ANDROGYNE, in ancient mythology, creatures of whom, according to the fable, each individual possessed the powers and characters of both sexes, having two heads, four arms, and two feet. The word itself is compounded of two Greek radical words: andro, in genitive andros, a male; and gyne, a female. Many of the rabbinical writers pretend, that Adam was created double, one body being male, the other female, which in their origin not being essentially joined, God afterwards did nothing but separate them.
The gods, says Plato in his Banquet, had formed the structure of man round, with two bodies and two sexes. This fantastic being, possessing in itself the whole human system, was endowed with a gigantic force, which rendered it insolent, inasmuch that it resolved to make war against the gods. Jupiter, exasperated, was going to destroy it; but, sorry at the same time to annihilate the human race, he satisfied himself with debilitating this double being, by disjoining the male from the female, and leaving each half to subsist with its own powers alone. He assigned to Apollo the task of repolishing these two half bodies, and of extending their skins so that their whole surface might be covered. Apollo obeyed, and fastened it at the umbilicus: If this half should still rebel, it was once more to be subdivided by another section, which would only leave it one of the parts of which it was then constituted; and even this fourth of a man was to be annihilated, if it should persist in its obstinacy and mischief. The idea of these androgynes might well be borrowed from a passage in Moses, where that historian of the birth and infancy of nature describes Adam as calling Eve bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. However this may be, the fable of Plato has been used with great ingenuity by a French poet, who has been rendered almost as conspicuous by his misfortunes as by his verses. With the ancient philosopher, he attributes the propensity which attracts one of the sexes towards the other, to the natural ardour which each half of the androgyne feels for reunion; and their inconsistency, to the difficulty which each of the separated parts encounters in its efforts to recover its proper and original half. If a woman appears to us amiable, we instantly imagine her to be that moiety with whom we should only have constituted one whole, had it not been for the insolence of our original double-sexed progenitor:
The heart, with fond credulity impress'd,
Tells us the half is found, and hopes for rest;
But 'tis our curse, that sad experience shows,
We neither find our half, nor gain repose.