Ancient Greek Statue of an Androgyne, Called “Hermaphroditos,” Now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy
III. Androgynes of Mythology and History.
The Third Sex.
Apollo is the pre-eminent androgyne god. He was always represented with a feminine face and coiffure, and therefore worshipped as the god of beauty.
In conformity with his semi-femininity, he was the life-giving and light-giving deity—both physical and figurative life and light. He was the leader of the muses—the spirits presiding over all human inspiration in the fine arts.
The artistic instinct—the poetic temperament, “sentimentality” in its highest sense—goes hand in hand with a rounding-off of the sharp corners of masculinity. Artistic or poetic decades have been conspicuous because of a semi-slumbering of fundamental masculine traits, that is, the instinctive relish for wrangling and war. The sterner sex has temporarily laid aside its primal fighting function ordained by Nature and become to some degree effeminate.
As a rule, abstract beauty’s devotees—“æsthetes” in the highest sense, that is: poets, novelists, painters, sculptors, and superior musicians—have been characterized by more or less effeminacy. They have been particularly prone to homosexuality. While among full-fledged males, the proportion that has achieved proficiency in one of the fine arts is something like one in a thousand, among androgynes (the two varieties combined), it has been one in about twenty. I will later point out that the pinnacle in poetry, sculpture, and painting has been achieved by androgynes.
Apollo.
But the feminesque Apollo was the god not only of beauty, but of adolescence—the period of life during which human beauty is at its culmination. He possessed eternal youth. He is even referred to as “the boy god.” Adoration of him sprang out of man’s delight in the semi-womansouled and quasi-womanbodied stripling just before arrival at puberty.