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[haptalaon]

Anyway, it's silly bevause a key thing is that our Powers tend towards gender fluidity -they can appear in appear in all sorts of forma. But in practice, I've only got so much time, and so unless I go through writing dual myth sets and multiple liturgies, what's going to happen is that Deities are closely associated with a gender; it's not really a solution to take a heterosexual myth and rewrite it with all the gender pairings, nor a good use of time.

Comments

[ilthit]

Because a) Finnish mythology is a mess resisting modern attempts at categorization, and b) Finnish has no gendered pronouns, a lot of Finnish deities/spirits have ambiguous genders, by which I mean they can appear in the surviving song-spell-poems as either male or female. Some might have no gender if the researchers didn't default to male. I'm entirely going to run with this and conceptualize them as male-female pairs OR as single deities that are bigender, agender, or genderfluid as suits my purposes, because it is no less accurate than defaulting to male.

I'm really not sure what I'm doing here, I'm just following my curiosity.

I'm trying to think of male homosexual myth and first off the top of my heath is Apollon and Hyacinthus, yet another story of one of Apollon (the sun's) lovers turning into plants. Loki, who also talks about gods wanting to bed him in Lokasenna, but Norse mythology's relationship to MLM/MSM is not exactly positive.

Hah, and there are male pregnancy myths, which might disturb the whole Beltane energy a bit.

[haptalaon]

That's very cool abour Finnish mythology.

With Deities, I tend to assume a "gender fluid as standard" approach. Gender is related to both bodies and society; as spirits don't have bodies or human societies, it seems intuitively true that they wouldn't really have genders the way we do. And that gender is part of the form they put on to interface with humans, just like carrying an owl or wearing a helmet is. Some spirits of ie ancestors, or gods who were once ancestors, have a gender - and many gods have a preferred gendered form.

Still, shapeshifting is so common that who could say which of the forms was rhe "real" one.

I also find that meditating on a god as a different gender helps me understand them more deeply. You get a picture in your head like from a children's book of like Athena or Loki. When you swap the deity's gender, it helps you nail down their essential characteristics. What is the "essence" of Athena's lessons, skills, power, story? How would that appear in a male figure?

I find this helps me get a new perspective, sometimes a very profound one, because it frees up my misconceptions. Because we gender things so heavily. So stuff like, Mars and Thor the male gods of war match our instinct of men as warriors and so on. But Mars and Thor also had agricultural cults. And that's neglected. So imagining Mars as a woman, or remembering to imagine Him as a farmer, and so on.

I can think of a couple of MSM ones from Greece, although none of them central cults. Antinoous and Hadrian - rhe emperor had his dead boyfriend deified - and Zeus and Ganymede.

Interestingly, I can think of MSM legends which are - as you say - usually ambivalent or negative. I actually can't think of *any* WSW legends. Artemis/Diana is often reclaimed as lesbian, which works with the text; but you could as easily understand her as asexual or celibate. This would make sense with the general cultural trend of "MSM exist and are dangerous/wrong; WSW don't exist"

[ilthit]

Heh, I have written/drawn some genderswap fanfic/fanart before and funnily enough that is the context in which I understand what you're saying. The essential characteristics of a character, or god, can be placed in a different social category by changing their gender... As someone who is officially female but actually agender, I understand gender better as a social category than a deep-set identity, though I know it is that for some other people, but that social category packs a punch, and it changes both perceptions and expectations. So changing the gender of a god changes their context. Like you said.

(The Furies as male, for example, would make me think of blood vengeance on a more national, almost political scale. Hephaestus as female suddenly aligns with things I associate with Brighid.)

I kinda do wander if there was some division of labour reflected in which gender a Finnish spirit was assigned when addressed? Like, this is the same deity, but I'mma gonna call them "veden emo" when hunting for pearls and "Ahti" when I want fish. I don't think we can really know.

Ugh, I should probably go looking for gay myth. Or we just make more...

[haptalaon]

Yes, the gender swap characters - that's exactly it :)

I think the concept of the goddess has done a great disservice to Brigit. I've been reading Celtic stuff ahead of publishing my thing, and Brigit definitely is in a category with Hephaestus and the Lightbringer and other gods of cleverness, craft and the forge. This often seems...de-emphasised by her goddessliness, when I see her written and drawn; she's never filthy with soot and sweat with the smile which is the pleasure of the mastery of her craft and hair out of place. She's always a bit...motherly, slender, white skinned and we'll dressed.

I love the idea that the differently gendered Finnish spirits might genuinely represent different aspects. I think you're on to something. I can't think right now of any equivalent deity system, although there are a couple like Frig/Frigga where Deities appear as male or female and we're not sure if they're the same or not. Hmmm.

[ilthit]

Since my last post I've been rereading the Kalevala and it strikes me that Kullervo really comes off as a male Fury...

Brigit's depictions also have a lot to do with modern ideas of idea womanhood being thin and pale.