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Binary Clusterfuck: How Hellenistic Astrology Queers Gender :: Chronos & Chaos 16



It may seem counterintuitive to say that Hellenistic astrology—which assigns a binary gender (masculine or feminine) to every planet and sign—actually articulates a very queer understanding of gender compared to rigid contemporary standards. It’s my view that the Hellenistic approach to assessing planetary gender—the way that layer upon layer of binary gender are laid on top of one another and interpenetrate—allows for a more slippery and multivalent perspective. In short: gender in Hellenistic astrology is so binary it collapses the binary. 


First I’ll break down how planetary gender is assigned and assessed in Hellenistic astrology and explain what I mean when I say there are layers and layers of gender for each planet in the chart. Then, I’ll point to a couple of ways that this astrological perspective reflects the way gender was constructed and understood outside the binary in the time and place where these techniques were developed. 


First, what are the genders assigned to the planets and signs? 


The masculine planets are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the sun 


The feminine planets are the moon & Venus 


What about Mercury? For 2,000 years of astrological practice, Mercury has been a trans planet. If it rises before the sun (morning star mercury) it’s masculine; if it rises after the sun (evening star mercury) it’s feminine. It also changes from a day sect to a night sect planet. That alone shows that the system is built on gender deviance and mutability, mic drop, essay over. 


Anyway, the signs are gendered based on element: all earth & water signs are feminine & lunar; all fire and air signs are masculine & solar. 


The planetary rulerships are also based in this masculine/feminine, solar/lunar division. Every planet rules two signs: one masculine and one feminine. As the quintessential masculine and feminine forces, the sun and the moon only rule one sign each (Leo & Cancer respectively). That means, for example, that Venus has her masculine energy in the sign of Libra, while Mars has a feminine, lunar home in Scorpio. 


The Hellenistic assignment of gender to both planets and signs already queers the chart. Mars is a masculine planet, so if it is in any water or earth sign in your chart, it’s a feminized masculine planet. The moon in Aries would be a masculinized feminine planet. With 7 planets in the natal chart, each with their own gender, and 12 signs that feminize or masculinize them, it’s rare to have a chart where every planet is in a sign of its own gender.  But when we take sect into consideration, it goes from being rare for a chart to be normatively gendered, to being impossible.


Sect & gender are inextricably linked in the ancient texts. The only planet that belongs to a sect counter to its gender is Mars, an interesting revelation about the baseline lunar energy present in the planet most closely tied to masculinity. 


With the planet and sign, we already have 2 overlapping layers of gender, but when we add in sect considerations, there are really more like five layers of gender assigned to each planet:


1) Planet


2) Sign


3) Solar charts are baseline masculine and lunar charts are baseline feminine. 


So Mars in Taurus in a day chart would be a feminized masculine planet in a masculine environment. 


4) The half of the chart that the sun is in is the day part of the chart, and the other half is the night part of the chart. So every planet is also in either a masculine or feminine part of a masculine or feminine chart. 


So Mars in Taurus in a day chart in the 2nd house would be a feminized masculine planet in the feminine part of masculine environment.


5) Just for fun, and one more layer, we could add the sect of the planet (even though Mars is the only one that differs from their gender) 


So the full gender of Mars in Taurus in the 2nd house in a day chart would be: a feminized lunar masculine planet in the feminine part of masculine environment. 


And that’s just one of the 7 planets in the chart. 


If you really want to get ridiculous you could consider the terms to have a gender based on their ruler, and even the decans, dodecatemoria, and monomoria. So if Mars in our example is at 2 degrees of Taurus (in the bounds of Venus, decan of Mercury, dodecatemoria of Taurus, and monomoria of Mercury… let’s say Mercury is masculine in this chart) then it could be described as being a planet with 5 layers of femininity & 4 layers of masculinity. 


You could do a full chart analysis this way (Mars: 5 fem, 4  masc; Sun 3 masc, 6 fem, etc) but I’m more interested in the way this hypersaturation of binary gender ultimately arrives at a representation of gender that is hard to describe (from my 21st century vantage point) without using the word queer. 


Is there anything meaningful behind these meshes of gender in Hellenistic astrological doctrine? 


That is to say, is it just an abstraction or does this way of articulating the multivalent layers of gender reflect anything in the actual society & culture of that time? 


It’s impossible to talk about one unified understanding of gender and sexuality in the Hellenistic world because there was none. What we can say is that none of the ancient cultures had a bio-medical model for either gender or sexuality, since the notion that gender & sexuality are the realm of medicine is a modern invention. Genitals did not define the limits or even paramaters of gender. 


I don’t want to sprawl out excessively here, so I’m not going to talk much about the transexuality of Tiresias; or the Borghese statues of Hermaphrodite; or the Galli, a sect of highly respected roman priests who castrated themselves and wore women’s clothes; or or or (see the works cited at the end for a few suggestions for further reading). 


We do have representations of queer, multilayered, ambiguous expressions of gender in surviving Hellenistic texts, like the popular satirist Lucian’s Dialogue of the Courtesans. It was published in the 2nd century CE, about the same time Ptolemy wrote the Tetrabiblios. The dialogue tells the story of a sex worker named Leaina’s social and sexual encounter with a woman named Demonassa and her genderqueer partner Megillos who “uses a masculine name and both feminine and masculine case endings”: 


“Leaina uses feminine endings to refer to Megillos, but Megillos refers to themself in both masculine and feminine terms, and more importantly refuses to resolve the tension this creates — they’re a “young man” (νεάνισκος) but not male, feminine but not a woman.”


Megillos uses the ambiguity around their sex and gender to flirt with, stimulate, and tease Leaina (and the reader). Just like in the examples of planetary gender above, they layer binary genders on top of each other, troubling the binary not by refusing it or ignoring it, but by taking supposed opposites and embodying them at once.


It can be hard for us to think about gender and sexuality outside the paradigm of identity (I am gay, I am trans, I am a man, etc), while gender at that time was more defined by behavior, demeanor, and performance, and was not considered fixed, but something that had to be maintained. In ancient Rome, as one example, homosexuality wasn’t stigmatized, but bottoming was. Passivity was considered effeminate, so having the desire to be penetrated feminized the person, while performing penetration was considered masculine regardless of the gender of the person receiving. The way you had sex more than who it was with (along with the way you behaved in all other areas of life), would determine the nuances of your gender. 


This focus on action rather than identity is apparent throughout ancient astrological texts as well, like in the Carmen Astrologicum in which Dorotheus gives instructions for evaluating whether someone would desire or practice sodomy, or not be interested in women. He describes a man being the receptive partner as “acting out the deed of women” and women having sex with women “will be of those doing with women the actions of men”(Carmen, 134). Passive and receptive actions are themselves gendered, as are the people performing them, so two discordant expressions of gender can co-exist, as with the overlapping of gendered planets and signs.


In her essay The Perception of Bodies: An Exploration of Ancient and Modern Constructs of Gender, Emily Flavin draws on Matthew Robinson’s work about Hermaproditus in Ovid to show how ancient Roman customs around what we would consider gay sex are more legible through the lens of gender than sexuality: “what we would deem ‘homosexual’ acts were not an issue whatsoever; the deviance was in the embodiment of effeminacy by desiring penetration which was rooted in ancient misogyny rather than homophobia.” In other words, sex between “men” wasn’t an issue because of sexuality, but because of the mutability of gender. It shows that one’s gender was slippery enough that simply having sex with the same person you were just having sex with—but in a different position— could invert your masculinity, and therefore compromise your perceived power and social status. 

It wasn’t just sex acts that masculinized or feminized someone.


Even a man committing adultery with a married woman was seen as effeminate because it exhibited a lack of mastery over his passions. Interestingly in this case, a man having sex with a woman, makes him effeminate and less of a man. This example provides at least one possible reason why Mars, the planet of impulsivity, could be considered both masculine and lunar.


As you can tell, Roman culture was still deeply patriarchal, it was just a different form of patriarchy that included a more shifting, mutable, and multilayered understanding of gender as something performed and embodied, not assigned based on a paradigm of biological predetermination. 


In reality we know that Roman society was not truly accepting of gender dissidence and the living reality of gender non-conforming people still undermined the patriarchy, and for that was mostly punished and ostracized. In their essay Of Gods & Emperors: Trans Experiences in Ancient Rome, GVGK Tang explains that:


“Ancient Rome featured a myriad of, what could be understood, both then and now, as experiences that transcended sex and gender norms. However, male-centered Roman society encouraged the marginalization and sensationalization of (trans)feminine expressions, identities, and non-binary sex assignments.”


In a way, the mutability of gender, particularly the ease with which masculinity could be compromised, also reflects an anxiety on the part of the patriarchy, producing elaborate categories of exclusion to define who is a not man. But ironically, delineating masculinity (and how to lose it) in this way just confirms the very queer reality that no actual person (or actual natal chart) meets the criteria for binary gender. The fact that these micro-expressions of gender were given attention in order to avoid them and achieve an idealized masculinity or femininity doesn’t make them any less queer, just the opposite. This reflects the way that, in practice, attempts to codify or control gender actually just delineate more nuanced marginal spaces to be occupied. 


This is a very long way to say that I think this particular cultural context is helpful for understanding the oversaturation of binary gender embedded in Hellenistic gender and sect doctrine. The multilayered gender combinations only seems contradictory or impossible if we’re looking through a modern binary lens that didn’t exist at the time this astrology was practiced. If gender is on a multi-layered spectrum based on shifting desires and behaviors, then it’s not confusing at all for Venus in Aquarius in the 4th house of a day chart (for example) to be a masculinized feminine planet in the feminine part of a masculine environment. (I’m imagining like a genderqueer high femme who grew up in a matriarchal family of professional wrestlers.) 


Each of our planets has its own predisposition, but it performs its gender dynamically based on the sign it lives in and its relationship to the sun and the moon. All of these factors add up to that one planet’s particular gender queerness, which then combines with the hybrid genders of the 6 other planets, all of which combine to form us, and our unique gender slurry. 


And that’s how Hellenistic astrology clusterfucks the gender binary. 




Works cited: 


Demetra George, Ancient Astrology Vol. 1


Paulus, Introductory Matters


Dorotheus, Carmen Astrologicum 


Rhetorius, Astrological Compendium






Robinson, M. 1999. “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus: When Two Become One: (Ovid. Met. 4.285-388).” The Classical Quarterly 49 (1): 212-223. https://www.jstor.org/stable/639498


edited: Dire, Jessica and Surtees, Allison. Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World

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