Gender Fluidity in Gods and Heroes
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 25 August 2026.
Many cultures feature gods, demigods, heroes, and other mythological beings with both male and female attributes, and it is worth asking why that might be.
In Hinduism, Vishnu’s female avatar, Mohini, seduced Shiva, later giving birth to the god Shasta. Shiva himself is often represented as Ardhanarishvara, an androgynous composite of Shiva and Parvati with a body that is male on the right-hand side and female on the left.
This recalls the Greek Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who became fused with the nymph Salmacis—giving us the word ‘hermaphrodite’.
The great warrior of the Mahabharata epic, Arjuna—a kind of Hindu Achilles, but more thoughtful—spent a year as a woman, during which he took the name of Brihannala, and taught song and dance to the princess Uttara.
Speaking of Achilles, to prevent him from dying at Troy, as had been foretold, his mother Thetis sent him to live at the court of the king of Skyros disguised as another daughter of the king, under the name of Pyrrha (‘the red-haired’), Issa, or Kerkysera. The great killing machine of Homer’s Iliad was for a time a shy princess.
Hapi, the god of the annual flooding of the Nile, brought such fertility to the land of Egypt as to be regarded by some as the father or most important of the gods. He is usually portrayed as intersex, with a ceremonial false beard and pendulous breasts.
Hapi might be compared to Tlazolteotl, the Aztec goddess of fertility and sexuality, who was associated with the moon and, like the moon in Aztec culture, had both male and female attributes. Tlazolteotl inspired vice, but as Tlaelcuani the ‘Eater of Filth’ she was also able—not unlike Jesus—to purify sinners by absorbing their sins.
The Mesopotamian Ishtar, the beautiful goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex, was sometimes represented with a beard to emphasise her more bellicose side. Ishtar could change a man into a woman, and the assinnu, kurgarru, and kuku’u who tended to her cult had both male and female features.
After the hero Gilgamesh rejected her offer of marriage, Ishtar unleashed the Bull of Heaven, leading to the death of Enkidu, whom Gilgamesh loved more than anyone: ‘Hear me, great ones of Uruk/ I weep for Enkidu, my friend/ Bitterly mourning like a woman mourning.’
Gilgamesh bears more than a passing resemblance to the Greek Herakles (Hercules), who spent a year enslaved to Omphale, Queen of Lydia. Omphale made Herakles wear her clothes and sit at the spinning wheel, while she herself wore the skin of the Nemean Lion and brandished his olive-wood club.
To seduce the nymph Callisto, Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, took the form of the goddess Artemis. Zeus took many lovers, but, according to the historian Xenophon (d. 354 BCE), granted immortality to but one, the Trojan prince Ganymede, whom he abducted and appointed his cupbearer.
Other instances of same-sex (typically male) love in Greek myth include: Apollo and Hyacinthus, Hermes and Krokus, Dionysus and Ampelos, Poseidon and Pelops, Orpheus and Kalais, and Herakles and Abderus, Hylas, and Iolaus. In these pairings, the eromenoi (younger men) usually got killed, with the first three, Hyacinthus, Krokus, and Ampelos, each finishing up as a flower or flowering plant, the hyacinth, the crocus, and the vine. If you love a god, you will probably die, but you will also flourish.
Also in Greek myth, the prophet Teiresias spent seven years as a woman, even giving birth to children in that time. One day, Zeus and his wife Hera dragged Teiresias into an argument about who has the greater pleasure in sex: woman, as Zeus claimed, or man, as Hera countered. Teiresias averred that, ‘Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.’ For this, Hera struck him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven generations.
Even the hyper-masculine Thor, the Germanic god of thunder, had to travel to the land of the giants dressed as a bride to retrieve his hammer, Mjölnir, without which he and the other Asgardian gods would have fallen to the giants.
But Thor had nothing on Loki, who turned himself into a mare, mated with the stallion Svaðilfari, and gave birth to Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin.
What It All Means
How might all this gender bending be read?
The union of masculine and feminine elements shows them to be complementary, inseparable, or one and the same, while also emphasising divine attributes such as power, fertility or creativity, and boundlessness. In its completeness, the union of the sexes also represents perfection and self-sufficiency, and, by extension, serenity or even ecstasy.
Spiritual schools tend to look favourably upon sexlessness, especially in the priestly caste, since the attraction between man and woman—or indeed between man and man, or woman and woman—gives rise to worldly concerns and attachments, such as children and a home, and jealousy and heartbreak, which can detract from spiritual work and the wisdom and liberation at which it aims.
In heroes, gender fluidity may mark out the hero as something more than a mere mortal. It may also, like the katabasis (descent into hell) undertaken by Gilgamesh, Herakles, Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas, and other mythical heroes, represent the search for knowledge, especially self-knowledge, which is the hallmark of the heroic quest.
As well as the search for knowledge, the katabasis represents death and rebirth. Wisdom is perspective, that is, objectivity rather than subjectivity—and the pretender has to die to himself, to die as a subject, to be reborn as a hero. The time that he spends as a woman, or in the guise of a woman, is another way of making the same point. To become more than himself, the hero must first cease to be merely himself.
But there is also an uglier, misogynistic aspect to all this gender shifting. Especially in Western myths, there is often the suggestion, as with Herakles and Teiresias, that having to spend time as a woman is a kind of humiliating punishment—made all the worse, in their particular cases, for being meted out by a woman.
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth and For Better For Worse: Essays On Sex, Love, Marriage, and More.
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