Episode 2 (Rebooted) Cybele and the Galli: Transgender Empire
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Hello and welcome to episode two of the new and improved Valentine’s Voice, the show fueled by estrogen and escapism. As always, I am your host, Valentine Valcourt. I appreciate everyone that took the time to give me feedback on the new format, and all in all it seems to be viewed as an improvement by everyone! Which is good, because I enjoy it a lot more myself. In this episode, we will be generally be following the goddess Cybele as she is born in modern day Turkey and spreads through Greece and then is famously imported into the Roman Empire in an effort to do literally anything it took to win their war against Carthage. Specifically, we will be focused on Cybele’s priestesses, the transgender women who tended her temples and kept her mysteries.
Phrygia
We don’t have very much information about the beginnings of Cybele’s religion. The first sources that we have show an already established cult centered in Phrygia, early in the first millennium BCE. Ancient Phrygia was located in the central part of the Anatolian peninsula (modern day Turkey) and while you may have never heard of it, you have likely heard of its most famous king. King Midas, one of history’s most famous examples of the folly of greed, was a king of Phrygia. Just to the west of Phrygia was Lydia, which is historically known as the first country to use metal coinage. The Phrygians themselves were participants in one of history’s many great human migrations, and likely came from the Balkans down into the Anatolian peninsula. They managed to absorb the last bits of the Hittite Empire that the Assyrians hadn’t managed to pick up and they stamped their name on the land. Phrygia as a country would be conquered by the Lydians in the 7th century BCE, but to those in the west the area was always known by its ancient name.
Between the story of King Midas and Lydia being the first country that used metal coinage, you can take away that this was an area known for its wealth. Phrygia benefited from its location as the hub of trade between the Black Sea to the North, the Mediterranean to the West, and the wealth of Persia and India to the East.
Cybele’s Creation Myth
Cybele’s creation myth is intriguing in it’s own right. Cybele didn’t start her life as Cybele, but as Agdistis. Agdistis was an intersex deity whose intersex nature was intimidating to the prevailing deities. It is said that they struck off her male genitalia and renamed her Cybele out of some kind of fear. Agdistis would continue as a semi independent deity well into the Greek phase of Cybele’s worship. Sometimes when writers and worshipers said Agdistis they meant Cybele, sometimes they were referring to Agdistis directly. It is one of the things that makes the historiography of our subject today somewhat confusing.
Location
As a brief aside, Phrygia and it’s Hittite predecessor state border the Assyrian empire from our first episode.
We don’t know if or how much influence Inanna and Ishtar’s religion had on Cybele’s or vice versa, but it does leave us two fascinating possibilities. Either we are about to discuss two totally independent cultures that decided that transgender people made great clergy or there was an interchange of ideas between the Assyrians and the Phrygians that resulted in one learning about transgender priests and priestesses from the other.
The myth of Attis
Personally, I think that we have two independent transgender traditions here, and it is mostly due to the story of Attis. The mythology of Attis is confused because it has been retold by the Phrygians, their successor state of Lydia, the Greeks, and the Romans. It is possible that Attis was originally an independent deity responsible for plant life. Every culture has a god or goddess like Attis, whose loss or disappearance is responsible for Winter and whose return brings on Spring. A good example would be the Greek Persephone, who had to spend half her time with Hades, causing winter, and the other half with Demeter, causing Spring. For the Phrygian version Attis was either Cybele’s child, lover, or both. She castrated herself either out of guilt for cheating on Cybele or she went mad when Cybele revealed herself in her full glory. She died from her wound, but Cybele was moved and either brought Attis back herself or begged Zeus to preserve her body forever.
This story has no similarities to the Sumerian and Akkadian explanation of the gala being created to sing for Inanna or Ishtar. It seems like we have to groups of people who independently saw transgender people, especially transgender women, as being the conduit to speaking to a particular deity for the rest of the population.
The actual story of Attis could be even more interesting. There is very little evidence of independent Attis worship prior to being merged with Cybele, and there is a theory that Attis was actually Phrygian royalty who renounced her duties and devoted herself to Cybele. Attis may have been a rogue royal who joined Cybele’s cult and transitioned using the best gender affirming surgery that they knew about. That may have even been their cause of death, or the death myth could be an allegorical reference to their transition. It’s only a theory, but it is always interesting trying to find the inspirations for the myths that have come down to us.
The priestesses of Cybele followed Attis’s example and castrated themselves as part of their devotion to Cybele. Once they did this they lived the rest of their lives as women. We don’t have much information from this Phrygian stage of Cybele’s worship, but we do know that her main temple was located in the city of Pessinus near her holy Mount Dindymon. Importantly for later, the physical manifestation of Cybele was a fallen meteorite in the center of the temple at Pessinus.
Cybele was an earth goddess and a mother goddess, called Mother of the Mountains or even just Mother by the Phrygians. She was the goddess of fertility, wild nature, healing, and protection. She was often depicted with lions or predatory birds like a hawk, wearing a high crown that was sometimes shaped like the turret of a city wall, and a long formal gown. She is also often depicted with musicians, likely a depiction of her followers. The followers of Cybele were known in Phrygia as Kurbantes, in Greece as the Corybantes, and in Rome as the Galli.
Let’s briefly address one of my favorite terms again here. The followers of Cybele are almost universally referred to as eunuchs. The definition of the word eunuch is ‘a man or boy deprived of his testes or external genitals’ according to Merriam Webster. The emphasis here is that the individual doesn’t stop being a man or boy after being castrated. The followers of Cybele 100% did stop being men after they sacrificed either their testes or external genitals (we don’t know for sure which it was) to Cybele. They became women in both internal identity and external presentation. Because of this, the term eunuch is not and never has been an accurate term for Cybele’s clergy.
Descriptions of the Kurbantes worshiping Cybele remind me a bit of my time in the pentacostal church. Before anyone gets too worked up about the photo I’m showing here is a scene from the Blue’s Brothers. Don’t come for me for showing you Elwood’s dance moves. At any rate, there would be some services where we would say ‘The Spirit Fell’, which I think is a line from the book of Acts. It would usually be at the tail end of a particularly intense service. The band would go back on stage, start playing some faster song. Some people would be singing and clapping along, some people would burst into the aisle and start dancing, we had one lady that seemed like she was having some kind of seizure every time. Dad or the guest speaker would be upfront praying for people or speaking in tongues, the entire front area was full of people in prone positions from being slain in the spirit. Usually everyone would tire out and go home after an hour or two.
The Kurbantes had a similar ramp up. Their services didn’t take place in a church, they usually took place in nature. They sang, danced, and chanted themselves into a frenzy. It was such a frenzy that the Greeks would tell someone who was worked up that they were kurbantisizing. The intensity only ramped up as they played their tambourines and drums and very likely consumed large amounts of wine. In some sources they even cut themselves with knives in this heightened state. The climax of their religious rites was often literal, the celebrations often ended in massive orgies. It was also said that the Kurbantes could heal mental illnesses at these ceremonies. It is unsurprising that the name of this type of ritual was The Orgia.
Cybele’s cult was also known for it’s mysteries and cult initiation rituals, which likely traded influence with the more popular Eleusian Mysteries. Between the allure of learning the hidden mysteries, and the intensity of her worship, Cybele grew incredibly popular and spread west quickly.
By 600 BCE her worship had spread into Greece through Thrace and especially the island of Samothrace, which already had an important place as a religious center. The Greeks were simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by Cybele and her Corybantes as they called them. They loved the mysteries, they loved this new protector goddess, they even loved some of the revelry aspect, but the orgies were just too much. So in Greece, they were significantly toned down. It is also here that we run into some confusion due to the Greek tendency to merge foreign gods into gods in their own pantheon, an example of ancient syncretism.
Greece
Syncretism (Greece and Rome)
The definition of syncretism in the context of our discussion according to Miriam Webster is “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”. The first time many of us knowingly encounter the concept is when we learn that Venus is the Roman equivalent of Greek Aphrodite, or that Jupiter is the Roman Zeus. The implication when I learned this was that the Romans essentially copied the Greek religion. Many of us unknowingly encounter syncretism much earlier though. Have you ever wondered why there is an Easter bunny or why a Christmas tree is an essential part of Christmas? Why does Christmas even take place on December 25? The answer to all of these questions is syncretism. As the Christian religion spread it picked up many different traditions and symbols from the regions that it spread into. Bunnies are a symbol of fertility, Christmas trees were born from Yule logs. December 25 was the celebration of Sol Invictus, a religion that had also spread from the eastern side of the Roman empire and was in direct competition with Christianity. Rather than tell their followers that they couldn’t celebrate Sol Invictus, they told them to celebrate the birth of Christ instead. In the case of the Romans and the Greeks, what sounds like an isolated example of religious plagiarism is actually what naturally happened with neighboring ancient cultures. Stories and ideas spread like through cultures, and when you heard that your neighbor had a god or goddess that you didn’t have, you generally merged their ideas into your pantheon either merging them in with one of your goddesses or drafting that goddess into your religion. We’ll follow this more in a later episode, but you can actually follow the idea of Ishtar from Inanna to Ishtar to Attart to Astarte to Aphrodite. In each new culture her worship was shaped into their cultural framework.
So it is no surprise that as Cybele traveled West from modern day Phrygia, through Thrace (modern day Bulgaria) to Greece, the Greeks drafted her into their religious beliefs. Greece wasn’t united in any way at the time, so they didn’t have a single way that they did this. Some Greeks merged her in with a Greek mother goddess, such as Demeter or especially Rhea and tried to make her worship less foreign and more Greek. Some kept her Phrygian but gave her a place in the pantheon herself as the Mother of the Gods from Idaea, Meter Phrygia (The Mother from Phrygia), and even Megale Meter Theon (great mother of the gods).
In Athens a priest was thrown into a deep chasm as a threat to the local order, but it is said the Cybele struck them with a great famine until they apologized and accepted her worshipers.
Attis experienced her own mergings and became conflated with both Adonis and Dionysus. Dionysus was worshiped in a similar manner to the Orgia, and Adonis is another beautiful Greek youth with a tragic back story.
It is from a Greek playwright named Aristophanes that we know that the Orgia was a resource for those suffering from mental illness. In his play Wasps, written in the late 5th century or early 4th century BCE, he writes of a son trying to cure his father:
“At first he tried him with gentleness, wanted to persuade him to wear the cloak no longer, to go out no more; unable to convince him, he had him bathed and purified according to the ritual without any greater success, and then handed him over to the Corybantes; but the old man escaped them, and carrying off the kettledrum, rushed right into the midst of the Heliasts. As Cybele could do nothing with her rites, his son took him to Aegina and forcibly made him lie one night in the temple of Asclepius, the God of Healing, but before daylight there he was to be seen at the gate of the tribunal.”
Cybele’s cult at the time
Cybele’s worship spread throughout Greece in various forms and achieved a moderate amount of popularity, we have story after story in the ancient sources speaking of road shrines and hidden temples in the wild. The Greeks emphasized the mystery religion aspect of Cybele’s worship. Pausanius wrote of visiting two different temples of Cybele in his ‘Description of Greece’:
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 25. 3 (trans. Jones) (Greek travelogue C2nd A.D.) :
“Crossing the river Dirke [near Thebes] you reach . . . a sanctuary of the Meter Dindymene (Mother of Mt Dindymenos). Pindaros dedicated the image, and Aristomedes and Sokrates, sculptors of Thebes, made it. Their custom is to open the sanctuary on one day in each year, and no more. It was my fortune to arrive on that day, and I saw the image, which, like the throne, is of Pentelic marble.”
Pausanias, Description of Greece 9. 25. 5 :
“[In Thebes] you co“They wear effeminately nursed hairand dress in soft clothes. They can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks. Then, having made themselves alien to masculinity, swept up by playing flutes, they call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. What sort of monstrous and unnatural thing is this?”
me to a grove of Demeter Kabeiraia [i.e. the Samothrakian goddess, here identified with Demeter] and Kore. The initiated are permitted to enter it. The sanctuary of the Kabeiroi is some seven stades distant from this grove. I must ask the curious to forgive me if I keep silence as to who the Kabeiroi are, and what is the nature of the ritual performed in honour of them and of the Meter (Mother).”
Both of these descriptions show the fragmented nature of Cybele’s worship in Greece and also their focus on Cybele’s mysterious rites.
It is important to remember that as Cybele’s cult continued to move west, it’s main center remained in the east in modern day Turkey. This home version was not tamed by Greek sensibilities and while it certainly continued to evolve as human traditions tend to, it remained much closer to it’s roots.
Roman Republic
It is likely that Cybele’s worship would have eventually entered the Roman belief system eventually in the same slow spread, but in 218 BCE events came together to pour gasoline on Cybele’s flame and change her religion forever.
it is important to recognize that we aren’t talking about Imperial Rome, but the Roman Republic. Their territory was limited to most of Italy along with the nearby islands of Sardinia, Sicily, and Corsica.
Rather than having a vast array of provinces full of professionally trained legions that they could draw on, the Roman legions were whatever conscripts and volunteers they could pull together from Italy itself. Complicating this even further, Sardinia, Sicily, and Corsica along with parts of Italy were recently acquired territory and the Roman hold on them was tenuous at best.
In 218 BCE the 2nd Punic War began. This was the 2nd in a series of three wars that would be fought between Rome and Carthage over who would be the sole great power in the Mediterranean world. This 2nd war was the one that really decided the whole matter, and it was also the closest that Carthage came to winning the whole thing, mostly due to the efforts of the brilliant Carthaginian General Hannibal.
Hannibal was one of those once in a lifetime great military minds that just seem invincible. He marched into Italy in 218 BCE and dominated Italy until the Romans forced him to withdraw by attacking Carthage itself in 204 BCE.
Cybele’s Arrival
There are several stories about how this resulted in Cybele coming to Rome. According to Livy’s account, the Romans were in a desperate place in 205 BCE. Without the benefit of hindsight, this is entirely understandable. They had been at war for 13 years, Hannibal still roamed Italy at will, and even worse, his younger brother Mako had just arrived from Iberia (modern day Spain) with reinforcements and had managed to flip some Roman allied tribes to his side in the process.
There were also signs from the gods in this time, dark omens that convinced the Romans that they had to do something to stop this war from getting any worse. Livy recounts the events here:
“That situation had filled men’s minds with superstitious fears and they were inclined both to report and to believe portents. All the greater was the number of them in circulation: that two suns had been seen, and that at night there had been light for a time; and that at Setia a meteor had been seen shooting from east to west; that at Tarracina a city-gate had been struck by lightning, at Anagnia a gate and also the wall at many points; that in the temple of Juno Sospita at Lanuvium a noise was heard with a dreadful crash.”
In their desperation they turned to the Sibylline Books, a collections of prophecies that had been purchased from an oracle by Rome’s last king. This wasn’t the first time in this war that the Romans had turned to them for guidance. In 216 BCE after receiving a particularly brutal defeat at the hands of Hannibal they consulted the books for guidance. The books directed the Romans to bury two Greeks and two Gauls alive in the city marketplace. Something to keep in mind the next time you visit Italy.
This time, in 205 BCE, the books guided them to send a mission to Pergamom, the kingdom that controlled Phrygia at the time. The goal of this mission was to bring back Cybele’s physical manifestation on earth, the meteorite at the temple of Pessinus, along with those clergy necessary to complete the rites necessary to keep Cybele on Rome’s good side.
The more realpolitik explanation is similar, but removes much of the mysticism. Rome and Carthage were to some extent proving to be evenly matched. Hannibal couldn’t be beaten in Italy, but Rome was strong enough elsewhere that Carthage could do little to support Hannibal and take advantage of his position. Hannibal wasn’t strong enough to finish off Rome, Rome wasn’t strong enough to force Hannibal out.
Both sides began reaching out to other Mediterranean powers in search of allies to turn the situation in their favor. Carthage reached out to the king of Macedon in an attempt to encourage an invasion from the east, Rome countered by allying with a group of Greek cities called the Aetolian League to force the Macedonian forces to stay closer to home. This was only one area of these strategic alliances, but it was also a big enough deal that the resulting conflict is known as the First Macedonian War. One key Roman ally in this war was King Attalus of Pergamom. Attalus had been elected as one of the two yearly generals of the Aetolian League, and in one naval attack he had worked directly with the Romans in an attack on a Macedonian island. Once the Romans had blunted the Macedonian attack they pulled out of Greece and left the Aetolian League to make their own peace. This mission to bring Cybele back to Rome could have been an attempt to make sure that the alliance with Attalus remained strong and also make sure that he didn’t feel thrown under the bus. This could be viewed almost like the deity version of a political marriage.
Regardless of why the Romans sent the mission to Pergamom, the mission itself was a success. Early in the year 204 BCE, Cybele arrived in Rome with great fanfare. The Romans placed her stone in the Temple of Victory until they could build her a temple of her own. It would also give the Romans time to figure what in Hades they were going to do with this flock of dancing, singing, partying, transgender priestesses who had come along with their new goddess. Compounding matters, in less than a year the Romans would go on to defeat Carthage, their last major rival for Mediterranean dominance. Cybele and her galli got much of the credit, the Romans promised her a grand temple in 203 BCE. Cybele had saved the day, so Cybele was here to stay.
The Romans were not expecting the galli (gallus singular) at all. I have a personal theory concerning why they weren’t expecting the galli that I actually haven’t seen before from anyone else. Southern Italy had been Greek territory until around around 270 BCE, less than 75 years before the 2nd Punic War started, so it’s no surprise that the whole area went over to Hannibal during the war. What this means though, is that the Romans had recently been bringing a series of Greek cities and their religious ideas into their orbit. It is entirely possible that the Romans had been exposed to the tamer Greek version of Cybele’s worship. They may have been expecting the Greek version of Cybeline worship, an insular mystery cult, but that definitely wasn’t what they got.
If you are wondering, like I did, why the Romans chose to import Cybele from Phrygia rather than having the much closer Athenians or the Thebans send over some of their priestesses to found a temple in Rome, we once again have two given reasons. The first reason, the reason given, is that the Sibylline Books told them to. We don’t know exactly what the Sibylline Books said in regards to bringing Cybele to Rome, none of our authors wrote it down and the Sibylline Books burned when the Temple that was their home caught fire in 83 BCE. Another reason, which we do find supported in the sources, goes back to Rome’s founding. The Romans traced their ancestry back to Aeneas, a Trojan prince who escaped the destruction of Troy. Troy was located along the northwestern coast of modern day Turkey, and the Romans genuinely believed that they were bringing home one of their ancient home’s deities.
Regardless of their intentions, motivations, and expectations, the galli had arrived. They didn’t fit into the box that the Romans had thought they would be able to fit them in. First, they didn’t dress like the Romans thought a priest should. The galli dressed in the Roman female fashion, wearing the stola, a long flowing garment and golden bracelets called an occabus. Apparently their favorite color cloth for a stola was a bright yellow. To avoid the Roman laws against begging for alms the galli told fortunes in exchange for coin, cloth, and jewelry. They also wore some kind of crown or wreath as a sign of their station. They groomed themselves as women: shaving their legs, wearing makeup, growing their hair out, and dyeing their hair blonde. They spoke as women, with higher pitches and feminine tones. They sang and danced and played tambourines and flutes and drums. For any Romans who still saw these people as men, none of this was acceptable.
To explain why, we have to dig into the Roman ideas around sexuality and masculinity. The early Romans had been rough farmers and who were also tough enough to trade out their plows for swords and form a legion whenever it was deemed necessary. As Rome moved farther away from this past ideal Roman citizen by changing who was allowed to be a legionary to virtually everyone and increasingly relying on slave labor to run their farms, they clung ever closer to this ideal. The Romans also had an idea of masculinity as something to be defended against the encroachment of feminine ‘softness’. They looked down on Eastern cultures as both effeminate and weak and they were afraid that if they let down their guard they too would lose their masculinity. As much as our current culture seems stacked against women, Roman culture was infinitely more so. Roman women were not allowed to hold office or conduct their own legal or financial business. They were very much second class citizens. Finally, the Romans also held anyone that they saw as male that was the passive sexual partner, what we would call the bottom, in low regard. Anyone who was a passive sexual partner lost their masculinity in some way. The Romans were huge believers in the idea that all men had a man card, and even the rumor that you had been a bottom for another man could get it permanently taken away. Just ask Julius Caesar, who was rumored to have lost his man card to the King of Bithynia and spent the rest of his life being called the Queen of Bithynia. There was actually an entire Roman gay secret code similar to our gay bandanas, anyone who scratched their head with a single finger was saying that they were willing to hook up. The galli were an incredible triple threat to the Romans. They came from one of those contaminated eastern cultures, were quite obviously the passive sexual partner, and gave up their masculinity to live as powerless women.
It’s no surprise that we quickly had decrees coming down the pipeline restricting how much damage these dangerous transgender women could do. Writing in the first century BCE Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote this:
“By senatorial decree, no freeborn Roman citizen may walk through the city, begging in the service of Cybele or accompanied by flute music, in a multicolored stola, or partake in the celebrations of the Phrygian goddess.”
The ban on wandering around accompanied by flute music makes me wonder if this was the Roman equivalent of ‘those damn kids and their rock music’. Romans were also forbidden to castrate themselves, and therefore were also forbidden to join the cult of the Magna Mater. It is important to note here that most of the writings that we have come from Romans of the senatorial class (the richest of the rich) or from people who were hoping to join the senatorial class. These were not the class that Cybele was popular with, and their opinions were not universal among the Roman population.
The Romans didn’t take this out on Cybele though. The restrictions led to Cybele becoming beloved amongst the lower classes such as slaves, immigrants, and freedmen. They built her a temple on the Palatine Hill, prime placement in the center of Rome. When the temple burnt down not once but three separate times, the Romans rebuilt it each time. In 193 BCE, the Romans declared a celebration in her honor called the Megalesia, which would become an annual event once her temple was finished in 191 BCE.
The Romans solved the dilemma of a Phrygian goddess and her foreign ways becoming a core part their society by forming a kind of split between Cybele and Magna Mater. Where the Greek’s had toned down the parts of the Orgia that they saw as excessive, the Romans rejected what one Roman writer saw as ‘Phrygian Clap-Trap’. They instead worshiped the Magna Mater, the Great Mother. Cybele might require singing dancing transgender women and the Orgia. The Magna Mater was worshiped in the Roman manner. This split is easily seen in the Megalesia.
First Attis was celebrated from March 15-28. During this time, there would be two days of mourning the death of Attis, followed by the Dies Sanguinis, which translates to The Day of Blood. On the day of blood the galli performed ritual self flagellation, sprinkling the blood on Cybele’s altar. This is also the day that any who wished to join the galli would remove their testes. Which they had to do themselves, with only wine to dull the pain. So glad that I live in 2024. We have an account from Lucian of Samosata dated to the 2nd century CE describing this:
“As the Gallae sing and celebrate their orgies, frenzy falls on many of them and many who had come as mere spectators afterwards are found to have committed the great act. I will narrate what they do. Any young man who has resolved on this action, strips off his clothes, and with a loud shout bursts into the midst of the crowd, and picks up a sword from a number of swords which I suppose have been kept ready for many years for this purpose. He takes it and castrates himself and then runs wild through the city, bearing in his hands what he has cut off. He casts it into any house at will, and from this house he receives women’s raiment and ornaments. Thus they act during their ceremonies of castration.”
The Day of Blood would be followed by the Day of Joy and Relaxation. Which I really imagine that everyone needed. The festival of Attis flowed seamlessly, and with barely a pause to sober up, into the Cybele portion of the Megalesia.
On April 4th, the Romans celebrated the anniversary of Cybele’s arrival with the ludi scaenici, a theater competition. It started as a serious competition but through the years it became increasingly devoted to comedy and farces. The festival ramped up through the next week where people would host each other for increasingly expensive feasts. The feasts actually got to be so expensive that a law was put in place putting an upper limit on how much people were allowed to spend entertaining during the Megalesia. On April 10th there would be a grand public procession, which actually sounds more like a mobile party, carrying Cybele’s icon from the temple to the Circus Maximus, where Cybele would be placed atop her lions to watch the races and festivities in her honor. Roman citizens were not allowed to take part in the procession and Roman slaves were forbidden to even see it. It sounds like it got pretty raucous.
We have a poem from Lucretius, a 1st century BCE Roman poet who wrote this about the procession of Cybele and her galli through the city.
“They have crowned
With turret-crown the peak of her head,
Since, fortressed in her divine, lofty strongholds,
She is who sustains the cities; now, adorned
With that same token, today is carried forth,
With solemn awe through many a mighty land,
The image of that mother, the divine.
Her the wide nations, after antique rituals
Name the Idaean Mother, giving her
Escort of Phrygians, since first, they say,
From out those regions it was that grain began
Through all the world. To her do they assign
The Galli, the emasculate, since thus
They wish to show that men who violate
The majesty of the mother and have proved
Ungrateful to parents are to be adjudged
Unfit to give unto the shores of light
A living progeny. The Galli come:
And hollow cymbals, tight-skinned tambourines
Resound around to bangings of their hands”
It almost seems like the traditions were taking turns. Phrygian religious festivals, followed by a Roman theater competition and Roman banquets. A religious procession so Phrygian and unRoman that Roman’s weren’t allowed to participate, followed by Roman games.
Cybele became increasingly popular among the Roman populace, much the consternation of the Senate. During this time the Roman Senate was trying to reign in many of the cults that they saw as unRoman, such as the cults of Bacchus, Dionysus, and Liber Pater. The Roman people seemed to have been looking for something with a bit more passion than the most traditional Roman gods and goddesses.
Regarding both how the Romans saw the Galli priestesses and also in further refutation of the term ‘eunuch’, we have Catallus. Catallus lived and wrote in the middle of the first century BCE, the final days of the Roman Republic and the chaotic dark before the dawn for the Roman Empire. Catallus was a poet who was born in a section of northern Italy that the Romans called Cisalpine Gaul. He only lived thirty years but didn’t let that stop him from making his mark on history. He also traveled widely in his brief time, we know that Catallus served on the staff of a Roman official who served in Asia Minor, which we know to be Cybele’s home territory. I will also point out that like a great many historical figures, it is often overlooked that Catallus was bisexual. At any rate, in the poem we only know as Catallus 63, our poet wrote of both the Galli and Attis with feminine pronouns. I have two selections of the poem here to highlight this, the first section addressing the galli here:
Catallus 63
“Haste you together, she-priests, to Cybele’s dense woods, together haste, you vagrant herd of the dame Dindymene, you who inclining towards strange places as exiles, following in my footsteps, led by me, comrades, you who have faced the ravening sea and truculent main, and have castrated your bodies in your utmost hate of Venus, make glad our mistress speedily with your minds’ mad wanderings.”
and the second addressing Attis here:
“When Attis, spurious woman, had thus chanted to her comity, the chorus straightway shrills with trembling tongues, the light tambour booms, the concave cymbals clang, and the troop swiftly hastes with rapid feet to verdurous Ida. Then raging wildly, breathless, wandering, with brain distraught, hurries Attis with her tambour…”
So, again, applying the term eunuch to this group yet again is a sign of bias and academic laziness.
Roman Empire
As I mentioned, the Roman Republic fell under the weight of it’s greatest citizens in two massive civil wars. First Caesar defeated Pompeii, followed by Caesar’s heir Octavian defeating Mark Antony. Once he became the sole ruler of the Roman Empire, Octavian humbly took on the title Augustus. The last two times that Cybele’s temple was rebuilt, it was Augustus who did it and he did it grander than ever each time.
This seems in line with Augustus’s general attitude to Cybele. He gave her imperial support and funding and allowed the galli one day a year to beg for alms, an allowance he gave no other cult. I find this a little confusing, given the emphasis Augustus put on sexual morality and Roman virtue later his life.
Year by year, emperor by emperor, the Roman empire expanded, and with it the cult of Cybele. Each place the Romans started a new city, town, or colony they brought their gods and Cybele was among them. Some emperors favored Cybele, such as Claudius, who relaxed the Roman restriction on citizens joining the cult of Cybele and brought the cult more formally into the Roman pantheon. Other Roman emperors saw Cybele as a bad influence and restricted the cult, such as Domitian, who put the restriction on Romans citizens joining the cult back in place.
I have put up a map of Rome at her greatest extent. We have found evidence of Cybele and the galli in every single one of Rome’s provinces. Speaking of which, if I made it sound like the galli were isolated into their temples, I apologize. Some galli were only temple workers, but there was a large number of them that would wander throughout the empire, sometimes alone, and sometimes with a group of followers, singing, dancing, telling fortunes, and performing rituals. Having one of them visit your quiet village had to have been a blast.
Apuleius (2nd century CE) tells a story about meeting a group of Galli travelers:
“The eunuch, whose name was Philebus, led me off to his lodgings. When he reached the door he called out: “Look, girls, Look! I have brought you a lovely new man-servant!” The girls were a set of disgusting young eunuch priests who broke into falsetto screams and hysterical giggles of joy, thinking that Philebus really meant what he said, and that they would now have a fine time with me… This queer family included one real man, a great big slave, whom they had bought with money collected by begging. When they went out, leading the Goddess in procession, he would walk in front playing a horn–he played extremely well–and at home they used in him all sorts of ways, especially in bed.”
Galli grave site in Britain
When I saw the galli wandering the Roman Empire, I mean the Whole Empire. In 2002, Peter Wilson published a book titled Cataractonium with findings from an archaeological dig in what had been the Roman town of Cataractonium and is currently known as Catterick, in North Yorkshire England. Britain was one of the Empire’s frontiers and was never entirely conquered. The fierce tribes to the north and the sheer distance from Rome just made it a low enough priority that it never quite happened.
Chapter 14 of Cataractonium was written by Dr. Hillary E.M. Cool, who definitely has one of the more impressive names that I’ve come across in my readings. Dr. Cool wrote about a grave site that was different from all the others. DNA testing showed that the bones were from someone assigned male at birth, but the artifacts of the grave were things like jewelry and amulets that had only been found in female graves. Based on this, and some of the more mystical items that were found in the grave, Dr. Cool decided that this was likely a gallus. So even here, in the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire, Cybele and her priestesses had a presence. Also, for anyone who attempts to tell transgender people that archaeologists are going to dig up our bones and think that we’re the wrong gender, archaeologists are too smart for that.
Cybele vs Christianity
During this same time, another strange religion was slowly spreading through the Empire. The Romans saw this new religion, known as Christianity, as even more of a threat than they had the cult of the Cybele some two hundred years before. Christ and Cybele were in direct competition, even targeting the same followers, the poor and the powerless. This might be a spoiler, so heads up, but Christianity eventually won the popularity contest and became the dominant religion throughout the Roman Empire. The Christians also had a tendency to destroy the documents, art, and architecture of other religions, so it isn’t any surprise that the majority of the documents that have survived from this period come from biased Christian authors who thought very little of the galli and their goddess. One author that highlights this is the hilariously named Firmicus Maternus, an astrologer turned Christian apologist who wrote:
“They wear effeminately nursed hair and dress in soft clothes. They can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks. Then, having made themselves alien to masculinity, swept up by playing flutes, they call their Goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so as to seemingly predict the future to idle men. What sort of monstrous and unnatural thing is this?”
Since Formica’s Maternus had published eight books on astrology just a few years prior to writing this one, I will point out that people in glass houses should avoid throwing stones.
There were at least two attempts to merge Christianity with Cybele’s worship. The first was called Montanism, and came from Cybele’s home territory in Phrygia. A former follower of Cybele named Montanus converted to Christianity but tried to bring some of the aspects of Cybele’s worship to his new religion. He called this the New Prophecy, and it involved bringing the passion and frenzy of Cybele’s worship to the Christian service. We don’t know much about Montanism because after it was declared heresy and stamped out a great many documents were burnt.
The second was a Gnostic sect called the Naassenes, who attempted to merge Attis and Christ into a single figure. We know even less about them, they are an entry in a book called the Refutation of All Heresies by Hippolytus of Rome. Both of these attempts eventually came to nothing.
Sadly for the Cybele and her galli, Christianity soon became not only accepted in the Roman Empire, but also its official religion. There was however, a brief respite under the Emperor Julian, known as Julian the Apostate for his rejection of Christianity. He attempted to breathe life back into Cybele’s worship, even writing his own work called ‘Oration to the Mother of the Gods’ extolling her virtues. However, when I say brief, I don’t mean in some historical timeline sense, Julian only ruled for two years. After Julian’s death, the Christians damned his memory and did everything they could to pretend the brief digression back into Paganism never happened. For me it is one of the great ‘what if’s’ of history. What if Julian had lived long enough to make his pagan reforms stick, or even just long enough to name an heir that would have continued on his path. Would we live in a predominantly Cybeline world? What would that look like?
What actually happened was a response ensuring nothing like Julian’s apostasy could ever happen again. In 394 CE, Emperor Theodosius the First ordered Cybele’s temple on the Palatine Hill destroyed and Cybele’s worship was damned in an event called The Persecution of the Pagans.
Despite all of this, people continued to worship Cybele. Her religion was popular enough that it continued without any official funding or support. In one example, we have Augustine of Hippo, also known as St. Augustine, writing in what is now Algeria around 413 CE.
“Concerning the effeminates consecrated to the same Great Mother, in defiance of all the modesty which belongs to men and women, Varro has not wished to say anything, nor do I remember to have read anywhere anything concerning them. These effeminates, no later than yesterday, were going through the streets and places of Carthage with anointed hair, whitened faces, relaxed bodies, and feminine gait, exacting from the people the means of maintaining their ignominious lives.”
We also have a letter from Synesius of Cyrene, a Christian bishop in what is now Libya that I only include because of its cattiness. Synesius is criticizing a woman’s fashion sense when he wrote:
“Next week she is preparing to display herself crowned with fillets, and with a towering head-dress like Cybele.”
We aren’t sure exactly when Cybele’s worship petered out, but its importance in history cannot be overstated. Geographically, this is the largest transgender tradition that I have been able to find. It spread from modern day Turkey to the British Isles, from northern Africa to the Rhine frontier and it existed for thousands of years. For millennia, transgender women had a place that they could go where they could find acceptance and community. We don’t know exactly what happened to the galli. It is likely that most kept temples until they couldn’t find enough followers to keep them open, or they were forced to close them due to Christian persecutions such as their temples being burnt down. Some likely wandered the countryside until they could wander no more. Whatever happened, their memory lives on, and transgender women can always look back to the time that we got credit for saving Rome.
Thank you so much for listening, I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed producing it. As always, sources, maps and other images, and links to my social media profiles can be found at vvalcourt.com Next month we will continue our tour of ancient transgender communities. I’ll see you then.
Sources
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