The Beetle so far has involved a mysterious being that is able to shape shift into others and what seems to be a beetle when that has other powers per se. After doing some research I found a paper that talks about the beetle being “a shape-shifting Egyptian creature adopts whatever sexuality it finds most advantageous as it moves through London…switching clearly between feminine and masculine guises in order to prey sexually on the conservative characters that orbit around Lessingham” (Stuart).
This is evident when Holt thinks to himself “I knew it to be a man,—for this reason, if for no other, that it was impossible such a creature could be feminine” (53). Then continues on with “something which was essentially feminine; so feminine, indeed, that I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood” (61).
“The creature crosses gender and sex boundaries, certainly, but it also violates taxonomic, aesthetic, and temporal categorization” (Stuart). This is clear as this beetle does not fit into a category that we have created before for previous monsters. This one alone does not really have a specified gender looking at the description of the Khepri it mentions the beetle to be both male and female depending on what is happening. Even though it may seem as though the Egyptians would be talking about a different beetle they aren’t they are referring to the same beetle.
Khepri, ‘the one who comes into being’, is the morning sun. He is usually shown in the form of a beetle, although he might also be a beetle-headed man, or a beetle-headed falcon. He is a divine version of the humble scarab beetle whose habit of pushing around a large ball of dung made the ancients imagine a huge celestial beetle rolling the ball of the sun across the sky (History Extra).
The female scarab would lay her eggs in the burrow with the dung and her young would feed on the dung until they were ready to emerge.The Egyptians, however, believed that the young scarab emerged spontaneously from the burrow as if created from nothing. (Ancient Egypt Online).
Sources:
Ancient Egypt Online. https://ancientegyptonline.co.uk/khepri/
Marsh, Richard. The Beetle. https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacea5cfn2iucvvpifa6t4fbhrxl3atjmqmpejeq5mot6s6r464uvdbw?filename=Richard%20Marsh%2C%20Julian%20Wolfreys%20-%20The%20Beetle-Broadview%20Press%20%282004%29.pdf
Stuart, Thomas M. “Out of Time: Queer Temporality and Eugenic Monstrosity.” muse.jhu.edu/article/697832.
History Extra. https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/8-ancient-egyptian-gods-and-goddesses-that-you-probably-didnt-know-about/
