Deities in the Rainbow

By Kristie Cook

If the many faces of the Divine came into corporeal form today, several would be leading the Pride parades and events around the world this month as members of the LGBTQIA+ community. After all, putting confines on who we’re allowed to love is a human construct. The Great Divine is gender-fluid, flowing with both feminine and masculine energies. As Father God, He would be at the end of the parade, waving the biggest rainbow flag ever seen, and as Great Mother, She stands at the finish line wearing a T-shirt offering “Free Mom Hugs” as she hands out bottles of water. In fact, they are there, at every single one, their Spirits filling the human bodies of all that are present.

From the myths and legends left for us, we can see that many of the deities of cultures around the world stand with and as part of the community. Here are only but a few.

Depending on the story, Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt, was asexual or a lesbian with many female lovers. She had a strong following of gay and lesbian worshippers. Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, had many male lovers, and is also revered as the god of transgender and intersex people. Truth be told, Greek mythology is full of gay, queer, trans, and asexual deities.

The Egyptian god Set is shown in many depictions as having intimate sexual relations with males, including with the god Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. Isis also granted what may have been the first Divine gender affirmation, transforming a human born as female into a man.

In the Hindu religion, Ila/Sudyumna, known as the chief progenitor of the Luna dynasty, changes gender in different stories. Agni, the Hindu god of fire, creativity, and wealth, and also known as the mouth of the gods and goddesses, was married to both the goddess

Svaha

and the moon god Soma.

Chinese folklore includes Tu Er Shen, who became the god and safeguarder of homosexual relations. Chou Wang, Yu the Great, and Shan Gu are also associated with homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism. We would be remiss to not honor Quan Yin, also known as Guanyin and Kwan Yin, the beloved goddess of compassion. Up until the 12th century, she was the male bhodisattva Avalokiteshvara, who was genderfluid, taking the form of many beings, including gods and goddesses, to relieve people of their suffering.

There was also the Mayan deity Chin, who introduced homosexuality to the Mayan nobles, and the Aztec Xochipilli, the god of art, games, dance, flowers, and song.

The Akan people of Ghana worship transgender and androgynous celestial deities, including Awo (the Moon), Aku (Mercury), and Abrao (Jupiter).

In Inuit, the creator goddess Sedna, who rules marine animals, is said, in some stories, to have been lesbian or bisexual, living at the bottom of the ocean with her wife.

The Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo Ghede Nibo is an Iwa (spirit or deity) who cares for those who die young and is sometimes depicted as a drag queen. Both of his Iwa parents, Baron Samedi and Maman

Brigitte, were considered transgender and/or bisexual.

Lakapati, a revered deity of fertility in Tagalog mythology of the Philippines, was a hermaphrodite.

In Norse mythology, Odin himself is sometimes referred to as the “queer god of the Vikings.” As the trickster god, Loki often transformed himself into a woman to play his mischievous tricks.

There are even stories from the Old and New Testaments of the Judeo-Christian bible, as well as the Islamic Quran and the Jewish Qabal, that may have shown transgenderism and homosexual relationships, but they’ve been (re)interpreted as platonic or that of unrelated “brothers.”

This provides barely a glimpse into the gods and goddesses, the spirits and deities, and the mythology of the human race over millennia and around the world that show that relationships and gender identity have always been more fluid than in the modern era. Our world—our universe—is meant to be one of infinite diversity, with humans, spirits, and deities alike filling every color of the rainbow in all facets of existence, including love. Because the real Truth is, we are all simply fractals, individuals created by the prism of the One Heart, the Divine, the Source of All.