Religion & the Importance of Androgyny

Divine androgyny was one of the foremost aspects of Egyptian religion (Matić).  Gods & goddesses alike are discussed in a number of different ways & with a variety of gendered connotations.  The god Atum was said to have created the world through an act of divine masturbation; goddesses were often depicted with royal beards or an erect phallus, a sign of masculine power; the goddess Neith was said to be two-third male, one-third female (ibid.).

Over time, many shifts occurred to Egyptian culture surrounding masculinity & femininity, which, while still retaining the importance of androgyny, led Egypt more in line with its neighbours & changed several aspects of divine androgyny.  Such can be seen through the evolution of the use of grammatical divine classifiers.

In the earliest Old Kingdom texts deities were rarely classified, & only gods, with the falcon (1).  By the fifth dynasty the falcon was standard for gods with the seated bearded man (2) less common, & the strictly orthographically defined Pyramid Texts occasionally classified goddesses with the cobra (3).  The Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts classify goddesses with the seated woman (4), & the Book of the Dead of the New Kingdom often use the cobra in lieu of the seated woman, leaving the seated bearded man as standard; a number of texts use these interchangeably for gods & goddesses (Shalomi-Hen).  Later Coffin Texts classify goddesses with a seated woman with a crown, lotus, or cobra; however, by the Late Period (664 - 332 bce) the cobra came to be the standard classifier for goddesses (ibid.).

Here is a clear lexographic record of the difficulties which arose in a heteronormative patriarchal society that laid such importance on androgyny.  How does one reconcile a gendered language with an androgynous religion?  Evidently a plurality of possible solutions arose, & it appears to have taken nearly three millenia to reach a concensus.