Author Games: Ragnarok

Best Not To Ask Slot 6: Hermaphroditus

Name of Deity:   Hermaphroditus

Culture of Origin: Greek

Gender: Both male and female.

God of: Sexuality, fertility, androgyny and marriage.  

Appearance:   Hermaphroditus, son of Hermes and Aphrodite, was the personification of perfection. He had a strong sinewy frame like his father but possessed his mother’s breath-taking beauty too, with her enrapturing blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair.  However, after he was engulfed and merged with Salmacis, a vain and lustful water nymph that fell in desperate love with him, Hermaphroditus became both male and female.  While still biologically male, Hermaphroditus took on an undoubtedly more effeminate physique, emerging from the lake the water nymph dragged him into with a curvier body, a slimmer face and a womanly chest. He wears a loose white robe to hide his new attributes.

Personality: Hermaphroditus has the best of both worlds. Once he merged with Salmacis, he could view the world through the eyes of both men and women, meaning his feelings of empathy and ability to see from a differing point of view to his own are particularly acute. Hermaphroditus still remained powerful, just not as much as he was before becoming part woman, but tends not to brawl, preferring to find a more peaceful resolution to a disagreement. Most of the time, Hermaphrodites finds it easier to pass himself off as a woman but doesn’t feel any less of a man than before he entered the water nymph’s pool. He’s friendly, flirty and funny, but tends to keep to himself at first.

History: Hermaphroditus is the son of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, and Hermes, the messenger of Olympus. He was born as the most beautiful boy in the world and of the Heavens, as expected. At the age of fifteen, he went to the city of Cairo, the home of a group of water nymphs, one of which was Salmacis. Salmacis had gone against her role as a beautiful, friendly, virginal water princess and had become vain and lustful.

Chance brought the two together and Salmacis fell for Hermaphroditus within her first glance of him, as maybe people did. She proposed to him right there on the spot, to which Hermaphroditus rejected. Angry, she retreated to the woods and hid behind a tree and watched as the young man undressed and bathed in the waters of her pond. The water nymph was so overcome with desire for him that she threw off her robe and sprang into the water, clinging to him and trying to force kisses upon him. As Hermaphroditus protested, Salmacis realised that he’d never love her and cried ‘Gods, please join us together forever in love’. In this prayer, she was asking to be married to Hermaphroditus, but, instead, the two were fused together as one flesh as they sank into the pool’s depths.

Knowing that the spell couldn’t be undone, the now womanly Hermaphroditus cursed the water, announcing that any man that bathed or drank there would fall to the same unlucky fate that had met him.

Powers- Acute empathy skills and the ability to make those who look upon him fall in love with him. If he so wishes, Hermaphroditus can make those who fall for him die of a broken heart.

Weakness: Hermaphroditus shrinks away from those incapable to love and all the ugly things about the world. He doesn’t know how to cope with such hostility. It overwhelms him.

Token:  A comb made from ivory.