Without History

Why then do we call those who castrate themselves Galli,

When the Gallic country’s so far from Phrygia?

‘Between green Cybele and high Celaenae,’ she said,

‘Runs a river of maddening water, called the Gallus.

Whoever drinks of it, is crazed: keep far away, all you

Who desire a sound mind: who drinks of it is crazed.’

(Ovid, Fasti Book 4)

I

In the summer of 2024 I started hearing Cybele talk to me.

In the summer of 2021 I was diagnosed with a personality disorder after a disabling breakdown the year before.

In the summer of 2020 I began researching the Gallae – the ancient transgender Priestesses of Cybele – and making music about them.

In the summer of 2024 I started hearing Cybele talk to me.

She isn’t loud or particularly garrulous, but she is firm and determined. She doesn’t speak in her own voice – if she even has one, why should a being who opens doors in mountainsides speak as we do? She takes over my internal voice and guides my thinking with a revelatory but gentle turn. She doesn’t offer visions. She doesn’t offer the deepest secrets of the universe. She offers clarification. She offers understanding. She offers a way to understand the relationship between trans people – trans women in particular – and the austere motherhood she offers.

She’s very clear about what she is. She is an introjection of the idea of Cybele I have built up through the years I have been thinking about her and reading about her. The revelation she offers is nothing more than an interpretation of that material I have been unable to bring to the light of consciousness on my own. She is an alter. An alternative product of the processes that create my own consciousness.

And yet she comes to me after months of experimenting with different forms of prayer. She comes to me after multiple offerings of my own blood modelled on what historical accounts of the practices of the Gallae exist. She comes to me after I made a sustained effort to make space in my mind for her through scrying, through ritual, through mantra. She comes to me as my persistent intrusive thoughts turn to the idea of a ritual involving self harm. She comes to me when I abandon my usual practice of resisting such thoughts and gather pine bough and pine cones, follow the reported dress of the Gallae, and make an offering of my blood in plea for the safety of my fellow trans folk.

I’m obviously insane and indulging my own madness. Nurturing my own delusions. A garden of choicest ramblings and paranoias. Fed with trauma. Fed with fear. Fed with blood.

II

In the summer of 2019 I voluntarily had my testicles removed. The various psychiatrists I had to convince to give me permission to do this declared me of sound mind (‘she presents completely in female role and her mood is euthemic’) as a condition of that permission. The UK’s antiquated and bigoted trans healthcare system demands this.

Our desire for bodily modification, our desire to remove the signs of our assigned genders, mark trans people as dangerously close to insanity. We are forced to perform our sanity – our conformity to the expectations of our acquired genders as well as the expectations of mood and behaviour and belief of “productive” members of society. The gatekeepers of the asylums demand it to allow us access to the healthcare we need.

To be allowed to exist in cis society we must deny madness. Like St Peter at the cock crow we look the guards in the eye and lie.

‘My mood has been fine.’

‘I haven’t self harmed in years.’

‘Oh, work have been fine about it.’

In the psychiatrist’s office, there is no trauma, no grief, no fear. We dance the dance of normality for those with power over us to get what we need. We deceive them into thinking they know our ways and our lives. Deceive them into thinking we are as they are. And in return we get access to hormones and surgeries.

This too is a cage. Trans reality, trans consciousness, trans culture – all this must exist in impermanent shadow. Conversations never recorded. Traditions never written down. Writings thrown away by uncaring families at our untimely deaths. The touch of madness lies too heavily on what we create for it to be tolerated. We drink too deeply of the maddening waters as we build a world for ourselves.

Of course Cybele comes to me in madness. How else would she come?

The queer and the mad have always had common cause and common enemies. Through trauma, through iatrogenesis, through hardship and pain inflicted by a society that despises us – we become one another. The delusion is our natural home. The hallucinated whisper our natural voice.

Of course Cybele comes to us in madness. How else would she make us her own?

And yet this truth is also a dangerous romanticisation. To be mad is to suffer and there is no dignity in suffering. The lionisation of privation has always been a lie perpetuated by those who benefit from taking things away from us. The solidarity and commonality between the mad, the disabled and the queer does not come from any wild internal poetry. It comes from persecution. It comes from trauma. It comes from needless pain and death inflicted upon us by a society that despises us and wants us invisible or gone. So many of my siblings in madness and transness are fucking dead and the grief at this drives me further and further away from being able to live in this world. Further into the most destructive madness.

Of course we go to Cybele in madness. How else would we make her ours’?

III

Cybele is a goddess who has travelled. Worshipped first under that name in Phrygia we know her through the writings of the ancient Greeks who would later adopt her as their own. Her legacy can be seen in the monumental sculpture that still survives in the mountains of modern Anatolia in Turkey. Gigantic statues, long eroded into facelessness by time. Huge doorways carved into mountainsides to ease her way between worlds.

Whether she goes back still further is impossible to say. Icons depicting mother figures associated with mountain lions and eagles have been found at neolithic Anatolian archaeological sites. These creatures would later be closely associated with Cybele. Whether this indicates a longer continuity of the Mother of the Mountains back into prehistory is impossible for us to say. Historians disagree. Some pagan feminists have imagined a prehistoric matriarchy. Others dismiss such wishful thinking and point to not only the complete lack of evidence for this, but also to the reactionary turn such politics has often taken. Ultimately we cannot know and will never know.

What we do know is that during the Punic wars the Oracles in Rome demanded that the Great Mother, the Magna Mater, be brought to Rome. After much negotiation and no few miracles this came to pass and a great statue of Cybele travelled from Phrygia to Rome to take up home in her new Temple.

And with the statue came the Gallae. “Soft-skinned men” who self castrated, took women’s names and dress, called each other sisters and danced frantically for Cybele. Roman society – at least as preserved in the writings of privileged slave owning and abusing men – found them foreign, vaguely disgusting and amusing by turns. They were not men, but not women either. Mocked for fucking women and men alike. Untrustworthy whores and unfuckable monstrosities at the same time. Roman citizens were banned from self castration so, as far as we can tell, the Gallae were likely drawn from the least privileged sections of society. At the very least, anyone with any privilege who joined them would have had to do so in secret and at the loss of all their social status.

In the writings of Martial especially, the attitude of Roman society to the Gallae is a fully articulated transmisogyny recognisable to any present day trans woman. And the women who can be glimpsed between the cracks of patriarchal texts are fully recognisable as our sisters. Outcast but joyful in their womanhood. Walking a line between madness, joy and despair. Despite the hesitation of cishet historians and archaeologists to name it so – a hesitation which is falling away as more queer scholars lay their hands on the wealth of evidence – we can see an ancient trans culture in these texts. These women are our sisters.

IV

Our modern antagonists – the Gender Critical movement, TERFs, regressive religious activism of all stripes – insist upon transness as a modern invention. A form of medical abuse inflicted upon the mentally ill. A sick perversion of a decadent society preying on children. Liberalism gone too far. The metaphorical rape of women’s bodies by predatory men. Whatever the particular excuse the pattern is the same. We are a new disease. A sickness in the body politic recently developed and to be excised by violence.

In understandable response, many queer people have gone hunting for our history. And wherever we look, we find it. Trans people existed throughout the ancient world. We find trans subcultures throughout the history of Europe and Asia. Trans women in particular are often hypervisible – as we are today – and exist in highly structured and socially recognised subcultures. Scythian priestesses, cross dressing sex workers in Molly Houses, the Gallae, the Hijra.

We explore our history and notice that many of our ancient ancestors were priestesses or acolytes of one kind or another. Seers. Holy women. Devotees of some goddess or another. We see this and we grasp for status. Trans women are holy. We were revered and worshipped. In the past we delivered prophecy, today we deliver Starbucks because they have the good health insurance (as long as we stay quiet and away from unionising drives). We see modern transphobia and transmisogyny as society’s fall from grace. The corruption of capitalism and modern patriarchy making the world smaller and smaller and smaller.

In the same way that many gay men have pointed to the ubiquitous sexual relations between men in Greece and Rome as evidence that homophobia is a modern innovation, trans women invoke Inanna and join sisterhoods where we try to reclaim our former holiness.

Sadly, this is bullshit. Predatory bullshit at that. The “gay” cultures of ancient Rome and Greece were patriarchal cultures of abuse, where slaves and children were reduced to the sexual playthings of patriarchs. There was nothing queer about a rich man fucking his male slaves. It was a pure exercise of the power of patriarchy. The reduction of some men to the less than human status of women. This was taken up by gay men of social status and power returning to ancient Greece as a model for their desire in the late 19^th century. Younger, working class men were exploited by older, richer men. The beginnings of sex tourism in Morocco that continues today saw colonised and impoverished children exploited by western gay men in the name of liberation.

In contemporary trans subcultures we see a repetition of the same patterns. Trans woman predators wrap themselves in the trappings of ancient trans culture – Inanna worship or whatever – and create “safe” spaces full of younger, more vulnerable and often newly out women who are easy to abuse. This is a pattern which has repeated many times, especially in online spaces, and which has allowed those with social power and status to abuse those without again and again.

The mystification and glorification of our past as a time of reverence and power for queer people slots neatly into the need for power of the minority of more privileged, abusive, queer people. Rich men prey on young homeless men. Trans women with status and steady jobs offer shelter and flattery to the young and newly transitioned and then abuse them with impunity.

No community is without its predators. No community is immune to the ways that hierarchy, power and access to resources makes some more vulnerable than others. All trans people are oppressed. But some trans people seek to oppress and abuse in their turn with the privileges that remain to them.

Seeing in our history what we desire to see, crafting stories from the limited evidence that provide the comforting narrative that our oppression has not lasted forever and will maybe end one day without needing to completely upend society as it is, is completely understandable. It is also intensely dangerous. It is how abusive cults come to be.

V

I refuse to be a vector of harm. I refuse to tolerate any space where abuse is allowed to thrive. I refuse to be silent while my siblings are hurt – by each other or the cis, I don’t care. We live under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every structure, every institution, is designed from the ground up to harm and abuse and exploit. To mark some as lesser and suck everything of value to those marked as greater out of them. To destroy whatever is left and mark it as worthless and disgusting.

Religious organisation has again and again and again served this purpose. Whether it’s aggressively patriarchal Abrahamic faiths or so called “feminist” paganism we find in great churches and tiny cults alike abuse upon abuse upon abuse. A rotten set of structures that exist in a rotten society to extract extract extract from anyone vulnerable.

And yet Cybele speaks to me.

And yet trans people cry out for a sense of history and belonging.

And yet Cybele whispers to me, in my own voice, of the covenant she offers between the Mother of the Mountains and the Sisters of the Cut.

We are hers and she is ours.

There is, in madness, a way through this. Through whispering voices and intrusive thoughts, through the solidarity of the Gender Clinic waiting room and the raw hatred of psychiatrists, through shattered minds and multiplying identities, through deep disgust at the hatred thrown our way by a society that despises us and the deep love we can have for each other in our abjection.

In the covenant that Cybele offers, I believe there is a way to access and venerate our history as trans people and build a community of care that is watchful and active around the possibilities of abuse. I believe it is possible to build a ritual practice that raises us all up and protects us in our deepest vulnerability. I believe we can dance and bleed and fuck for the Goddess without making anyone dance and bleed and fuck for us. I believe it is possible to derange our senses and enter into the most vulnerable and terrifying relationships with the universe and each other and still build from the ground up an ethics and a practice of care that makes this a risk we share and support each other in, not an opportunity for the worst amongst to take what they want at our expense.

I’m not saying this is easy or guaranteed. But I do believe it’s possible. And I believe it’s worth trying.

VI

The revelation that Cybele brought me to is neither complex nor dramatic. It is based on a reading of the existing contemporary texts about the Attis myth and the Gallae. This reading is supported by contemporary writings, but it is far from the only reading, the most common reading or even the most plausible reading. It is, however, a reading which gives us an insight into the relationship between the Gallae and the Goddess they danced for. It is a reading which allows us, as modern trans people in a very different situation, to create our own relationship with Cybele.

What Cybele told me, in many more words spoken in my own voice and notions and images bubbling up in my consciousness, was this:

Attis was not the first of the Gallae and his self castration was not an act of liberation.

It was instead an invitation. The madness that Cybele drove Attis to in her jealous rage was not transness, it was self destruction. But those of us who live in the madness of trans identity can see in that act liberation for ourselves.

The cut that Attis made on his body that severed his testicles is an invitation to a covenant with Cybele. The Cut, an act of parting and severing that places us forever at odds with cis society, is an invitation to community and an invitation to worship.

Cybele did not create trans people and claims no dominion over us. Instead she offers us refuge and a space to build our own community in return for our devotion. She recognises herself in us and offers us a chance to recognise ourselves in her. Severed from cisness, straight society sees us as a barren dead end. Indeed, it often insists on our literal sterilisation in order to allow us to exist at all. Cybele, as the Mother of the Mountains, is similarly barren, surrounded by lions and bare rock rather than children.

In our alienation from a society that sees the increase in the labour supply through the domination of women by men as a driving force, a sacred necessity ordained by patriarchal gods and states alike, Cybele and trans people come together as avatars of a barren madness, of the howling wilderness hammering at the gates of civilisation.

This is, of course, complete fabrication. Cybele speaks to me not through but because of my own madness. She is an introject, a psychic construction of my own mind built from years of reading and thinking and creation. The covenant Cybele offers conveniently mirrors my own anarcha transfeminist politics and makes no supernatural or authoritarian claim. Clearly whatever trauma, psychiatry and a lifetime of extreme politics has done to my mind has created an avatar of wish fulfilment in the shape of a mountain striding Phrygian deity.

And yet it is from within madness that all trans culture, politics and community must exist. Our very genders are pathologised and our experiences often derange in all kinds of ways. We live daily with suicide and voices, depression and mania. We seek help and our personalities are labelled disordered and we are thrown back out into the street, for our own good of course. We have capacity after all…

VII

The invitation to worship that Cybele offers us is an invitation to exploration, to self definition through the creation of community, to the creation of our own values as trans people trying to live in a cis supremacist society. She offers space and the possibility of collective ritual, nothing more. There is no creed – whatever there may once have been in ancient temples is long lost to us beyond all recovery. There is no set ritual – we have fragments and suggestions from surviving texts by outsiders but there is no way to know how accurate this is and some of it is almost certainly deliberate slander. Cybele offers no particular revelation or truth. She doesn’t even offer her own reality – something in my mind made her up as my mental health became worse and worse over the years.

You would be forgiven, dear Reader, for asking what exactly the point of such an invitation is?

Trans people already build community for ourselves. We are, arguably, the single most mobilised and active minority community there is if we take turn out at demonstrations, involvement in community organising of many different kinds and the mutual aid networks we run as any kind of measure. If any group has taken on board and run with the idea that we protect us – not the state, not the cops, not fairweather “allies” – but *us*, it’s trans people.

The answer is in our vulnerabilities. Like all queer people we are raised amongst people who are not like us and do not understand us. Even those of us with supportive and loving families – a privilege for trans people! – find ourselves deeply alienated from them and their inability to understand the lives we lead, cocooned as they are in their straightness. This is always a wound. And it is something we consistently seek to heal through seeking community.

Approaching the necessity of community through our wounds, through our trauma, creates great vulnerability. The need for a sense of belonging and meaning for our lives which cannot be reached through anything in our childhoods creates a huge opportunity for exploitation and for abuse. Being deliberate and open about the ways we create this meaning and making it accessible without gatekeepers is one way we can make ourselves safer.

The Wound left by the Cut we have no choice but to make to live as ourselves does not heal unattended. We have to be deliberate about it and there are many who would abuse that Wound while pretending to dress it. One of the things that Cybele offers us is a history, a place to stand. A way of understanding ourselves that gives us a community that stretches back into the past. An understanding that insists we have always been here and presents a possibility of belonging which does not depend on the gatekeepers of community.

Cybele offers not just a place to stand to reach an understanding of ourselves, but a foundation on which to do it.

VIII

Like the most obsessive of masochists we must examine the Wound before we take any steps to heal it. The alienation of trans people from cis society is far from natural. It is a political construct, an essential feature of patriarchy. For women to be exploited in our societies the boundaries between genders must be extensively policed. Like all borders, gender is maintained by violence, created by violence. The accidental features of our bodies inscribed with apparently inescapable meaning at the point of an abuser’s fist and a rapist’s dick. Those of us who joyously cross those borders are doing what is supposed to be impossible, remaking what is supposed to be immutable.

Patriarchy’s answer to us is always expulsion – whether to the fringes of society, some despised third gender or our deaths is irrelevant. We are to be excised from the body politic like the cancer in the heart of patriarchy we are. Tumours cut out and cast away. The Wound left by our excision stitched closed and forgotten. Our absence only remembered in the sclerotic, malfunctioning values of a system of domination which can never deliver the wholeness, the consistency and the inevitability that it promises.

To the patriarchy, queer folk are the Wound. We mark the point at which it cannot remake the world in its own image. A potentially fatal malfunction where the creation of heterosexual men and women in their proper place fails and something monstrous emerges. The Cut cishet society makes to excise us is the cutting out of rotten tissue, a Cut which heals and finally closes a pre-existing Wound.

But, of course, a body as diseased as patriarchy can never heal the Wounds it makes in shaping itself. Each Cut endlessly spews blood for which it will try to make the excised responsible. Queer folk are constantly asked to suture the wounds left by cutting us off. Hostile families, hostile states, hostile institutions – forever asking us to salve their consciences and stitch closed the Wound that expelled us. It is here we can make the first of our own Cuts. By refusing this act of suturing, by severing this thread and rejecting the meaning they force on us, we Cut for ourselves.

This Cut, which many trans people enact literally upon our bodies with the various surgeries we pursue, is the Cut which Cybele asks us to see enacted in Attis’ dreadful self mutilation and death. His rebirth is not enough. It does not atone for the jealous, suicidal madness Cybele drove him to. But in that madness trans people wait, exiled and seeking meaning, and we can bring to self castration a joy, an ecstasy, that is available to no cis person.

In its turn the choice to refuse patriarchy its reassurance and choose to make the Cut necessary from cis society to live authentically opens up a Wound of its own. Aside from the discrimination and persecution this brings down on our heads, so often this Cut leaves us without roots, without full access to the family and communities we had before. We lose identity that roots us to their world but gain only a label they place on us to mark the mutual rejection.

The “queer community” does not pre exist our rejection by the straights. Each of us enters it naked and has to build our own place in it. Over time roles have developed, cliches we can adopt, life paths that can give us some stability. But all of this must be adopted and adapted intentionally. The inevitability of patriarchy, the iron path laid down which leads us to one of a small bushel of available lives, is gone for us. We must live without scripts, but also without roots.

These are vast absences. Wounds that take much to heal. We are thrown into community with our fellow queers to reach this healing. To lay down new roots, to make new meaning in our lives. The flesh exposed by the Cut we make is raw and delicate and so so vulnerable. The collective project of queer life we enter into is full of joys and dangers and endless possibilities for new Cuts, new Wounds.

This then is further exacerbated by multiple historical discontinuities in that community. In the UK, my generation of queers are forever marked by the darkness government and media censorship plunged us into in the Section 28 years. A shared trauma that is difficult to understand for those younger than us. The generation before us was devastated by AIDS and lives with a deep trauma none of us in later generations can really understand. All of this makes the intergenerational transmission of values, of institutions, of traditions, deeply unreliable and often completely malfunctional. This series of Cuts can leave us rootless and vulnerable and is one of the reasons that queer people seek meaning in so many places.

And it is here that we circle back round to history, to madness, and to the covenant that Cybele offers us.

IX

Ritual. Remembrance. Derangement.

Madness. Community. Healing.

Rebuild. Relearn. Remake.

As trans people in a cis supremacist society, as gender outlaws in a tightening and suffocating patriarchal regime, we have many tasks before us. Many of the roads we are forced to travel are intensely isolating and none more so that when we explore our spiritual and religious needs. Trans people finding their place in traditional Abrahamic religions face outright discrimination and coming to terms with religious text that apparently makes us sinful in our true selves. Trans folk in paganism find the Divine Feminine deployed against them and find themselves deeply excluded, even sometimes from the worship of Cybele herself. These are lonely roads, walked by people of deep conviction and faith. Every last one of them is deeply admirable and braver than I will ever be.

However, these are not the only roads. We have opportunities now to build for ourselves. To enter into collective trans labour and to build a ritual and spiritual life around out experiences and our lives and our history. To refuse to be a despised footnote – however necessary that may be for some people – and instead write our own stories, drawing on the stories our trans ancestors found powerful.

The covenant Cybele offers us is a space to build. To create our own rituals drawing on the historical information we have, but more importantly on our own need for each other and a relationship with the mystical that recognises us as who we are. We live inside madness. We can build here temples where our own derangement becomes an engine of meaning not exclusion. Where we share our visions and our delusions with each other in a new mythology that rejects the psychiatrist and the cop alike.

This is a collective process. This is something we can do together. This is something we can invite our siblings to share with us.

I have ideas. I have prayers and texts delivered to me by the construct of our Goddess who built herself in my psyche. And neither of us has any interest in imposing these on anyone. They are to be shared, joyously. To be used and altered and combined and transformed in joy and ecstasy and in delirium and derangement.

In blood and pine bough.

In the jet mirror and the sharpened stone.

In the few relics of our ancestors and the art we make for ourselves.

In blood, in dance, in love, in madness.

…the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the Cut makes the Wound heals the…

We are yours and you are ours, Sisters of the Cut for the Mother of the Mountains.

And we will dance and bleed and fuck with each other, for each other, under Cybele’s protection. Endlessly watchful for each other. And so so full of love.