This is a portion of an ongoing series which seeks to chronicle the occult, magickal and mystical alchemy roots of the transgender and postgender movements from secret societies and mystery religion sources. I have chronicled these in the Postgender Androgyny, Hermaphroditism & Beyond section.
John M. Robertson wrote the following in his 1911 AD book, Pagan Christs (1911 AD), pp. 296-298:
the combination of Mithra in a double personality with that of a Goddess is made clear, not only by the statement of the Christian controversialist Julius Firmicus, in the fourth century, and later writers, that the Persians make Mithras both two-sexed and threefold or three-formed,[1] but by innumerable Mithraic monuments on which appear the symbols of two deities, male and female, the sun and the moon, or, it may be, male and female principles of the sun or of the earth.
And this epicene or double-sexed character is singularly preserved to us in that Mithraic monument of the Græco-Roman period which we possess in our own British Museum, in which the divine slayer of the bull presents a face of perfect and sexless beauty, feminine in its delicate loveliness of feature, masculine in its association with the male form.
In such a combination there is reason to see a direct influence of the old Akkado-Babylonian system on the later Mazdean. From the old Akkadians the Semites received the conception of a trinity, the “divine father and mother by the side of their son the Sun-God.”[2] But their own ruling tendency was to give every God, up to the highest, a “colourless double or wife”;[3] and in the final blending of these in a double-sexed deity we have the consummation of the idea.
It was not special to Asia; for the Egyptians gave a double sex alike to moon, earth, air, fire, and water, making the earth male as rock, female as arable soil; fire masculine as heat, female as light, and so on;[4] and the Greeks and Romans accepted the notion;[5] but it was probably from Chaldæa that it reached the Mithraists. Bel had been represented as both father and mother of Enlil, and Belti as both father and mother of Ninlil; and there are yet other instances of the Babylonian vogue of the idea of a God combining the two sexes. [6]
There is a further presumption that it was either from Babylonia or through Mithraism as modified after the Persian conquest of Babylon that the idea of a double-sexed deity reached the Greeks. In the Orphic hymns, which probably represent the theosophy of several centuries before our era, it is predicated of four deities, of whom two, the Moon and Nature (Selenê and Physeos), are normally female, and two (Adonis and Dionysos) normally male.[7] Selenê is further identified with Mên, the Moon-God, who, as being double-sexed like Mithra, was finally identified with him in worship and on coins.[8]
As Dionysos and Adonis, originally Vegetation Gods, have at this stage become identified with the Sun, there arises a presumption that a solar cult has been imitated; though at the same time the solar cult may have adopted features from the others. The likelihood is that the notion of a double-sexed deity was the outcome on the one hand of the concrete practice of bracketing a male and a female deity together, and on the other hand of speculation on the essence of “divinity.” But the concrete process probably came first, and the conjunction of the symbols or heads of a male and female deity in one monument or sculpture would give the lead to a mystical theory of a twy-sexed being.
In “§ 18. Synopsis and Conclusion: Genealogy of Human Sacrifice and Sacrament,” Robertson sets out “a tentative genealogical scheme of the history of the sacrificial idea as we have sketched it up to Christianity” which includes:
…there would thus arise the general conception of…C″. Human sacrifices, in which the victim (a) represented the God, or (b) had a special efficacy as being a king or a king’s son, or (c) a first-born or only son.
In the case of Goddesses, the sacrifice might be a virgin; and this concept would react on the conception of the God in an ascetic movement, making him either double-sexed or virtually sexless. For the sacrifice, nevertheless, the victim must latterly be as a rule a criminal. These various victims might or might not be eaten.
Footnotes:
[1] De Errore Profanarum Religionum, v. Compare Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, Foist. vii ad Polycarp., cited in Selden, De Diis Syris, Proleg. c. 3; and in Cudworth, Intellectual System, Harrison’s ed. i. 482. In a passage in the Yasna there is mention of “the two divine Mithras” (Lenormant, as quoted, citing Burnout). But cp. Mills’ rendering of Yasna, i, 11, which appears to be the passage in view.
[2] Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 193.
[3] Id. p. 215. Cp. Genesis, i, 27; Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks, 7th ed. p. 21; and Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, pp. 129-130. In all likelihood, the Hebrew “Holy Spirit” was originally held to be feminine. Cp. Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. c. 64.
[4] Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, c. 43; Seneca, Quaest. Nat. iii, 14.
[5] See Servius on the Æneid, ii, 632. Cp. Donaldson, as last cited. It was in this way that Apollo and Dionysos came to be at times represented in feminine robes; while Aphroditê was sometimes (as in Sparta) bearded. Cp. Macrobius. Saturnalia, iii, 8, as to the double sex of Venus, which is abundantly illustrated by Preller, Römische Mythologie, 2nd ed. p. 389, and Griechische Mythologie, 2nd ed. i, 268. On other developments of the Principle cp. Selden, De Diis Syris, Syntag. ii, c. 2; and Spencer, De legibus Hebræorum, lib. ii, c. xvii, § 12. It has been discussed with much suggestiveness, if with some fantasy of speculation, by Mr. Gerald Massey in his Natural Genesis, 1883, i, 510-518.
[6] Anz, Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnosticismus, 1897, p. 105, following Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 142 sq., 272 sq.
[7] Orphica, ix, 2, 3; x, 18; xliii, 4; lvi, 4.
[8] Cumont, ii, 189-190; i, 235, and notes. As we saw, Mithra was also identified with Shamas, the Babylonian Sun-God. Id. i, 231.
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