A little write-up on the queerness of Lady ʿAshtart
"Star of Ghassul" wall painting from Teleilat Ghassul; Ghassulian culture, Late Chalcolithic, c. 4000–3900 BCE. (Drabsch and Bourke, 2019)
In the poorly-understood religion of preliterate Semitic-speaking peoples, the planet Venus appears to have been worshipped as a male Morning Star (ʿAthtar) and a female Evening Star (ʿAthtart) ("The Sumerian goddess Inanna (3400–2200 BC)" (1994), Paul Collins, pp. 110–11). This is reversed in the Northwest Semitic scheme for reasons I can't quite remember (Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (2002), Dennis Pardee, p. 275). This may have even deeper, more mystical roots, with it being supposed based on their art that the people of the Chalcolithic Ghassulian culture conceived of Venus and its motions in relation to the cycles of life and death (The Mysterious Wall Paintings of Teleilat Ghassul, Jordan: In Context (2015), Bernadette Drabsch, pp. 32, 57, 154, 162).
Ancient depictions of ʿAshtart in gender-ambiguous form (Sugimoto, 2015)
Although ʿAshtart and ʿAshtar (the "th" sound shifting to a "sh" in most of the relevant Semitic languages) developed with their own distinct identities in the various places they were worshipped, the gender-fluid aspect never quite faded away. Some ancient depictions of ʿAshtart give her a beard and even a penis combined with feminine characteristics such as breasts ("The Judean Pillar Figurines and the 'Queen of Heaven'", David T. Sugimoto, in Transformation of a Goddess: Ishtar – Astarte – Aphrodite (2014), Sugimoto (ed.), pp. 158–164; see also the case of a peculiar mask from Carthage). An association with gender-variant priests is also quite ancient and consistent, as seen with the gala of Inanna-Ishtar and the eunuch priesthood of ʿAttarʿatta (a combination of ʿAshtart and ʿAnat; Atargatis in Greek). This fascinatingly found its way as far as the Eurasian steppe, as after incursions by the Scythians reached ʿAshtart's cult center in Ashkelon they began maintaining a transfeminine priesthood, whose members were called Anarya ("un-man", Greek: Enaree), who served the androgynous goddess Artimpasa (Herodotus gives pejorative accounts in Histories 1.105 and 4.76).
Terracotta mask of the bearded ʿAshtart; Carthage necropolis, c. mid-7th – early 6th century BCE. (The Louvre)
As a Canaanite Pagan and a trans woman, it means something very special that even the Queen of Heaven could look like me.
