Hermaphroditos stands secona among androgyne gods. The myth is that "he-she" was originally a fullfledged human adolescent and an entirely separate nymph in the full flower of feminine charm. The nymph, falling in love, besought Zeus that the adolescent and herself might be forever amalgamated. Excepting the pudenda, the body remained that of the nymph. The psyche became a compound of the masculine and the feminine. This myth was a poetic recognition of the existence, at the very dawn of history, of androgynes such as exist to-day.
A picture or statue of Hermaphroditos adorned nearly every Greek and Roman home of the better class. This was because the ancients held the androgyne in honor as the super-human—man and woman in one individual.
Ganymede ranks third.[1] Originally a human adolescent of extraordinary feminesque beauty, Zeus snatched him up into the heavenly zone and conferred immortality that the feminesque youth might be his cup-bearer. The latter's statues represent him with a mademoiselle's chevelure, hips, and legs, but with male breasts and pudenda. The fact that the fathergod of the classic world entered into this most intimate
- ↑ "Catamite" is the Latin, as well as modern, corruption of the vocable "Ganymede." For the relation between Jupiter and Ganymede, see Dr. Wm. Lee Howard's Pederasty vs. Prostitution in Journal of the American Medical Association, May 15, 1897. Also Plato's Phædo. Greek literature in general is suffused with pederasty. I read Greek six years in "prep" and university. My observation is that androgyne scholars have a penchant for that language and drift into teaching it. Prior to the twentieth century, the Greek and Latin masterpieces—in all "preps" and colleges read unexpurgated because the sexually full-fledged have not generally understood the homosexual descriptions—were the only publications affording androgynes an inkling of the secrets of their sex life.
