Geldings For The Gods

by Roberta Perkins

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King Ashurbanipal on a chariot during a royal lion hunt.

Changing gender and dress are very ancient behaviours. The first recorded incident of cross­dressing is a 7th century B.C. Assyrian tablet showing King Ashurbanipal getting into drag. But customs and rituals associated with cross­dressing were very much older. For instance, the priests of the ancient Earth Goddess Ishtar in Babylon dressed as women to appease the deity. There are many accounts throughout the ancient Near East of priests attached to goddesses donning female apparel, and in the case of the priests of Attis, consort to the Earth Goddess Cybelle, in the kingdom of Phrygia, they also castrated themselves because, according to mythology, the God had removed his testicles whilst sitting beneath a pine tree.

In Babylon an annual ritual involved young men slicing off their own genitals, including the penis, and flinging these into nearby houses as they ran bleeding and in great pain through the streets of the city. In return for this sacrifice women's clothes were handed them and thereafter they spent their time at female tasks.

With so much cross-dressing/gender going on in Near Eastern civilizations in deference to their gods and goddesses, it is little wonder that the Hebrews, fearful of their more powerful enemies, and with a solitary masculine god, Jehovah opposed to other gods and their ceremonies, introduced the Deuteronomy law 22:5, which made donning the clothing of the opposite sex "an abomination before the Lord, your God". While such laws and isolationist stance were a source of strength to "God's chosen people", unfortunately Christian civilisation later adopted these attitudes, to the detriment of every transgender in Western society since.

A source of great interest to the Greek historian Herodotus in the 5th century B.C. were the Scythians, a bold equestrian warrior tribe from the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia who terrorized the civilised centres of Asia Minor. He noted that their priests, or enarees, dressed and behaved as women, but accompanied the warriors on raids, even participating in the battles. According to Greek mythology, the Scythians were punished by the Goddess Aphrodite for sacking her temples in Syria by changing their leading warriors into women. The Greek physician Hippocrates thought that the enarees had slowly demasculated themselves by riding horses too much and squashing their balls.

Greek mythology is full of incidents of cross-dressing or changing gender, a clear indication of the bisexual and androgynous minds of the ancient Greeks, especially when the supermen of their legends, like Achilles, spent some time in female drag. The strongman of Grecian mythology, Hercules, was obliged to live as a serving maid to Queen Omphale in punishment for killing the catamite Iphitus. Many of the deities were cross-dressers or bisexual, most notably Hermaphroditos, after whom the modern term for a biologically androgynous person comes from. The young God Dionysos once disguised himself as a woman to enter the kingdom of the warrior-women, the Amazons, in order to conquer them. There are many examples of role reversal, like that of the Amazons, such as the masculine women guarding Sappho on the island of Lesbos, or of the boy Ganymede, who served as both a water carrier and sexual playmate to the gods. Foremost among female transgenders in Greek mythology is Kainonis, who was changed into a man by Poseidon, but because he made his spear a phallic symbol and demanded adoration of it by the people, the centaurs slew him with tree trunks (their phallic symbols). Then there was the mortal man Tiresias changed into a woman as punishment for killing a female snake. Ten years later the Goddess Hera asked Tiresias how she liked being a woman and she replied that she enjoyed sex ten times more as a woman than as a man. With that Hera promptly changed her back into a man.

That gender-crossing was also a fact in Greek society is seen in the existence of the Goddess Venus Castina, whose sympathy and understanding for "feminine souls locked up in male bodies" prompted men with a yearning to be women to pray to her. Much later, a similar custom existed in the Roman Empire. The 2nd century A.D. Jewish philosopher Philo wrote of certain men in the city of Alexandria: "Expending every possible care on their outward adornment, they are not ashamed even to employ every device to change artificially their nature as men and women ... some of them, craving a complete transformation into women, have amputated their generative members." The Roman poet Manilius, observing the same phenomenon among some of his countrymen, commented: "(They) hate the very sight of (themselves as) a man, and long for arms without growth of hair. Women's robes they wear ... (their) steps broken to an effeminate gait." In " the satin of Juvenal is this poem:

Isn't it now high time for them to try The Phrygian fashion and to make the job complete
Take a knife and lop off that superfluous piece of meat?

Thus sex-change surgery, however crude, was alive and well from the earliest civilizations to the time of the Romans.

Some of the Roman Emperors themselves were not beyond cross-dressing, and a few went even further. In his youth, Julius Caesar apparently lived as a girl in the court of King Nicomedes, and later he was referred to behind his back as "Queen of Bithynia" who, it was said, was "every woman's man and every man's woman."

Another story associated with Caesar concerns a senator, Publius Clodius, who fancied Caesar's wife, Pompeia, and on one of his assignations with her disguised himself as a woman in order to meet her during a ceremony to the Goddess Bona Dea, exclusive to women adherents. Clodius, however, was unmasked by the women and dragged before a court on a charge of sacrilege. He was acquitted, supposedly by bribing the jurors, but Caesar's enemy, Cicero, exposed him, forcing Caesar to divorce Pompeia and to break up his friendship with the unfortunate senator. The story of Clodius' cross-dressing antics was used by the enemies of the emperors to discredit the aristocrats as decadent.

But propaganda was hardly needed in many cases, for some of the emperors brought about their own ruin, and others genuinely enjoyed cross-dressing. Caligula turned up at banquets dressed as Venus. However, he believed himself divine and therefore might be expected to have imitated the deities, but his choice of the Goddess of Love was an interesting one. In the end his own guards thought he went too far and assassinated him while attending gladiatorial contests. Nero killed his wife in a fit of rage and then in deep remorse for her loss sought a companion who closely resembled her. He found a young male slave, Sporus, closest to the ideal, had him castrated by his surgeons and the two were formally married, with the young man acting as the wife. Later he married a gladiator and this time he was the wife, screaming like a deflowered virgin on their wedding night. His excesses ended in his suicide. Eliogabalus was a particularly tragic figure in Roman history. He also married his slave and thereafter became the wife "delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the Queen of Hierocles". He even offered half the empire to the surgeon who could refashion his genitals into a vagina. Obviously, Eliogabalus was a true transgender and lived well before his time, but the Romans weren't amused and after four years into his reign he too was assassinated.

Another Roman Emperor known, or said, to have cross­ dressed was Tiberius, who, by all accounts dressed as a female during sexual escapades on the Island of Capri. Domitan and Hadrian took as lovers female impersonators from the stage. All of these rulers defied the ancient Scantinian Law against homosexuality, which the Romans observed, and this may have been no small contributor to their violent ends. On the other hand, the Roman histories are so full of propaganda by those critical of the aristocracy that fact and fiction may have become indelibly confused, particularly in the caustic writings of Plutarch and Pliny.

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