Two Pathic Subcultures in Ancient Rome

332 RABUN TAYLOR
ously he had brought it not as a slave, but as a husband for himself.
"Hey!" they said. "Don't you eat up this pretty little yearling by
yourself, but share it with your dovies from time to time."40
This seems a hopelessly paradoxical picture: frantic sexual urges
among men who lacked their sexual organs altogether. We might be
tempted to dismiss the image as a gross misunderstanding on the part of
unsympathetic observers, if not for the existence of a modern anthropological
parallel whose analogies to the ancient cults are little short of astonishing.
The hijras (hijaras, hijadas) of India so closely resemble the
priests of antiquity that the question arises whether their two cults could
be distant filiations of a single group of west Asiatic fertility cults.4'
Both the hijras and the Galli are servitors of a female fertility goddess.
Throughout India, this goddess is the center of a series of rural village
cults and is called by a number of names. Like Cybele and many other
fertility goddesses, she is often paired with a lesser male god.42 The roots
of her cult are pre-Aryan; it was probably brought into the peninsula by
the Dravidians in the third millennium B.C.E. These may have come from
Mesopotamia, and their culture and language were related to those in
Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean. One authority places the origin
of the Phrygian and Syrian cults in the same region, specifically near
Carchemish along the Euphrates.43 It is quite possible, then, that many
of the ritual elements in the Indian cults are related to those of the ancient
Phrygian and Syrian cults. Although the circumstances of the two
cult groups' rituals may differ significantly, the rituals themselves at
40"'Puellae, servum vobis pulchellum en ecce mercata pcrduxi.' Scd iliac pucllac chorus
crat cinacdorum, quae statim exsultantes in gaudium fracta et rauca et effeminata voce
clamores absonos intollunt, rati scilicet vere quempiam hominem servulum ministerio suo
paratum. Sed postquam non cervam pro virgine, sed asinum pro homine succidancum vidcre,
nare detorta magistrum suum varie cavillantur: non enim servum, sed maritum illum
scilicct sibi perduxisse. Et 'Heus,' aiunt, 'cave ne solus exedas tam bellum scilicet pullulum,
sed nobis quoquc tuis palumbulis nonnumquam impertias'" (Apul. Met. 8.26). Comparc
Lucian Asinus 36.
41Apparently the only scholar who has explored this link is Sumant Mchta, "Eunuchs,
Pavaiyas and Hijadas," Gujarat Sahitya Sabha, Amdavad, Karyavahi, Ahmedabad, pt. 2
(1945-46): 3-75. I have not had access to this article, but A. M. Shah, "A Note on the
Hijadas of Gujarat," American Anthropologist 63 (1961): 1325-30, reports that Mehta
'traced analogous institutions in other parts of India and also in other parts of the world
in modern as well as ancient times" (p. 1325).
42 For anthropological parallels, sce Sir James Gcorge Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study
in Magic and Rcligion, pt. 4: Adonis Attis Osiris: Studics in the History of Oricntal Religion,
3d ed., 2 vols. (London and Basingstoke, 1980).
43E. 0. James, The Cult of the Mother-Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary
Study (London, 1959), pp. 100, 113-20, 123; Vermaseren, p. 17.
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