Galli

Where the name gallus comes from

The ancient explanations disagree with each other. Stephanus Byzantinus, writing in the sixth century of the common era, derived the name from a King Gallus. Ovid derived it from the Gallus River in Phrygia. Romans used the same word, gallus in the singular and galli in the plural, for Celts and for roosters, and the rooster sense supplied a steady stream of puns at the priests' expense.

A third proposal reaches much further back. A Mesopotamian origin has been floated for Cybele's cult, and Cybele resembles the Sumerian goddess Inanna closely enough that galli and the priests who served Inanna, the gala, have been given a shared derivation. The sources describe that as plausible and not yet conclusive.

No source on file dates the first use of the word. The earliest surviving references are epigrams in the Greek Anthology, a tenth-century compilation of much older material, several of which mention or clearly allude to the castrated state.

How the cult of Cybele reached Rome

The worship reached Greece around 300 BCE. Its sacred object was a black meteorite, housed at Pessinus, in what is now Turkey, in a temple named the Megalesion. Phoenician galli served Astarte instead, taking on feminine dress, appearance and manner and dancing ecstatically at her temples, the one at Afqa among them, sexual acts forming part of the rites there.

Rome imported the cult late in the Second Punic War, during the third century BCE. No contemporary account of the arrival survives. Later writers make the import an official answer to the meteor showers, crop failure and famine of 205 BCE, which the Senate and the Sibylline books read as prodigies warning that Rome would be destroyed unless they were expiated. The Senate made Cybele a state goddess in 204 BCE and her cult image travelled from Asia Minor. Livy has it reaching the Temple of Victory on the Palatine the day before April's Ides, and the anniversary was kept as the Megalesia, running from 4 to 10 April with games, animal sacrifice and music the galli played. Plutarch records a gallus named Bataces prophesying Roman victory to the general Marius more than a century later, after which the Senate voted a victory temple to the goddess.

Pessinus, the cult's centre, had two high priests in the Hellenistic period, titled Attis and Battakes, both eunuchs and both politically influential; letters one of them sent to Eumenes II and Attalus II of Pergamon survive on inscribed stone. By the Flavian period a college of ten priests held the title Attis, uncastrated and Roman citizens. Beyond that college nobody has counted the galli, and no source gives their number at any date.

What the galli wore and carried

The signs of office were a crown, possibly a laurel wreath, and a golden bracelet called the occabus. Everything else was women's dress: clothing often yellow, a turban, pendants and earrings, hair bleached and worn long, and heavy makeup. Galli travelled with followers, begged for charity and told fortunes in return, and may have taken second-hand clothes and goods from women on the same terms.

The central rite was the Dies sanguinis, the Day of Blood, on 24 March. Mourning Attis, the galli ran dishevelled, danced to pipes and tambourines, flogged themselves until they bled, and castrated themselves; a day of feasting and rest followed. A sacred feast belonged to the initiation, and the Christian polemicist Firmicus Maternus records what may be its password: "I have eaten from the timbrel; I have drunk from the cymbal; I am become an initiate of Attis." The Greek and the Latin of that formula do not agree about the last clause, and some editions omit Attis from the Greek altogether.

In Rome the head of the order was the archigallus, attested at least from the reign of Claudius. He was a Roman citizen in every case, appointed by the quindecimviri sacris faciundis and serving for life, with authority over the Phrygianum sanctuary and the taurobolium rite. Whether the archigallus was himself a eunuch is disputed, since Roman citizens were forbidden eviratio, castration, which is also the ground for reading the original galli as foreigners or slaves. Claudius lifted that ban and Domitian reimposed it, and whether membership was confined to the foreign-born remains argued.

How Roman writers used the galli

Roman literature uses the galli as a device for arguing about masculinity, and the treatment hardens over time.

The shift between Catullus and Martial is political. English Heritage attributes it to the expansion of Roman territory under Augustus and to the rebuilding of the Magna Mater's temple in AD 3, which brought the cult within reach of Roman citizens: as new peoples arrived and took citizenship, concern about Roman identity rose and the galli moved from curiosity to threat. Dionysius of Halicarnassus claimed Roman citizens took no part in the cult's rituals, and literary sources call the galli semiviri, half-men, and ἡμίθηλυς, half-women. Whether that disapproval was a social reality or largely a construction of modern scholarship is itself argued, because votive statues of Attis have been found on the Palatine, which points to citizens taking some part in the reverence of the goddess and her consort. Prudentius alone reports a position, and even there it cannot be told whether he repeated how the galli described themselves or reached for an insult.

Where the galli turn up in Britain

Cybele and Attis were worshipped in Roman Britain, including on Hadrian's Wall. An altar to Cybele was found at Corbridge in 1913, later broken up and used to fill a cavity under a floor, and another at Chesters Roman Fort. A head from a statue of Attis, probably third century AD, was found at Corbridge in 1911. No written evidence for galli in Britain survives, and the case rests on the cult objects.

The nearest thing to a person is a burial. Archaeologists working at Catterick in North Yorkshire, Roman Cataractonium, uncovered fourth-century remains in 2002: a skeleton that appeared male, dressed for burial in women's clothes, wearing jet, shale and bronze, with two stones placed in the mouth. Jet was worn by women and associated with childbirth and magic. Isotopic analysis, though inconclusive, suggested an upbringing in southern Britain or a similar climate, and the quality of the jewellery, some of it possibly from Whitby, suggests wealth. Pete Wilson, senior archaeologist at English Heritage, said of it: “The find demonstrates how cosmopolitan the north of England was.” A fourth-century cemetery at Hungate in York has produced a comparable burial, bones that appeared male with jet bracelets, and the same difficulty of interpretation applies to both: burial goods are weak evidence of identity, and what they support is the narrower statement that the person was not treated as a man by those who buried them.

Why modern readings of the galli differ

Self-castration together with women's clothing, jewellery and makeup has led to the galli being read as transgender. A second reading places them in a third gender: Jacob Latham connects the foreignness of Magna Mater to her priests' gender presentation and argues that they stood outside the way Rome built masculinity and femininity rather than between the two, which would account for how Roman male citizens reacted to them. An article by Mowat in Gender & History in 2021, titled Don't be a Drag, Just be a Priest, argues from the clothing that the galli were placed outside any expected gender binary and inhabited a non-binary identity, applying drag theory and a case study of Lucian of Samosata's On the Syrian Goddess.

Shelley Hales points at what the ancient literature was doing. “Greek and Roman literature consistently reinforces the sexual and racial difference of eunuchs by stressing how different they look,” she wrote, and they “were presented as wearing bright clothes, heavy jewellery, make-up and sporting bleached and crimped hair.” That is a description of a rhetorical habit, and it is the reason the surviving sources are hard to read as evidence of how the galli understood themselves. English Heritage's account stops at the same point, stating that how the galli thought about their own identity cannot be known.

Paganism was progressively repressed and worship was effectively banned under the Theodosian decrees of AD 389 to 391. The last known reference to the cult of Magna Mater is a dedicatory inscription at her temple in AD 390, and the fate of any remaining galli is not recorded. The office is closer to the Eunuch priesthoods of other ancient courts than to any modern label, and the readings that make it Transgender or Third gender are arguments about a record in which the galli never speak.