Androgynes, fabled people with two sexes, two heads, four arms, and two feet. The term androgyne is composed of the two Greek words ἀνήρ, in the genitive ἀνδρός, male , and of γύνη, woman . Many Rabbis claim that Adam was created man and woman, man on one side, woman on the other, and that he was thus composed of two bodies that God simply separated. See Manass. Ben Israel. Maimonides. Op. Heideg. Hist. Patriarch. Vol. I. pag. 128.

The gods, Plato said in Symposium , first made man as a round figure, with two bodies and two sexes. This bizarre creature was extraordinarily strong, and as a result, insolent. The androgyne went to war with the gods. Jupiter, irritated, would destroy it: but distressed at the idea of destroying all of humanity in one blow, he limited himself to weakening the androgyne by separating it into two halves. He ordered Apollo to perfect these two half-bodies, and to extend the skin so that all of their surface would be covered by it. Apollo obeyed and knotted it at the navel. If this half revolts against itself, it will again be divided, which would leave it with one of each of the parts of which it has two; and this quarter man will be destroyed, if it persists in its wickedness. The idea of these androgynes could well have been borrowed from a passage of Moses', where that historian of the birth of the world said that Eve was bone of Adam's bone and flesh of his flesh. However that may be, Plato’s fable has been ingeniously used by one of our Poets whose misfortunes have rendered him almost as famous as have his verses. He attributes, along with the ancient Philosopher, the desire that draws one sex toward the other to the natural ardor that the two halves of the androgyne have to be reunited; and inconstancy to the difficulty that each half has in finding his or her complement. A woman appears to us—she is kind, right away we take her for the half with which we would be made one being, without the insolence of the first androgyne .