Roman castration clamp reconsidered

[germar (imported)]

There is a picture of a Roman castration clamp on the starting site of the EA. I never really understood how this clamp worked and why it should be necessary for cutting off of a man's testicals. There is a German doctor thesis of Susan Tuchel ("Kastration im Mittelalter"). In the Roman Empire there had been changing legislation about castration. This legislation had been often contradictious to the social status of eunuchs in Rome. But there had been two reactions to prohibition of castration inside the Roman Empire: First, importing already castrated slaves or prisoners of war into the Empire, and second, as long as castration was understood as cutting off the testes, the testicals were destroyed be crushing them but not to take them away from the eunuch. In the book, there is no reference to the instrument with which the testicals had been crushed, but maybe it was this clamp.

[colin (imported)]

There is a picture of a Roman castration clamp on the starting site of the EA. I never really understood how this clamp worked and why it should be necessary for cutting off of a man's testicals.

Unless the blood flow is constricted in some manner the castrate would quite possibly die from blood loss.

The most likely use for this clamp was self castration of priests of the Goddess Cybele. As far as I can remember, one of the earlier posts described how the clamp was placed around the penis with the scrotum trapped between the serrated 'arms' which were then secured. At the height of the ceremony the new ordinand would use a razor to slice off the scrotum and testicles below the clamp and then throw them into the brazier as an offering to the Goddess.

Incidentally, I understand that the little figurines on the clamp are thought to be representations of Attis who was the first eunuch priest of Cybele.

LOL

[JesusA (imported)]

There seem to be two or more different things going on here.

The “castration clamp” that was apparently for use by devotees of the goddess Cybele was, most likely, used in a severing of testicles and scrotum. Exactly how has been disputed in the literature. The major calendrical festival of the faith was the Dies Sanguinis, or “Day of Blood”, when devotees were drenched in the blood of a sacrificed bull and ecstatic music and dance was punctuated with self-mutilations of various sorts, including castrations.

Germar brings up the legal status of castration and eunuchs in Late Antiquity. The Romans were never happy about the process of castration, though they were perfectly willing to accept eunuchs into some low positions as slaves and servants. (And far less willing to accept the occasional eunuch who rose to high position, such as the grand chamberlain Eutropius.)

The crushing of the testicles of small boys had been used to create eunuchs for centuries before it became popular in Rome as a substitute for the knife. Most Assyrian eunuchs, for example, seem to have been castrated as small boys by the process of crushing. Frequently they were the younger sons of important families, removed from contesting the inheritance of their oldest brother.

Pueros, in his historically very accurate story of eunuchs in the Persian Empire, Tribute, describes castration by both cutting and crushing.

Tribute was posted in five segments. Here are links to the entire story:

Part 1 (http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/T/ea_114806tribute_.htm)

Part 2 (http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/T/ea_160027tribute_.htm)

Part 3 (http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/T/ea_151730tribute_.htm)

Part 4 (http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/T/ea_130555tribute_.htm)

Part 5 (http://www.eunuch.org/Alpha/T/ea_62936tribute_.htm)