- Galli
Galli (singular Gallus) was the Roman name for castrated followers of the
Phrygia n goddessCybele , which were regarded as athird gender by contemporary Roman scholars,Fact|date=July 2007 comparable totransgender ed people in the modern world. The chief of these priests was referred to as a battakes, and later as the archigallus.ref label|1728|1|^Cybele's Galli were similar in form to other colleges of priests in Asia Minor that ancient authors described as "
eunuch s", such as the priests ofAtargatis described byApuleius andLucian , or the "galloi" of the temple ofArtemis atEphesus .The first Galli arrived in Rome when the Senate officially adopted
Cybele as a state goddess in203 BC . Until the first century AD, Roman citizens were prohibited from becoming Galli. UnderClaudius , however, this ban was lifted.Further information is difficult to come by, given the persecution faced by followers of Cybele and other pagan deities after the Theodosian edict of
391 AD . All of her temples were destroyed, with orders that they should never be built upon (in contrast to the usual practice of converting non-Christian religious sites). As a result the only surviving records of the Galli come from historians and archivists. The accuracy of such records is often dubious because of thegender biases of most ancient writers.The name "Galli" may be derived from the Gallus river in Phrygia. Alternatively it may be derived from the Sumerian Gallu, (from "Gal" = Great, "Lu" = Man) special servants of the Sumerian God
Enki . (One of the first temples to Cybele was built near this river, which led to a rumor that drinking from the Gallus would cause such madness that the drinker would castrate himself. It has also been supposed that "Galli" is derived from the Latin word for "rooster". Hieronymus believed the name was given by the Romans as a sign of their contempt for theGauls . However, in that case, "gallus" would have been borrowed from Asia or Greece, where it meant "eunuch".The Galli were castrated voluntarily, typically during an ecstatic celebration called
Dies Sanguinis , or Day of Blood, which took place onMarch 24 .References
*note label|1728|1|^1728 [http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?type=turn&entity=HistSciTech000900240173&isize=L]
ee also
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Korybantes
*List of transgender-related topics
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