ANDROGYNES, 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; and, in ge-
nitive andros, a male; and gyne, a female. Many of the
rabbinal writers pretend, that Adam was created
double, one body being male, the other female, which
in their origin not being essentially joined, God after-
wards 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 re-
solved to make war against the gods. Jupiter, ex-
asperated, was going to destroy it; but, sorry at the
same time to annihilate the human race, he satisfied him-
self with debilitating this double being, by disjoining
the male from the female, and leaving each half to sub-
sist with its own powers alone. He assigned to Apollo
the task of repolishing these two half bodies, and of
extending their skins so that the whole surface might
be covered. Apollo obeyed, and fastened it at the am-
bilicus: If this half should still rebel, it was once more
to be subdivided by another section, which would on-
ly leave it one of the parts of which it was then con-
stituted; and even this fourth of a man was to be an-
nihilated, if it should persist in its obstinacy and mis-
chief. The idea of these androgynes might well be
borrowed from a passage in Moses, where that histo-
rian 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 misfor-
tunes 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 re-union; and
their inconstancy, 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 impressed,
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.