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"
no subject
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"