink nor didst thou eat during that time nor didst thou wash. Thrice didst thou cross Achelous with his silver eddies, and as often didst thou pass over each of the ever-flowing rivers, and thrice didst thou seat thee on the ground beside the fountain Callichorus, parched and without drinking, and didst not eat nor wash.

Nay, nay, let us not speak of that which brought the tear to Deo! Better to tell how she gave cities pleasing ordinances; better to tell how she was the first to cut straw and holy sheaves of corn-ears and put in oxen to tread them, what time Triptolemus was taught the good craft ---

O Demeter, never may that man be my friend who is hateful to thee, nor ever may he share party-wall with me; ill neighbours I abhor

Sing, ye maidens, and ye mothers, say with them: “Demeter, greatly hail! Lady of much bounty, of many measures of corn.” And as the four white-haired horses convey the Basket, so unto us will the great goddess of wide dominion come bringing white spring and white harvest and winter and autumn, and keep us to another year. And as unsandalled and with hair unbound we walk the city, so shall we have foot and head unharmed for ever. And as the van-bearers bear vans full of gold, so may we get gold unstinted. As far as the prytaneia let the uninitiated follow, but the initiated even unto the very shrine of the goddess, as many as are under sixty years. But those that are heavy and she that stretches her hand to Eileithyia and she that is in pain, sufficient it is that they go so far as their knees are able. And to them Deo shall give all things to overflowing, even as if they came unto her temple.

Hail, goddess, and save this people in harmony and in prosperity, and in the fields bring us all pleasant things! Feed our kine, bring us flocks, bring us the corn-ear, bring us harvest! And bring peace, that he who sows may also reap. Be gracious, O thrice-prayed for, great Queen of goddesses!"

In the Argonautica Medea was explicitly a devotee of, priestess, and even student of Hekate, and among the things the Goddess transmitted to her was herbal magic and pantheistic incantations, which are also explicitly tied to chthonic forms of sorcery and ritual devotion (invocations of chthonic gods and chthonic sacrifices). These incantations are assigned the power of altering the weather, healing, protection, quenching burning fire, altering the course of rivers, and even arresting the stars and moon themselves pass into literature as the pantheistic incantations of Thessalian witches - which are highly evocative of those employed in the PGM. The craft of herbalism was reportedly transmitted to priestesses of Hekate, as book 8 of Polyaenus’ Stratagems, which was written in the 2nd century CE but records older history, reports that during the age of the Ionian settling of Asia Minor, a Thessalian priestess of Hekate Enodia named Chrysame possessed “great skill in the occult qualities of herbs.” Pausanias in his Description of Greece also reports of the Peloponnesian town of Titane, which took its name from the brother of Helios (who may have possibly been a doublet of Helios himself), in which annually a priest performed mystic rites to Hekate, taming the winds and chanting the incantations of Medea. So the House of Helios and Hekate were very much connected to incantations of ritual power, as well as chthonic and herbal sorcery, over centuries of living tradition.

⚖️⛈️Zeus Pater🪶🏺

He has been a lot on my mind with the April rains here

🍐🐄 Hera Pais, the cow eyed bride🪵🏛

 "I sing of golden-throned Hera whom Rhea bare. Queen of the immortals is she, surpassing all in beauty: she is the sister and the wife of loud-thundering Zeus, -- the glorious one whom all the blessed throughout high Olympus reverence and honour even as Zeus who delights in thunder." -Homeric Hymn to Hera

"The presence of a cuckoo seated on the sceptre [of Hera] they explain by the story that when Zeus was in love with Hera in her maidenhood he changed himself into this bird, and she caught it to be her pet [in order to seduce her]." - Pausanias, Description of Greece 2. 17. 4

I’m currently reading "The Transformation of Hera: A Study of Ritual, Hero, and the Goddess in the Iliad" by Joan V. O’Brien. She argues, sometimes speculatively, about the early cult origins of Hera, but I still find it very interesting.

The book suggests that Hera’s early rites in Samos might have portrayed her as arriving annually on a horse drawn chariot at a confluence of waters, where her bathing and binding to a cultic tree were believed to renew all life, presenting her as a goddess of the seasons.

There also seems to be an argument that she had a connection to the Potnia Theron, based on the large animals associated with her and the artifacts found at her temples, such as lions, griffins, and sphinxes. Her association with domestic animals like cows and horses could suggest that she was seen as a tamer of beasts, and her yoking of the bull may be parallel marriage and the "taming and yoking" of the bride.

I find this especially interesting because it aligns with my view of Hera as a goddess who makes things perfect.

In some traditions, it seems that she was worshipped in different life stages with epithets such as Hera Pais (the young maiden before marriage) Hera Teleia (the married woman)