The Galli, singular Gallus, were male worshippers of the Great Mother Goddess Cybele. They are thought to have come from Phrusgia, or Turkey. They dressed as women and wore their hair long and scented. Their rights were frenetic, involving frantic dancing that was followed by self-flagellation or cutting themselves. It was not uncommon for the act of self-emasculation to end the wild dance.
One legend of the Galli incolcdes one priest of Cybele who took refuge from a storm in a cave. The cave proved to house a lion. The priest started his wild dance which frightened the lion.
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In ancient Rome, the galli (galloi in Greek, Latin singular gallus), translated as both
"cocks" and "Galatians," were castrated priests of Cybele, the Asian Mother Goddess,
and of the Syrian goddess Atagartis. They were named after the river Gallus, whose waters supposedly
drove people crazy but also helped purge them. The cult of Cybele was widespread, like that of Dionysus.
People other than the galli, such as priestesses and musicians and other adherents, participated in the
mystery rituals of the cult, which included role-playing and inducing states of ecstasy, but only the galli
were officiants.
The many-faceted literary evidence presents the galli as figures of unmanliness for having abdicated male
cultural responsibility. As Craig Williams notes, "Castration is an extreme instance of a conceptual all-ornothing
tendency that pervades Roman texts: softening a male constitutes a direct infringement upon his
masculine identity." Moreover, since they adopted women's clothing and seemed to prefer the receptive
role in anal intercourse (in violation of the rigid Roman gender system), the galli are an important factor in
the history of gender and sexuality as well.
Cult and Castration
As priests of Cybele, the galli devoted themselves to their goddess by castrating themselves (apparently
removing both the testicles and the penis), cross-dressing, and, in some cases, offering themselves to other
men for sex. A tax may even have been levied on them as prostitutes.
Cybele was accepted into the state cult in 204 B.C.E., and she thus became an official goddess of the
Roman state. From that point, the religion was funded by public money, but also placed under stricter
control of the state.
Although Cybele was an official goddess, the Senate refused Roman citizens the right to participate in her
rites as priests, reflecting the Roman distrust and fear of the galli, for both their infertility and their
rejection of masculinity. The galli not only deliberately made themselves unable to produce offspring, but
they served as bad examples to others, tempting young men to join their ranks. Because of their
effeminate nature, the galli flouted Roman exhortations toward virtus, the ideal of manliness. In brief, the
Roman reverence for paternity and masculinity made castration a highly stigmatized activity, especially for
Roman citizens, and made the galli a distinctly marginalized community.
The galli were often described in derogatory terms such as pathicus ("faggot"), mollis ("softie"), or cinaedus
(originally an Eastern dancer, but later a term for a grown man who displayed effeminate behavior and/or
desired to be penetrated). Being a gallus was deemed the ultimate in unmanliness.
Because of wide-spread castration anxiety, the emperor Domitian (81 to 96 C.E.) declared genital
mutilation illegal. Once Christianity triumphed over paganism and became the state religion, the highly
institutionalized Greek and Roman mystery cults finally disappeared, although some galli may have plied
their trade as late as the fifth century.
Continence and Castration
Why castration? Eugene Rice explains the self-castration of the galli as a failure to reconcile two crucial
beliefs in the ancient world. Only people of perfect continence may perform sacred functions, and
voluntary continence is impossible for a male. As a result, the enthusiast is left "no alternative but chastity
by the knife."
Rabun Taylor argues that some of the galli may have had strong "gynemimetic" urges and so, in effect, gave
themselves a partial sex change because of transgender tendencies and in order to identify more closely
with the mother goddess.
It may be that castration was a sign of reverence for the goddess; in mutilating themselves, the galli gave
up something that was important to them. From this perspective, castration functioned to indicate the
galli's devotion to their deity.
Certainly, a radical practice such as castration must have been motivated by complex psychological
reasons, and may have originated in ideas of ritual purity and sexual continence. What we know is that, in
the eyes of most Romans, the galli failed miserably to live up to their ideals. According to the literary
testimony, at any rate, the galli were perfectly incontinent, eagerly profaned their religious services, and
devoted themselves to money-making.
Literature and Lampooning
To the point of caricature, the literary evidence concerning the galli focuses on physical emasculation,
effeminacy of manner and dress, sterile lasciviousness, religious mockery, and materialistic greed. Roman
authors often use feminine nouns and pronouns to denounce the galli.
Catullus, in poem 63, describes how Attis, a pais kalos ("lovely boy"), was swept away by galli and finally
joined their ranks. Attis castrates himself and thereby abdicates his manhood. Catullus refers to the galli as
gallae (feminine plural), suggesting that the loss of their private parts has in fact perversely changed their
gender, just as Attis has become a notha mulier, a "fake woman."
In his inability to make the transition from eromenos (beloved) or puer delicatus to erastes (lover) or
husband, Attis represents in Roman eyes an appalling failure of culturally sanctioned masculinity.
Juvenal, in the Second Satire, compares hypocritical priests to galli: "Here is Cybele's crew, with their
uninhibited babel / Of squeaky voices. A crazy old man with snow-white hair / Presides at the rites, a rare
and truly remarkable case / Of voracious greed. He ought to be paid to give masters classes." Juvenal
sarcastically adds: "It's time to follow the Phrygian mode: / Just take a knife, and sever the lump of useless
meat."
In Apuleius' The Golden Ass, a eunuch buys the ass Lucius. Lucius describes his new owner: "he was a real
old queen, bald apart from a few grizzled ringlets, one of your street-corner scum, one of those who carry
the Syrian Goddess around our towns to the sound of cymbals and castanets." The buyer takes Lucius home
and introduces him to his cohorts (fellow priests and eunuchs): "Look, girls, at the pretty little slave I've
bought." The "girls" at first think that their chief has brought them a handsome man, but, seeing the
deception and disappointed that "this was not a case of a hind substituting for a maiden but an ass taking
the place of a man," they sneer at their boss, saying that this was not a servant for them but "a husband for
himself."
Later, they carry the Syrian Goddess in procession: "Next day they all put on tunics of various hues and
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'beautified' themselves by smearing colored gunge on their faces and applying eye shadow. Then they set
forth, dressed in turbans and robes, some saffron-colored, some of linen and some of gauze; some had
white tunics embroidered with a pattern of purple stripes and girded at the waist; and on their feet were
yellow slippers." They eventually repair to the baths, where they pick up "a robust young peasant, finely
equipped in loin and groin," on whom they perform oral services.
Tibullus, in his book of elegiac poems, asks the god Priapus for advice on dealing with boys, especially his
favorite Marathus. Boys should value the gift of poetry rather than cheap tokens of love, which is something
the followers of Cybele on Mount Ida cherish in particular: "But the one deaf to the Muses, who sells his
love, / Let him follow after Luxury's / Idaean Chariot, fill three hundred cities / With his vain footsteps,
hack his worthless flesh / As Phrygian music blares."
Virgil, in the Aeneid, contrasts decadent/effeminate Easterners and strong/manly Italians; Numanus insults
the Trojans by calling them Phrygiae (feminine plural) rather than Phryges; and Turnus offends Aeneas with
the term semivir Phryx ("half-male Phrygian"), which alludes to the Phrygian cult of Cybele and her "halfmale"
priests.
The high and mighty were also not exempt from suspicion and ridicule. For example, Suetonius, in The
Twelve Caesars, compares the emperor Augustus, who reputedly enjoyed passive intercourse in his youth,
to a gallus on a Roman stage.
Even Christian writers were concerned with the galli. St. Augustine, in City of God, uses the rites of Cybele
as examples of pagan atrocities, religious prostitution, and same-sex promiscuity. Anna Klosowska explains:
"For Augustine, Cybele is a paradox: a fertility goddess who requires infertility from her castrated priests."
(But do not the Roman Catholic Church and some other Christian denominations require from their priests a
similar sacrifice, a life of sexual renunciation? To be sure, celibacy is not equivalent to sexual mutilation,
but modern religions are no less paradoxical than Cybele in their expectations of priests and their attitudes
toward sex.)
Sex and Sexuality
For embracing a permanent state of feminine subjugation, the galli were marginalized to the fringes of
Roman society. They seem to have converged in a subculture that protected them from the enmity of the
majority. In the cult of Cybele, they were able to pursue their minority sexual interests without the
ostracism that they experienced in the larger society.
There exists in the galli a fascinating interplay of nature and nurture. Walter Stevenson, who claims that
eunuchs became more prevalent in the Greco-Roman world, writes: "Though it is helpful to separate
discussion of sexuality from evocations of 'nature' and to use the more versatile concept of 'construction of
sexuality,' in the case of eunuchs we are forced to face the interaction of these two forces: most often the
eunuch's sexuality is first created by a surgical procedure, then, once biology has altered the individual's
sexuality, the society creates roles and a 'construction' for him."
Studying the galli and eunuchs in general (cultural phenomena that no longer exist in the modern world)
thus complicates our understanding of ancient sexuality and puts in question the rigid Foucauldian
dichotomy of essential and constructed sexualities. The galli are neither masculine nor feminine but almost
a third sex, a neuter(ed) category.
Bibliography
Hubbard, Thomas K., ed. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003.
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Klosowska, Anna. Queer Love in the Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Richlin, Amy. "Not Before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love
between Men." Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993): 523-73.
Skinner, Marilyn B. "Ego Mulier: The Construction of Male Sexuality in Catullus." Roman Sexualities. Judith
P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 129-50.
Stevenson, Walter. "The Rise of Eunuchs in Greco-Roman Antiquity." Journal of the History of Sexuality 5
(1995): 495-511.
Taylor, Rabun. "Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome." Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1997):
319-71.
Tougher, Shaun, ed. Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond. London: Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth,
2002.
Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
About the Author
Nikolai Endres received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
in 2000. As an associate professor at Western Kentucky University, he teaches Great Books, British literature,
classics, mythology, and gay and lesbian studies. He has published on Plato, Petronius, Gustave Flaubert,
Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Renault, Gore Vidal, Patricia Nell Warren, and others.
His next project is a “queer†reading of the myth and music of Richard Wagner. He is also working on a
book-length study of Platonic love as a homoerotic code in the modern gay novel.
Article by Leonhard Schmitz, Ph.D., F.R.S.E., Rector of the High School of Edinburgh
on pp566‑567 of
GALLI, the priests of Cybele, whose worship was introduced at Rome from Phrygia, in B.C. 204 (Liv. XXIX.10, 14, XXXVI.36). The Galli were, according to an ancient custom, always castrated (spadones, semimares, semivir, nec viri nec feminae), and it would seem that impelled by religious fanaticism they performed this operation on themselves (Juv. VI.512, &c.;Ovid, Fast. IV.237; Martial, III.81, XI.74; Plin. H. N. XI.49). In their wild, enthusiastic, and boisterous rites, they resembled the Corybantes (Lucan. I.565, &c.; compare Hilaria), and even went further, in as much, as in their fury, they mutilated their own bodies (Propert. II.18.15). They seem to have been always chosen from a poor and despised class of people, for while no other priests were allowed to beg, the Galli (famuli Idaeae matris) were allowed to do so on certain days (Cic. de Leg. II.9 and 16). The chief priest among them was calledarchigallus (Servius, ad Aen. IX.116). The origin of the name of Galli is uncertain; according to Festus, (s.v.), Ovid (Fast. IV.363), and others, it was derived from the river Gallus in Phrygia, which flowed near the temple of Cybele, and the water of which was fabled to put those persons who drank of it into such a state of madness, that they castrated themselves (Compare Plin. H. N. V.42, XI.40, XXXI.2; Herodian. 11). The supposition of Hieronymus (Cap. Oseae, 4) that Galli was the name of the Gauls, which had been given to these priests by the Romans in order to show their contempt of that nation, is unfounded, as the Romans must have received the name from Asia, or from the Greeks, by whom, as Suidas (s.v.) informs us, Gallus was used as a common noun in the sense of eunuch. There exists a verb gallare, which signifies to rage (insanare, bacchari), and p567which occurs in one of the fragments of Varro (p273, ed. Bip.) and in the Antholog. Lat. vol. I p34, ed. Burmann.
