"There are rites in which you mutilate yourselves and maim your bodies to make an offering of the pain... and it is the barbarity of the wounds that earns heaven. Another makes the sacrifice of his genitals; appeasing the goddess by mutilating his loins, he unmans himself and offers her a shameful gift; the source of the man's seed is torn away to give her food and increase through the flow of blood. Both sexes are displeasing to her holiness, so he keeps a middle gender between the two, ceasing to be a man without becoming a woman. The Mother of the Gods has the happiness of getting herself beardless ministers with a well-ground razor!"

Behind this literary attack on pagan castration placed in the mouth of a Christian martyr was a defense of martyrdom. Martyrdom was also a bloody act of self-sacrifice believed to earn salvation, but Prudentius contrasted the martyr's unwilling sufferings with the eager sufferings of the eunuch priests: "But this blood of ours flows from your barbarity [and not from our own]." The passage also implied a sharp contrast between the manly self-sacrifice of the Christian martyrs as soldiers of Christ and the unmanly sacrifice of the eunuch priests.

The dangerous gender ambiguity of the eunuch priests was also exhibited in their sexual behavior, at least as reported. The sexual aspect of the cult of the Mother of the Gods has also been neglected by historians, but, in their defense, it is also unclear in the sources. Worship of the Mother of the Gods seems to have involved in some places and at some times what is often called sacred or cultic or temple prostitution, ritual sexual activity performed by female priestesses acting as sacred prostitutes. The practice should not be too surprising in a cult that had fertility at its heart, but even ancient writers contradict each other about the ritual, so the extent or nature of sacred prostitution cannot be known. It is sometimes also maintained that after their castration, the eunuch priests also offered their sexual serviced to male worshippers at the shrines, as sacred male prostitutes alongside the sacred female prostitutes. Again, the practice is not inherently illogical. Eunuchs preserved the youthful attributes of male adolescent beauty longer than other males (although we cannot know at what age the eunuch priests castrated themselves), and sexual activity with young males as well as females seems to have been part of the sexual repertoire of many adult males in the ancient Mediterranean.

Evidence for sexual activity on the part of the eunuch priests, however, remains vague. In the middle of the second century, the pagan writer Apuleius had mocked the sexual indulgence and gender ambiguity of the eunuch priests in his 'Metamorphoses,' although he seemed genuinely sympathetic to the worship of the Mother of the Gods. He called the eunuch priests 'cinaedi' (men who enjoyed being penetrated sexually), and included an episode in which they seduced a local farmer's son more for fun than for religious reasons. He also alluded to their renunciation of masculine identity, having them call each other "girls" (puellae) in private. Nonetheless, Apuleius is one of the few sources to describe in other than hostile tones the supposed sexual activity of the eunuch priests, and even he was writing satire. It is possible that the eunuch priests did not act as sacred prostitutes, and that writers inimical to the cult libeled them in what they knew would be a damaging manner, borrowing their details from the general sexual repertoire of vices attributed to eunuchs (described in chapter 3). It is also possible that the eunuch priests did act as sacred prostitutes, and the reluctance to mention the fact in sources favorable to the cult betrays the general discomfort of Roman writers to admit the sexual penetration of adult males, even castrated males and even in the service of religion. In the end, while we cannot be certain about what practices existed, we can know what representatives of interested groups chose to believe or to assert existed.

For Christians who denounced the cult, the sacred prostitution of the eunuch priests was evident enough and constituted proof of the perversity of paganism. Paulinus of Nola claimed that "the brothel of Venus together with the madness of Bacchus were divinities for the wretched, and lust allied with insanity celebrated wicked ceremonies in foul rituals." Firmicus Maternus condemned the priests of the Carthaginian goddess to whom he referred by her Latin epithet 'Caelestis' ("the Heavenly One"). His denunciation is worth quoting and discussing at length. He began by addressing the gender ambiguity of the eunuch priests, relating their intermediate position between male and female to the general "middleness" of the pagan cult:

"Animated by some sort of reverential feeling, they actually have made this element [air] into a woman [Caelestis]. For, because air is an intermediary between sea and sky, they honor it though priests who have womanish voices. Tell me, is air a divinity if it looks for a woman in a man, if its band of priests can minister to it only when they have feminized their faces, rubbed smooth their skin, and disgraced their manly sex by donning women's regalia?"

He continued by alluding to sacred prostitution as one of the ways in which the eunuch priests were more women than men. He emphasized the revolting "public" nature of the sexual activity, but if there was a social reality behind his remarks, the public and visible nature of the sexual activity may have been an important part of its ritual function. He wrote:

"In their very temples one may see scandalous performances, accompanied by the moaning of the throng: men letting themselves be handled as women, and flaunting with boastful ostentatiousness this ignominy of their impure and unchaste bodies. They parade their misdeeds in the public eye, acknowledging with superlative relish in filthiness the dishonor of their polluted bodies."

He returned again to the eunuch's dressing as women, linking the feminine appearance and their feminine sexual activity together with the deficiency of their pagan beliefs:

"They nurse their tresses and pretty them up woman-fashion; they dress in soft garments; they can hardly hold their heads erect on their languid necks. Next, being thus divorced from masculinity, they get intoxicated with the music of flutes and invoke their goddess to fill them with an unholy spirit so that they can ostensibly predict the future to fools. What sort of monstrous and unnatural thing is all this? They say they are not men, and indeed they aren't; they want to pass as women, but whatever the nature of their bodies is, it tells a different story."

The expression "monstrous and unnatural thing" [monstrum prodigium] refers to a portent of evil. In other words, the eunuchs attempted to tell fortunes to gullible pagans, but their own bodies were a bad omen. Firmicus Maternus had been a pagan and an astrologer before his conversion and knew the language of paganism well, but his hostility to his former beliefs might have clouded his accuracy about the activities that went on at the shrines of the goddess. The passage formed part of a polemical attack on paganism itself. "Ponder too what sort of divinity it is which finds it such a delight to sojourn in an impure body," he asked, "which clings to unchaste [impudici] members, which is appeased by the contamination of a polluted body?"

Firmicus Maternus was not the only Christian to offer lurid (if questionable) details about sacred prostitution and the eunuch priests in devotion to the Mother of the Gods. Augustine of Hippo also devoted several sections of 'The City of God' to "the obscene practices of this depraved cult," in which "effeminates [molles] consecrated tot he Great Mother, who violate every canon of decency in men and women" could be seen "in the streets and squares of Carthage with their pomaded hair and powdered faces, gliding along with womanish languor." He denounced the sexual violations of the cult as gender violations: "For men to be treated as women is not in accordance with nature; it is contrary to nature." But his attack was also part of a larger critique of traditional Roman religion and against those who believed they were worshipping a god "by the commerce of prostitution, by the amputation and mutilation of sexual organs, by the consecration of effeminates, by the celebration of festivals with spectacles of degraded obscenity." The eunuch priests provided further proof of the irrationality of pagan belief and the insanity of those who "should try to convince anyone that they perform any holy action through the ministry of such persons [homines]."

It should be noted that Christians were not the only ones who objected to this cult and its supposed sexual depravities. Augustine quoted from Seneca to demonstrate how respectable Romans had always condemned such unnatural practices. It is true that there had always been a certain scandalous quality to the cult of the Mother of the Gods from the time of its first arrival at Rome. Equally scandalous in late antiquity was the association of the emperor Elagabalus with the cult. We have already seen how Elagabalus's reputation suffered at the hands of historians; here is another important reason for that disgrace. Before his assumption of the imperial honors, Elagabalus had been High Priest of the Sun God at Emesa in Syria (he was named Elagabalus after the god and, because it was a sun god, also as Heliogabalus; his actual imperial title was Varius Avitus Bassianus Marcus Aurelius Antonius). Shortly after his arrival at Rome, Elagabalus attempted to unite all of the pagan religions into one cult, one of the first attempts at unifying religious practice across the Roman Empire. (Constantine's official support for Christianity proved more successful, but he also did it by assimilating the Christian god to a sun god, 'Sol Invictus,' "the Unconquered Sun.") As part of that attempt at unification, Elagabalus had married the chief vestal virgin (a sacrilege, according to traditional Roman standards) and had a symbolic rite performed in which his Sun God was married to the Mother of the Gods. The gods' marriage lasted no longer than Elagabalus's brief reign.

Still, the association of Elagabalus with the worship of the Mother of the Gods and its cultic prostitution may shed some light on the emperor's reported actions. Historians described the emperor Elagabalus as wanting to become a eunuch priest himself. It is possible that he did. According to the 'Historia Augusta,' he tied up his genitals in a symbolic or actual attempt at castration, and if he thought of himself as a sort of 'gallus,' it might help to explain his supposed transvestism and his willingness to be sexually penetrated or at least help to explain the historians' impugning him with such actions. The claim that he associated with prostitutes and performed as one himself may also be an intimation, accurate or not, of his encouragement of sacred prostitution as part of his syncretic religious reforms. In any case, the association of Elagabalus with the cult of the Mother of the Gods lent both a further unsavory reputation.

Again, we must be careful not to mistake the distaste of writers, either pagan or Christian, for an accurate reflection of the details of or popular support for the cults. The poet Claudian, for example, in order to discredit the status of eunuchs everywhere in his polemic against Eutropius, asked a question that he must surely have known to be disingenuous: "Have we ever seen a temple built or altars raised to a eunuch god?" Nor must we assume that the Roman writers shared the feelings of all Roman men toward the cults or toward the eunuch priests. It is possible that while men of the upper classes denounced the obscenity of the eunuch priests and their religion, men of the lower classes found in their visits to the shrine a useful sexual or spiritual outlet. Tertullian, for example, complained of "the vulgar superstition of popular idolatry" that took the cult seriously. Indeed, the vehemence with which the literate members of Roman society denounced the worship of the Mother of the Gods may reflect their exasperation at the popular support for the cult. After all, someone was attending the shrines and participating in the processions that so dismayed the authors of our sources. Augustine complained that even decent Christians could not avoid seeing the revolting displays of the eunuchs as they passed by in the streets and being thereby corrupted, but this complaint was perhaps in part to excuse his own admission that as a young man he hat "thoroughly enjoyed the most degrading spectacles" of the Mother of the Gods.

For Christian writers, the condemnation of the pagan eunuchs could become the focus for a panoply of other critiques: the blurring of the sexes following from an abandonment of what was natural, the irrationality of pagan belief and practice, the violence of the Roman spirit, or the obscenity of sexual license. The polemic against pagan eunuchs thus formed an integral part of a more general Christian critique of traditional Roman culture that we have seen endlessly repeated. Pagan writers perhaps worried that the eunuch represented the worst features of the later Roman man; Christian writers assured them that he did.