Episode Three (Rebooted): The Ancient Transgender Tradition Mosaic
This episode features a number of transgender traditions throughout the ancient world! From the Scythian Anarya to the Bellonarii of Bellona, learn the stories of six different transgender religious traditions from Siberia to Rome!
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Script
Introduction
Artimpasa & the Anarya
Now, if you are a person like me who likes to at least try to put yourself in someone’s place from another culture, and you have trouble doing that with these steppe nomads, it isn’t just you. It’s one thing to try to imagine being someone from Europe as an American, or even someone from the past in a related culture, like imagining being alive during the American Revolution. At a base level, there are a lot of similarities that make it easier. Even the neighboring cultures who frequently interacted with them had trouble understanding the nomadic Massagetae or the Cimmerians or the Scythians and vice versa. It has been a continuous theme that has increased the antagonism between settled and nomadic societies.
As an example of this, we have a story from Herodotus about a settled society going to war against the steppe nomads. Darius the First of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, one of the most dominant conquerors and society builders in world history, decided to end the raids from the Scythians once and for all. He marched west out of Persia and looped north around the Black Sea. The Scythians just rode ahead of him, burning their crops ahead of the Persian army to starve them out. The Scythians didn’t have a capital or even a city that could be taken. Herodotus says that out of frustration Darius sent a messenger to the Scythian king taunting him to come and fight. The messenger returned with a message from the Scythian king that I am going to heavily paraphrase that essentially said, “Why? You threaten nothing we value. We have some sacred graves and if you find those you’ll see us fight, but unless you can find those or catch us we have no reason to fight.” Whenever the steppe tribes did unite together enough to burst through the borders of a nation the only saving grace for the settled societies is that most of the nomadic cultures were unable to take strong cities.
From the other perspective, the steppe nomads came from an incredibly harsh environment, and it almost seems like they saw settled populations as having lost a large part of what made them human. They saw them as soft, untrustworthy, and mostly as sources of loot.
It is also thanks to Herodotus that we know that at least some of the Scythians who were advising their king in his war with Darius were their transgender shaman.
Sadly, another commonality of these cultures was that they did not leave us written records. The only records that we do have come from whenever these cultures bumped up against a settled culture that did leave written records. This why we are going to have far less to say about this particular transgender group. Our first glimpse of these transgender shamans comes from Herodotus in the mid 5th century BCE.
Herodotus called the transgender Scythian shamans the Enarei. This was because he was butchering a Scythian word, Anarya. Sadly, if you are interested in doing further research on this group, they are mostly known by their butchered Greek name of Enaree in singular or Enarei in plural. We will be referring to them by their Scythian title of Anarya, which translates to un-man or unmanly in English.
Credit to Liusa-piu on Tumblr for the Enaree image. There is a link to her page on Tumblr in the sources for this show, she does some really amazing art, go check it out.
Herodotus gave one of his classic interesting stories about how the Anarya came to be.
“But the Scythians who pillaged the temple, and all their descendants after them, were afflicted by the goddess with the “female” sickness: and so the Scythians say that they are afflicted as a consequence of this and also that those who visit Scythian territory see among them the condition of those whom the Scythians call “Enaree”.”
He says it was the punishment for looting a temple of Aphrodite, though he is likely actually referring to Astarte or Ishtar based on the area he describes the looting taking place. I won’t go into one of my eunuch rants, but the words Enaree and Anarya has generally been translated as eunuch or hermaphrodite. Which they weren’t. What is interesting is that Herodotus describes it as a sickness, implying there was actually something going on with the bodies of the ancient Anarya, this wasn’t just their gender expression. The primary theory about this is that the Anarya drank the urine of female horses, which is known to be rich in estrogen. Distilled mare urine is actually still a primary component in some modern HRT medications such as Premarin, which is actually short for Pregnant Mare Urine. Transgender people have been figuring out how to transition as long as humanity has existed. This is supported when Ovid wrote about it in the first century BCE. In Ovid’s work called treatments for women’s faces he writes:
“Thus love compels you rather than strong herbs
The hand which the witch with terrible art pierces;
Neither do you believe in the herbs mixed with juice,
nor attempt the noxious venom of an infatuated mare’s milk”
and in his work called Lovers he also wrote:
“She’s learnt the Magi’s tricks and Circe’s Aaean charms
and her art can make rivers flow back to their source:
She knows what herbs to use, how to whirl the bullroarer
and the value of the poison from a mare on heat.”
Given that Ovid was writing this from Rome with the Galli on the Palatine Hill, it makes me wonder how widely used this ancient method of HRT was.
Also, speaking of Ishtar, the Scythians saw their Anarya as the priestesses of Artimpasa. Artimpasa has also historically been known as Argimpasa as well. Artimpasa was the Scythian version of the Iranian Arti, who was the Iranian analog of Ishtar. Such a small world we live in. Just like Ishtar, Artimpasa was the goddess of fertility, warfare, and sovereignty. Just like Ishtar, Artimpasa was linked to the sovereignty of the king through a marriage ritual. Finally, just like Ishtar, one of the main things that Artimpasa was known for was being able to turn men into women and women into men. Artimpasa is likely the half-snake goddess that has been depicted throughout Scythian art. Artimpasa herself was known to be somewhat gender-fluid, sometimes being depicted as a man with a beard, sometimes being depicted as a woman.
I will point out here that just like the Romans calling Asia Minor Phrygia for centuries after the Phrygian Empire disappeared, the Greeks called anyone north Thrace riding a horse a Scythian. Due to this, the horse nomad cultures are collectively still known as Scythians.
Herodotus tells us some information about how the Anarya would tell the future or ascertain the truth of someones words. They would slowly weave and unweave strips of willow bark between their fingers until the answer came to them. The Anarya were known the wear antlers and play drums during some rituals. They are also said to have been ritually cleansed in smoke, grave sites show that the smoke often contained cannabis or opium. It is known the the Scythians used cannabis in at least some rituals. The shamans were also known to have great skill in the use of herbs and healing, maybe even poisons.
Around roughly the same time in the mid to late 5th century BCE we have another reference to the Anarya from the Hippocratic Corpus. We know that the Hippocratic Corpus was compiled from a variety of authors over a wide range of time, and we don’t know for certain which parts Hippocrates actual wrote. Because of this we refer to the author as pseudo-Hippocrates. In the section known as On Air, Water, Places, our pseudo-Hippocrates puts forth several theories for the origins of the Anarya with varying degrees of likelihood horseback riding, wearing pants, or that a cut behind the ear will cause impotence. He tells us that the Anarya came from nobility and were revered.
“And, in addition to these, there are many eunuchs among the Scythians, who perform female work, and speak like women. Such persons are called Andreieis. The inhabitants of the country attribute the cause of their impotence to a god, and venerate and worship such persons…”
As I said, the Anarya came almost exclusively from the nobility of the Scythians, and because of this were the soothsayers an shamans closest to the king. It was also somewhat risky to become an Anarya. To prove that you had the necessary power and knowledge, you had to first perform a ritual involving singing, dancing, drumming, self-flagellation with a whip, and entering a kind of trance state. Next you had to have performed several healings to the sick and wounded. Failure resulted in death. In one particular ritual performed when the king was sick, it was thought that the king being sick was the result of someone swearing on the kings hearth and then breaking their word. One group of Anarya would decide who had broken their word, then another larger group would come in to confirm the findings of the first group. If the second group didn’t agree, the first group was put to death. The harsh steppe had no mercy on those who made mistakes, so neither did those who lived upon it. Also, quick side note, if you are assuming that the Anarya living as women meant that they didn’t fight in battles, think again. Something like a third of female Scythian graves show that they fought as warriors alongside the males.
The next time we hear about the Anarya is several hundred years later and it comes from the Greek writer named Appian of Alexandra. He wrote of the Mithradatic Wars, which Rome fought against Mithradates the VI. Mithradates was the king of Pontus, in modern day Turkey, and a first rate politician and general. He was known to be obsessed with poisons and venoms, to the point that he gave himself mild doses of poisons in an attempt to build up immunity. One of ways he learned more about poisons and kept himself from being poisoned was to keep a group of Scythian or Sarmatian shamans by his side that Appian called the Agari, but is yet another miss at the Scythian word Anarya. Greeks just couldn’t quite get the hang of the word Anarya.
The shaman of Artimpasa appear again in the records of a 10th Century CE Armenian scholar named Moses of Kalankat. We only have fragments of of his work, but he does mention Artimpasa indirectly. Moses was writing about a much later and somewhat infamous culture that came out of the Eurasian steppe, the Huns. In his document he speaks of the:
“sorcerers, magicians and fortune tellers of Aphrodite”
It sounds like they were being tortured to force to convert to Christianity in the story that he relays here:
“When the sun-like radiance of Holy Easter dawned, many of the chief pagan priests and principal magic sorcerers were still in painful fetters, but with the consent of Prince Il-it’uer all the citizens were assembled and a court and tribunal constituted. When each side was disputing before the crowded assembly, the bishop began to preach from the holy scriptures, and sternly refuted them and put them to shame. The wretched priests of the false religion were put to shame by the Lord’s cross which the bishop held constantly in his hand, and were discouraged and disheartened, and accusing themselves, they confessed their sins and were converted to the true faith. They gave their destructive dice of witchcraft into the hands of the bishop, who burned them, and they themselves were made worthy of rebirth in the holy font.”
The next source that we have is Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, a Catholic friar who wrote towards the beginning of the 13th century CE. As you can probably tell from his name, Giovanni was Italian, but he was one of the great travelers of his time. In 1245 CE, four years after the Mongols had ravaged Russia and central Europe. The Pope decided to send a diplomatic mission to the leader of the Mongols in an attempt to keep them from repeating the act or finishing the job. The person he picked to head this mission was Giovanni, who left Italy without even the faintest clue where the Mongol Khan was located.
Astonishingly, Giovanni actually made it to the Khan and left us his observances in a work called The Story of the Mongols: Whom We Call the Tartars. He speaks of the shamanic tradition here:
“The Tartars practice a great deal of divination, augury, magic, and incantations, and when demons respond they believe God himself is speaking to them. They call God “Utoga” (though the Comani call him “Kam”) — and they fear and revere him and give many offerings and the first drops from their cups according to their universal custom.”
Obviously, he is running this through a European Catholic filter. Polish scholar Zaur Hasanov who wrote an amazing work about Artimpasa and her worship throughout virtually all steppe tribes in an article called ‘Argimpasa – Scythian goddess, patroness of shamans: a comparison of historical, archaeological, linguistic and ethnographic data’, explains further about Giovanni’s account here:
“In the comments to this work the editor points out (with reference to Dorji Banzarov) that Giovanni da Pian del Carpine made a mistake and mixed the mongolian word udagan, idogan designating the shamaness with the name of the mongolian goddess. the editor also adds that the source mixed the turkic word qam designating shaman with the name of the Koman deity. But the name of the scythian goddess Ar-gim-pasa, which contains the root gim/gam, (identical to the name of the Koman goddess Kam) shows us that the information of de Plan del Car- pine is correct. This fact convinces us that the mongols and Komans had the goddess, whom they not only considered to be, but also called ‘the shamaness’.”
If you are looking for more information about Artimpasa, I highly recommend Zaur Hasanov’s work. While we do not have Moses of Kalankat or Giovanni da Pian del Carpine speaking directly to the transgender nature of the steppe shaman, it is highly likely that the tradition continued. Both of these authors were not only writing from a Christian worldview, but also assuming knowledge on the part of the reader. The priests of Aphrodite were known to not conform to gender roles, and archaeologists have also found Scythian burial mounds, called kurgans, that contain transgender shaman in these time periods.
After this, we have another large gap, but we do know that the tradition of transgender shamans continued on. We find the tradition still alive in frozen Siberia, an area that was desolate enough that it was mostly left alone by the surrounding settled states and kept many of it’s traditions intact. In 1914, a Polish anthropologist named Maria Czaplicka traveled into Siberia to learn about these traditions. She spent a year moving through Siberia learning about the native cultures with a focus on their shamanic traditions. She wrote this in the resulting book, Aboriginal Siberia: A Study in Social Anthropology:
“The change of sex is called in Chukchee ‘soft-man-being’, yirka-laul-vairgin, ‘soft man’ (yirka-laul) meaning a man transformed into a being of the weaker sex. A man who has ‘changed his sex’ is also called ‘similar to a woman’ (ne uchica), and a woman in like condition ‘similar to a man’ (qa cikcheca).”
So at this point the Chukchi, who live on the Siberian peninsula north of Korea, had settled on a non-binary identity for their shaman. This was confirmed be several other anthropologists who studied the area around the same time. I focus on Czaplicka because she is the not only the one who managed to study these people without judgement, but also knew the difference between transgender people and cross-dressers. There were some tribes who had begun having cross-dressing shaman instead of transgender shaman. The Chuckchi have suffered as a part of being part of Russia, there are very few left, very few of those practice the traditional Chuckchi spirituality, and they appear to have abandoned the tradition of transgender shamans entirely. The main causes of this are heavy evangelizing by Orthodox Christian missionaries and the Soviet Union’s policy of planting factories on their land.
As a brief side note, there is a possibility that the Norse seidman, who were known by the insult ‘ergi’, which translates to effeminate, were somehow related to this broad tradition. We run into three main issues trying to link them too. We aren’t sure if the ergi seidman were transgender, gay, or just effeminate. The second issue is that there is no direct link between the Norse and Siberian spiritualities. They did both originally come from the Steppe, but there are massive spaces between them in both time and distance. Lastly, neither of these cultures were big on leaving written records, so we just don’t have enough data to make a call on how the seidman would have identified.
One of the main things that makes this transgender tradition so significant is the sheer amount of land that Scythian culture and it’s descendants managed to touch. These cultures slammed against the settled societies for thousands of years, and anywhere the nomads found a weakness they burst through, sometimes for a quick raid, sometimes to nab some territory, and sometimes they would conquer a kingdom and stay as long as their dynasties lasted. Persia was known as Parthia due to being conquered by the Parthians, the northwestern Indian peninsula was ruled by Scythians for a time, the Kipchak Turks had a massive empire throughout west Asia, and I’m not even going to start to list all the countries that were ruled by Mongols. Our next episode will be focused on a transgender tradition in India, and if that tradition is not independent, the Scythians are definitely one of the groups that could have spread the idea into India. I honestly wish we had more information about the Scythians and their Anarya, but we do have the broad strokes of a culture that began in pre-history and only died out some time in the mid-20th century, and that alone is amazing enough that the Anarya should never be forgotten.
The Controversy
Before we move into our next section we will deal with a controversy that I have gone back and forth about addressing, but eventually came down on hitting it head on. What do you call someone who is assigned male at birth and begins presenting as a woman at some point in their life. Or someone who is assigned female at birth and begins presenting as a man at some point in their life. What if the surrounding society still sees them as male, or female, or sees them as something in-between or beyond those labels? What if the individual sees themselves as between or beyond those labels? Our controversy is in categorizing or labeling people from different cultures, whether the culture is past or present.
Some historians follow how society saw a person or group of people, some historians follow how the person seems to have identified their self, and some historians stick with assigned gender at birth. Worst of all, some historians ignore gender and sex entirely and shuffle anyone from these traditions into the eunuch bin. We have virtually no first hand accounts from people in these traditions, which could mean that they were never written down or that the monotheistic cultures that gained ascendancy destroyed their accounts.
There absolutely are other opinions out there about every single group that I have or ever will cover. The people that I am saying are transgender have been called cross dressers, eunuchs, effeminate men, and in the case of one trans-exclusionary feminist author, men taking over women’s jobs as priestesses. I have read as many of these other takes as I have been able to find, and analyzed them as objectively as possible in an attempt to assess whether I was wrong, or projecting my bias or opinion onto these ancient peoples and groups.
So, in the interest of transparency, I will explain how I come to my understanding of these people and their traditions. On every single one of the people and traditions that we have or will discussed I follow the rabbit trail of sources all the way to the primary source. I don’t take any author’s word for what an ancient source said, I find out who they are quoting or referencing and read their account. There have been several times that I eventually found out that an author was warping what the original source said, or reading their own opinion into it. This refusal to accept anything without proof is one of the reasons that this show comes out monthly.
I’ll give you an example of how far down the rabbit hole goes. I’ve found several people referencing a particular hyper-sexualized story about one of the gala of Inanna. It’s on Wikipedia and several different write ups that people have done all over the internet. The source listed was a book from the 1980’s that is now out of print. Once I managed to find a copy of that book, I found out that the author in the 1980’s referenced two separate books, one of which had been published in four separate editions all the way back to 1927, which were of course, all out of print. One by one, I found both books, including all four editions of the one. The salacious story about the Sumerian gala was only in the first edition, it was removed in all other editions because it was found to not be an accurate translation. It took me two weeks to track it all down, and that was for one throwaway line that would have gone a step further in understanding the ancient priestesses.
In my opinion, the stories of the transgender, non-binary, and third gender people who came before us are absolutely amazing in their scope, time frames, subject matter, and impact. They don’t need to be built up on a flimsy house of cards full of assumption and speculations. In fact, I think it cheapens the beauty of their experiences to make them sound like something that they weren’t, like coloring over a masterpiece with a crayon. The truth is beautiful and the truth is powerful, so I will always tell the truth as it was, to the best of my abilities.
Mediterranean Priestesses
With that being said, we will begin going over the legion of transgender, non-binary, and third gender traditions that were scattered throughout the Mediterranean region. Many of these traditions were heavily influenced by the goddesses that we have already covered. We don’t have as much information about these priests, priestrix, or priestesses, so we will only be spending a small amount of time on each group, but I think it is vital that none of these amazing and influential groups slip through the cracks.
Artemis of Ephesus and the Megabyzoi
First up we have Artemis of Ephesus and her Megabyzoi, which is right up there with Inanna’s pilipili for fun words to say. For anyone who is watching the video version of this, those aren’t breasts. Artemis of Ephesus is depicted with what looks like a massive vest covered in water balloons. This was some kind of symbol of fertility, but does not depict her having dozens of breasts. Right off the bat, it is important to understand that Artemis of Ephesus is a very different deity from the Artemis that would come to be worshiped further west in Greece. Ephesus was a Greek colony that was located on the western edge of modern day Turkey. Because of this, the Ephesian Artemis was very heavily influenced by Cybele. One admittedly superficial way that this can be seen is in the crown of Artemis of Ephesus, which also resembles a city’s walls. Another way that we can see the influence of Cybele is in the existence and character of the Megabyzoi but it should also be noted that the Megabyzoi did not go in for the orgiastic celebrations of their neighboring Kurbantes, but had a much more ceremonial and bureaucratic position. The Megabyzoi or Megabuzos carried on the tradition of the transgender priestess, but it is unknown if there was only one Megabyzoi at a time or if there was a class of priest called a Megabyzoi. It does appear that the Megabyzoi were not an original or organic part of the cult. The Megabyzoi were put in place after the Achaemenid Persians conquered the area that the temple was built on to eliminate the possibility of the the cult as a source of rebellion. The role became integral enough that after the Persians were pushed back from the area, the Megabyzoi continued to exist. Axel W. Persson wrote about the Megabyzoi in his book 1942 The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times: ”In Ephesus the high priest of the goddess was a eunuch, and other temple attendants were spoken of as consecrated in the same fashion to the great deity.”
and also
“The Megabyzos’ insignia of office were the tiara and the dress extending to the ground, reminiscent of that worn by the eunuchoid high priests on Hittite bas reliefs”
Apologies for using the hated ‘e’ word.The temple was burnt down by an arsonist known as Herostratus in the 4th century BCE. Herostratus was one of history’s first people who decided to get famous by doing something awful. The temple was rebuilt over a period of 150 years, and was so glorious that it gained a place in history as one of Antipater of Sidon’s seven wonders of the world in the 2nd century BCE.
“I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, “Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand”.”
When the Romans syncretized Artemis into Diana, the Megabyzoi came along, all the way into Rome. Just like the galli, the Roman Senate saw the Megabyzoi as a threat to Roman masculinity. The Megabyzoi were enough of a popular threat that the Emperor Tiberius began to restrict their practices and numbers in the 1st century CE.
The temple of Artemis at Ephesus remained culturally relevant for hundreds of years after this. The main festival celebrated was the Artemision in March and April, and it drew in legions of young single Greeks and later also Romans looking for marriage partners.
The temple was destroyed by Christians in the mid-5th century CE, who also saw fit to destroy every reference to Artemis on the temple. Currently all that is left of this wonder of the world is one lonely column standing on the still firm foundations. An inscription found at Ephesus reads:
“Destroying the delusive image of the demon Artemis, Demeas has erected this symbol of Truth, the God that drives away idols, and the Cross of priests, deathless and victorious sign of Christ.”
In a totally unrelated story that was cute enough that I had to include it, we have a story written in the 2nd century CE by Antoninus Liberalis about a young hunter who saw Artemis bathing.
“The Cretan, Siproites, had also been turned into a woman for having seen Artemis bathing when out hunting.”
I love the idea of one of Artemis’s retinue was a transgender woman, just had to relay that story.
Non-Binary Aphrodite/Aphroditos
An early version of Aphrodite known as Aphroditos of Cyprus was worshiped on the island of Cyprus and was likely heavily influenced by Artemis of Ephesus. Their image is shown with both breasts and penis and testes, sometimes with a beard and sometimes without. In the 5th century CE, the Christian author Macrobius wrote this in his book Saturnalia:
“There’s also a statue of Venus on Cyprus, that’s bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditus, and Laevius says: Worshiping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is male or female…” Philochorus, too, states that men sacrifice to her in women’s dress, women in men’s, because she is held to be both male and female.” (Saturnalia 3.8.2)
We don’t have any more information about the clergy, but from this it sounds like they cross dressed rather than being transgender. We don’t have enough information to really make a call either way. Regardless Aphroditos was definitely a non-binary deity, which is amazing in it’s own right.
Hecate and the Semnotatoi
Also located on the cost of modern day Turkey was the city of Lagina. This was the site of the main temple of Hecate, who was the goddess of boundaries, such as the boundary between life and death, the physical and the spiritual, and the goddess of magical practices and witches. Hecate was served by the Semnotatoi, who were transgender priestesses. Like the gala, the galli, and the Kurbantes, these people were people who were assigned male at birth and permanently transitioned when they joined the cult. They lived and worshiped as women.
The temple at Lagina was renowned for it’s festivals, making it part of a Greco-Roman festival circuit. The Semnotatoi were also famous for the mysteries that they were the keepers of, which is in keeping with Hecate’s role of guardian of the boundary between life and death.
There was also a shrine to Hecate near the temple of Artemis of Ephesus, interestingly the priestesses who kept the shrine at this location were called Megabyzoi rather than Semnotatoi.
The temple at Lagina remained influential until 365 CE. The entire eastern Mediterranean experienced a catastrophic earthquake which was also poorly timed. This was just after Julian the Apostate’s brief attempt to return the Roman Empire to it’s pagan roots, and the Christian Emperor Valens was watching over the return to his particular Arian version of Christianity. Rather than rebuilding the temple to Hecate, the authorities rebuilt the temple as a Christian church.
Isis and her Priestesses
The Egyptian cult of Isis, which was one of the largest cults in the Roman Empire also had what Randy Conner called ‘gender variant priests’ in his 1993 book Blossom and Bone. The non-binary priestrix were only a small portion of the entire priesthood of Isis, but were present in both her Egyptian and Roman temples. They were also prevalent enough that Roman writers would compare people to the non-binary priestrix to imply that they were effeminate. One example of this was the Christian author Tertullian writing of the reign of Emperor Otho in the 3rd century CE:
“He used to shave every day, and rub his face with soaked bread; the use of which he began when the down first appeared upon his chin, to prevent his having any beard. It is said in this same way that he celebrated publicly the sacred rites of Isis, clad in a linen garment, such as is used by the worshipers of that goddess.”
Tertullian also references the priestrix of Isis again when he calls them Numidians here:
“Whence comes it that some of our Numidians, with their long locks made longer by horsetail plumes, learn to bid the barber shave their skin close, and to exempt their crown alone from the knife? Whence comes it that men shaggy and hirsute learn to teach the resin to feed on their arms with such rapacity, the tweezers to weed their chin so thievishly? A prodigy it is, that all this should be done without the Mantle! To the Mantle appertains this whole Asiatic practice! What have you, Libya, and you, Europe, to do with athletic refinements, which you know not how to dress? For, in truth, what kind of thing is it to practise Greekish depilation more than Greekish attire?
The transfer of dress approximates to culpability just in so far as it is not custom, but nature, which suffers the change.”
I find it of note that even this Christian author in what amounts to a diatribe points out that he is not discussing merely how they dress, but something much deeper in the core and identity of what he sees as overly feminine men, but we know to be non-binary priestrix.
The priests, priestesses, and priestrix of Isis had an important role in Egyptian agriculture. They were responsible for raising the Nile each year to bring the fresh sediment to the farmers for planting season. They did this through a fertility ritual that also involved them raising their robes and exposing themselves to the river.
Constantine demanded that they stop doing the ritual as part of a turn towards Christianity. The cult of Isis refused, and these priests, priestesses, and priestrix were murdered for their dedication to their goddess. Soon afterwards their temples were desecrated and destroyed.
Ma/Enyo/Bellona and the Fanatici/Bellonarii
Lastly in this section we have a cult that became tied to the Cybeline cult of the Magna Mater. The goddess Ma was worshiped in Cappadoccia, modern northern central Turkey along the Black Sea. Ma seems to have been heavily influenced by Cybele, and her followers seems to have been heavily influenced by the Kurbantes. Ma was a sun goddess that was tied to war and victory, and due to this her followers leaned heavily into self flagellation and blood play, using whips and a particular double headed axe. Strabo wrote briefly about the area in his book Geographica in the late 1st Century BCE or the early 1st Century CE. At least some of the priestrix of Ma seem to have occupied a third gender in Cappadoccian society.
“The priest is master of the temple, and also of the temple-servants, who on my sojourn there were more than six thousand in number, men and women together. Also, considerable territory belongs to the temple, and the revenue is enjoyed by the priest. He is second in rank in Cappadocia after the king; and in general the priests belonged to the same family as the kings.”
She was brought back to Macedon after Alexander the Great moved marched east in his road to conquest.
She was brought to Rome by Sulla during the First Mithradatic War, the first time the Romans tangled with the aforementioned Mithradates the VI in the 1st Century BCE. The Senate accepted Ma and her priestesses in an attempt to secure victory against Mithradates, which must have paid off because the war ended in a Roman victory. The Romans first called the priestrix the Fanatici (yes, that is where the word fanatic comes from) and later as Ma became fused with the Roman goddess of Victory, Bellona, they came to be called the Bellonarii. Referring again to Conner’s book Blood and Bone, he describes their dress and ritual here:
“Gender-variant male fanatici wore heavy black robes with necklaces and tiaras resembling flower garlands. They dyed their hair blond and braided it, or they wore blond wigs. In processions, they carried double axes and branches of leaves. Some appear to have been eunuchs. The rites of Ma were wild and rather bloody. The fanatici would let their hair down and begin to dance faster and faster in a circle until they reached an altered state of consciousness. In this state, they would wound themselves with the axes, splattering the statue of the Goddess, which stood in the center of their circle, with blood. They would then begin to utter the words of the Goddess. Their practices are similar to other cultures that open the flesh and release blood in order to fully embody the deity; in many places cutting and flagellation of the body are linked to possession and trance.”
In later years, the cults of Ma-Bellona and the Magna Mater seem to have begun to merge eventually coming close enough that priests, priestesses, and priestrix could hold office in both cults at the same time. Like many of the traditions that we have discussed, the cult of Bellona slowly died out with the other traditional Roman gods as Christianity became the religion of the Empire.
Summary and Sign off
That wraps up our six in one episode, and honestly I am not satisfied with it. I profoundly wish that we had more information about these groups, enough to give them all their own episodes. Finding even what I have has been grueling, but just like the traditions that did get their own episodes, these traditions provided so much to generation after generation of transgender, non-binary, and third gender people. The temples of these deities gave them a home, meaning, safety, and community, for thousands of years. In the case of the Anarya traditions, it gave them a slot in their community where they could be themselves. So despite being proud to tell you about these people, I wish that there had been more to tell you about each one. They deserved it.
All of that being said, for anyone keeping track, the transgender, non-binary, and third gender peoples that we have discussed so far have occupied the vast majority of the Eurasian landmass along with northern Africa. From a scientific standpoint, this makes sense if a small part of the global human population has been transgender throughout history, but it has been amazing discussing these cultures that have been incredibly similar in their space that they occupied in society.
Just to be clear, this was generally their only place in society. None of the societies that we have discussed were any kind of transgender utopia. While becoming a priestess, priestrix, or priest of someone like Inanna, or Ishtar, or Cybele, or Aphroditos could provide a community and the safety of being something sacred, that was really the only refuge in these societies. For some people, there was no refuge like that. You’ll notice that in most of these groups that we have discussed there were no transgender men, for example. There was no broader transgender movement, there was no real place in society to be transgender and do something other than join the clergy. No room to be say, a transgender historian. But we do have one story of a transgender woman breaking out of that one accepted role. Through the luck of being born into a very specific time, to a very specific family, one woman did not stop at becoming the head of a priesthood, but went on to be the first Empress of Rome. In our next episode, our subject will be the Empress Elagabalus.
