for Queer Ecologies
Anasyrma
Pia Bakala, Trancestor, 2022–2023. Oil on canvas © Pia Bakala
Anasyrma is a pose found within the ancient Greek sculptural tradition wherein a figure lifts their garments in the act of revealing the genitals or buttocks. It is common in depictions of the deity Hermaphroditus, the mythological offspring of Hermes and Aphrodite possessing both male and female sex characteristics. In the context of queer ecologies, the image of Hermaphroditus Anasyrma presents an opportunity to view Greco-Roman cosmology from a non-binary critical perspective, with implications for our own understanding of the complex and divinely-guided spectra of gender and sexuality.
The Greek pantheon is composed of figurative amalgamations of human characteristics, deities formed to explain and characterize the world through human archetypes. Sculptural depictions of Hermaphroditus Anasyrma and other gender-bending deities add evidence not only to the fact that that gender diversity existed in ancient Mediterranean society, but that gender fluidity was an important aspect of religious belief.[i] In The Saturnalia, Roman historian Macrobius details the traditional worship of Aphroditus, a masculine form of Venus:
“Therefore, worshiping Venus, the giver of life, whether the deity is female or male—even as is the life-giving deity [the Moon] that shines by night…Venus is the moon and that men offer sacrifice to the moon dressed as women, and women dressed as men, because the moon is thought to be both male and female.”[ii]
This quote suggests that Venus herself—paragon of femininity in the Greek pantheon—was sometimes worshipped as male, androgynous, or intersex, a fact also evidenced by early Athenian sculptural depictions of Aphroditus Anasyrma with male genitals.[iii] What’s more, the Saternalia reveals that the moon, which was itself worshipped as a deity by ancient Greeks, was considered to be both male and female, and ritual acts of cross-dressing reflected the non-binary and unfixed nature of this celestial body. [see MUTABILITY]
Significantly, depictions of Hermaphroditus Anasyrma that survived antiquity were often depersonalized or stripped of their divine status, referred to simply as “statue of a hermaphrodite.”[iv] Modern oppressive conceptions of nature remain deeply rooted in binary oppositions, with the sun typically characterized as male and the moon generally considered female, while gendered conceptions of “Mother Earth” and “nature” are rooted in narrowly reproductive definitions of womanhood. Hermaphroditus Anasyrma may, at the very least, act as a transhistorical reminder that ambiguous, complex cosmologies of gender have always existed, and that the universe is not bound by essentialist or binary definitions of masculinity and femininity.
The anasyrma pose itself asks viewers to witness the queer body in its divine beauty and vitality, signifying sexual freedom and celebratory expression.[v] [see EROS] To be witnessed becomes a means for self-actualization, and Hermaphroditus Anasyrma becomes a mythic transestor(trans-ancestor), proof of a rich yet underrecognized mythological history of the sacred existence of trans, intersex, and gender-non-conforming identities.
[i] For a deeper historical consideration, see Dyer, Jennifer and Allison Surtees, eds., Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 157-168, and particularly Evelyn Adkins, “The Politics of Transgender Representation in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass and Loukios, or the Ass,” 157, in which the author explores textual references to priests of the Syrian Goddess (galli), many of whom were eunuchs, who adopted feminine social roles and garments and referred to themselves and each other as girls: “In their own words, they construct feminine identities, adding to the evidence that some of the followers of Cybele and the Syrian Goddess–commonly referred to as galli–were transwomen and other assigned-male-at-birth individuals with diverse gender identities and sexual orientations.”
[ii] Macrobius, The Saturnalia, trans. Percival Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 214.
[iii] The myth of Hermaphroditus is a later Roman addition to the pantheon, first seen in the Metamorphosesof Apuleius (The Golden Ass) in the late 2nd century CE. It is likely that the story was an adaptation or expansion upon earlier traditions of Aphroditus, the male or intersex Venus.
[iv] The Louvre’s famedSleeping Hermaphroditus, the Roman marble statue for which Gian Lorenzo Bernini carved a tufted mattress in 1620, is commonly referred to as the “Borghese Hermaphrodite” to this day.
[v] The joy and reparative power of sexual liberation and the queer body can also be explored through representations of Baubo, the crone goddess of mirth, who is sometimes reprepresented in the Anasyrma pose. Baubo is said to have made the greiving Demeter laugh by showing her vulva to the Goddess. See “Baubo, Truth, and Joyful Philology,” The German Quarterly 93, no. 3 (Summer 2020), 359-373, accessed October 30, 2023, doi: 10.1111/gequ.12145
Pia Bakala and Alex A. Jones with QuERC, 2023