Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Tamara L. Siuda, PhD, author of the new Weather Magic.
Members of the alphabet community (from acronyms representing different sexualities and gender identities in the LGBTQIA+ community) often have to parse relationships with religion in ways people outside our community never encounter. Considerable scholarship and personal writing about the religious experiences of LGBTQIA+ people appears more frequently as our community becomes less hidden and more accepted in public life.
While there is sometimes controversy about how to describe religions or deities using today’s gender or sexuality terms, especially for religions that predate such terms, discussing why X might be a “gay god” or Y might be a goddess of LGBTQIA+ people is healthy for contemporary people of any gender or sexual identity.
Talking about how contemporary people relate to the divine does not define how other people related to them in other times. It does no harm to a deity or understanding of a deity’s original religion or culture to interpret or re-interpret that deity in new contexts. Understanding these relationships helps create better relationships, and also encourages the religions that form the frameworks for these relationships to flourish.
Among the Netjeru (ancient Egypt’s term for its divine beings), some can be defined using LGBTQIA+ terminology as other-gendered, having alternate identities, or otherwise “queer,” with the caveat that this term has changed in meaning even over my own lifetime. Whichever terms speak to you—and there’s room in the community for all of them—following is a short summary of Netjeru who can be approached around these topics and/or who embody identities we can define as LGBTQIA+.
Syzygies: this word is used to describe a deity who is male and female, or both at the same time. Almost all creator Netjeru are syzygies, including Amun/Amunet, Aten/Atenet, Atum/Atumet, Heh/Hauhet, Kek/Kauket, Nun/Naunet, Ra/Rait, and Sobek/Sobeket. At least two other creators, Neith and Ptah, are bigendered in the sense that they encompass masculine and feminine genders and are referred to as “mother of the fathers and father of the mothers.” There are also syzygies who aren’t creators: Anubis/Anput, Bes/Beset and Horus/Horit; and less frequently encountered syzygies like Bast/Basti-tjai “male Bast,” Seshat/Sesha (where Sesha may be the god usually named Thoth), and Shai/Shait.
Anput, translated “female Anubis,” is often defined as Anubis’s daughter but can also be Anubis as a goddess. Some devotees describe Anput, who is also named Qebehut, as “trans Anubis,” and invoke her for issues related to the trans community.
Antinous, the human lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, was deified after drowning in the Nile. Today, Antinous is called “the gay god” by groups who worship him as a deity and/or the apotheosis of gay men, after he was introduced into modern homosexual subculture as a gay icon by Oscar Wilde and others.
Hapy, the deified Nile, is depicted as an intersex being. Heh/Hauhet also can appear as a single intersex being instead of a syzygy (and in some periods, Heh and Hapy are syncretized).
Horus and Set are described in some myths as having a sexual relationship; in others, this is defined as rape (which is not sexuality, but violence). However, even if we set aside those myths, Set is described as bisexual or pansexual, with multiple partners having multiple genders.
Every Netjer is accepting of anyone who approaches them; it’s never required for any LGBTQIA+ person to worship only deities that match their identities. But it is comforting to know that the alphabet is observed in a divine family and not just the human family. It’s also refreshing to encounter a pantheon that does not pass judgment on gender or sexual identity and demonstrates that acceptance by encompassing all the diversity of creation in its own ranks.
Our thanks to Tamara for her guest post! For more from Tamara L. Siuda, PhD, read her article “There’s An Ancient Egyptian Deity for That!.”
