Galli
The Galli: Rome's Transgender Priesthood
Based on Wikipedia: Galli
In 2002, archaeologists digging in Catterick, a small town in northern England, found a skeleton dressed in women's clothing. The body was adorned with jewelry made of jet, shale, and bronze. Most strikingly, two stones had been placed in the corpse's mouth.
The skeleton was male.
This was a gallus—a eunuch priest of the goddess Cybele, buried according to ritual customs that stretched back more than a thousand years and across thousands of miles, from the temples of ancient Phrygia to the cold frontier of Hadrian's Wall. The senior archaeologist at English Heritage, Pete Wilson, put it simply: "The find demonstrates how cosmopolitan the north of England was."
But cosmopolitan barely captures it. This priest had castrated themselves during an ecstatic religious ceremony, wore women's clothing and heavy makeup, and served a foreign goddess in a land that wasn't their own. They were part of one of the most fascinating and misunderstood religious traditions in the ancient world.
A Goddess from the East
The story of the galli begins with Cybele, a goddess whose worship likely originated in Mesopotamia before spreading to Greece around 300 BCE. She was associated with wild nature, mountains, and lions. Her sacred symbol was a black meteorite, which her followers kept in a temple called the Megalesion in Pessinus, a city in what is now central Turkey.
Cybele had a consort: a beautiful young god named Attis. Their mythology was tragic. In the most common version of the story, Attis was unfaithful to Cybele, and in a moment of divine jealousy, she drove him mad. In his madness, he castrated himself beneath a pine tree and bled to death. Cybele, stricken with grief, resurrected him—or, in some versions, transformed him into an evergreen pine, ensuring he would never truly die.
This myth was not merely a story. It was a template.
The Day of Blood
On March 24th each year, the galli reenacted the death of Attis in a ceremony called the Dies sanguinis, which translates literally as the "Day of Blood."
It was exactly what it sounds like.
The priests would run through the streets in a frenzy, hair disheveled, bodies wild with ecstasy. They danced to the sound of pipes and tambourines, working themselves into a state of religious transport. They flogged themselves until blood flowed. And those who were new to the priesthood—those who wished to dedicate themselves fully to Cybele—would castrate themselves during this ceremony.
The next day was for feasting and rest.
It's worth pausing here to consider what this meant. These were not involuntary eunuchs, castrated as children for some political or social purpose, as was common in other ancient and medieval contexts. These were adults who chose this path. They cut away their manhood in a moment of religious ecstasy, permanently altering their bodies in service to their goddess.
The Romans, who would eventually adopt this cult as part of their state religion, were absolutely horrified. And absolutely fascinated.
How Cybele Came to Rome
In 205 BCE, Rome was desperate.
The Second Punic War against Carthage—the war of Hannibal, of elephants crossing the Alps, of the Roman army's catastrophic defeat at Cannae—had dragged on for over a decade. The countryside was devastated. Crops had failed. Meteor showers had streaked across Italian skies, which the Romans interpreted as signs of divine anger.
Something had to be done.
The Roman Senate consulted the Sibylline Books, a collection of cryptic prophecies kept under guard by a special college of priests. The Books gave a remarkable answer: bring the Great Mother to Rome. If the goddess Cybele became an ally, the famine would end and Carthage would fall.
So the Romans did something extraordinary. They sent an official delegation to Asia Minor, negotiated with the priests at Pessinus, and arranged for the black meteorite—Cybele's sacred stone, the physical presence of the goddess herself—to be shipped to Italy.
It arrived in 204 BCE and was carried into the city with enormous ceremony. On April 4th of that year, the stone was installed in the Temple of Victory on the Palatine Hill, overlooking the very heart of Rome. The anniversary was celebrated ever after as the Megalesia, a festival featuring public games, animal sacrifices, and musical performances by the galli.
And yes, Carthage fell. Rome won the war. Whether this was divine intervention or coincidence, the Romans knew what they believed.
Half-Men in the Holy City
Here's where things get complicated.
Roman citizens were forbidden from castrating themselves. The law was called eviratio, and it was taken seriously. So how could Rome adopt a cult whose priests were eunuchs?
The answer involved some careful legal maneuvering. The original galli who came to Rome were not Romans—they were either Asians from the cult's homeland or, possibly, slaves. A Roman citizen could worship Cybele, could attend her festivals, could make offerings at her temples. But they could not become a gallus.
Or at least, that was the official position.
The Emperor Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54 CE, lifted the ban on castration for religious purposes. This allowed Roman citizens to join the priesthood fully. His successor Domitian reversed this decision, reinstating the prohibition. Scholars still argue about how this worked in practice, whether Roman galli before and after Claudius were genuine eunuchs or whether they found ways around the restriction.
What we do know is that Rome eventually created a new position: the archigallus, the "chief gallus." This was always a Roman citizen, selected by the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, one of the four major priestly colleges of Rome. The archigallus served for life and presided over the cult's major rituals, including a ceremony called the taurobolium—a blood baptism involving the sacrifice of a bull.
Some scholars believe the archigallus was never actually castrated, that he walked a careful line between cult tradition and Roman law. Others disagree. The evidence is fragmentary, and the Romans themselves seem to have been uncertain about how to categorize these priests.
What the Romans Saw
Roman writers couldn't stop talking about how the galli looked.
They wore women's clothing, typically in bright yellow. They wrapped their heads in turbans and hung pendants and earrings from their ears. They bleached their hair and wore it long. They covered their faces in heavy makeup. The scholar Shelley Hales notes that "Greek and Roman literature consistently reinforces the sexual and racial difference of eunuchs by stressing how different they look."
The galli were visible. They were meant to be visible.
They wandered through Roman cities with bands of followers, playing tambourines and pipes, begging for charity. In exchange for donations, they would tell your fortune. The respectable classes found them embarrassing, exotic, and impossible to ignore.
Roman sources call them semiviri—"half-men." Greek sources use the word hemithēlys, "half-women." These terms were not meant kindly. The historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus claimed, perhaps defensively, that true Roman citizens never participated in the actual rituals of Cybele's cult, that they kept their distance from these foreign priests with their foreign ways.
But archaeology tells a different story. Votive statues of Attis have been found on the Palatine Hill itself, dedicated by worshippers whose names suggest they were Roman citizens. The cult was integrated into Roman life in ways that literary sources don't fully acknowledge.
Neither Man nor Woman
Modern scholars have been fascinated by what the galli meant in terms of gender.
The simplest interpretation is that they were transgender, in our modern understanding of that term. They were assigned male at birth, but lived as women—wearing women's clothes, using women's cosmetics, presenting themselves to the world in a feminine way. Their castration wasn't just a religious sacrifice; it was a bodily transformation that aligned their physical selves with their social presentation.
But other scholars suggest the picture is more complicated. Jacob Latham has argued that the galli occupied a "third gender" in Roman society, existing outside the normal categories of masculinity and femininity altogether. They weren't men who became women. They were something else—something that Roman gender categories couldn't quite accommodate.
This might explain the intensity of Roman reaction to them. The galli weren't just breaking a taboo about castration. They were breaking a taboo about gender itself, refusing to be either of the two things a person was supposed to be. Their foreignness and their gender nonconformity were linked: they came from the East, they served an Eastern goddess, and they embodied a way of being that felt fundamentally alien to Roman sensibilities.
And yet Rome kept them. For six centuries, from the end of the Punic Wars until the triumph of Christianity, the galli remained part of official Roman religion.
A Priesthood with Deep Roots
The galli may not have been a Roman invention at all—or even a Phrygian one.
The name itself is mysterious. Ancient writers disagreed about where it came from. Some said it derived from King Gallus, a legendary figure. The poet Ovid claimed it came from the Gallus River in Phrygia. The same word also meant "rooster" in Latin, which provided Roman writers with endless opportunities for crude jokes.
But there's another possibility. Cybele has strong connections to Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, who was worshipped in Mesopotamia thousands of years earlier. Inanna had her own gender-crossing priests, called the gala. The similarity between "galli" and "gala" may not be coincidental.
If this connection is real, the galli represent a continuous religious tradition stretching back to the dawn of civilization—priests who served goddesses of love and transformation by transforming themselves, who existed between genders in cultures as different as ancient Sumer and imperial Rome.
This isn't proven. Scholars remain cautious about drawing direct lines across such vast stretches of time and space. But it's suggestive. The role of the gender-variant priest, serving a powerful female deity, appears again and again in Mediterranean and Near Eastern religions: the gala of Inanna, the hijra of India, the priests of Atargatis in Syria. There seems to be something persistent here, something that keeps emerging in human religious experience.
An Initiation
To become a gallus was to be remade.
Beyond the castration itself, which was dramatic enough, there was a formal initiation ritual involving sacred meals. A Christian writer named Firmicus Maternus, who lived in the fourth century CE and strongly disapproved of what he called "pagan" religions, preserved what may have been a ritual password spoken by the galli:
"I have eaten from the timbrel; I have drunk from the cymbal; I am become an initiate of Attis."
The timbrel and cymbal were the percussion instruments the galli played during their rituals. To eat and drink from them was to take the instruments of worship into your own body, to become one with the music of the goddess.
This formula is similar to passwords from other mystery religions, like the famous Eleusinian Mysteries celebrated near Athens, where initiates reportedly said: "I fasted; I drank the kykeon; I took from the sacred chest; I wrought therewith and put it in the basket, and from the basket into the chest." Mystery religions were secretive by design—only initiates knew the full rituals—so our knowledge comes largely from hostile Christian writers who were trying to expose and discredit them.
What we can say is that initiation into the galli was a transformation. You went in as one thing. You came out as something else. Your body was different, your clothing was different, your place in society was different. You had died, like Attis, and been reborn into a new life.
The Gallus of Catterick
Which brings us back to that skeleton in northern England.
The burial at Catterick, dating to the fourth century CE, tells us several things. First, the cult of Cybele had spread across the entire Roman Empire, from Anatolia to the fringes of Scotland. Second, the galli maintained their distinctive practices—the women's clothing, the jewelry, the ritual placement of stones in the mouth—even in outposts far from the Mediterranean world.
A similar burial was found at Hungate in York, another Romano-British settlement. Again, male bones buried with feminine grave goods, including jet bracelets that were strongly associated with women in that time and place.
These priests lived on the edge of the Roman world, where Hadrian's Wall marked the boundary between civilization and the unknown north. They served a goddess from Anatolia in temples dedicated to her in places like Corbridge, where archaeologists have found altars inscribed with her name. They were outsiders many times over—foreigners in a foreign land, neither men nor women in a world of strict gender categories, members of an ecstatic cult in a society that valued moderation and self-control.
And they were there for centuries. From the Republic to the late Empire, through civil wars and invasions and the slow transformation of Roman civilization, the galli persisted.
The End of the Galli
Christianity changed everything.
Saint Augustine, writing in the fifth century CE, described the galli of Carthage in his monumental work The City of God:
"These effeminates, no later than yesterday, were going through the streets and places of Carthage with anointed hair, whitened faces, relaxed bodies, and feminine gait, exacting from the people the means of maintaining their ignominious lives."
His contempt is obvious. Augustine saw the galli as everything wrong with paganism: gender transgression, bodily mutilation, religious ecstasy, worship of false gods. As Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, traditional cults were suppressed. Temples were closed or converted into churches. Priesthoods were disbanded.
The galli vanished from history.
But their story didn't entirely disappear. Scholars continued to write about them, sometimes in fascination, sometimes in horror. The Catterick burial was excavated two thousand years after the gallus was interred, and we can still reconstruct, imperfectly, what their life might have been like. They are part of a long history of gender-variant religious practitioners, a tradition that appears to be as old as religion itself.
What Remains
The galli force us to confront how little we know about gender in the ancient world—and how much we assume.
We tend to imagine the past as more rigidly binary than the present, as if transgender and nonbinary identities were modern inventions. The galli remind us that people have been crossing gender boundaries for as long as we have records. They weren't exactly like modern transgender people—their context was different, their understanding of themselves was different, the categories available to them were different. But they weren't entirely unlike modern transgender people either.
They lived as women in bodies assigned male at birth. They transformed those bodies through ritual and surgery. They adopted feminine dress, mannerisms, and social roles. They faced mockery and discrimination, but also reverence and official recognition. They served a goddess who loved them, and they believed that their transformation brought them closer to the divine.
Somewhere beneath Catterick, in soil that was once the frontier of an empire, lies a person who lived that truth two thousand years ago. The stones in their mouth are long silent. But we're still telling their story.