The Gallae were the priestesses of Kybele (Cybele), the mother goddess worshipped in ancient Rome. We’ll explore them in-depth today.
Welcome to Rome, April 14th, 205 BCE.
Living on the top floor of a five storey insula, a Roman apartment building, was a far cry from the life you used to lead – exchanging the peaceful, sun-kissed fields of your farm for the dark single room you now call home was a major sacrifice, but after more than a decade of open warfare between the Romans and Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces, of hard sown and nurtured crops razed and trampled, of poor growing seasons and drought, of one commander or another demanding tribute, you and your husband had had enough uncertainty and tried your luck within the protection of the city’s walls.
Your husband managed to find work as a carpenter, which surprised you as much as it did him. After all, he didn’t have much experience in such things, and an injury after a run in with a particularly surly Carthaginian commander last year made it difficult for him to walk. But with so many Roman men having been killed in the war that they were even recruiting slaves and convicted criminals for the legions, they couldn’t afford to be as picky as they used to. Besides, there was a temple to the Great Mother goddess to be built, and someone had to do it.
Meanwhile, you were fortunate enough to find work as a hairdresser for a senator’s family. It wasn’t much, but between the two of you, you managed.
As of last year, a lot of the other farmers who’d had to leave their farms were able to return, so you and your husband had been considering doing the same. In fact, the senate tried forcing you to go back. But after a few years here in the city, you’re not sure you’d want to. After all, your farm house was burned to the ground during the war. And besides, you’re getting to the point where you can afford a better place – maybe even one of the main floor apartments, the ones that have running water inside. And, the recent years of war notwithstanding, life on the farm was boring and predictable. There’s always something new here to discover, to experience.
As you walk home, through the meandering claustrophobia of Rome’s cobblestone streets, the clashing of metal against metal and shrill screams carried through the air by thunderous pounding freezes you in place. Was this finally it? Was even the city no longer safe from the marauding Carthaginians? As you begin to consider where you could possibly go for safety next, you notice nobody else seems to share your concern. There were no fires, no smoke, nobody fleeing. Those around you are either strolling toward the source of the sound, or continuing on with their day. Terror giving way to curiosity, you move toward the cacophony, and find the sounds to be not of violence, but ecstasy.
A large black stone sits atop a four horse chariot, along with a wealthy looking woman and a Roman soldier – probably a general, or someone else important. A group of senators and soldiers walk along with it, around which dance a wild group of strangely dressed people, clashing cymbals, pounding drums and tambourines, and shrieking sounds you’d never before heard coming from a human body.
These women – you think they’re women – are dressed in yellow, with tiaras upon their bleached hair, golden bracelets around their wrists, and heavily made up faces not unlike the prostitutes you’d come to recognize. You stop to ask another onlooker what’s going on, and she tells you these are the Gallae, the priestesses of the Great Mother goddess, represented by the black stone on the chariot. They were to escort the goddess to her new home, the Temple of Victory, until her own temple was finished. With the Great Mother’s help, Rome would defeat the Carthaginians and once more enjoy peace.
This sort of thing never happened on the farm…
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Introduction to The Gallae
This isn’t the first time we’ve visited Rome in this series, and there’s a good reason for that. We don’t get a view of any western civilization that’s as detailed as the Romans give us, before or after, until the printing press shows up in Europe.
Besides, I just think they’re neat.
In particular, we know quite a bit about Roman religious life. Before the rise of Christianity, the official Roman state religion involved worship of Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, Venus, and a bunch of other gods who don’t have planets named after them. But unlike Christianity, Roman religion was more open to adopting the religious practices of other societies into their own, so long as those practices didn’t threaten the stability of the Roman state religion. After all, it’s easier to conquer a people if you tell them their god is still part of the club. Christianity and Judaism, of course, were exceptions, because their gods couldn’t coexist with the Roman state religion.
Christians not being able to coexist with people from other religions, what an unusual idea that’s completely not relatable in the modern world, it’s a good thing we’ve progressed past that point isn’t it?
When Rome conquered Greece, for example, their gods and the stories around them were essentially adopted into the Roman pantheon, to the point where they became interchangeable. The stories of Zeus became the stories of Jupiter, the stories of Aphrodite became the stories of Venus, and so on. The Greek god Apollo had no Roman equivalent, but he became such an important part of Roman religious life that the emperor Augustus spent a decent amount of his time basically doing an Apollo cosplay.
The same goes for many eastern gods as well. The Zoroastrian god Mithras, and the Egyptian gods Isis and Osiris, are all great examples of gods that came from the east but were adopted into the Roman state religion.
And then there’s Kybele (also called Cybele).
Kybele was a goddess from Phrygia, in Anatolia, which is where most of modern day Turkey is. There’s some interesting transgender stuff in her mythology, which we’re going to look at, but the real spicy stuff is going to come up when we get to exploring the priests of her worship, the Gallae. Because look, the Scythian Enaree priestesses are pretty interesting, but we don’t have any Scythian sources for them. And with Elagabalus, as we talked about, all our sources are extremely unreliable. But the Gallae are one of the most well documented example of transgender people living in the ancient Mediterranean, so I’m real excited about this one.
It’s gonna take a little while to get to their story, however, because I want to make sure we’ve given Kybele’s mythology its due as well. In fact there’s a lot I had to cut out of this one, including many of the Kybele myths, and how later Christians used the Gallae against Roman Paganism, and it’s still going to end up being one of the longest videos I’ve done so far. I really ought to give up on the idea of brevity altogether.
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First, we’ll talk about Phrygia, the part of the world where the Kybele myth came from. Then we’ll explore the mythology surrounding Kybele and her various associated figures, and how her worship came to the Roman world. From there, we’ll spend some time with the Gallae, and explore what their daily life was like in Rome, how the Romans treated them, some Roman case law involving them, and a whole lot more.
Special thanks go out to everyone who supports me on Patreon, I’m so so so grateful for you all. If you like this series, and you’re interested in supporting the channel, would you consider hopping over to Patreon and becoming a patron? It starts at just a buck a month, and it really does make a difference in helping make my little corner of planet piss a little less musty. But if you’re not able, that’s okay too – consider it like sort of a tip jar at the door for the performer. It’s not required, but it is appreciated.
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There’s also all the YouTube algorithm bloops that can help too. When you like, comment, and subscribe, it tells YouTube that people like you like this sort of thing, so it will show this sort of thing to other people like you. And yeah I know it’s tacky, you hear it from every YouTuber, but in the 21st century, we pay tribute to the algorithm gods on each other’s behalf in exchange for their favour.
So like, comment, subscribe! All the cool kids are doing it.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at where Kybele comes from.
Chapter 1: The Origins of Kybele
Kybele comes from Phrygia, so let’s take some time to understand a little about Phrygia before we continue. It’s not one of the more mainstream ancient cultures, you probably haven’t heard of them, but just like the music of a band like Liliput might not be on your radar, they had a major influence on the music of Kurt Cobain, which of course had a significant influence on the artists that came after him, so in a way this obscure little Swedish band made an impact that extended far beyond their brief existence, and likewise Phrygian culture can be traced through the Greeks and the Romans which influenced us today.
(insert joke about how much white trans women love Kurt Cobain here)
Phrygia was a kingdom in central Anatolia, becoming the dominant power in the area around 1200-700 BCE, with its capital at Gordium. They were a landlocked kingdom, surrounded on all sides by various powers, at times hostile and at times friendly. According to the Iliad, the Phrygians fought in the Trojan War on the Trojan side, opposing the Greeks.
Phrygia hit its peak under King Midas, who ruled during the late 700s BCE. You might recognize that name from mythology – the guy where everything he touched turned to gold. There were at least two guys named King Midas who ruled Phrygia – the gold guy is the first one, but the King Midas we’re talking about now is one of his descendants. He’s considered Phrygia’s greatest king, but Phrygia would fall under him too, after being invaded and conquered around 695 BCE by a nomadic people known as the Cimmerians, whom we’re told had a lot in common with the Scythians, to the point where ancient writers often confused the two for each other.
The neighbouring Lydians to the west eventually expelled the Cimmerians from Phrygia, but instead of giving the Phrygians their freedom, they decided to conquer them instead, and Phrygia became a province of Lydia. When Lydia fell to the Persian Empire led by Cyrus the Great in the year 546 BCE, Phrygia went with them. They stayed part of the Persian Empire until they were conquered by Alexander the Great, when he visited Gordium in 333 BCE. If you’ve heard of the story of the Gordian Knot, this is when and where Alexander cut it. When Alexander’s empire fell apart, it became part of the kingdom of Pergamum, which then became a part of the Roman Empire in the 1st century BCE, then the Byzantine Empire once the Roman East and West divided in the 4th century CE, then the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century CE, and today it’s part of Turkey.
Whew.
Phrygian religion was polytheistic, but the only deity we know of who was for sure worshiped by the Phrygians is Kybele. We don’t know anything about how the Phrygians worshiped her specifically, but we know her worship eventually made its way to Greece and later Rome. And because we know about how they worshiped Kybele, we can make some educated guesses, but we still can’t know for sure.
How did her worship travel? It may seem surprising in the modern world, but the west coast of Anatolia – the Asian part of modern Turkey – was thoroughly Greek for most of its existence. The Greek areas were conquered by various powers at various points, but the area always retained its Greek identity. Herodotus and Hesiod, for example, were both from that area – both important writers in ancient Greece. So it’s thought that when Kybele was worshipped by the Phrygians, her worship spread to the Lydians, then to the Greeks who lived both nearby and under Lydian rule, and from there to the Greek mainland.
The earliest inscriptions about Kybele we have come from, of course, Phrygia, where she’s described as Matar kubileya, which means “mother of the mountains” in the Phrygian language. The “mountains” they’re referring to are the mountains in Anatolia, one of which is called Mt. Ida.
Kybele’s association with Mt. Ida has some interesting mythological connotations, so let’s take a closer look.
Mt. Ida is in Phrygia, just south of the city of Troy. After the Greeks assembled the Trojan Horse, and loaded themselves inside of it, the Trojans brought it into the city, celebrated the end of the war, got drunk, and passed out, at which point the Greeks got out, opened the gates so their comrades could come in, killed or enslaved anybody they could get their hands on, and destroyed the city. During the chaos, the Trojan hero Aeneas gathered a group of Trojans and fled the city, making their way to Mt. Ida, where they built a fleet to sail away and find a new home. Eventually they would make their way to Italy, and lay the foundations for the Roman people – this little tidbit is going to be important later, so keep it in mind. Mt. Ida was also the place from which Zeus abducted the beautiful young boy Ganymede to serve as his gay lover, er, I mean cup bearer, there was nothing gay about it at all Zeus is totally hetero and has normal sexual appetites, like that time he turned into a bull and had sex with Europa, or when he appeared in the form of a “golden shower” and had sex with Danae, or when he turned himself into a cloud and had sex with Io, or when he turned himself into a swan and had sex with Leto, or when he—
But they were all of them deceived, for a second Mt. Ida was created.
The second Mt. Ida is on the island of Crete, southeast of the one we just talked about. Before Zeus and his siblings were the rulers of the universe, their father Kronos was in charge. Kronos violently overthrew his father Ouranos, who told him the same thing would happen to him, so every time he got his wife Rhea – whose myth was adapted with Cybele – pregnant, he would devour their babies as soon as they were born. Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon all went straight down the hatch, but by the time Rhea was pregnant for the sixth time she’d had enough of this, so when she gave birth she tricked Kronos by feeding him a boulder in place of the newborn Zeus, and hid Zeus in a cave on the Cretan Mt. Ida. Cybele’s devotees stayed nearby the infant Zeus and made lots of noise to drown out his cries so Kronos couldn’t hear him. Once Zeus grew up, he overthrew his father, who was forced to barf up all his kids as well as the boulder, before being banished to a corner of the underworld. The Cretan Mt. Ida is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the island, southwest of the Knossos palace if you’re familiar with Aegean prehistory. If not, don’t worry about it.
If you watched my previous video on Hermaphroditus, you might recall that Mt. Ida is also where Ovid said Hermaphroditus was born. It’s the first Mt. Ida – the one near Troy – that he’s talking about.
Later Greeks and Romans would see her as a mother goddess as well. The Greeks associated her with their own Earth goddess Gaia (who’s also associated with Rhea), and the Romans called her Magna Mater, or great mother, and gave her a central role in their pantheon. Cybele has a bunch of other names as well, and we’ll take a look at some of them as they come up, but I’m mostly going to keep calling her Cybele so it doesn’t get too confusing.
But here’s the tricky part. When we think of a mother goddess, our view is necessarily influenced by post-Christian ideas of what such a goddess would look like. If you’re like me, you grew up in a part of the world where Christianity is the dominant religion. And even if you didn’t, it’s still a good bet that the Abrahamic religious tradition colours your view of things to a certain degree. The closest figure to a mother goddess in Christianity is that of the Virgin Mary, and of course her primary role was to give birth to Jesus. She does show up here and there in the Bible after that, but her time as an influential figure in Christian mythology begins and ends with the birth of Jesus.
Cybele did, of course, give birth to Zeus. But she did a lot more than that.
Chapter 2: Cybele and Attis
One of the most important myths about Cybele relates to her and Attis. Attis is described as her youthful consort, which is sort of somewhere between what the 1960’s Robin was to Batman, and a f***boy.
Attis is a deity with Phrygian origins, but it’s unlikely he was a Phrygian deity.
Wait, what?
From the evidence we have, it seems that “Attis” was the most common name for Phrygian men, especially for priests. We find it on monuments, on pottery, and even in graffiti. So the Greeks and Romans probably just took the name and ran with it, deciding he was a Phrygian god, but the Phrygians themselves probably didn’t worship Attis.
It might be like if you created an Irish religious figure, maybe a saint, and used a common name for that region, like Patrick – okay bad example.
Maybe if you created a Middle Eastern religious figure and used a common name for that region, like Mohammad – okay again, bad example.
Maybe if you wrote a book about wizards, and people pointed out that all the characters in your book are very white and you want to look like you’re totally progressive and not at all filled with a mind blowing amount of hatred and prejudice, so you decide to introduce a Chinese character, but you call her Cho Chang because you can’t even be bothered to learn that there is more than one culture in Asia and not only is Cho not a Chinese name, it’s not even a first name at all but a Korean last name, so it’s essentially the equivalent to calling a white character Johnson Duchamps, and while you’re at it you decide to make this character do nothing except date boys, be sad, and snitch on people, and anyway I’m starting to lose control of this analogy so let’s move on.
Now, for those of us who grew up in parts of the world where Christianity is the dominant religion, it’s easy to get wrapped up in ideas of “canon”. A lot of Christian nerds have spent a lot of time deciding what is and isn’t canon in the Bible. The Bible contradicts itself all the time, so I guess that makes sense.
It reminds me a lot of how Star Trek nerds behave.
Why was the Voyager crew able to travel back in time to the year 1996 and see no evidence of the widespread destruction of the Earth as a result of the Eugenics Wars perpetrated by Khan Noonien Singh?
Why did they say Soong-type androids like Data and Lore were the only artificial life forms in the galaxy despite Harry Mudd having been shown with several androids nearly a hundred years earlier?
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Why does it say in Genesis 32:20 “I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved” but in John 1:18 it says “No man hath seen God at any time”?
CHECKMATE CHRISTIANS
The ancients wouldn’t really have cared about any of this – not until the Council of Nicaea where Christian nerds started trying to codify it all, and not until the release of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Star Trek continuity started to get messier. That’s why so many earlier Christian writings are so weird compared to what actually ended up in the Bible.
You think Revelation is wild? A second century Christian writer named Tertullian claimed Jesus was a eunuch. Maybe I’ll do a video on that one at some point.
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Anyway, with ancient myth the stories often directly contradict each other. We talked about this in the Hermaphroditus video, and it’s a thing with Cybele and Attis as well.
We have a couple of surviving sources about the myth of Attis, but we’re going to take a closer look at two of them – the Roman writer Ovid, and the Greek writer Pausanias.
We’ve talked about Ovid before – he’s given us useful information on the Scythians and on Hermaphroditus – and here he is again.
Quite a bit of his works survive, but his most famous poem is the Metamorphoses. It’s sort of a catalog of transformations that happened throughout classical mythology, including a bunch of gender transformations, which is why he keeps coming up. He was a Roman poet who lived during the time of the emperor Augustus.
Ovid tells us about Attis in the Metamorphoses.
TL;DR: Attis was a beautiful young shepherd boy whom Cybele fell in love with. She made Attis her priest, on the condition that he preserve his chastity. He didn’t, so she made him go mad and castrate himself. After that, Cybele felt sorry for him and turned him into a fir tree, and decided that all her future priests would be eunuchs as well, in his honour.
Pausanias, a Greek writer who lived in Rome in the 2nd century CE, tells another myth of Attis, related to Agdistis. The story goes that Zeus had a wet dream – Pausanias says he fell asleep and dripped some seed on the earth, but we all know what that means – and from his little nocturnal emission sprang Agdistis, who had both sets of sexual organs. Agdistis was chaotic and frightening, so the god Dionysus tied her foot to her dick while she was sleeping, and when she woke up she flailed about, and that tore her d**k off. They tossed it on the ground and an almond tree grew from it.
So apparently if I want my garden to grow better I just need to, um, anyway.
A local girl picked some almonds from the tree and put them down her shirt, because I guess that’s what you do with almonds. The almonds absorbed into her chest, somehow, and she became pregnant, somehow.
And that baby’s name? ALBERT EINSTEIN – no, it was Attis.
She abandoned Attis, who ended up being raised by goats, who were apparently perfectly capable of raising and taking care of a human baby, so he grew to be a healthy and well-adjusted adult, which is completely and totally believable thank you very much I don’t know why you’re questioning this. Attis was betrothed to the daughter of the king of Pessinus, but Agdistis had fallen in love with him, so at their wedding she showed up and drove Attis so mad that he castrated himself. Agdistis apologized, and Zeus made Attis immortal. Cybele isn’t mentioned by name in this story, but multiple other sources say that Agdistis was one of Kybele’s names.
So hey, Cybele was intersex, basically. That’s kind of interesting.
Attis is mentioned by a few others as well, including the Roman poet Catullus, and the Roman emperor and philosopher Julian the Apostate’s writings, but most of the Attis stories have a few consistent threads – Attis’ birth, Cybele falling in love with him, she drives him mad and he castrates himself, and Cybele laments. Also, there’s usually a tree involved.
So uhh – what’s the deal with all the eunuching?
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Well, it’s complicated.
In the Pausanias story, when Agdistis is castrated, the resulting wound drenches the Earth in blood, from which grows a bunch of lush beautiful foliage, as well as her dick sprouting an almond tree. So in that case, it’s very much a fertility thing, and it’s a bit of a roundabout way of getting there, but a mother goddess being a fertility figure makes sense I suppose.
On the other hand, Ovid tells us Attis’ castration is a punishment for his disloyalty to the goddess. And since the Romans thought very highly of Cybele, the punishment makes sense. It’s still driven by madness though. This theme of Kybele causing madness is going to play into how we look at her cult later, so keep it in mind.
Either way, the Romans were a little confused by it all too. But that didn’t stop them from greatly revering Cybele.
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Chapter 3: Roman Worship of Kybele
It was only a matter of time before we started talking about Virgil in this series. Publius Vergilius Maro was his full name, and he was one of the three great poets of the Augustan age, along with Horace – the carpe diem guy – and our boy Ovid. He wrote just three poems – the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid, the latter of which he wasn’t finished writing when he died. He asked for it to be destroyed, but Augustus intervened and we still have it today. Maybe not the best outcome when it comes to respect for the artist and their wishes, but the man’s been dead for two thousand years so I’m not going to get too bent out of shape over it.
The Aeneid is a sort of sequel to the Iliad. It takes place around the same time as the Odyssey, following the story of the Trojan hero Aeneas as he escapes the burning ruins of Troy and leads his people to Italy where they eventually founded the city of Rome. We might look at it today as state propaganda, but that’s only because it absolutely is. It was commissioned by the emperor Augustus and kisses his ass pretty much every chance it gets, but it’s also a masterful work of Latin poetry.
So if Virgil tells us how important the cult of Cybele was to the Romans, I tend to believe him.
And he certainly does.
What god, you Muses, warded off such savage flames from the Trojans? Who drove from the ships such raging fire? Tell me. Trust in the tale is old, yet its fame will never die… In the early days on Phrygian Ida’s slopes when Aeneas first built his fleet, gearing up for the high seas, they say the Berecynthian Mother of Gods [Cybele] herself appealed to powerful Jove with pleading words: ‘Grant this prayer, my son, that your loving mother makes to you, since now you rule on Olympus’ heights’
– Book IX, lines XC-C
Virgil is referring to when Aeneas built his ships near the Phrygian Mt. Ida after escaping the destruction of Troy with a group of Trojan refugees, which happens earlier in Book III. So when Aeneas built his ships to escape the destruction of Troy, Cybele watched over them. Right away we see that without Cybele’s help, mythologically speaking, Rome would not exist. On top of that, though, she’s also the mother of Jupiter, their king of the gods. That ties in with the Roman name for Cybele, Mater Magna – Great Mother.
In Book X, Aeneas is sailing back to the Trojan camp in Italy that’s under siege, and Cybele sends some water nymphs to help speed him along the way. These nymphs were actually Trojan ships that had sunk earlier, which Cybele had transformed. Don’t ask me how that works, I guess it just does. Had they not reached the Trojan camp in time, it would have been destroyed. So that’s three the Romans owe Cybele now.
One more example. This one comes from the Roman historian Titus Livius, or just Livy, who was a contemporary of Virgil and Ovid. He wrote an enormous work of history in 142 books, and unfortunately today we only have 35 of them.
Toward the end of the third century BCE, Rome was in the thick of a heavy and costly war with Carthage, which we call the Second Punic War. The Carthaginian general Hannibal was rampaging throughout Italy, wiping out Roman armies much larger than his and conquering a significant chunk of Roman territory in Italy itself. This was the last time anybody had any real chance of halting the expansion of Roman supremacy in the Mediterranean, and the Carthaginians came pretty close to doing it. Hannibal had paused his campaign for the winter in 205 BCE, and the Romans had a moment to breathe and plan their next move. Having recently won a couple of key victories over the Carthaginians, they had a renewed sense of purpose and confidence.
So they consulted the Sybilline Books, not the Cybele books, the Sybilline books – it sounds similar, but they’re not related.
These were a collection of oracles supposedly purchased by the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, in the late 500’s BCE. The Romans would turn to these books for guidance during important moments, and from an existential perspective, this was about the most important moment they’d ever faced.
In the book, they found that if a foreign invader was ever making war on Italy, they could be driven out if the Romans brought the Great Mother of Mt. Ida – that is, Cybele – to Rome.
So they did. They went to Pessinus, a city in what used to be Phrygia, and negotiated for them to bring the black meteorite which was a sacred symbol of the goddess to Rome. They built a temple for it on the Palatine Hill – a central location in Rome which was considered a great honour – and just a few years later the Romans declared victory over Carthage.
That’s four they owe the goddess.
Chapter 4: Finally We’re Getting To The Trans Stuff
Okay, so you get the point. Kybele was really important to the Romans. I know there hasn’t been a whole lot of trans stuff so far in this video, so you might be wondering where that part starts to come in, since that’s kind of my thing. And yeah, we’re at the trans part now, but before we got to that I wanted you to have a good understanding for how important Cybele was to the Romans, so when I tell you about her transgender priests – the Gallae – and how they were treated, you have some context.
Gallae is the plural, and Galla is the singular. You might see them referred to as Gallus/Galli as well – this is the masculine singular and plural. Without getting too deep into a linguistics lesson here, words that end with -a in Latin are feminine, and words that end in -us are masculine, most of the time. They’re referred to using both in ancient literature, and I’m going to use the feminine form Galla/Gallae – it’s going to become pretty obvious why.
Anyway, when Kybele arrived in Rome, her Gallae came with her. And though the Romans loved and venerated Cybele, they really didn’t enjoy the Gallae being around.
Why?
First of all, they were eunuchs, and the Romans had a… complicated relationship with eunuchs.
On one hand, if you were wealthy enough to own slaves, you might seek out eunuch slaves in particular. They were highly desirable, since they were more obedient and less likely to f*ck your wife. But the Romans also felt pretty squeamish about the act in the first place. The emperor Vespasian supposedly made his wealth through selling eunuch slaves, but the emperor Hadrian banned the practice about fifty years later, going so far as execute anybody who did it as well as anybody who volunteered to have it done to them.
So the Romans liked their slaves to be eunuchs, but they didn’t like to think about where the eunuchs actually came from and how they became eunuchs. It’s kind of like how we are today in the west with fast fashion – we want cute new clothes quick and cheap, but we don’t want to think about how many slaves were involved in making them or the environmental destruction caused by churning out so many cheap crummy clothes.
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The 1st century BCE Roman philosopher Lucretius describes how disturbed he is by the Gallae castrating themselves.
They give her eunuchs as attendant priests, to signify that those who have defied their mother’s will and shown ingratitude to their father must be counted unworthy to bring forth living children into the sunlit world.
– De Rerum Natura, pg 78
It’s worth noting that we might consider Lucretius today to be a hardline atheist, so it’s hard to know how much of his disgust is related to the fact that they eunuch’d themselves, or the fact that they had a religious reason for doing it.
Speaking of which, the actual eunuching happened during the dies sanguinis, the Day of Blood. On March 24th of each year, initiate gallae would dance wildly to the entrancing rhythms of drums, tambourines, and crashing cymbals, whip themselves into a frenzy, and finally, using a sharp stone, a broken piece of pottery, or a knife, snip snip.
Then, they would rampage through the city, waving their bits around, before tossing them in a nearby house, and I’m trying to imagine how I might react if I was just standing there cooking a stew or something, and a severed dick just flew into my window and landed in it.
“Hey honey, it’s the day of blood, better close the shutters!”
Yep, this is definitely going on the list.
After all this, they would have a feast and a day of rest – probably pretty important considering all the blood they’d have lost – and forever discard their male clothing and dress like ladies instead.
We’re all familiar with togas, which Roman men wore, but Roman women would wear a garment called a stola. It was considered bad form for women to wear a toga – the Romans associated it with prostitution and adultery. So the next time the local college kids throw a toga party, you should definitely go over there and tell all the women they’re dressed like prostitutes, this will go over really well and you will definitely be the coolest most popular person at the party.
Anyway, the gallae would wear stolae, usually yellow or multicoloured. They would grow their hair long, bleach it blonde, and wear it in a style common to women of the day. They would wear tons of jewellery, including earrings, pendants, and rings, and they would also wear heavy makeup. On the top of their head, they’d often wear either a turban or a tiara, sometimes both.
Take a look at this sculpture of a galla, for example, from the 2nd century CE, in the Capitoline Museum in Rome for an idea of what I’m talking about. I know it might be hard to imagine, but this was considered extremely effeminate for the time.
St. Augustine talks about this in more detail as well, saying:
These Gallae, not later than yesterday, were going through the streets and places of Carthage with anointed hair, whitened faces, relaxed bodies, and feminine gait.
– St. Augustine, City Of God, Book VII, Chapter XXVI
The whitened faces part refers to the makeup they wore. A lot of Roman cosmetics were designed to lighten one’s face, because it was a sign of beauty and class. A woman who had lighter skin had the luxury of affording slaves to do the work she would have had to do. So the Gallae having whitened faces was likely related.
To the Romans, this was confusing. They couldn’t take on a man’s role anymore, because of the snippy snip, but they couldn’t bear children so they couldn’t take on a woman’s role either. So they lived in this liminal space between genders. I’m betting some folks in the audience might relate to that.
They also apparently had some wild parties, as Lucretius describes:
A thunder of drums attends [the Great Mother], tight-stretched and pounded by palms, and a clash of hollow cymbals; hoarse-throated horns bray their deep warning, and the pierced flute thrills every heart with Phrygian strains.
– Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, pg 78
Ovid describes a similar scene in his poem Fasti:
The eunuchs will parade and pound the hollow drums, and their clashing bronze cymbals will ring. She will ride on the soft necks of her acolytes, howled along the city’s major streets. The stage roars, the shows call…I have much to ask, but the strident cymbal’s clash and the claw-pipe’s chilling noise scare me.
– Ovid, Fasti IV, 183-186, 189-190
This isn’t the only time there’s reference to their necks being soft. Firmicus Maternus says “they can barely hold their heads up on their limp necks”
It seems like their having limp necks is a sign of their effeminacy, with a similar connotation that a limp wrist might have today.
Is he, you know… *flops neck*
The worship of Cybele was always associated with noisy parties. They’re mentioned as far back as in the Homeric Hymns – a collection of hymns the ancients attributed to Homer, but they were almost certainly not written by him. We’re not sure who wrote them though, so we just keep calling them Homeric Hymns. They probably come from around the 7th century BCE. Homeric Hymn #14 is to Cybele, and it reads:
Prithee, clear voiced Muse, daughter of mighty Zeus, sing of the mother of all gods and men. She is well-pleased with the sound of rattles and of timbrels, with the voice of flutes and the outcry of wolves and bright eyed lions, with echoing hills and wooded coombes. And so hail to you in my song, and to all goddesses as well!
That’s not an excerpt, it’s the whole thing.
So why the love for noise?
Remember the story of how the devotees of Cybele made a bunch of loud noise and drowned out the sound of baby Zeus crying while they hid him from his father Kronos in Mt. Ida? We assume it has something to do with that.
Anyway, the Romans weren’t very big fans of all this.
The average Roman man was shocked by their dress and their behaviour, but what was most surprising to them was the fact that people would actually volunteer for such a thing. After all, who in their right mind would grab a broken piece of pottery and, *ahem*
But this put them in a conundrum. They were disgusted by the Gallae, but they had a great reverence for Cybele. Persecuting, exiling, or otherwise mistreating the Gallae could offend the goddess, and they couldn’t afford that – not after she’d done so much for them.
So the Romans did the only humane thing. They locked up the Gallae in a temple like animals and fed them a bucket of fish heads once a week.
It saved the empire!
The Senate declared that the Gallae would be confined to the temple of Kybele they’d built, except during festival days. They also forbade any Roman citizen from joining their ranks, but at the time that didn’t include a lot of people, because Roman citizenship was a complicated thing.
When they brought Kybele to Rome, the Roman state was Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and the parts of Italy that weren’t under Hannibal’s control, but you weren’t granted Roman citizenship unless you were either born to a family that already held Roman citizenship – mostly the families who lived in Rome itself – or you earned it, often through military service. It wasn’t until the emperor Caracalla – remember him? Elagabalus claimed to be his child, and that’s what led to her becoming emperor – that everyone who lived in the empire was granted citizenship. But he did that in the year 212 CE, which is like 400 years after the Kybele stone came to Rome.
Livy tells us the population of citizens in the Roman state in the year 209 BCE was 137,108 (Livy, XXVII, 36), but it’s hard to know how many people in total there were, including slaves and free non-citizens. The question of Rome’s population around this time is a complicated one and I’m not going to get into all of it, but suffice it to say there were plenty of non-citizens living under the control of the Roman state.
But even though they would have had a pretty decent supply of new recruits locally, it seems like new Gallae were still recruited from the east.
Beyond not being allowed to be Gallae themselves, though, Roman citizens were also not even allowed to enter the parts of the temple where the Gallae lived. It seems like the Senate wanted them entirely removed from Roman public life, with the exception of the festivals they were part of.
This raises an interesting point, however – the Romans wouldn’t have bothered creating laws banning citizens from becoming Gallae unless citizens wanted to become Gallae. Because why would you make a law barring people from doing something nobody was doing in the first place?
Think of it this way – if you’re an elder millennial like me, you might remember when salvia was a big thing back in the early 2000’s. People were talking about it like it was this cool new way to get high legally, but then everybody tried it and realized it kinda sucked, so the demand just plummeted. Most jurisdictions don’t have laws regulating salvia as a result – the government still doesn’t want you to get high, but nobody wants to get high with that particular substance, so it doesn’t really matter.
So if the Romans created laws barring Roman citizens from becoming Gallae, it must have been because, well, some Roman citizens wanted to become Gallae. And why else would a Roman citizen want to become a Galla?
I wish we knew more about the daily life of the Gallae; what they did all day while locked in the Temple of Cybele. And I’m sure there are at least a few polyamorous trans lesbians in the audience who have some ideas of what might have been going on, and yes it’s fun to imagine that, but we really have no evidence for it one way or another.
That doesn’t mean we can’t muse about it though.
Chapter 5: No Really, Why?
The Romans were a little confused by it too, but fortunately we have both Lucian, and our constant companion Ovid to guide our way.
It’s easy to just say they followed Attis’ example, and that’s basically what Ovid tells us. But Ovid’s writing, as illuminating as it is, comes from the 1st century CE, and from what we can tell worship of Cybele had been around for at least a few hundred years before that. So it’s a good bet that Ovid didn’t actually know where the Gallae came from, and his description was more likely to be just a post hoc justification as it was an actual understanding of their origins and history.
Besides, there’s more to it than that.
Lucian was a Greek writer who lived in Roman Syria during the 2nd century CE. He provides two possible explanations in his work, On The Syrian Goddess, but there’s one he says he finds more compelling, so let’s focus on that.
RELATED: Uncovering Ancient Transgender Men in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans
And before I get into it, I want to again stress that this is the more believable of the two stories.
In the story, the Syrian queen Stratonice received a vision in a dream that she was to build a temple. So she left to do so, and the king sent his best friend Combabos along to help her and keep her safe. He decided to castrate himself as a precaution – perfectly normal thing to do – and left his bits in a jar at home. Stratonice fell in love with him along the way, but he rejected her, letting her know about his, er, status. The king had guards follow the two, and when they watched Stratonice’s advances, they mistook it for Combabos trying to get fresh with her. So they told the king, and he was about to have Combabos executed until Combabos asked for his bits in the jar, at which point the king realized his mistake and conferred great gifts and honours upon his friend, and I swear this is the story Lucian tells and not a bizarre fever dream I had after smoking too much salvia.
How does that connect with the Gallae? The king built a bronze statue of Combabos, and his friends all castrated themselves out of sympathy for him. Then later, another woman fell in love with Combabos, but when she found out about his status, she killed herself, so he wore women’s clothing for the rest of his life to prevent such a thing from happening again. His friends did the same, and eventually other people joined them, and they became the Gallae.
What the @#%# did I just read?
That might be the most elaborate “still cis tho” story I’ve ever read…
So Lucian says this is the more believable of the two stories, and I know it doesn’t exactly sound like it, but it does have some parallels with stories from Persia and India, notably in connection with the foundation myth about the hijra in India, who have ancient roots and are still around today. That said, it’s still obviously very much exaggerated.
Okay, so let’s look at Ovid’s story.
The last poem he completed before his death in the year 17 or 18 CE – we’re not sure – was the Fasti, a sort of catalog of Roman religious festivals. And it’s unlikely he actually finished everything he wanted to write, since the poem only explores festivals up to June 30th. Lucky for us, the festival devoted to Kybele began on April 4th, which was the anniversary of the Kybele stone coming to Rome. It was called the Megalensia, and lasted for a week.
During the festival, Ovid describes the frenzied dancing, clashing of cymbals, and pounding of drums we’ve come to know the Gallae for. But he’s confused as to what’s happening, so he asks Kybele to send him someone to explain it all, and she sends one of the muses.
“What causes the impulse to self castrate?” Ovid asks. After going through an outline of the Attis myth that we already well know, she tells him “[Attis’] madness became a model: soft skinned acolytes toss their hair and cut their worthless organs.” – Fasti 4, 221-254, page 89.
This explanation seems like it was enough for the ancients. And plenty of modern scholars have just accepted it at face value as well, or assumed it was some sort of insanity, because why would a man ever want to perform such an act on themselves unless they weren’t in their right mind?
But scholar K.A. Lucker doesn’t quite buy it, and neither do I.
Mental illness is real, of course, but the social construct of “madness” depends on whatever prejudices happen to exist at the time. Institutionally, we no longer consider being transgender to be a mental illness – it was removed from the DSM. But that’s not going to stop some Very Smart and Very Interesting boy in the comments from calling me a mentally ill degenerate or whatever it is that conservative photocopies are calling us these days.
The fact that contemporary Roman writers just figured the Gallae were emulating Attis’ insanity – and were therefore insane themselves – is not something we as modern readers should just uncritically accept as true. The Romans saw in the Gallae behaviour that was outside what was expected or accepted by Roman society at large, so they called the Gallae insane. Yeah they’re part of our culture, but it’s not their fault – they’re just crazy.
It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to just say their behaviour is a result of religious belief. Because if it was a way to honour Attis, there would have been a long, long list of ways to do that which were easier than to grab a shard of pottery and *shudder*. And while there have been other religious eunuchs in different cultures globally who did so for sexual purity, Roman writers sometimes referred to the Gallae as prostitutes, so that doesn’t make sense either.
So, uh, why then?
Will Roscoe, in his paper Priests Of The Goddess, suggests they did so as a way to escape the pressures of a male gender role. You’ll find transphobes today making such claims too, especially about trans women, and no disrespect to Will Roscoe, he’s done some great work in the field of queer mythology and I’m not saying he’s a transphobe here, but this is such a hilariously bad take it gives me a headache.
Because okay, the expectations of being a man can weigh heavily, I understand that. I spent a decent chunk of my life pretending to be one, after all. But my dude, you just heard about how the Romans treated the Gallae, and you’ve seen how modern society treats trans women – who would possibly think that would be an easier life?
It’s like a CEO saying his life has too much pressure, so he’s going to give up his 7 figure salary and all his wealth and get a job at Burger King. Sure, you’re putting aside one set of problems, but you’re taking on so many more that it really doesn’t seem worth it.
The ideas cis people have about why we exist are so easy to poke holes in, it’s like talking to little babies sometimes.
So all that said, we’re really no closer to answering the question of where the Gallae religious rituals came from, are we?
Well, there is one possibility we’ve yet to explore. Is it possible that the Gallae rituals and social roles were an elaborate way to explain and address gender dysphoria?
Unfortunately, we have no writings that come directly from any Gallae. But this possibility seems the simplest and most straightforward.
When you spend time in trans circles, you’ll inevitably meet at least a few trans women who express severe bottom dysphoria, to the point where they describe wanting to just cut it off. Fortunately, there are surgical procedures that can fix that now in ways that aren’t quite so brutal, but I sometimes wonder what a trans woman in this situation might do if such procedures didn’t exist. My bottom dysphoria isn’t *quite* so acute, but there are times where I find myself relating deeply to the stories of the Gallae.
Chapter 6: So, Were They Transgender?
This is a ridiculous question.
Yes, obviously the Gallae were transgender.
Occasionally, you’ll see articles showing up in places like Vice or some other general interest publication that doesn’t specialize in history and isn’t written by trans people suggesting that they must have been cis men who just felt really devoted to Kybele, and this is such an unbelievably ridiculous idea that I can’t believe anybody would ever print such a thing and still have any self respect.
There are limited situations where cisgender men like to dress and act like women on a temporary basis, like the case with crossdressers who get their jollies from dressing like ladies, or drag queens who perform as caricatures of women. But I have a really hard time imagining any situation where a man would be happy to live his life as a woman, and I know a whole lot of trans men who will agree with me on that one.
RELATED: Trans Men in History
So I’m proceeding on the assumption that the Gallae were not cisgender men serving an unusual religious role, but essentially an example of historical transgender women expressing their gender identity as best they could given the society in which they lived, and the technology available to them at the time.
Maybe this is more self-evident through a transgender lens, but for the cisgender folks in the audience, ask yourself if you’d be happy living the rest of your life on the opposite end of the gender binary. If the answer is no, then the question in the title of this chapter should be just as ridiculous to you as it is to me.
And if the answer is yes, then maybe you’re not quite as cis as you think you are.
Chapter 7: Unexpected Consequences
One of the wildest things I discovered during my research on this topic was the fact that there is legal precedent for a third gender in western societies that’s at least as old as Christianity itself.
The Roman writer Valerius Maximus lived during the 1st century CE, and worked during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, Augustus’ successor.
His work survives as a collection of anecdotes from Roman history. In it, he describes two slaves – Genucius, who was a eunuch, and Naevius Anius. Both were owned by a guy named Sordinus, who freed them at the same time. After freedom, Genucius decided to become a Galla. We don’t know what Naevius did, but we do know the two remained friends. After Naevius died, he willed his possessions to Genucius, but Sordinus contested this on the grounds that Genucius couldn’t inherit property. After all, Roman law had inheritance rights laid out differently depending on whether you were a man or a woman, and, being a Galla, Genucius was neither. Genucius was forbidden from entering the court and speaking in self defense as well, out of fear a Galla’s presence would pollute the court.
The consul overseeing the proceedings ruled in favour of Sordinus, and Genucius wasn’t allowed to inherit Naevius’ stuff.
Messed up, right?
Well, yeah. But this also has some interesting consequences.
Sordinus’ argument hinged on the fact that Genucius was neither a man nor a woman, so it would have to be the case that Genucius was a third gender. And the fact that the court recognized this argument as valid meant that this third gender was legally recognized. That doesn’t mean they were legally protected, of course – quite the opposite. And I know most trans women would be pretty frustrated at the idea of being called a “third gender” – we’re not a third gender, we’re women.
But it’s still kind of cool that genders beyond the binary have been legally recognized for thousands of years.
Chapter 8: What Does This All Tell Us?
The mythology around Kybele is packed full of gender transgression. But it gives us a bit of a chicken and egg scenario as well. Did the cult of Kybele arise as a way for the Gallae to express their gender in a way that’s more socially acceptable, or was it a myth that evolved independently, and became that safe place for gender transgression after the fact?
I lean toward the former.
In particular, it’s interesting that the Gallae created a religious meaning for their experiences. As an atheist, it’s easy for me to write off their faith as just an excuse to express their gender, but the ancient world was a different place.
There were atheists, of course; we talked about Lucretius earlier, who’s probably the most famous Roman atheist, and the emperor Vespasian probably was too. But the ancient Mediterranean was much more spiritual than modern western society. Writing off the motivations of religious people as having some sort of scheme behind them is, I believe, too cynical an approach.
It might work when you’re looking at American megachurch preachers who use religions to become multimillionaires; there’s a very clear profit motive there. But what did the Gallae really gain through this from a material perspective?
They gained an opportunity to live a life more in line with their gender and a community that supported them, in exchange for an extremely marginalized social role.
How is this different from how modern trans people view our transitions? We often talk about them using a very personal approach. It’s about being who we are, finding a sense of inner peace from an individual perspective. And this makes sense in the modern world, which is much more individualist than the past. After all, we live in a society.
The Gallae lived in a society too, but it was much less individualistic than the western capitalist societies of the modern era. So is it any wonder that the Gallae expressed their flavour of transness differently than modern trans people do?
We have always existed, but the way we exist is influenced by the culture we live in.
So if you were a trans feminine person born 2000 years ago in the Roman east, you might have found comfort in the idea that a group of gender nonconforming people found a way to express their gender that was at least marginally accepted. And we know the Gallae and the cult of Kybele traveled quite a bit, as well. We’ve found the remains of one in what would have been the northern part of Roman controlled Britain, and St. Augustine talks about them wandering about in the city of Carthage, in modern day Tunisia, so it wasn’t just a Rome thing. So they might have been a beacon of hope and acceptance, again marginally so, for trans feminine people across the Roman world.
They can serve as the same for us today.
If you’re watching this, and you’re transgender, you might find comfort in the fact that we’ve existed for a very long time, and we’re going to continue to do so, regardless of how hard they try to stop us.
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Ancient Sources:
►St. Augustine. “De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos”. Translated by Rev. Marcus Dods. Edinburg, T. & T. Clark, 1871.
►Euripides. “Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops, Rhesus, Third Edition”. Translated by David Grene & Richmond Lattimore, edited by Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2013.
►Firmicus Maternus. “De Errore Profanarum Regilionum”. Translated and with an introduction and commentary by Richard E. Oster, Jr. MA thesis, Rice University, 1971.
►“The Holy Bible, King James Version”. E-book edition, Project Gutenberg, 2011.
►“The Homeric Hymns.” Translated by H.G. Evelyn-White. Loeb Classical Library Volume 57. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
►Lucian of Samosata. “A New Translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria with a Discussion of the Cult at Hierapolis”. Translated by Roy Dracus. Thesis. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1967.
►Lucretius. “De Rerum Natura”. Translated and with an introduction by Ronald E. Latham. 1951.
►Ovid. “Fasti”. Translated by A.J. Boyle and R.D. Woodard. London, Penguin Books, 2000.
►Ovid. “Metamorphoses”. Translated by Rolfe Humphries. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1964.
►Pausanias. “Description Of Greece”. Translated by Henry Ormerod. New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918.
►Titus Livius. “Ab Urbe Condita Libri”. Translated by Aubrey De Selincourt. 1960.
Modern Sources:
►BBC. “Dig Reveals Roman Transvestite”. 2002.
►Burton, Paul J. “The Summoning of the Magna Mater to Rome (205 B.C.).” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 45, no. 1, 1996, pp. 36–63. JSTOR.
►Graillot, Henri M. “Le Culte De Cybèle, Mère Des Dieux a Rome et Dans L’Empire Romain”. Paris, Fontemoing et Cie 1912.
►Lucker, K. A. “The Gallae: Transgender Priests of Ancient Greece, Rome, and the Near East”. Thesis, University of South Florida Sarasota, 2005.
►Olson, Kelly. “Dress and The Roman Woman: Self-Presentation and Society”. New York, Routledge, 2008.
►Roller, Lynn. “In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele”. Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1999.
►Roscoe, Will. “Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion”. History of Religions, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Feb., 1996), 195-230.
►Turcan, Robert. “The Cults of the Roman Empire”. Translated by Antonia Nevill. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers, Inc, 1996.
►Vermaseren, Maartin J. “Cybele and Attis: the Myth and the Cult”. Translated by A. M. H. Lemmers. London, Thames and Hudson, Ltd, 1977.
