Androgynos

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Androgynos ( Greek  ἀνδρόγυνος andrógynos , literally "the male female ", plural andrógynoi ) is a term of the ancient Greek language, which plays a role especially in literary mythology . The word is formed from ἀνήρ anḗr ( genitive ἀνδρός andrós ) "man" and γυνή gynḗ "woman".

Originally the term only "effeminate" effeminate men described as in Herodotus' Histories mentioned soothsayer in the Scythians . In Plato , the word appears for the first time with a new meaning: in his usage, androgynoi are mythical beings who are androgynous , i.e. have both male and female sexual characteristics.

In the Talmud , dealing with hermaphrodites is dealt with in a separate, very short section ( pereq ) called Androgynos , which discusses in what respect a hermaphrodite is like men or women, in what respect men and women and in what respect neither men nor women . The section does not belong to the actual Mishnah , but was taken from Tosephta ( Bikkurim 2) and subsequently expanded. It is completely absent from the first Talmudic edition, but can already be found in the first Mishna edition (Naples 1492).

The platonic myth

The term became widely known in antiquity through the myth of the spherical people , which Plato tells in his fictional, literary Dialog Symposion ( The Banquet ). Here is the oldest evidence of androgynous in the sense of androgyny. Plato invented the myth himself, utilizing old mythical motifs. The core idea also occurs in non-European myths.

Plato's fictional narrator is the comedy poet Aristophanes . He takes part in the banquet, the course of which the dialogue describes. Each participant gives a speech on Eros , which is the theme of the gathering. The speech of Aristophanes offers a mythical explanation for the origin of erotic desire. According to the myth, humans originally had spherical torsos and four hands and feet and two faces on one head. In their arrogance they wanted to storm the sky. For this she punished Zeus by cutting each of them in half. These halves are today's people. They suffer from their incompleteness; everyone seeks the lost other half. The longing for the former wholeness manifests itself in the form of erotic desire, which aims at union. Some spherical people were purely male, others purely female, and still others - the androgynoi - had a male and a female half. The purely masculine originally descended from the sun, the purely feminine from the earth, and the androgynous from the moon. With this different constitution of the spherical people, Plato's Aristophanes explains the differences in sexual orientation. Only people who have emerged from androgynoi are heterosexual.

Plato's Aristophanes, who is himself homoerotic, expresses his appreciation for the homoerotics who have emerged from purely male spherical people. About the androgynoi , he disparagingly remarks that most of the adulterers belong to them. He assumes that they have a tendency to sexually addictive behavior and a related lack of loyalty. He also mentions that in his day androgynous was only used as a swear word. In fact, the word had a contemptuous sense in normal parlance ("womanish man", "coward").

Reception of the myth

Jewish interpreters of the creation account in Genesis , according to which God created man “as man and woman” or “as male and female”, used the Platonic myth when interpreting the passage, as it is an analogy between Plato's androgynous and the first People saw Adam . According to the androgynous interpretation, Adam was both masculine and feminine in nature prior to being split up by the creation of Eve from his rib.

The church father Eusebius of Caesarea said that Plato knew the biblical account of creation and used it for his symposium , but he did not understand it correctly.

A new reception began in the Renaissance . The influential humanist Marsilio Ficino published his Latin translation of Plato's Symposium in Florence in 1484 . He also wrote a Latin commentary in dialogue form, the Commentarium in convivium Platonis de amore , which is usually called De amore - on love - for short . This work, also printed in 1484, was also distributed in an Italian (Tuscan) version with the title El libro dell'amore . For the first time since the end of antiquity, the Platonic myth of androgyny was made accessible to a broad, educated reading public in Central and Western Europe. In the commentary, Ficino avoided the term androgynous and interpreted the three sexes of the spherical people allegorically . By interpreting them as symbols for three different types of souls and assigning the “mixed” (male-female) souls the virtue of justice as a divine gift, he avoided the offensive physical-sexual relationship at the time. In addition, he interpreted the division of the androgynoi in Christian terms as an allegorical representation of the separation of the apostate soul from the divine realm: Due to the fall , the soul separated from its divine half and since then it no longer has divine light, but only natural light . However, through Eros (Cupid), the principle that creates unity, it can regain its original perfection. With the neutralization of sexual affects, Ficino adapted the myth to the requirements of the prevailing courtly norms of behavior and a Christian interpretation of Plato. This enabled the courtly reception of the androgyny motif.

In France, literary reception began in 1534 with the novel Gargantua by François Rabelais . There the emblem on the hat of the young giant Gargantua shows an androgynos who, contrary to Plato's description, has two heads that look inward. Rabelais received the suggestion directly from the symposium to which he expressly referred; the Greek text was before him.

In the first half of the 16th century, the myth was used literarily, especially in the circle of Queen Margaret of Navarre . The queen, who herself emerged as a writer and poet, took up the motif of longing in her poem Les prisons , following on from Ficino's interpretation. In addition, she added Heptaméron , a collection of short stories, a discussion of the search for the lost half. One of the cultural carriers that Margarete supported was the poet Antoine Héroet, who in his poem L'Androgyne de Platon, published in 1542, treated the subject on the basis of Ficino's symposium translation. In Héroet's very popular work - fifteen editions are documented between 1542 and 1568 - the myth is adapted to court life. The often changeable erotic relationships of the noble courtiers receive a mythical background and a justification: They appear as attempts of the separated halves androgynous spherical people to find the lost half again. The inevitable errors explain and excuse the infidelity in the partnership. The popularity of Héroet's poetry brought the word androgynous to the educated vocabulary as a French noun and adjective, and by the mid-sixteenth century the spouse or loved one began to be referred to as "my half". A number of poets showed interest in the subject, including Bonaventure des Périers , Queen Margaret's secretary. In his poem Blason du nombril , which appeared posthumously in 1550, he dealt with the fate of the Platonic androgynoi. Des Périers judged their punishment as too harsh a measure by the deity. In French-language poetry of the sixteenth century, the idea was put forward that marriage should be viewed as the union of the two halves.

The Jewish philosopher Jehuda ben Isaak Abravanel (Leone Ebreo) dealt with Plato's myth in the third book of his Dialoghi d'amore (Dialogues on Love) , published posthumously in 1535 . He combined the story in the symposium with his interpretation of the account of creation in Genesis. He interpreted the creation of man “as male and female” as a statement about the prehistoric man Adam, who according to his understanding corresponds to the Platonic androgynous. According to the interpretation of the Jewish thinker, Plato's assignment of androgynous spherical people to the moon results from the middle position of the moon between sun and earth. The moon as a symbol of the male-female soul nature of primitive man mediates between the sun, which stands for the “male” intellect, and the earth, which is the symbol of the “female” physicality. For Jehuda Abravanel, the mythical division of the spherical man into two halves corresponds to the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam, that is, by breaking the androgynous prehistoric man. As in the Platonic myth, this splitting of Adam is interpreted as a punishment: God has thus punished an original sin of the first man, which had been committed before the later fall into sin . The initially androgynous Adam symbolizes the higher value spiritual love, which only acquired a physical aspect through the separation of Eve.

The Platonic androgynous was often used as an argumentation aid in Italian love treaties of the 16th century. Debates about the priority of spiritual love over physical desire and the handling of erotic passions as well as the equality of the sexes were a popular expression of the courtly culture of conversation. The androgyny concept of the myth served to illustrate the ideal of a noble spiritual love and the equality of man and woman in the aristocratic milieu. In Pietro Bembo's dialogue Gli Asolani , the natural necessity of eroticism is derived from the half-measure of the dismantled androgynous spherical people and thus contradicts the thesis that love should be understood as a principle of suffering.

literature

  • Achim Aurnhammer : Androgyny. Studies on a motive in European literature (= Literature and Life , New Series, Volume 30). Böhlau, Cologne / Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-412-01286-6
  • Mário Jorge de Carvalho: The Aristophanesian Speech in Plato's Symposium. The constitution of the self . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8260-3782-5
  • Robert Valentine Merrill, Robert J. Clements: Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry. New York University Press, New York 1957, pp. 99-117

Remarks

  1. ↑ Herodotus 4.67. See Katharina Waldner: Birth and Wedding of the Warrior , Berlin 2000, p. 155; Donat Margreth: Scythian shamans? The news about Enarees-Anarieis in Herodot and Hippocrates , Schaffhausen 1993, p. 4 f., 80-82, 110 f.
  2. ↑ For the meanings of the expression see Henry George Liddell , Robert Scott : A Greek-English Lexicon , 9th edition, Oxford 1996, p. 129 (with references).
  3. ^ Marie Delcourt , Karl Hoheisel : Hermaphrodit . In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum , Volume 14, Stuttgart 1988, Sp. 649–682, here: 662.
  4. ^ Hermann Baumann : The double sex , Berlin 1986 (reprint of the Berlin 1955 edition), pp. 134, 176–182, 360–363; Marie Delcourt, Karl Hoheisel: Hermaphrodit . In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum , Volume 14, Stuttgart 1988, Sp. 649–682, here: 650–652; Wendy Doniger , Mircea Eliade : Androgynous . In: Lindsay Jones (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Religion , 2nd Edition, Vol. 1, Detroit 2005, pp. 337–342, here: 338.
  5. ↑ Plato, Symposium 189d-193d.
  6. ^ Plato, Symposium 190a – b. See Bernd Manuwald : The Speech of Aristophanes (189a1–193e2) . In: Christoph Horn (Ed.): Platon: Symposion , Berlin 2012, pp. 89–104, here: 93 f.
  7. ↑ Plato, Symposium 191d-192b. Cf. Mário Jorge de Carvalho: The Aristophanesrede in Plato's Symposium , Würzburg 2009, pp. 295–297.
  8. ↑ Plato, Symposium 191d-e. See Mário Jorge de Carvalho: The Aristophanesrede in Plato's Symposium , Würzburg 2009, pp. 296-302.
  9. ^ Plato, Symposium 189e.
  10. ↑ For this common meaning see Katharina Waldner: Birth and Wedding of the Warrior , Berlin 2000, p. 155 f. and the references in Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott: A Greek-English Lexicon , 9th Edition, Oxford 1996, p. 129.
  11. ↑ Genesis 1:27.
  12. ^ Marie Delcourt, Karl Hoheisel: Hermaphrodit . In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum , Volume 14, Stuttgart 1988, Sp. 649–682, here: 666–668; Achim Aurnhammer: Androgyny. Studies on a motive in European literature , Cologne / Vienna 1986, p. 28 f.
  13. ^ Eusebius of Caesarea, Praeparatio evangelica 12,12. Cf. Marie Delcourt, Karl Hoheisel: Hermaphrodit . In: Reallexikon für Antike und Christianentum , Volume 14, Stuttgart 1988, Sp. 649–682, here: 677.
  14. ↑ Marsilio Ficino, De amore 4, 1–2.
  15. ↑ Achim Aurnhammer: Androgyny. Studies on a motive in European literature , Cologne / Vienna 1986, pp. 45–48.
  16. ^ Marian Rothstein: Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature. In: Sixteenth Century Journal 34, 2003, pp. 409–437, here: 412–414; Achim Aurnhammer: Androgyny. Studies on a motive in European literature , Cologne / Vienna 1986, p. 97 f.
  17. ^ Robert Valentine Merrill, Robert J. Clements: Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry , New York 1957, p. 107 f .; Marian Rothstein: Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature. In: Sixteenth Century Journal 34, 2003, pp. 409–437, here: 417 f.
  18. ↑ Achim Aurnhammer: Androgyny. Studies on a Motive in European Literature , Cologne / Vienna 1986, pp. 98–100; Marian Rothstein: Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature. In: Sixteenth Century Journal 34, 2003, pp. 409–437, here: 430 f.
  19. ↑ On the use of "half" (moitié) in this sense in the early modern period, see Georges Gougenheim : La déchéance d'un terme platonicien: "ma moitié". In: Festgabe Ernst Gamillscheg , Tübingen 1952, pp. 44–50.
  20. ^ Marian Rothstein: Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature. In: Sixteenth Century Journal 34, 2003, pp. 409–437, here: 415–417; Robert Valentine Merrill, Robert J. Clements: Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry , New York 1957, pp. 105-107.
  21. ^ Marian Rothstein: Mutations of the Androgyne: Its Functions in Early Modern French Literature. In: Sixteenth Century Journal 34, 2003, pp. 409–437, here: 432–436.
  22. ↑ Achim Aurnhammer: Androgyny. Studies on a motif in European literature , Cologne / Vienna 1986, pp. 49–52.
  23. ↑ Achim Aurnhammer: Androgyny. Studies on a motif in European literature , Cologne / Vienna 1986, pp. 88–96.