Enaree

The Scythians left no writing that names them. Everything in the surviving record was set down by Greek authors, several of whom disapproved of the Enarei and blamed them for the sack of a temple, and the name the Enarei used for themselves has not come down at all. The office is therefore known from its critics and from the objects found in graves.

Why the Greeks called them unmanly

The English word comes from Enarees, the form Herodotus of Halicarnassus recorded, which renders a Scythian term anarya, unmanly. The Scythian word is built from a-, non, and narya, from nar-, man. Pseudo-Hippocrates got closer to the original with Anarieis.

The name that survives is a negation in somebody else's language. An enaree is named for what the office was held not to be rather than for what it was, it comes from writers who were hostile to them, and the Scythian word underneath it may not be what the Enarei or their neighbours called the office at all.

What the Enarei did in the cult

The Enarei belonged to the cult of Artimpasa and the Snake-Legged Goddess, two closely related figures whose forms were heavily shaped by the fertility goddesses of the Near East. The rites they conducted mixed indigenous Scythian shamanic practice, itself related to the practice of indigenous Siberian peoples, with material imported from Levantine religion. Some modern scholars hold that the Enarei served much the same purposes in the cult as priests of other genders.

Written evidence for what they did is thin and the archaeological evidence is wider. One ornamental panel of the third or fourth century BC shows an enaree pouring wine for a communion beside the chief priestess of the goddess. Funerals are the other documented setting: after a body was mummified and buried, the priests involved cleansed themselves in the vapour of cannabis, which Herodotus described as a tent ritual that left them howling with laughter. Saka tombs in Siberia have produced tripods, braziers, pelts and charcoal holding the remains of cannabis leaves and fruits, and a pot from one of the Pazyryk burials held cannabis fruits alongside a copper censer. None of that material names the Enarei specifically, and what it establishes is that priests of this cult were involved, which makes them among the earliest spiritual practitioners known to have used cannabis to reach altered states.

Pseudo-Hippocrates supplies the everyday description. The Enarei wore women's clothing, did women's work in the company of other women, and spoke with a feminine voice using the grammar assigned to women. Scythians regarded them as essentially different from other men because of the transformation, and the difference was read upward: the Enarei were respected, feared, and rich.

How the Enarei told the future

Their divination was distinct from the ordinary Scythian kind. Other soothsayers worked with willow withies; the Enarei used the inner bark of the linden, cut into three strips and plaited and unplaited around the fingers to produce an answer. Among Scythians in Russia the linden went on to serve as a symbol for the third gender, and for feminine-presenting people born male.

The office was consulted when the king fell ill, which the Scythians took as proof that somebody had sworn a false oath on the royal hearth. The enaree named a suspect, who denied it, at which point six further soothsayers were called. If they agreed, the accused was beheaded and his property divided among the Enarei who had accused him. If they cleared him, more soothsayers were called, and if the larger number found him innocent, the original accusers were loaded into an ox-drawn wagon packed with brushwood and burned alive with the oxen. Their sons were killed and their daughters spared. The procedure measures the office in both directions: the power to name a traitor and the price of naming the wrong one.

What the burials and the pole tops show

The regalia is inferred rather than described. The Enarei may have used drums, and antlered headdresses of the kind found in Saka horse burials and worn until recent times by Siberian shamans. What is not in doubt is the sceptres, capped with ornate pole tops and often hung with rattles, which functioned as marks of authority and have been found across the steppe from Mongolia to the Great Hungarian Plain. The oldest of them, from the eighth century BC in Tuva and the Minusinsk Basin, are topped with a stag or an ibex standing with its feet together as though perched on a rock. Later ones grow elaborate: from the Oleksandropilskiy kurhan come a goddess with her hands on her hips, a griffin in a frame with two bells hanging from it, and a third splitting into three branches, each carrying a bird of prey with a bell in its beak. The tinkling announced that the rites were about to begin.

Individual graves have been argued about. Eileen M. Murphy, writing on the Scythian burials at the Aymyrlyg cemetery in Siberia, points to remains showing slipped capital femoral epiphysis, a condition associated with delayed sexual development in males, and to individuals with chromosomal variations, as candidates for the people Herodotus described. Jeannine Davis-Kimball connects a high-status burial at Tillya Tepe in Afghanistan to the Enarei on different grounds: the person buried was male, dressed very like the priestesses in neighbouring graves, and accompanied by objects that do not usually appear in a man's burial.

How each age explained the Enarei

The Scythians' own explanation was hereditary and punitive. The Enarei were believed to be born repeatedly into particular families, and the condition was traced to a curse laid by Artimpasa on the warriors who sacked her temple at Ascalon, inherited ever after by their descendants. The context is a real expansion: during the seventh century BC the Scythians pushed into West Asia and their religion took on the shape of the Fertile Crescent's, and Ascalon held a temple of Astarte, an androgynous vegetation and fertility goddess credited with turning men into women and women into men, whom the Scythians identified with Artimpasa. Read from the other side, the Enarei combined the transformed shaman of the steppe with the gender non-conforming priesthoods of the West Asian Great Goddess: the Kelabim of Astarte, the Galli of Kubeleya, the Megabyzoi of Ephesian Artemis.

The steppe tradition told it as an elevation rather than a punishment. In indigenous Scythian shamanic terms the Enarei were transformed shamans who had changed their sex, and that made them the most powerful of shamans, feared and specially respected. Gender-crossing shamanism of the same kind, in which men gain prophecy and possession by giving up masculinity, survived among indigenous Siberians into recent times. The Enarei appear to have lived their early lives as men, with the transformation arriving later.

Greek and later European writers rationalised. Pseudo-Hippocrates put the androgyny down to impotence caused by riding horses and wearing trousers, and Clement of Alexandria to a feminising illness spread by the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis. The Hippocratic reading, under the name the disease of the Scythians, then had a long second life in European medicine, discussed across the writings of the 1500s to the 1700s. Pierre Petit, writing in 1596, took it for natural variation; by the 1700s writers had reclassified it as a melancholy or a hysterical disease; and in 1882 William A. Hammond wrote up the Pueblo mujerados by comparing them to it.

The modern readings are translations into a vocabulary built long afterwards, in the same way the Greek ones were, and the Scythian explanation is itself only visible through writers who thought the Enarei had been cursed.