Sadhin

Jan. 13th, 2024 01:44 pm
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Haven't written up a subject: sex and gender posting about alternative genders in forever, so let's have a few notes on the sadhin of the Himalayan foothills. "A sadhin can take on many of a man's social roles and behavioural attributes, can wear men's clothes and can cut her hair short like a man. Becoming a sadhin is regarded as a respectable alternative to marriage for a female." The sadhin, who remains female, adds the suffix Devi to her name. Shaw points out that a man can become an ascetic at any time in his life, while the sadhin takes on her role only at puberty.

More on the sadhin here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3630617
Phillimore, Peter. Unmarried Women of the Dhaula Dhar: Celibacy and Social Control in Northwest India. Journal of Anthropological Research. Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 331-350 (20 pages)

ETA: In turn, Phillimore mentions this article, about the transgender jogamma ("male, ascetic women"), disciples of the goddess Yellamma:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3629673
Bradford, Nicholas J. Transgenderism and the Cult of Yellamma: Heat, Sex, and Sickness in South Indian Ritual. Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), pp. 307-322 (16 pages)

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Alison Shaw and Shirley Ardener (eds). "An Introduction." in Changing Sex and Bending Gender. Berghahn Books, New York; Oxford, 2005.

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'Cyber-archaeology' salvages lost Iraqi art (BBC, 2015)

Middle Egyptian Grammar by Dr. Gabor Toth -- texts, vocabulary, exercises, etc

Volcanic eruptions may have contributed to war in ancient Egypt (SMH, 2017)

Viking expert raises doubts over research claiming famous warrior was actually a woman (ABC, 2017)

Egypt had an unusually powerful 'female king' 5,000 years ago, lavish tomb suggests (Livescience, October 2023). Meret-Neith, wife of the First Dynasty pharaoh Djet. It's not clear if she reigned in her own right.

Ancient Egyptian papyrus describes dozens of venomous snakes, including rare 4-fanged serpent (Livescience, October 2023).

4,500-year-old Sumerian temple dedicated to mighty thunder god discovered in Iraq (Livescience, February 2023). The god in question is Ningirsu.

Falcon shrine with cryptic message unearthed in Egypt baffles archaeologists (Livescience, October 2022). "An ancient falcon shine in Berenike, an old port city in Egypt, has flummoxed archaeologists who aren't sure what to make of its headless falcons, unknown gods and cryptic message that reads, 'It is improper to boil a head in here.'"

500 Year-Old Love Letter Found Buried with Korean Mummy (IBT, 2013)

Ancient Viking warrior given a hero’s burial may have actually been ‘transgender, non-binary or gender fluid’, researchers say (Pink News, 2020) | Archaeologists say it’s not scientific to assume gender of ancient human remains (Pink News, 2022) -- not just gender, but sex, which can't always be accurately determined and may not dictate how someone lived, which is why there are multiple "Oops! Warrior was not a man!" news stories | 1,000-year-old skeleton may have been non-binary medieval warrior, say archaeologists (Pink News, 2021)

The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong (Sci Am, November 2023) | Worldwide survey kills the myth of ‘Man the Hunter’ (Science, June 2023)

Lost Ethiopian town comes from an ancient empire that rivalled Rome (NS, 2020) ie Aksum

Oldest legible sentence written with first alphabet is about head lice (NS, 2022)

Where was the first city in the world? (NS, nd)

Powerful photo by Pacific Indigenous artist reveals truth about 1899 painting (CNN, 2022). "Kihara also believes that Gauguin’s models may not be cisgender women, referencing the research of Māori scholar Dr. Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, who has written that the “androgynous” models he painted were likely Māhū – the Indigenous Polynesian community that, like Samoa’s Faʻafafine, are considered to be a third gender and express a female identity."

Egypt unearths 'world's oldest' mass-production brewery, dating back to era of King Narmer, more than 5,000 years ago (ABC, 2021)

Third Gender: An Entrancing Look at Mexico's Muxes (YouTube, 2017)

The Hidden Girls of Afghanistan (YouTube, 2017) | Inside the Lives of Girls Dressed as Boys in Afghanistan (NG, 2018) | I'm a Woman Who Lived as a Boy: My Years as a Bacha Posh (Time, 2014) | Bacha Posh: An Afghan social tradition where girls are raised as boys (The News Minute, 2018) | She is My Son Afghanistan's Bacha Posh, When Girls Become Boys (YouTube, 2018)

Did Aboriginal and Asian people trade before European settlement in Darwin? (ABC, 2018)

History of chocolate rewritten by cacao traces found on ancient pottery unearthed in Ecuador (ABC, 2018)

Earliest roasted root vegetables found in 170,000-year-old cave dirt (NS, 2020)

Religion from nature, not archaeology (Starhawk, 2001). Still an important document.

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Many interesting abstracts for the CRE 2023 conference in Basel, including one entitled Death is Only the Beginning: Non-Existence – A State of Existence or Total Annihilation? (p 83) by Kristine Reinhold, which asks how we should understand what happens to the damned. "The attestations will be presented in thematic groups, including: existence in a state of anti-life, where one is deprived of the features of life, non- existence as total annihilation, and a state of non-existence characterized by existing in the darkness, without the potential to come forth." I hope this is eventually published and I can get my hands on it.

More from CRE 2003:

And from CRE 2022, Conception of the Doors of Heaven in Ancient Egyptian Religion (p 24) by Mennah Aly; The study of ex-votos: new perspectives on the cult of Bastet/Boubastis and its diffusion in the Mediterranean (p 36) by Emanuele Casella; The One She-Cat of Pakhet: Towards a New Type of Animal Cult? (p 48) by Romain Ferreres; The Libyan Political and Social Impacts on Ancient Egypt within The Third Intermediate Period (p 107) by  Marwa Soliman; and Late Twentieth Dynasty Yellow Coffins of Akhmim: Towards the Identification of a Corpus, Workshop, and Individual Artisans by Jaume Vilaro Fabregat.
https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/download/9781803275833


And CRE 2021: Being annihilated or being satisfied in the Duat. About the dynamic of the sw.wt in the New Kingdom Books of the Underworld (p 17) Mariano Bonanno: "... as one of the elements with greater mobility, the shadow is a first-order component to preserve the integrity of the deceased. That is why a deceased (or a god) with a “powerful shadow” or who can keep it in the Hereafter, guarantees to join the crew of the disk and therefore regenerate. On the contrary, with the annihilation of the shadow, the condemned are executed and included among those that do not exist." And The Beginnings of a Consumer Society: Beer Production in Predynastic Egypt (p 34) by Nisha Kumar; Red images in the Amduat of Thutmose III (p40) by Jordan Miller; Near Eastern deities in Egyptian magical texts of the New kingdom: Some methodological considerations and a case study on Anat and the servant of Hauron (p 78) by Joachim Friedrich Quack.

And CRE 2019: Not to see isefet: Symbolic links between eyesight and bwt in the Coffin Texts (p 5) by Apolinário de Almeida, Ana Catarina: "Bwt is the most regularly used verb to introduce isefet in the Coffin Texts, yet another verbal form can be found closely associated with bwt, often showcasing a parallel or causal relation with it, which is n mAA (not to see)... an akh has no limits to its eyesight and finds no obstacle (IV117): he who sees will never die, while the dead mwt are conceived as blind. Those who exist see and can be seen."; “Father of the Fathers and Mother of the Mothers” in the religious hymns of the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1069 BC): Creator’s non-gender binarism or expression of an all-encompassing deity? by Borges Pires, Guilherme; Spell 125b of the Book of the Dead [the judges] by El-kemaly, Radwa; Anat in LBA Egypt: Some preliminary remarks on the audience, agents, and importance of a foreign deity in a new land by Huwyler, Jacqueline M.; The Book of the Twelve Caverns in the tomb of Petosiris (Tuna el-Gebel) by Méndez-Rodríguez, Daniel Miguel; It has not been seen until today: Some myths from the texts of the outer sarcophagus of Iufaa by Míčková, Diana: "... and text about Tutu and his group of protective demons connected with the new year, mentioning also their connection to the fight of Ra and Apophis, as well as the personified eye of Ra."; Where do you come from, Bastet? by Pubblico, Maria Diletta / Vittori, Stefano; The demon-deity Maga: Geographical variations and chronological transformations in ancient Egyptian demonology by Rogers, John; A dangerous seductress? Re-reading the Tale of the Herdsman by Serova, Dina; An unpublished 21st Dynasty coffin set in the Nicholson Museum, Sydney University [!!!] by Smith, Danielle; and Litany of the Underworld. Forms of Osiris represented in the inside of some XXIst Dynasty coffins by Haładaj, Dagmara.

CRE 2018 has papers on Apedemak, "the dreadful aspect of Nu[n]", catfish-headed gods, mummiform demons on Third Intermediate Period coffins, gender differences in the CT, Illustrations of Temple Rank on 21st Dynasty Funerary Papyri, and Being the son of a Goddess: The claim for legitimacy of the bubastite kings.
Partial contents: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781789692143

ETA: Amunet in Thebes - how Hatshepsut developed the cult of the feminine form of Amun, 17th Current Research in Egyptology, Kraków, 4-7 May 2016

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Wrote a thing on Ptah-Naunet, the double-gendered deity from the Memphite Theology, over at my Tumblr. Perhaps, to give Ptah the powers of the entire Ogdoad, there was also a Ptah-Kauket, a Ptah-Amaunet, and a Ptah-Hehut?
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Back to Egypt shortly.

Mesopotamian religion involved ritual performances, such as recreations of mythical battles, such as the fight between Marduk and Tiamat from Enuma Elish. But in this chapter by Thorkild Jacobsen, it was the Sacred Marriage Drama, and related fertility dramas, that interest me.
 
The Sacred Marriage Drama, writes Jacobsen, "is patterned after the normal Ancient Mesopotamian wedding ritual". The bridegroom goes to the door of the bride's father's house, bringing gifts of food, seeking entrance. The bride, "bathed and dressed in all her finery", opened the door. The couple were separately escorted to the bridal chamber; the next morning they oversaw a feast.
 
The earliest evidence of the ritual is preserved on the Warka Vase, which depicts the god Dumuzi at the door of Eanna, Inanna's temple, with Inanna ready to open it and welcome him. An Old Babylonian text "is styled as a blow-by-blow account of a well-placed observer keeping worshipers farther back informed about what is going on." Inanna prepares by taking jewels from a pile of dates, then goes to the door of the giparu (the temple storehouse) to let Dumuzi in. She dispatches messengers to her father, asking to have the bridal bed prepared and Dumuzi escorted to it. The hymn Iddin-Dagan A also details the ritual.
 
Jacobsen writes that there are three further fertility dramas, which he calls the Mourning Drama, the Road of No Return Drama, and the Search and Fetching Drama.
 
The Mourning Drama was "a procession into the desert to Dumuzi's raided camp to mourn the slain god", with his widow (Inanna), mother (Ninsun), and sister (Geshtinanna). One such drama may have involved "Nin-gipar 'The Lady of the Giparu' (ie Inanna), and Nin-ibgal, another form of Inanna... and the goddess Igi-zi-bar-ra, known to be the personified harp of Inanna". (p 85)
 
The Road of No Return Drama was similar, with the god Damu's mother and sister searching for him after his death. Their search takes them to the netherworld, where Damu's sister eventually stays, to be both sister and "mother" to him. (I'll save notes on this for a separate posting.)
 
The Search and Fetching Drama has the god's mother seeking to find the nurse she left her son with - a tree. A procession returns him to his father Enki. In this drama "the god is identified with a variety of other fertility figures" and with deceased kings.
 
Jacobsen discusses the changes in Mesopotamian religion and religious drama. IIUC originally the whole community would have participated in ritual; in time, as natural forces became anthropomorphised as deities, those deities were represented in ritual and drama, reflecting the community's own practices, while the community looked on. There also seems to have been a shift from considering Dumuzi as the source of plenty to Inanna as the one who provided the king, and thus the community, with plenty - responding to the king's sexual allure and prowess.
 
The Battle Dramas appear in the First Millennium BCE. They included a footrace which recreated Ninurta's pursuit of Anzu. Fertility dramas, including the sacred marriage of Nabu and Nana at Borsippa, were still performed. Some fertility dramas may have changed their meaning to become understood as battle: as Jacobsen notes, "the fact that a rite survives does not guarantee that it preserves its original meaning".
 
Which observation led to this interesting remark:
 
"The death and lament drama of Dumuzi seems very likely to have retained its purpose of strengthening emotional ties with the god - especially in the case of Dumuzi of the grain where the death of the god has been brought about by his worshipers and where the rite of lament is therefore one of great ambivalence and covert guilt." (p 75)
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Jacobson, Thorkild. "Religious Drama in Ancient Mesopotamia". in Hans Goedicke and J. J. M. Roberts (eds). Unity and Diversity: essays in the history, literature, and religion of the ancient Near East. Papers presented at a symposium held at Johns Hopkins University, Jan. 9-12, 1973. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.
 
 
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 The "sworn virgins" of the Balkan Peninsula in southeastern Europe are women who, as children, as adolscents, or in adulthood, adopt male dress, take male names, socialise with men, and take on masculine jobs in agriculture and blood feuds. Traditionally, the farmers and herders of the mountain regions were organised into patrilineal households and tribes, which feuded constantly (I love the detail that, because the head of an enemy would be taken, the men wore topknots "for ease of carrying".) The details of the sworn virgin's life varied from place to place; different sworn virgins had different motivations. Some were "surrogate sons", whose presence in the household kept property in the family, let a widow stay in her marital home or let sisters avoid arranged marriage; some were themselves widows. Some may have helped make up for a shortage of men caused by constant feuding. Sometimes the sworn virgin seems to have chosen the role as a child, sometimes it seems to have been imposed by parents. They claimed not to menstruate. Some had female partners.
 
As Mildred Dickemann points out, women were valued in these societies as the primary laborers, inside and outside the home; as producers of children, especially male heirs; and for the bridewealth the brought when sold as wives. They were segregated, beaten, and regarded with contempt (often also expressed by sworn virgins). Escaping this life must have been an attractive prospect. Dickemann writes, "They seem to have enjoyed respect and even high esteem for doing what women were believed incapable of doing." (They also had an advantage in feuding; they could kill a man, but no man would kill a woman, even a sworn virgin.)
 
René Grémaux states that there are numerous records of sworn virgins from the mid-Sixteenth Century to the early Nineteenth Century; there were still some alive in the late Twentieth Century who she was able to interview.
 
Grémaux remarks on the special status of the virgin in many cultures: "Virginity is inherently an extremely ambiguous and ambivalent human condition, for it is considered to be neither a masculine nor a feminine quality, but rather a peculiar combination of both." An adult virgin doesn't fit into the scheme of men vs women, or girls vs women. "Virgins challenge common concepts of femininity," she writes, "of which motherhood and dependence on men are basic traits, and moreover they threaten the clear-cut demarcation of both genders." Classifying them as men partly resolves these ambiguities. Similarly, post-menopausal women in these cultures may behave like and be treated like men.
 
Grémaux describes the women of these cultures as "social outsiders" - it's interesting to think that, broadly accepted as what Dickemann calls "a subcategory of men", the "third gender" sworn virgins had become social insiders, the opposite of the fate of trans people in Western society. That makes this another of the numerous societies in which an established role for gender variant people offers some inclusion and protection.
 
The sworn virgin and the Ancient Mesopotamian "third gender" cult functionaries such as the gala have little in common, but I couldn't help connecting them when Grémaux remarked that, "Singing and making music for an audience that included males, activities traditionally considered improper for local women, was a kind of speciality of many Albanian sworn virgins."

(Would that I had time to more than glance at Suzana Milevska's thesis Gender Difference in the Balkans. Into the infinite queue it goes.)
 
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Dickemann, Mildred. "The Balkan Sworn Virgin: A Traditional European Transperson". in Bullough, Bonnie, Vern Bullough, and James Elias (eds). Gender blending. Amherst NY, Prometheus Books, 1997.
 
Grémaux, René. "Woman Becomes Man in the Balkans". in Gilbert Herdt (ed). Third sex, third gender: beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history. New York, Zone Books; Cambridge MA, Distributed by MIT Press, 1993.
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The first chapter of Will Roscoe's book Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native America is a brief, general introduction to traditional Native American societies. I wonder if there's a correlation between the acceptance of gender variation and the fact that most of these societies were "only weakly stratified" and that "opportunities for women to acquire prestige and take leadership roles existed in every group". (These are generalisations; Roscoe is careful to note the wide variety of social arrangements in the ~400 different groups.)

Roscoe writes: "Alternative gender roles were amongst the most widely shared features of North American societies. Male berdaches* have been documented in over 155 tribes... In about a third of these groups, a formal status also existed for females who undertook a man's lifestyle, becoming hunters, warriors, and chiefs." These groups "occur in every region of the continent, in every kind of society, and among speakers of every major language group."

The "core set of traits" of these third and fourth genders were "[s]pecialized work roles", "gender difference [ie] temperament, dress, lifestyle, and social roles"; "spiritual sanction"; and "same-sex relations... with non-berdache members of their own sex". As well as taking on jobs usually done by the "opposite sex", there might also be special tasks reserved for gender variant people. Their "active sex life" meant they were "considered fortuitous in all matters relating to sex and romance" - matchmaking, love magic, curing STDs. Their same-sex relations were the result of their gender status, rather than the other way around. "... rather than an opposition of heterosexuality to homosexuality, native beliefs opposed reproductive to non-reproductive sex." "[K]inship-based social organization" dictated most people's sexual availability, but the same restrictions didn't apply to gender variant people; similarly, some of the elements of marriage, such as bridewealth and political alliances between families, didn't apply.

Third and fourth gender people both had roles in war, from "provid[ing] support, entertainment, and luck", to "joining in the fighting, handling enemy scalps, and directing victory ceremonies". Roscoe remarks on "[t]he associations of alternative genders with death", such as in war or as "undertakers or mourners". He says: "They point to a nexus of beliefs difficult to grasp from a Western perspective, in which nonprocreative sexuality and fertility, creativity and inspiration, and warfare and death are linked". (I think there's something similar in Aztec culture, which Peter Sigal talks about in The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture, of which more later.) In some groups, the alternative genders "enjoyed special respect in privileges"; in a few, their supernatural powers were feared.

In an overview of third and fourth genders in various groups, Roscoe mentions a study of "central arctic Inuit, in which arbitrary gender assignments along with individual preferences result in complex and varied 'gender histories' for many individuals. Boys and girls are raised in accordance with the gender of one or more names selected for them before their birth. Consequently, some children are raised with cross- or mixed-gender identities" which they may retain or change at puberty. Also "[t]he Inuit believe some infants, called sipiniq, change their anatomical sex at birth." My curiosity is piqued.


* Roscoe mounts a thoughtful defence of this term, but I think it's now largely been discarded.


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Roscoe, Will. Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America. London, Macmillan, 1998.
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Multiple sources say the Chukchi people of Siberia have, or had, seven genders, citing a 1904 account by Russian anthropologist Waldemar Borgoras. For example, Sue-Ellen Jacobs and Christine Roberts in the chapter cited below say that "three were female and four were male". Looking at his account, I can only find four: man, "soft man" / "similar to a woman", woman, and "similar to a man". I'll pursue this - it'd be much more interesting if there really were three more.
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Borgoras, Waldemar. "The Chukchee". in Franz Boas (ed). The Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History 11, part 2, 1904, pp 449-451.

Jacobs, Sue-Ellen and Christine Roberts. "Sex, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Variance". in Sandra Morgen (ed). Gender and Anthropology: critical reviews for research and teaching. Washington DC, American Anthropological Association, 1989. p 440.


ETA: I thought this might be the case: Jacobs and Roberts count the intermediate stages of gender transformation as separate genders. Women start by changing how their arrange their hair, then begin dressing as men, and finally take on men's behaviour and tasks; men follow the same pattern. The seventh gender in this schema is the transformed person "feeling like" their new sex and taking on an appropriate spouse and domestic role.
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Jacobs, Sue-Ellen and Jason Cromwell. Visions and Revisions of Reality: Reflections on Sex, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender-Variance. Journal of Homosexuality 23(4), 1992. pp 43-69.



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This year, I paid my first visit in a long time to the Library of Congress. Once I found a photocopier with paper in it, I was able to make myself a copy of Cecelia F. Klein's chapter on gender ambiguity amongst "the Late Postclassical Period (1250-1521) Nahuatl-speaking inhabitants of Central Mexico", of whom the most famous were the Mexica, aka the Aztecs.
 
Alas, it seems that the Nahua were about as tolerant of gender variant people as the modern West has been. Intersex people were considered to be women with male characteristics and held in low regard. As in many cultures, a man who permitted anal intercourse was considered "womanly" - although both partners were killed. Harriet Whitehead states that the Spanish accounts of Mesoamerican cultures "provide little more than allusions to effeminate male prostitutes and to sanctions against homosexuality", leaving us with no evidence of a "third gender".
 
"Unlike us today, however," writes Klein, "the Nahua harnessed the metaphorical power of ambiguous gender and turned it back upon itself." Mixing genders was a feature of numerous ceremonies performed at important turning points in the calendar: the end of the year, the end of the dry season, the end of the wet season, and at the end of each month.
 
Klein contrasts "gender ambiguity" with "gender duality", when an entity has both a male aspect and a female aspect - for example, the male-and-female deity Ometeotl, "Two God"; two genders are present, but "there is nothing uncertain, unpredictable, or incomplete about them." Gender ambiguity symbolised "inversion", "reversal", and the "in-between"; ambiguous beings have been "infused with traits of the other gender" and are therefore "incomplete, imperfect, unfulfilled, partially disguised or hidden". Gender ambiguity gave form to fears of "cosmic and social chaos, loss of direction and purpose, illness and madness, the recklessness of youth, impotence, barrenness and loss of reproductive energy, darkness and deception, the onset of poverty and powerlessness - indeed, formlessness itself." Given form, this chaos could be used to restore order.
 
In practice, gender ambiguity seems to have largely consisted of men wearing women's clothes. During the month of Tititl, male priests donned female clothing and danced with a slave woman before she was sacrificed to the goddess Tonan. The Codex Borbonicus depicts another ritual in which priests dressed as deities, including male priests dressing as goddesses. A female slave impersonated the goddess Cihuacoatl in her aspect as Ilamatecuhtli; she was sacrificed and a male priest donned her flayed skin and danced backwards with her severed head. Klein quotes Susan Milbrath, who describes this as a "transformation into a male persona". Milbrath remarks that an old man would take hold of the severed head, becoming the "likeness of Ilamatecuhtli" - a "gender change" for the goddess. Cihuacoatl herself has an ambiguous gender: she is  impersonated by a man dressed as a woman, and referred to with pronouns of either gender. This, plus other examples of the sacrifice of a lunar goddess who then becomes male, indicate that the moon was seen as changing gender as it changed phases. Milbrath also remarks on the gender ambiguity of the Tzitzimime and the iconography they share with Cihuacoatl.
 
Women who died in childbirth might become one of the Cihuateteo, the "Divine Women" - malevolent spirits of women who had died in childbirth, who caused disease and deformity. Obliged to wear "the costumes and shields of male warriors", the Cihuateteo returned to Earth to search for their female clothes and tools, in the darkness of midnight and eclipses, at crossroads. ("In Mesoamerican thought," says Klein, "crossroads appear to have represented an excessive number of paths or directions.") Their patroness was Cihuacoatl-Ilamatecuchtli; in ritual, they were impersonated by masked men. Milbrath also remarks on the gender ambiguity of the Tzitzimime and the iconography they share with Cihuacoatl.
 
In the month Quecholli, at the end of the wet season, rituals included "public, indecent women who were dressed for war" (I assume this means sex workers) and "effeminate men" dressed as women.
 
Discussing the syncretic deity Maximón, worshipped by modern Maya, Klein remarks: "What we are seeing... is the need to give a name and a physical form to socially unacceptable sexual behaviour. This need is felt at moments when an important time period has come to its end, necessitating the removal of those dangerous forces that have accumulated over its course in order for the next period to begin on schedule, with renewed vigor. It is precisely because the materialized being represents, and thus locates and crystallizes, those threatening forces that it is properly equipped to remove them... the ambiguously gendered embodies the very principles of transition and reversal. It is the ambiguous nature of Maximón's gender identity that makes it possible for him to safely 'cross over from the stable center into the world of spirits, sickness, and death - to leave the one true path for the crossroads at the periphery, where he can aimlessly mix with the forces of the wild and lawless. Maximon was described... as a 'great traveler' who traveled at night through every country..." (In a footnote, she adds: "in Mesoamerica the center is contrasted with the periphery, which is represented by the wilderness and represents, in turn, asocial, immoral behavior, danger, filth, and disharmony. Yet the periphery... is also a place of creativity and sacred knowledge." (p 218) I thought of the Descent of Inanna / Ishtar and the ambiguous assinnu, Asušu-namir, and the kurgarra and kalaturra, and their ability to journey to the underworld (and return?).
 
Klein discusses the association between deformed or missing feet and legs and deviant sexuality in Mesoamerican myth. Notably, Tezcatlipoca, the god with one foot, was in the habit of changing himself into a woman and seducing his enemies; he may also have been the god who taught humans how to have anal sex. In mythology he is often accompanied by "a male friend or a younger brother"; Klein wonders if this was the role of the young man sacrificed after Tezcatlipoca's impersonator, who lived with the "god" before his death. The physical perfection required of Tezcatlipoca's impersonator strikes Klein as "effeminate"; she notes that he broke his whistle and flute on the steps of the temple where he would be sacrificed - a symbolic self-castration. Tezcatlipoca is both the only god who has "sexual relations with goddesses", but also the only god "without a permanent female consort". To the Nahua, his sexuality would have seemed "immature, asocial and unpredictable" - the exact opposite of the "ideal, married man".
 
For the Nahua, sex and gender were slippery and might mingle or change; it was crucial to "stabilize a child's gender" so they could marry and reproduce. Rosemary A. Joyce writes that newborn boys were presented by the midwife with miniature weapons and dressed in tiny versions of the clothes of adult men; girls were dressed as adult women and given miniature weaving equipment. Now, as I write this, the government plans to poll Australians on same-sex marriage; the "No" campaign centres not on marriage, but on the teaching of tolerance of gender-variant people in schools. I think in some ways modern Westerners are not so different from the Aztecs: many of us believe that gender and sexuality are not in fact dictated by nature, but mutable. The Nahua parents anxious that their sons might touch a spindle and become effeminate parallel the "No" campaigners terrified that acceptance of LGBTIQA+ people will somehow create more of them.
 
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Joyce, Rosemary A. Girling the Girl and Boying the Boy: The Production of Adulthood in Ancient Mesoamerica. World Archaeology, Vol. 31, No. 3, Human Lifecycles (Feb., 2000), pp. 473-483.
Klein, Cecelia F. "None of the Above: Gender Ambiguity in Nahua Ideology". in Cecelia F. Klein (ed). Gender in Pre-Hispanic America. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001.
Milbrath, Susan. Decapitated Lunar Goddesses in Aztec Art, Myth, and Ritual. Ancient Mesoamerica 8 (2): 186–206.
Whitehead, Harriet. "The Bow and the Burden Strap: A New Look At Institutionalized Homosexuality in Native North America". in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds). The Transgender Studies Reader. London : Routledge, 2006.
 

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I've just read some articles on alternative genders in non-Western cultures which each sound a note of caution, as well as providing more information on those genders. Oversimplification and misinterpretation are of course hazards of my cursory note-taking, so these warnings are relevant to my interests.
 
In "Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the 'Third Gender' Concept", Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan raise a number of problems with how Western popular accounts (in particular, those written by transgender people from the US) interpret alternative genders in potentially misleading ways. For instance, cultures with a "third gender" may be thought of as "primordial", as if all cultures "evolve" from more gender diverse to less gender diverse. Also, alternative genders from different cultures tend to be lumped together into a single category, into "a single, universal transsexual experience", one shared by trans Americans. "Third gender" categories may be depicted as homogenous and unchanging, and the extent to which they are accepted by their cultures may be exaggerated.
 
The authors ask whether the concept of a "third gender" actually protects binary gender rather than challenging it: "The existence of the 'third' category might imply - wrongly, in our view - that 'first' and 'second' categories are inviolable and unproblematic." Carolyn Epple makes the same point in her article "Coming to Terms with Navajo nádleehí" - that for there to be an alternative third gender, there must be a first and second gender which are not alternative or other. She asks: "But is it not possible that the existence of Navajo nádleehí is not in fact evidence of third genders but is instead constructed as such, given current theoretical interests?"

Moreover, adding additional genders doesn't guarantee a system in which individuals are free to express themselves. Towle and Morgan quote Anuja Agrawal re the hijra of India: "The greater the number of genders, the greater their oppressive potential as each may demand the conformity of the individual within increasingly narrower confines." A "real" hijra is a castrated man, not just a cross-dressing or effeminate one. Another researcher, Don Kulick, argues that the Brazilian travesti helps "solidify normative binary gender system, but not the Euro-American system that makes gender contingent on sex." Rather, the role in intercourse determines gender; the travestis "understand and position themselves as women". (Cf Unni Wikan's comments on the xanith.) So a "third gender" may uphold "a rigid gender system by formalizing variation."
 
Similarly, in "The Bow and the Burden Strap: A New Look at Institutionalized Homosexuality in Native America", Harriet Whitehead warns against confusing Western homosexual people with Native American gender-crossers, who were defined by "occupational pursuits and dress/demeanour" rather than sexuality. They occurred in some nations (such as the Yurok, the Crow, the Miami) but not others (including the Inuit, the Comanche, and the Maidu).
 
Discussing the cultural construction of gender, Whitehead writes: "A social gender dichotomy is present in all known societies in the sense that everywhere anatomic sexual difference observable at birth are used to start tracking the newborn into one or the other of two social role complexes." Anatomy creates the dichotomy, "but in no culture does it exhaust the ideas surrounding the two classes thus minimally constituted." Assumptions about additional differences between the sexes, along with beliefs about their "fate, temperament, spiritual power, ability, and mythical history" form a "cluster" of defining features, which vary from culture to culture, and make possible "a mixed gender or deficient gender status" - "a person of one anatomic sex assuming part or most of the attire, occupation, and social - including marital - status of the opposite sex for an indeterminate period."
 
A Native American gender-crosser (I'm avoiding the dubious catch-all term "berdache") might behave like a member of the "opposite" sex during childhood or adolescence, or might receive messages in dreams and/or visions telling them to do so. There were also male war captives who were given the status of "wife" in their captor's household, and made to dress as women and do women's work. Whitehead also mentions a Gros Ventre warrior woman who became a Crow chief and took wives.
 
Whitehead discusses why "the gender-crossed status was more fully instituted for males than females"; there were "[f]emale deviations in the male role", but not a "named, stable status category". There were two reasons: one, it's easier to move down in status than it wis to move up. Two, women were more defined by their anatomy, in particular their reproductive role, while this was less significant for men and made it easier for them to gender-cross. Female gender-crossers claimed not to menstruate. They were known for the "Mohave, the Cocopa, the Zuni, the Apache, and the Navajo"; the Kaska apparently had only female-to-male gender-crossers. Some had wives.
 
Without taking on this "fourth gender" identity, IIUC, women might also temporarily engage in male tasks (for example out of economic need), they might be trained in male skills by a husband or father, or they might "consistently cultivat[e] male skills from an early age". Women who were successful in the male domain were honoured as if they were men. OTOH, because "[w]omen's labour was not subject to total or even very extensive appropriation by men", a gender-crosser might make himself rich and respected with his expertise in female crafts.
 
The male gender-crosser was "a mixed creature", a "man-woman" or "part-man, part-woman". Whitehead remarks that "Navajo, Cheyenne, and Mohave lore about the berdache's exceptional abilities as a matchmaker, love magician, or curer of venereal disease again expresses the logic that the berdache unites in himself both sexes, therefore he is in a position to facilitate the union of the sexes." He might engage in male tasks as well as female, and/or have "specialized duties" such as handling corpses, carrying provisions for war parties, and looking after the sick.
 
Whitehead discusses why these cultures were "permissive" towards gender-crossers. She suggests this is because of the belief that peoples' characteristics, their talents, luck, and idiosyncracies, were unpredictably assigned to them by supernatural helpers (often via visions). The gender-crosser was just one of many types of person whose nature was decreed by forces beyond human control. (Carolyn Epple explains that the Navajo see an individual as the product of complex, cyclical natural processes, not "a handful of traits".)
 
Finally, Peter A. Jackson's chapter "Tolerant but Unaccepting: the myth of a Thai 'Gay Paradise'" does what it says on the tin, debunking the myth that Thailand is accepting of "non-normative sex/gender behaviours". Homosexuality is not illegal, nor considered immoral by the Buddhist majority, and gay-bashing is rare; however, homophobic rhetoric comes from both popular and official sources, pressure to conform comes from parents and from shaming through gossip, and "cross-dressing kathoey, like Thai women, are often subject to sexual harassment and even sexual violence by heterosexually identifying males." "Tolerance," Jackson writes, "denotes a preparedness to endure, put up with, or permit to exist, but does not necessarily imply the lack of criticism or the favorable or approving attitude connoted by acceptance."
 
The kathoey identity includes intersex people as well as cross-dressing and transgender men. They are assumed to take non-kathoey men as their lovers; they are more accepted than male-identifying gay men, whose existence seems to have come as something of a shock to mainstream Thai culture in the mid-60s. In turn, kathoey who "exhibit a high standard of feminine beauty and who adopt the reserved, polite manners and speech of a genteel Thai man or woman" are more accepted than those considered "loud-mouthed, aggressive or lewd". (Perhaps this is another example of a confining, rather than freeing, "third gender".) A heterosexual man can have sex with a kathoey without losing his masculinity, assuming he takes the role of "husband".
 
Jackson comments on the multiple masculinities present in Thai culture, remarking that "in classical and some contemporary literature it is not unusual for the ideal Thai man to be portrayed as soft-featured, occasionally being equally sexually attractive to men." There's a class component to this as well, I think, as in a 1991 story Jackson cites in which an "ambiguously attractive" refined nobleman, a kathoey, is contrasted with a peasant with "rough manners, a dark complexion and coarse features".
 
It's only natural that LGBT+ people would look to other cultures for evidence of their existence and acceptance. These writers are just cautioning against imposing Western ideas onto non-Western cultures. Even my slight reading has made it clear that Western assumptions about gender and sexuality - even the concepts "gender" and "sexuality" - are not natural and universal. That profoundly challenges sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.
 
__
 
Epple, Carolyn. Coming to Terms with Navajo "nádleehí": A Critique of "berdache," "Gay," "Alternate Gender," and "Two-Spirit". American Ethnologist, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 267-290.
 
Jackson, Peter A. "Tolerant but Unaccepting: the myth of a Thai 'Gay Paradise'." in Peter A. Jackson and Nerida M. Cook (eds). Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand. Silkworm, Chiang Mai, 1999.
 
Towle, Evan B. and Lynn M. Morgan. "Romancing the Transgender Native: Rethinking the Use of the 'Third Gender' Concept". in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds).The Transgender Studies Reader. New York, Routledge, 2006.
 
Whitehead, Harriet. "The Bow and the Burden Strap: A New Look At Institutionalized Homosexuality in Native North America". in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (eds). The Transgender Studies Reader. London, Routledge, 2006. (Originally published in Sherry B. Ortner and Harriet Whitehead (eds). Sexual Meaning: the Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge University Press, 1981. pp 80-115.)

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With the ugly possibility of a pointless postal survey on same-sex marriage in Australia, with the inevitable attendant claims that marriage has eternally and universally between one woman and one man, it seems like a good idea to revisit the fact of woman-woman marriage in traditional African societies with a few notes from the book Male Daughters, Female Husbands, a study of gender roles and relations in the Igbo town of Nnobi, Nigeria.

In Nnobi, writes Ifi Amadiume, "'male daughters', first daughters, barren women, rich widows, wives of rich men and successful female farmers and traders" all might have wives of their own. The term for woman-woman marriage was igba ohu. "Such wives, it seems, came from other towns. The 'female' husband might give the wife a (male) husband somewhere else and adopt the role of mother to her but claim her services. The wives might also stay with her, bearing children in her name."

Wives and children were a kind of wealth, for both men and women - "a question of a large workforce versus a small workforce". Women's wealth might also include animals and crops, but not land, which was passed from father to son. What to do, then, when there was no son? As with the Hittites and Hurrians, the solution was simple: give a daughter the status of a son, with a ceremony in which the father summoned "members of his patrilineage and gave them palm wine".

Generally, men owned the land and women worked it; Amadiume notes that women's access to gardens and farm land depended on men. She writes: "On the death of a husband, a wife's continued access to farmland depended on her having a son, or a 'male daughter'. On the death of a woman as wife and mother, the continuation of her matricentric household depended on the woman's son, or a 'male daughter', or respected ada, first daughter, marrying a woman to take the place of the dead wife."

This is only one of many societies in which marriage was not defined as one man and one woman, with polygamy and woman-woman marriage both well-established customs.
_
Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: gender and sex in an African society. London, Zed, 1987.

ETA: Nymba Ntobhu - Women Marrying Women. Half-hour documentary about woman-woman marriage among the Kurya people of Tanzania. Men's violence and mistreatment of women and children is very clearly a major reason for the practice.

ikhet_sekhmet: (Default)
(One of these days I would like to go back through all these jillions of links and organise them by subject. "'I would like'? I would like a trip to Europe!" - Daffy Duck)

Anat: Autonomous Goddess Of Ugarit. Presented by Ellie Wilson at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual meeting, November 1993.

Artefacts found in Pilbara cave show Aboriginal life in northern WA dates back 50,000 years (ABC, 19 May 2017) | The extraordinary science behind an Aboriginal history discovery 65,000 years in the making (SMH, 20 July 2017). "Artefacts found in Kakadu national park show that Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for a minimum of 65,000 years, 18,000 years longer than the previous estimate."

The world's oldest observatory? How Aboriginal astronomy provides clues to ancient life (Lateline, 13 October 2016) | How astronomy paved the way for terra nullius, and helped to get rid of it too (phys.org, 14 October 2016)

Ancient Humans Liked Getting Tipsy, Too (Smithsonian.com, 10 July 2017) | What wine did Jesus drink at the Last Supper? (phys.org, 17 April 2017) | Barley dormancy mutation suggests beer motivated early farmers (phys.org, 21 November 2016) | Revealing the science of Aboriginal fermentation (phys.org, 24 October 2016)

Late last year the Brooklyn Museum's Tumblr posted about the use of "Visible-Induced Luminescence imaging to map the presence of Egyptian blue". Meanwhile, the earliest known use of Egyptian blue has been identified in a bowl from the time of King Scorpion.

Archaeologists discover earliest monumental Egyptian hieroglyphs (phys.org, 26 June 2017)

DNA from ancient Egyptian mummies reveals their ancestry (Washington Post, 30 May 2017)

The origin of the tabby coat and other cat mysteries revealed (ABC Science, 20 June 2017)

The Amazon Women: Is There Any Truth Behind the Myth? (Smithsonian Magazine, April 2014) | The kingdom of women: the society where a man is never the boss (The Guardian, 1 April 2017) The Mosuo of Tibet.
 
What ancient Egypt tells us about a world without religious conflict (The Guardian, 30 October 2015) The Faith After the Pharaohs exhibition at the British Museum.


Information-age math finds code in ancient Scottish symbols (Scientific American, 31 March 2010)

How we discovered that people have been cooking plants in pots for 10,000 years (phys.org, 24 January 2017)

Scientists find advanced geometry no secret to prehistoric architects in US Southwest (phys.org, 23 January 2017)

Why we'll always be obsessed with – and afraid of – monsters (Medical Xpress, 31 October 2016)

Inscription About Ancient 'Monkey Colony' Survives [Daesh] Attacks (LiveScience, 9 December 2016)

Women Are the Backbone of the Standing Rock Movement (Time, 29 November 2017)

This is your brain on God: Spiritual experiences activate brain reward circuits (Medical Xpress, 29 November 2016)

Pristine pressed flower among 'jaw-dropping' bronze age finds (The Guardian, 30 September 2016)

“Gay” Caveman Wasn’t Gay… (En|Gender, 7 April 2011) "... she was trans." Or non-binary. Or...

Unearthing the origins of East Africa's lost civilization (CNN, 19 October 2015). Kilwa in Tanzania, part of the Azania trading society.

Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae
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You read something over breakfast thinking, this is short, it'll only take a minute, and before you know it you're embroiled.

This short article from the year 1900 suggests that Ishtar was originally an androgynous deity before being "split" into male and female aspects. Similarly, Barton argues, Enlil and Ninlil were originally one and the same god. This intriguing idea is based on three pieces of evidence: one, in South Arabia, the goddess Athtar became the god Athtar, the deity's female aspect becoming a separate goddess, Shamsu; an inscription which Barton argues should read in part "the king of countries, the god Ishtar, the lady, the goddess Ishtar"; and an incantation in which both Enlil and Ninlil are called "mother-father". Barton also mentions Phoenician inscriptions referring to "Ashtart of the name of Baal" and "Tanit of the face of Baal".

This is appealing, but I don't quite know what to do with it. I can't find any citations of this article (which makes me wonder how I found it in the first place); apparently no-one else has built on this idea (although Barton discussed it further in his 1902 book A Sketch of Semitic Origins: Social and Religious). Connections suggest themselves: the primordial Aztec creator deity Ometeotl, both male and female, who can also appear as a male god, Ometecuhtli, and a goddess, Omecihuatl. OTOH, the Egyptian god Atum seems to have started off male and acquired female characteristics as a necessary part of being a creator.

There's also a mention of a Phoenician idol of a bearded goddess (Tanit, but with Baal's face?). I tried randomly searching for "bearded goddess" and came up with various examples, including a bearded Isis (which I will ETA), and the bearded Aphrodite / Aphroditus / Hermaphroditus, and his/her festival in which men and women swapped clothes - shades of the transvestism apparently involved in Inanna's rituals. Scholars have argued over whether Anat wore a beard. (Which I will also ETA because I can't lay hands on the photocopies right now.)

ETA: After much faffing about I found a section on Anat's beard in Neal H. Walls' book The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth. There's a description of the god El mourning the slain Baal in a series of ritual actions, which includes shaving his beard and whiskers. Then Anat goes through the same series of steps. IIUC what El does, literally, is to "cut his cheeks and chin", where the word for "chin" is also used to mean "beard". So in Anat's case, she "gashed her cheeks and chin". Walls remarks: "the comparative evidence for bearded goddesses is dubious". I shall pursue this question. (Does Sekhmet's ruff count?)

ETA: Here's bearded Isis (click for larger size):



This is a plate from Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker: besonders der Griechen (Symbolism and mythology of the Ancient Peoples, Especially the Greeks) by Friedrich Creuzer. This in turn reproduces an illustration from Nachträge zu meinem Werke betitelt "Reise zum Tempel des Jupiter Ammon in der libyschen Wüste" (Supplements to my work titled "Journey to the Temple of Jupiter Ammon in the Libyan Desert) (whew!) by Heinrich Karl Minutoli. Here, alas, the trail runs out: Minutoli tells us that this is a relief in the Palazzo Grimani in Venice, and that is Graeco-Roman, but gives no further information.
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Barton, George A. An Androgynous Babylonian Divinity. Journal of the American Oriental Society 21, 1900, pp. 185-187
Walls, Neal H. The Goddess Anat in Ugaritic Myth. Scholars Press, Atlanta GA, 1992.
ikhet_sekhmet: (Default)
Behold:



These figures appear on the back pillar of a magical healing statue, Turin 3031, which portrayed a man holding a Horus cippus. Only the lower part has survived.

If that's an accurate rendering of "Sekhmet the Great, beloved of Ptah", then her phallus seems to have slid down to her knees. Kákosy compares her to other lioness-headed, ithyphallic figures, from Karnak and Hibis, and also "the statue in Naples inv. 1065 back pillar right side ref V.1.", which alas I seem to have neglected to photocopy.

There are enough examples of this figure - the ithyphallic lioness-headed goddess - to say that it was definitely A Thing, a rare example of androgyny in Egyptian religion. But what did it mean to the ancients? If it's a syncretism between Mut or Sekhmet and a specific male god or gods, then why not name them? Perhaps it was comparable to pantheistic figures - showing that the deity in question had the powers of all the gods, male and female?

ETA: Figures labelled as Sekhmet appear elsewhere on the same statue - which makes sense for a goddess associated with sickiness and healing. The goddess takes various forms: holding two snakes; holding a long double-headed snake ("Sekhmet who subdues the Rebel"); as a lion-headed uraeus, presented with the wedjat by a baboon (presumably a reference to the tale of the Distant Goddess); and as a lion lying on a shrine, wearing the atef crown ("Sekhmet the Great who dwells in the City" (perhaps Thebes)).

Nefertum also makes multiple appearances, firstly to the left of Horus on the cippus, in the form of a lotus with tall plume hung with two pairs of menits. The texts on the cippus which refer to this symbol name "Horus the Saviour", who Kákosy speculates was identified with Nefertem in this case. Kákosy writes that this symbol was "a potent emblem" and says that Nefertem and his lotus often appear in magic; Horus on the papyrus, which appears on the right side of the cippus opposite Neferterm's symbol as its "counterpart", "may have been the symbol of rejuvenation and freshness of health" as well as the union of male and female (many goddesses hold a papyriform sceptre).

There are several other interesting figures, such as Sobek pulling a snake out of his mouth and two cats flanking a sistrum. "Khonsu the Great who came forth from the Nun" appears in the form of a crocodile on a pedestal with a falcon-head and sun-disc emerging from its back.

__
Kákosy, László. Egyptian Healing Statues in Three Museums in Italy: Turin, Florence, Naples. Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali, Soprintendenza al Museo delle antichità egizie, 1999.
ikhet_sekhmet: (ankh-mi-re)
A long, copiously footnoted, often technical, and frequently filthy dirty article, "A Cloud Roams and Beautifies by Spitting Out Her Brother" discusses a Ugaritic composition called KTU 1.96. The author, Matthew S. Tarazi, discusses prevous interpretations of the hymn, and gives his own: it describes the goddess Anat, acting as the "servant-messenger" of the storm-god Baal, collecting the rainwaters and distributing them to the freshwater springs which are essential for civilisation. Here's his translation of the first 9 1/2 lines:

"A Cloud roams and beautifies by spitting out her brother —
And her brother is beautiful, how very beautiful!
May she devour his flesh without a knife,
May she drink his blood without a cup:
May she face the spring of shame.
From the spring of shame may she face the spring of the market, the spring of the assembly, the spring of the gate."

Tarazi interprets this as Anat performing fellatio on Baal to obtain his semen, which she then distributes to the underground springs and brings to the surface, fertilising ("beautifying") the land. Baal's "flesh and blood" is his "entire essence and nature", the rainwater; the "spring of shame" is Baal's penis. The market, assembly, and gate are all "components of civilized life in Ugarit", so Anat's visit "vivif[ies] these sectors of life and civilization." The title of the hymn can be less poetically interpreted as "A cloud roams and irrigates by emitting out rainwaters", fertilising the earth "so that it brings forth magnificent life, vegetation, and civilization".

The Ugaritic word 'nn means both "cloud" and "servant, messenger"; it makes perfect sense for the storm-god's servants and messengers, including in this case Anat, to be clouds.

"Shame" seems like such an odd word in such a positive context. I wonder if it's really the right translation. Tarazi points out that Anat herself might not feel ashamed, even if "she is shameful by certain social standards".

Tarazi argues that it's Baal who does the fertilising here; although she acquires his waters in an *ahem* active manner, Anat is his agent, not a fertility goddess in her own right. He believes this is a deliberate change from an older view of Anat as having the "innate capacity to fertilize the earth". ("It also accords well with iconographic images depicting her with small breasts, thus internally deficient of life-sustaining fluids." OTOH, Ishtar is depicted proferring full breasts, and yet is arguably a goddess of sexual desire rather than fertility per se*.) I guess that would fit with the image of Anat taking Baal's semen in her mouth, rather than her vagina. (This is not the same thing, but I thought of Atum, who is what Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty would call a "male androgyne", producing Shu and Tefnut by taking his semen in his hand and placing it in his mouth.)

The author discusses at some length "a literary convention wherein [poet-scribes] would pluralize a term that denotes a particular person, typically a deity, to refer to the essential manifestation of that person". (He argues in particular that the word "brother" is actually "brothers".) "... deities are construed as ultimate sources of certain constituents and phenomena of the natural world [which in turn are] construed as coming out from the body of the person of the deity himself, and embodying that deity's essential nature." The point of this convention was to show that the god and their essence were different, but intimately related. It also addresses the idea that a god can manifest simultaneously in multiple places; similarly, in the Hebrew Bible, "plural forms of deity names... can be used to refer to idols of that deity [because] an idol is construed as sharing in the very essence and nature of the god whom it represents."


* I can't remember for the life of me who made this argument.

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Doniger O'Flaherty, Wendy. Women, androgynes, and other mythical beasts. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Tarazi, Matthew S. A Cloud Roams and Beautifies by Spitting Out Her Brother: KTU 1.96 and its Relation to the Baal Cycle. Ugarit-Forschungen 36 2004, pp 445-509.
ikhet_sekhmet: (ankh-mi-re)
Egyptian hieroglyphs at Mnamon: Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean: A critical guide to electronic resources

A Very Remote Period Indeed: A blog reviewing recent archaeological publications having to do with Paleolithic archaeology, paleoanthropology, lithic technology, hunter-gatherers and archaeological theory.

Untangling an Accounting Tool and an Ancient Incan Mystery (NYT, 2 January 2016)

Diodorus Siculus describes the Assyrian king Sardanapallus (perhaps Ashurbanipal) as a transvestite / transgender bisexual and blames him for the destruction of the Assyrian Empire - although the Greek historian's account mostly sounds like a pretty ordinary war.

Ancient Egyptian herbal wines (Patrick E. McGovern, PNAS 106(18), 5 May 2009) | Archaeological team prepares 4,000-year-old Hittite meals (Slate, 8 September 2016)

Ancient 'Mad Libs' Papyri Contain Evil Spells of Sex and Subjugation (LiveScience, 20 May 2016)

Scientist debunks nomadic Aboriginal 'myth' (GA, 9 October 2007) | Waking our sleeping Indigenous languages: 'we're in the midst of a resurgence' (GA, 31 August 2016) | Indigenous Australians most ancient civilisation on Earth, DNA study confirms (GA, 21 September 2016) | World-first genome study reveals rich history of Aboriginal Australians (ABC, 22 September 2016) | Indigenous Australians know we're the oldest living culture – it's in our Dreamtime (GA, 22 September 2016)

How human sacrifice helped to enforce social inequality (Aeon, 8 June 2016)

The Exotic Animal Traffickers of Ancient Rome (The Atlantic, 30 March 2016)

Have archeologists found the only female ruler of ancient Canaan? (Jerusalem Post, 2009)

Scientists use 'virtual unwrapping' to read ancient biblical scroll reduced to 'lump of charcoal' (GA, 21 September 2016)
ikhet_sekhmet: (ankh-mi-re)
Alexander Pruss' chapter "The Use of Nude Female Figurines" discusses terracotta figures from Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine, including those weird-looking ones with all the holes in the head for attaching hair and earrings, and the later, more naturalistic ones which sort of wave their boobs at you. These and similar objects have long been interpreted as "fertility figurines". Pruss argues that "any link to childbirth and motherhood is completely lacking with these figurines". None are pregnant; none hold a child; the hands are not pressing milk from the breasts, but supporting them, presenting them.

"Generally, there is no reason to believe that the ancient inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Syria could not separate the fields of eroticism and human procreation," writes Pruss. In fact, in the ANE, fertility was more closely linked with male deities, such as Dumuzi. By contrast, the patroness of sexual desire, Inanna/Ishtar, was childless ("except for some ephemeral traditions").

That said, questions remain about who used these sexually aggressive little figures, and exactly what for (household rituals? votive offerings?).

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Pruss, Alexander. "The Use of Nude Female Figurines". in S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting (eds). Sex and gender in the ancient Near East: proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001. Helsinki : Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002. pp 537-545.

IŠTAR?

Mar. 19th, 2016 06:45 pm
ikhet_sekhmet: (ankh-mi-re)
A chapter on Hittite birth rituals, discussing "binding" in sorcery and mythology:

"Here [Text F in Beckman's catalogue] the goddess IŠTAR speaks to the goddess Malliya, who speaks to the goddess Pirwa, she she in turn to Kamrusepa, who 'yoked her horses and drove to the Great River, whom she conjured by incantation'. Then all that had been bound was loosed, through the ritual agency of Kamrusepa.

This goddess is found frequently in the circle of IŠTAR (ie the Hurrian Shausuga), Malliya (a river goddess), Pirwa and Askasepa, the 'genius' of the Gateway. Pirwa, both god and goddess, honoured by songs in Nesite and Luwian, is described as the god upon a Silver Horse and depicted in the iconography of Kültepe/Kanesh with chariot and team of horses... The logographic writing IŠTAR represented a deity, at once male and female, of War and Love." (All emphases mine.)

What caught my eye here, of course, was the hints of gender ambiguity; but also - look at all those goddesses! The article goes on to describe Kamrusepa's healing a newborn child and calming the anger of "the Hattic god Telepinus".

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Beckman, Gary M. Hittite birth rituals. Wiesbaden, O. Harrassowitz, 1983.
Pringle, Jackie. "Hittite Birth Rituals". in Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt. Images of Women in Antiquity. Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1983.
ikhet_sekhmet: (ankh-mi-re)
More about Emesal, the Sumerian "women's language" - or was it? Gordon Whittaker argues that Emesal should be understood as a literary device, not as the genderlect used by Sumerian women (in contrast with with the differences between male and female speech in other languages, including Japanese). He points out that although Emesal is used for the speech of goddesses in certain types of Sumerian compositions, "the evidence for mortal women and girls actually using Emesal still needs to be presented." Enheduanna, the "greatest known author of Sumerian cultic literature, did not write in Emesal... even when she is writing in the first person and identifying herself by name."

Whittaker also discusses the evidence for the gala-priest as eunuch - concluding "more evidence is needed". The gala uses Emesal when singing laments and so forth; some Sumerologists have suggested that he was a castrato. Whittaker counters: "no direct, or even reasonably cogent evidence has ever been proferred that the genitals of the gala suffered the fate of the pre-modern choirboy." He also notes the evidence of galas having children and passing on their profession to their sons (although they could have been adopted?) and a reference to a gala as puršum bitim "patriarch". (In Sumerian proverbs, the gala speaks Emesal "in everyday life", but this could be stereotyping and/or satire.)

The more I read about this stuff, the less certain everything becomes.

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Whittaker, Gordon. "Linguistic Anthropology and the Study of Emesal as (a) Women's Language". in S. Parpola and R. M. Whiting (eds). Sex and gender in the ancient Near East: proceedings of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Helsinki, July 2-6, 2001. Helsinki, Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2002.

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