Attis the Trans-Woman Part 3

Today's episode concludes our deep-dive into Attis, the Phrygian fertility deity assigned male at birth who underwent gender transition. After the emotional turmoil subsides, Attis settles into the house of Rheia. Though Attis had a few stumbling blocks at the beginning, she was able to grow in this affirming environment. Eventually Rheia and Attis got married and raised a foster child in Dionysos. Features of life such as  athletics and chariot races which Attis feared loosing actually did transfer over to her new life. 

Rather than interpreting the story as a tragedy, the story of Attis can be read as one of a successful transition!

Transcript

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to Lambda, the LGBT and Antiquity Podcast, your home for all things LGBT in the ancient world. I'm your host, Dominica Raven, episode 10, Atis the Transwoman Part 3. Attis stands alone at the seashore. She has been contemplating the transitory state she finds herself in during the first few hours post-sexual reassignment surgery. The past as a queer coded young man is long gone, and it is impossible to ever return home. But nothing from the affirmed future has been written yet. So there is a natural anxiety over what is coming next and what they have to go through to live an affirmed life in the house of Rea Kaibele. As Attis sits and stews on the anxiety, Rea sees her pain on the seashore. She calls to her lions who pull her chariot, ordering them to go to Attis and bid her to return to the forest. Kaibele tells her lions to charge at Attis, roaring and shaking their manes. Kaibele wants to make sure Attis returns to her house to let the passionate frenzy return to her heart. The lions charge and follow Kaibele's orders, but they don't actually attack Attis. Rather, what they do is chase Attis into the forest and up the mountain to the house of Kaibele. It is not Attis' fate to spend all her days in this indecisive anxiety. Rather, she is to become the bride of Kaibele and lead the Gale as her chief priest and handmaid. Over these past few weeks, we have talked about how Attis is a character coded as a trans woman in Catullus 63. The poem covers the first few hours after sexual reassignment. Attis goes through both gender euphoria and anxiety over the future. There are some moments when a discontented life as a queer coated Ephoe seemed preferable to the unknown future as a bride of Kaibalay. This week we are continuing our deep dive into Attis with a discussion of what comes after those first few anxious hours. The lions of Kaibalay certainly are frightening. Who wouldn't be terrified when several adult lions charged at them? But the lions are not necessarily trying to harm Attis. Think about the world of Rea and her many nymphs. The world of Rea is fundamentally a world of wild women, and now Attis and the other Gale are counted among them. Rea and the others live on the mountains of Phrygia, where they are well outside the domestic and civilized spheres. Yet this is a space where wild women could be vulnerable. So Chibalae sets her beasts, such as wolves, lynxes, and lions, at the border of her mountain home. They are terrifying, yes, but the fear is used for defense. There are many things in this world which are ostensibly for defense, but are actually very terrifying. For example, the nuclear arsenals we claim protect the West from the East, but if we were ever to use them, it is an end to all life on this planet. Sometimes the act of defense is horror tactic. This is basically what the lions are. Those mountains in Phrygia are so full of wild carnivores that no reasonable man would willingly go there. Now, if we apply this idea to the story of Attis, it spins the narrative differently than how many read it. Many scholars see the lions of Catullus 63 as Chibalae attacking Attis. They see Attis as an intruder into this world of women, and the lions are sent to attack the intruder and keep them in line. This reading follows the interpretation that Attis seriously regrets the transition and needs to be kept in line by violence. But if we remember the lions are actually defending Kaibala and her handmaids, this interpretation falls apart. It's almost as if this discussion stems from modern scholars bringing the bias that many people will regret their transition more than on the interpretation of the story in its own context. At this point in the story, Attis is conflicted. She stares out at the sea and tries to see home again. She is reflecting on where she has been and wondering what of that discontented but familiar experience will transfer over into her post-transition life. The lions come and drive her away from the seashore, back into the mountains. Attis is at risk of pining away for something she can never have back. She is at risk of staying in that liminal, conflicted state and never making steps forward into the affirming life Kaibele offers. Attis could be stuck in transition forever, never able to move to that next phase of life. This would be a tragedy. So the lions come to push Attis towards the next phase. Attis is to be Kaibele's bride, not eternally mourning. Viewed in this light, Kaibele is not attacking Attis or trying to punish her for seeking her homeland, but trying to save her from her own mixed emotions. Years later, Attis and Chibele adopted Dionysus and reared them to adulthood. When Dionysus was born out of wedlock, Hera was so enraged by what she saw. Zeus chose Dionysus, a Kinidos, a eunuch, who is not even a legitimate child of Zeus and Hera to be his chosen scion and successor to the throne of Olympus. Everything about this situation fills the queen of the universe with rage. So she attacked this bastard child with everything she had. Dionysus has to go into hiding to avoid danger. Hera is always one step behind because the child has Hermes as a guide. Hermes transports the infant from foster family to foster family, eventually reaching the house of Rhea and Attis. Now, this is where Dionysus finds a bit of safety. This is a great choice because Rea is both well outside of normal society in the wild lands of the mountains and therefore harder to find, and alone of all the female deities, Rhea is actually Hera's predecessor as queen of the universe. Rhea was once married to Kronos, and so she was the queen of all the feminine stuff. So Hera respects this unorthodox femininity of Rhea, even if it is a wild, unfamiliar form to her. So, where Hera attacked Athamas and Aino, destroying their entire household, Hera would never dare attack the house of Rea Kaibalay. Filial piety demanded Hera back down, at least for a little while. During this period, Dionysus was raised as a nymph, dressed as a young girl, and played the social roles expected of a young girl. One could interpret this as a crude disguise meant to take advantage of the intrinsically perfidious nature of women's clothing. However, when your children are being raised by a feminine-coded intersex deity, such as Chibalae, and a transwoman eunuch, Attes, why would we expect Dionysus to have a standard, heteronormative understanding of gender at all? At this point in the myth, Dionysus is not going through a phase but learning to be strong. It is also important that during this period, Dionysus is an adolescent, but no longer an infant or baby. Here is where Dionysus learned how to do athletics. Dionysus learned how to throw the thyrsus, a type of fennel wand sacred to Dionysus, as if it were a javelin. Later in the story, Dionysus wrestles with a Thracian princess named Palene, and Dionysus not only was able to win, but able to usurp her father, a cruel and twisted tyrant who desired to sleep with his own daughter. These are the basic athletic skills which basically every youth in antiquity practiced regularly so they could perform in athletic competitions. Somebody had to teach Dionysus how to do all these activities. Remember when Attis was depressed shortly after the sexual reassignment and wondered if she could ever return to athletics and sports? Well, Dionysus would have been too young to learn such skills from any of the other foster parents, and Rea is not really associated with athletic competition. But Attis is. It seems as though Attis was more than able to keep these facets of herself after transition. The ambivalence many of us experience during the sexual reassignment was actually unfounded. Women, yes, even trans women, are more than capable of continuing athletics after transition, however, society may perceive their accomplishments. Attis makes two more appearances later during Dionysus' exploits in India. The first comes when Dionysus is asleep and receives a portentious dream from Eris, the embodiment of Discord, who threw the golden apple at the goddesses to start the Trojan War. She appears as Rhea riding in a chariot driven by Attis. Rhea bore and raised Zeus, as well as bearing, but not raising Poseidon and Hades, the three strongest gods in descending order of that older generation. Now Rhea raised Dionysus as a foster parent, and, in the dream, claims to be disappointed. Dionysus is meant to be the strongest and most powerful of all the gods. Zeus himself made Dionysus a chosen successor to the throne of Olympus. Yet, at this point in the story, Dionysus hasn't actually done anything heroic or shown that overwhelming power. So, Eris, in the form of Rea, spits venom at Dionysus, claiming all the gods in the universe are laughing at Dionysus and their inability to use that power. This rhetorical device gets Dionysus moving to attack and civilize the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean by destroying the oppressive patriarchy in those provinces. Later in the plot, Attis appears for real in Dionysus' camp. Attis has brought a gift from Rhea, a brand new set of armor wrought by Hephaestus, and some words of advice. This is a fairly common scene in the epic when a goddess brings the armor for the hero. Achilles gains armor from his mother Thetis in Book 19 of the Iliad, and Aeneas receives new armor from his mother, Aphrodite, in Book 8 of Aeneid. It is important to note that it's pretty much always a goddess who brings the armor. Here, Attis plays that role and presents a magnificent set of armor displaying the stars of the heavens. Attis reminds Dionysus that they were trained by Rea Kaibele. Rhea is the bearer of mighty children, and Dionysus is destined to succeed and prevail against Hera. Then something interesting happens. After encouraging Dionysus, Attis takes off in the chariot and rides off into the night, making it all the way back to the house of Chibalay in one go. Remember how Attis was concerned about never being able to return to the race track? Well, here is a chariot race like no other: a trans woman riding solo on a cart pulled by those same mighty lions, racing across the whole of Asia in one night. So the fear of never being able to ride a chariot again was wholly unfounded as well. Attis just completed one of the most memorable chariot races of all time. For a long time, queer arguments were mainly about proving to the powers that be within the classics that LGBT models and theories could be used to describe ancient situations. This era was largely exploratory, where simply showing homosexuality in myth and society was the point. Now, while this literature is extremely important and ultimately does form the bedrock of everything we're talking about here, I find this literature to be fundamentally limiting. When the goal of a discussion is simply proving to the heteronormative power apparatus that there were in fact queer people living in the past, our arguments are never really able to get beyond the descriptive. From my perspective, this was deliberate as they made every effort to limit the study of gays and lesbians, as well as other gendered and sexual experiences. There was a very specific model of keeping us bottled up with setting the groundwork, then resetting it up, then resetting it up again. They had this clear image of homosexuality, and we were trying to challenge the intense friendship and sexual inversion models which prevailed during the 20th century. Today there are a lot more voices who are able to make actual arguments about the past, not simply prove the basics over and over again. Since we have an exceedingly small but growing voice in the classics, we're able to discuss Catullus 63 and Gnos of Panopolis on something a little closer to our own terms. This allows us to see a queer character in a queer situation and apply a queer interpretive framework to understand it. The descriptive model presented in these three episodes begins with a person assigned male at birth and their companions leaving some Greek city as exiles and heading to Phrygia for gender reassignment. We could interpret the gender nonconformity already present in Attis at the beginning as perhaps the reason they were exiled in the first place. Attis brought all of the effeminate weirdos who were way beyond Kinaidos and genuinely desired to live in the feminine sphere to Phrygia. These folks became the priestesses of Chaibalay once the transition was complete. Now Attis is the archetypal Galay priestess. In the poem, Attis is the first to complete the process and the first to be referred to by the feminine verbiage. The others followed suit and joined Attis in service to Chaibala. As the poem progresses, Attis is revealed not only to be the first Galay, but the first of the order. There is this emotional ambivalence, especially in the first few hours, but that is just the temporary state. Attis is destined to be the bride of Chaibele. By the time we get to Gnos of Panopolis, Attis is confident and affirmed in this environment. If we interpret the story this way, we see a trans woman deity and a gender nonconforming but female coded intersex deity who get married. When we read the story like this, we have a truly queer relationship where gendered and sexual expectations are wholly thrown out the window as these two abnormal wild women share a life together. Here, Attis is shown to thrive and even raise a foster child with Kybele in Dionysus. Ultimately, this is what I mean when I talk about taking the classical past on our own terms. The older repressive model would have had us stop with arguments like Attis could be thought of as a trans woman because where today we can take it a little further and ask questions like, if we interpret Attis as a trans woman, then. This is a massive step forward. We are able to follow the argument beyond simple representation and enter the realm of interpretation. Next week we're going to depart Attis and move on to Dionysus as a manifestation of general queerness. We have explored the gender fluid nature of Dionysus today and during the Transgender Day of Visibility special. But when you take it all together, Dionysus is genuinely attracted to soft men, powerful women, and all around androgynous figures. Both in gender and sexuality, Dionysus is capital Q, queer. We'll see you next Monday. Notes and comments. I wanted to apologize again for the somewhat reduced quality of the audio in this episode. My day job is in contract archaeology, and now the ground is no longer frozen, that means I am on the road. I recorded this in a hotel room between shifts. I tried my best to limit the background noise and use some editing tricks, but it's not necessarily at the same audio quality as usual. Thank you for understanding. The opening scene comes from Catullus 63 verses 74 through 90. Most scholars interpret this scene as Chaibele attacking Attis, but here we explore the alternate possibility that Caibele is moving to deliver Attis from the internal emotional danger. Catullus was a Roman poet who lived in the first century BC. He lived through a lot of crises, being born during the period of the Social War, First Civil War in the 80s BC, and grew up during the time of the revolt of the Consul Lepidus in 77 and the conspiracy of Catiline in 63. His adult life was taken up with the rivalries between Pompey the Arrogant, Elon Crassus, and Caesar, who valued his own power over democracy itself. Although Catullus himself died before the final showdown at Pharsalus in 48 BC. It was a period of immense change where literally every piece of Roman life and tradition fell apart. His poetry, which is mostly short verses, reflects this chaotic crisis era when the old republic was in its death throes. Catullus 63 is one of his longer poems, sometimes called the Hymn to Attis and Chaibalae, or the Hymn to Baracinthea, but the poem itself is actually an epilean or mini epic because of its heroic content. In any case, Catullus 63 tells the story of the first few hours of Attis' life after gender transition. The lions are ostensibly for defense of Chibalay and her nymphs, as well as other feminine wild deities, such as Artemis, Circe, and Dionysus. Attis seems to fit the mold, but it's never explicitly stated in the poem. Lions are symbolic in the religion of Chibalay for their physical and emotional defense. Adherents even to this day request Chibele send her lions to protect from physical violence, also emotional violence, sexual violence, and emotional trauma. Protection from physical attacks are clearly significant, but they're only part of it. The parts about Dionysus as a youth and the exploits in India are drawn from Nonos of Panopolis. Nonos was a poet who lived in the 5th century AD in the town of Panopolis in Egypt. His Dionysiaca is the longest epic in antiquity. It's really interesting because the story of Dionysus he presents really emphasizes the gender and sexuality of Dionysus. Though there are other sources on Dionysus, few make this queer reading so effective. Dionysus throws the thesis like a javelin in Gnos Dionysia, Book 10, verses 250 through 251. Dionysus wrestles with Pauline in the Dionysiaca Book 48. A study on Dionysus' effeminate heroism is found in J. D. Fincher's published PhD dissertation from Yale University, titled Gnos Dionysiaca and the Redefinition of Epic Poetry and Heroic Code from 2015. Specifically, chapter 5 addresses scenes from Nonos involving Dionysus and Attis interacting directly. He interprets these scenes as a mature fertility deity, passing on words of wisdom to an immature fertility deity. These two gods in Rea's orbit are gender nonconforming, and that is one of the sources of their power. Living outside of a heteronormative binary is a path to immortality and power for these gods. Rehea's concepts of gender are part of what allows them to be so strong. Another useful study on Dionysus and Attis is found in Robert Schorak's The Challenge of Epic: Elusive Engagements in the Dionysiaca of Nonos from 2001. He frames the interaction as a juxtaposition between Attis's impotent fertility and Dionysus' fertile androgyny. His interpretation is interesting, though I don't necessarily agree with everything. Both are fertility deities whose gender nine conformity is a path to their eventual immortality. I don't see Attis as impotent. As much as representing a different type of fertility than Dionysus. Attis completes the sexual reassignment process in Catullah 63, verse 5, and is referred to in the feminine immediately after, starting in verse 6. The others join after a speech from Attis at verse 17. That's all for this week, folks. We'll see you next week for our discussion of Dionysus.