Hercules, the Animus, and Gay Desire

A great big animus is coming to a movie theater near you!

I just want to start off by talking about Carl Jung. Jung popularized the idea of archetypes, which he claimed were bundles of instinctual emotional energy. One of these archetypes, the animus, represents masculine traits.

Jung claimed that the animus appeared in different forms in women's dreams, the most primal form being the muscleman. It's obvious why a large, strong, bulging man would represent masculine energies in the psyche. Jung focused mostly on heterosexuals, but a quick look around the internet will make it apparent that the animus also appears to a lot of gay men in a musclebound form.

The word psyche comes from Greek and means soul. Unlike a lot of psychologists who take a medicalized approach to their work Jung thought he was healing the souls of his patients, not just their minds. Jung was a shaman with a leather couch and a framed degree. The soul is the focus not only of psychologists but also priests and occultists, and the primitive animus also likes to flex its muscles in the realms of religion and magic.

Musclemen appear in some of the oldest ancient myths and religious art. The Sumerians had Gilgamesh, the Israelites had Samson, the Norse had Thor, and the Irish had Cuchulain. The Greeks had Heracles, and the Romans adopted him and named him Hercules. He's been with Western culture under that name ever since, and this summer he's coming to a movie theater near you.

Hercules opens this week, and stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as the muscular hero. From the trailers it looks like he performs classic cinematic Herculean feats, like fighting lions, wrestling dragons, battling armies, and flexing well-oiled biceps.



Most Americans probably just think of Hercules as that "strong guy," pure primitive male animus. The ancient Greeks and Romans did think of him that way, but also thought of him as an androgynous primordial snake god, a shamanic traveler between the realms, and a culture hero who founded dynasties and shaped the geography of the Mediterranean.

Fittingly for an archetypal male deity, they also thought of him as a sexual superhero with an unflagging libido. One myth tells how he bedded the forty-nine virginal daughters of King Thespis in one night. The fiftieth daughter who refused his sexual advances saw her sisters were having a religious experience and became his priestess instead.

Hercules was too much man to limit his affections to one gender - the Greek historian Plutarch wrote that Hercules's male lovers were beyond counting. His most prominent boyfriend was Iolaus, his cousin and companion on multiple adventures. Iolaus helped Hercules in one of his most prominent labors, slaying the multi-headed Hydra. The Greeks recognized Iolaus as an exemplar of what a male lover should be, and male couples would visit Iolaus's tomb to pledge their love to each other.

In the most popular version of the Hercules myth, Hera forces Hercules to complete twelve labors for nasty King Eurystheus as a punishment. But one variation on the myth tells another story, claiming that Hercules actually completed the twelve labors to win the love of King Eurystheus. (Like Iolaus, Eurystheus was a cousin to Hercules.) I like this version myself. After all, attraction is the guiding force of the cosmos, so it makes sense that a cosmic hero would guided by a cosmic force.

The writer Ptolemy Khennos named other men that Hercules loved, including Adonis, Jason (of the Argonauts fame), Nestor, and Corythus. Hylas was another of his lovers, a  young prince that Hercules abducted after killing his father. Hylas apparently suffered from Stockholm Syndrome and quickly fell in love with his brawny captor, even sailing with him on the Argonauts' quest. But Hylas was abducted again, this time by water nymphs on the island of Chios.

Hercules frantically searched for Hylas and refused to leave Chios until he was found. The other Argonauts eventually left Hercules behind in his grief. Hylas was never found and remained forever with the water nymphs. In historic times the people on Chios revered Hylas as a demi-god and annually performed a ritual where they searched for him.

Abderus, another of Hercules' boyfriends, also met a bad end. For his eighth labor Hercules had to steal the flesh-eating horses that were kept by King Diomedes, and Abderus volunteered to help. Hercules successfully stole the horses but asked Abderus to guard them while he fought off some pursuing soldiers. After defeating the soldiers Hercules returned to Abderus, only to find that the young man had been eaten by the horses. In a fury Hercules fed King Diomdedes to the carnivorous equines as well, who must have been very hungry that day. Hercules founded the city of Abderus in his dead lover's honor, and each year its citizens celebrated the life of Abderus with wrestling and boxing matches.

These days you don't see a lot of people celebrating Hercules or his lovers through rituals. He's not particularly popular even among modern Wiccans and pagans, but I'm not sure why. Maybe a naked, musclebound demi-god with a giant club just too blunt for modern religious sensibilities. Aleister Crowley wisely included Hercules among his list of Gnostic saints, and some New Age groups include him on their lists of ascended masters, but he doesn't get the widespread neo-pagan veneration that gods like Thor, Pan, or Lugh do. Of course, bodybuilding and gym culture is now a global activity, so he's being unofficially venerated in other ways.

Hercules has been much more successful in modern pop culture, manifesting in countless movies, TV shows, and comic books. This week's movie is the second Hercules film this year - one starring Kellan Lutz appeared in January. In general these productions ingore his man-loving ways in favor of action and adventure, but still consistently portray the demi-god as musclebound, half-naked and glistening. That's what I expect from the Rock's film. I'll be completely surprised if there's any overt queer content!

Regardless of the medium or particular production, Hercules's body is consistently presented as an object of admiration, if not worship. Whether he's an archetype, a god or an action hero Hercules' inherent nature as an erotically charged male force remains obvious to those who look.

I'm Obsessed with Orphism!

I have been working very long hours the last few months, and my brain is feeling a little overheated. That may be why I've become obsessed with Orphism! When the spirits come calling they need to be acknowledged, hence this post. Maybe it will help my brain cool down.

Orpheus by Karoly Ferenczy, 1894

Orphism was a strain of Greek religious philosophy supposedly founded by Orpheus, the mythical bard. Orpheus was considered an expert on all things religious because he had descended to the underworld to retrieve his wife Eurydice, and learned the secrets of life, death and the universe while he was down there. After failing to bring Eurydice back to the world of the living Orpheus founded an all male religious movement in Thrace. This outraged the Thracian woman, who wanted their men back, and they tore Orpheus into small pieces. His head continued to sing and prophesy after death, however, until it was finally buried by the Lesbian (and lesbian) poetess Sappho. As if this all doesn't make Orpheus sound queer enough, he also supposedly was the lover of Calais, the winged son of the North Wind.

My recent obsession with Orphism started when I was poking around the Web for information about Hercules. I've been interested in Herc ever since I was a child. He's most familiar to us by his Roman name, but the Greeks called him Herakles or Heracles, and he's appeared in many forms. He's a mortal hero who gained immortality, he's a constellation, he's a god on Mount Olympus, he's a shamanic figure (according to scholar Walter Burkert), he's syncretized with the Phoenician god Melqart, and he's one of the Daktyls, the divine helpers of the great mother goddess Rhea Cybele.

And, according to some Orphic texts described by a writer named Damascius, he was also a primal god who gave birth to the universe. According to these texts, in the beginning of time there existed only water and dirt. These two mingled to produce slime, and from the slime was born unaging Herakles, also known as Time. This version of Herc was a giant snake with three heads, those of a bull, a lion, and a god. Some accounts also give him a pair of wings growing from his shoulders. Nice!

Lou Ferrigno as Hercules, with egg, in one of the 1980s Luigi Cozzi Hercules films.

This primordial Herakles is described as bisexual, or hermaphroditic. He's a big musclebound snake deity, so naturally he makes love to himself. Be honest - wouldn't you do the same it you were the only being in the universe? This act of divine self-love produces a gigantic cosmic egg, which is filled with so much Herculean super-cosmic love power that it explodes into two halves. The upper half becomes the sky, or Ouranos (Uranus to the Romans) and the lower half becomes Gaia, the earth.

The Orphic creation myths then continue in a vein similar to the standard mythic creation described by Hesiod. Ouranos and Gaia make love and give birth to the Titans, including Rhea and Kronos. Kronos eventually castrates Ouranos and declares himself king of the universe. To prevent his children from castrating him, he eats them as soon as his wife Rhea gives birth. Rhea is not too happy about this, and tricks him into eating a stone rather than her last child Zeus, who she raises secretly in a cave. Zeus defeats Kronos and the Titans, and kicks them down into the deep underworld of Tartarus. And then....

Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, 1823

And then, the Orphic creation myths deviate from the standard Greek myth. In a big way. According to a recently discovered parchment called the Derveni papyrus, Zeus is aware of prophecies that he too will someday be overthrown by a son. But he figures out a way to avoid this fate! The giant severed phallus of Ouranos, "the phallus who had first ejaculated the brilliance of heaven," is still flying around in the atmosphere. Zeus grasps it and swallows it down. By this act of cannibalistic oral sex he absorbs the universe's generative power into himself and becomes the supreme god.You see, Kronos was simply eating his divine offspring, but Zeus actually eats the generative source of all the gods and goddesses. He's not just going to be another player in history - he's going to be history itself.

Well, my brain feels a little cooler after getting some of this down in writing. I think you can see why Orphism is interesting to me as a gay man. It was founded by someone who loved men, and the original lesbian has a role to play as well. A giant, hermaphroditic, serpentine version of one of my favorite deities creates the world through some self-pleasure. And Zeus absorbs the power of the universe through oral sex. It's a fantastically queer view of religion and the universe, and I can understand why it was so popular in the ancient world.

Underneath the somewhat lurid mythology, Orphism also has things to say about the nature of the human soul and how we should all act in the world. Hopefully I'll get to write about those aspects of it soon.