Darkness Came: The Myths of Easter and Good Friday

Every year, around this time, those who frequent social media platforms may find themselves bombarded with a certain form of anti-Christian misinformation. Of course, it depends on the algorithms determining what content is filtered out and what is directed at the user and how they have come to characterize the potential interests of each user, but the misinformation I speak about, and which I have spoken about before, is seasonal and holiday-oriented, and therefore has a greater chance of being spread this month because it pertains to the Christian holiday of Easter. Because of that, it is also more likely to be reposted or shared by users, since topical posts that appear timely can seem like content worth spreading. Nevertheless, this content, typically taking the form of a meme template, with an image and brief text statements superimposed over it, presenting supposed little-known historical facts, is certainly misinformation, or in this case, pseudohistory. And it has to do with the claim that Easter isn’t really a Christian holiday, but rather a pagan festival appropriated and exploited by Christians. This claim appeals to a surprisingly wide swathe of people. Of course it appeals to atheists, who often take pride in being able to point out the ignorance of many religious groups with regard to the origins of their own beliefs and their actual knowledge of the texts they place their faith in. They also appeal to former fundamentalist evangelicals, or exvangelicals, as they often call themselves, as a way to demonstrate the foolishness or hypocrisy of the belief systems from which they have become estranged. Surprisingly, though, they also appeal to those very same fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, many of whom are dyed-in-wool conspiracy theorists who have no love for older structures within the Christian Church or the many traditions handed down from Roman Catholicism. These are culture warriors, typically, who relish the opportunity to suggest that other Christians might have been led astray by pagan evils long perpetuated by a church that they would not consider the True Church. These are the strange bedfellows that pagan survival theories make, and I have occasionally found myself among them. I have repeated claims about pagan survivals in Christmas traditions and in claims about the life of Jesus, for example, that I would later go on to correct as being less than credible. I nevertheless have held out doubt about other details. Even just in the last episode I mentioned the theory that Ember Days were appropriations or Christian changes to existing Roman seasonal agrarian festivals. And after all, the syncretism of pagan traditions with Christianity is in many cases undeniable, such as when the Norse were converted and their midwinter traditions, like the burning of the Yule log, were incorporated into Christmas traditions. In these cases, however, it is less a conspiratorial rewriting of history, as it’s usually presented, and more of a simple process of people bringing old traditions with them when integrating into new cultures. That is not what the memes around Easter claim, though. You’ve probably seen them. They say the word Easter comes from the name of the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, also called Astarte, who is represented as a goddess of sex. According to some early accounts of her cult, it was apparently believed that she fell to earth in an egg, likely a form of meteorite worship, as I recently discussed in my patron exclusive on the topic, and it was claimed that the imagery of eggs and rabbits, which were well-known for being prolific breeders, represented her status as a fertility goddess, whose followers engaged in orgies and the ritual sacrifice of children. All of this, however, is entirely false. The idea, which rests only on the name looking or sounding similar, was dreamed up whole cloth by Alexander Hislop, a 19th century minister in the Free Church of Scotland who in 1853 wrote an anti-Catholic book absolutely chock full of such total fabrications called The Two Babylons. I did a whole episode on the book years back, and I have had occasion in several other episodes to mention him and the lies he printed in it, which would later be spread by fundamentalist cartoonist and pamphleteer Jack Chick. The Syrian goddess said to have fallen in an egg was actually Atargatis, and while Ishtar does appear to have been viewed as a fertility and sex goddess in some regions, and her cult in certain places does seem to have practiced sacred prostitution, she was also a huntress figure, and her worship was nowhere associated with human sacrifice. Neither was there any connection between her and rabbits or hares. But this is just one example of the many false claims and dubious assertions surrounding the Easter holiday, and though I am careful now to acknowledge that these pagan survival claims are in many, if not all cases exaggerated or fabricated, biblical literalists are themselves no innocents when it comes to spreading false and dubious claims related to the holiday.

Before I start enumerating the false and doubtful claims spread by biblical literalists, and eventually examine biblical literalism’s contribution to the state of the U.S. right now, there is, unfortunately, more to say about the false history attributed to the Easter holiday. The fact is that, almost everywhere in Christendom, the holiday is not even called Easter, but rather Pascha or Pasqua or something like that, a derivation of Pesach, or Passover, since it is, at its core, an adaptation of that Jewish holiday. Only in the English speaking world is it called Easter, and in Germany and Switzerland it is Ostern or Oschtere. The fact that this name is derived from a pagan Germanic Spring goddess, Oestre or Ostara, has led to further claims of pagan survival, which I too have entertained, but the reality is that this name for the holiday appears to just be named after the month in which it took place, a month itself named for the goddess because it was a month in spring. Ostara being a spring goddess has led to further claims about the principal elements of modern Easter celebrations, bunnies and eggs, being related to springtime and the reemergence of life. Even more specifically, a myth emerged that there was a story about the goddess Ostara once transforming a bird into a hare, and that hare, retaining the ability to lay eggs, laid miraculously colorful eggs, thus creating the traditions of the Easter Bunny and painted eggs. This claim, however, appears to have sprang up out of nowhere in the 19th century, not long after a certain German scholar, Adolph Holtzmann, in his 1835 book Deutsche Mythologie, first speculated that Easter traditions were tied to this goddess tradition. The fact is, though, that we know very little about the cult of Ostara, how she was worshipped, or what iconography was associated with her. Therefore, there is no compelling reason to believe that any part of the holiday’s tradition was derived from her cult beyond the simple Germanic name for the holiday being taken from the month named after her. Meanwhile, there are compelling explanations for the Christian origins of every other element of the holiday. For example, the long pondered question of why rabbits are associated with Christ on this holiday, a question which so bothered Holtzmann and other 19th-century antiquarians that they made up a connection with the spring goddess, has been credibly answered by Bible scholars, in that during the Middle Ages, the European brown hare came to be viewed as a symbol of the Virgin Mary. These brown hares can be carrying a litter to term and still become pregnant with a new litter, such that they appeared capable of giving birth back to back, without a carrying a litter for a full gestational period, which was in medieval times associated with the idea of parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. So brown hares became a feature of art depicting Mary, and art depicting Mary with the Christchild, and eventually they came to be symbols of Christ generally. As for the eggs, the simple fact is that eggs were commonly given as gifts before the Lenten fast, since they were one of the foods forbidden during that time. Then, eggs laid during Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter, were often decorated and called Holy Week eggs. This surplus of eggs, which kept well during the fast, were thereafter eaten, on or near Easter Sunday, to break that fast. The further symbolism associating eggs with rebirth, particularly in regard to the legend of the phoenix, which was said to be reborn from ashes that were carried by its young in an egg made of myrrh, led early Christians to associate this mythological bird and its rebirth with Christ and the resurrection. To be fair, much like the origin of the Christmas tree, the origins of these Easter traditions are obscure, but this iconography and these traditions within medieval Christianity stake a far stronger claim to being the origin of Easter imagery than does the far more recent speculation about a spring goddess that we don’t actually know much about. 

Illustration of the goddess with a hare appeared in an 1898 Pennsylvania newspaper.

While these claims about the pagan origin of Easter lack merit and thus cannot be wholly credited and should be doubted when seen circulating every year around this time, so too should the claims of biblical literalists that there is credible evidence of the events of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection as depicted in the Gospels. To be clear, as I have argued in the past, there is a strong, historical argument for the existence of Jesus Christ and his crucifixion by Romans. However, there is not compelling evidence to suggest that the claims in the Gospels of his death coinciding with some celestial darkness event, as well as an earthquake and the rising of dead saints, and the claims of his resurrection, are anything other than literary creations, fabricated years after the fact by the writers of the Gospels in an effort to demonstrate Christ’s fulfillment of prophecy and to establish a strong basis for faith in his cult. But reading and appreciating the Bible as literature is not something that biblical literalists can stomach, and that in itself is a major problem with fundamentalist evangelicals and Christian Nationalists today, a problem that has contributed to rampant anti-intellectualism and the post-truth era generally. So in order to view the myths surrounding Easter from all sides, we must look at these claims of biblical literalists as well, starting with the crucifixion darkness. The claim derives from the Synoptic Gospels, that is, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. According to Matthew 27:45, “From noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.” This was essentially the last three hours of his life, as he was dying on the cross, culminating in his asking why his god had forsaken him. Luke 23: 44-45 states likewise “It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” This further detail of the curtain of the temple rending was present likewise in a later verse in Matthew, but it is important to acknowledge that Matthew and Luke were both likely derivative works, working from the same source material, so both sources being in accordance with each other does not serve as evidence of veracity. The Gospel of Mark is believed to be the first of the three synoptic gospels written, according to the hypothesis of Marcan priority. Mark 15:33 states, “When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon,” and goes on likewise to mention the tearing of the temple curtain. As I discussed in my episode on Christ mythicism, which argued in favor of the existence of a historical Christ, scholars also hypothesize an additional lost source, the Q source, from which Matthew and Luke also derived material. There is also the potential of oral sources for this and other Gospel traditions. What is important here, in order to address the claims of biblical literalists that these events are historical, is that these three accounts vary in important ways. Luke seems to suggest that the tearing of the temple curtain occurred before Christ’s death, whereas the others indicate it happened at the moment of his death. And of these, only Matthew, a work that most scholars agree was completed later, includes the further dramatic signs that an earthquake took place at his death and many saints were resurrected, walking out of their tombs into the city. If we are to accept Matthew’s account as true, then a question arises as to why earlier accounts omitted these miraculous events, but if we are to acknowledge that the anonymous author of Matthew, writing at a time far removed from the actual events, was adding false details for dramatic or literary effect, then it must be further acknowledged that the same can be said of all the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion. 

Aside from the consistency of the synoptic Gospels relating to the timing of the darkness, in passages that we see are otherwise not very consistent at all, biblical literalists often suggest that the miraculous crucifixion darkness is a historically verifiable event because it was also attested outside the bible, by such ancient writers as Thallus, Tertullian, Origen, and Sextus Julius Africanus. So let’s look at these supposed independent witnesses of the crucifixion darkness whose accounts are often cited as verifiable evidence of the phenomenon. First, all of these ancient historians, who do indeed mention the darkness, as well as, some of them, the supposed earthquake and resurrection of the dead only mentioned in Matthew, were early Christians, and most of them apologists who were writing explicitly in defense of Christian belief and against criticism of the early church. The obvious problem with suggesting that their accounts represent independent testimony is that they were written long after the gospel traditions had been established. All the synoptic gospels are dated to the end of the 1st century, after 70 CE, but the earliest of these accounts, that of Africanus, dates to around fifty years later. Then Tertullian was writing more than a hundred years after the gospel traditions were put in writing, and Origen nearly 200 years afterward. It is true, however, that each of them appealed to some pre-existing source for their claims other than the gospels. Africanus refers to the work of Thallus, a first century historian whose work is now lost, suggesting that a mention of a certain eclipse in it confirmed the crucifixion darkness. However, Africanus was careful to say Thallus was wrong about it being a natural eclipse—for some reasons we will discuss shortly—and there is no indication that Thallus contextualized this event in relation to the crucifixion or even gave a clear indication of its timing. For all we know, Africanus took a mention of a totally unrelated eclipse completely out of context here and misrepresented it. Tertullian, years later, suggested that the Romans held some records of this mysterious darkness event in their archives, but there is nothing indicating this to be accurate, and it must be remembered that Tertullian was writing in defense of Christianity here and may have been bluffing about the supposed records of this event. Or the evidence he refers to in Roman archives might just have been gospel accounts or even the work of Africanus or Thallus, which preceded Tertullian’s. Lastly, writing in the middle of the third century, Origen, again defending Christianity against its critics, cites one Phlegon of Tralles, whom Africanus also cited, as mentioning an eclipse and earthquakes during the reign of Tiberius Caesar as definitive evidence of a supernatural event associated with Christ’s death. But again, Phlegon, whose work has also been lost, lived in the second century, a time when the Gospel traditions were established and being spread. So as we see, most of these supposed proofs consist of stating that the crucifixion darkness did occur because early Christians said so, because believers in the gospels repeated what was claimed in the gospels.

The earliest depiction of the crucifixion in a 6th century illuminated manuscript, featuring some sort of celestial event in the sky.

It is telling that biblical literalists don’t typically resort to citing apocrypha as support for their claims that there really occurred a miraculous darkness and other supernatural signs at the crucifixion of Christ. The Gospel of Peter, for example, which was only rediscovered in the 19th century, gives a far more detailed account of this darkness, describing how it was so dark that people were falling over and were forced to carry lamps, believing that the sun had somehow set early. Likewise the Gospel of Nicodemus reports the reaction of Pontius Pilate to the sudden and unaccountable darkness, and a certain report of Pontius Pilate to Tiberius describes the exact hours of the darkness in accordance with gospel traditions. The problem is, all these apocrypha have also been either declared heretical or have been proven to be forgeries, and all are of later origin, from the second century or even as late as the fourth or fifth centuries CE. However, if biblical literalists deny the veracity of these sources because of their later dates and because of authorship problems, then if they were applying the same standards to all their sources, they would eliminate the gospels as well. And quite oddly, biblical literalists often do cite one particular source that is apocryphal: that of Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius claimed to have witnessed an eclipse at the time of the crucifixion from all the way in Heliopolis, in Egypt, and is said to have stated, “Either the Creator of all the world now suffers, or this visible world is coming to an end.” The reason biblical literalists like Dionysius as a witness is because he is a biblical figure, a Greek convert to Christianity mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles. However, the Bible does not mention him witnessing this in Heliopolis, nor does the timeline make much sense for Dionysius the Areopagite to have presumed that a creator god must have been suffering for such an eclipse to occur, since this would have been long before he ever heard of Christ and was converted by Paul. What explains all these issues is the fact that this account of the crucifixion darkness appeared far later, in the late fifth or early 6th centuries CE, in a work written by someone who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite but who was in fact not that figure. The author is now recognized as Pseudo-Dionysius, whose work is agreed to be pseudepigraphal. His work is apocryphal, meaning not accepted as canon, because it is decidedly mystical and combines Christian theology with Neoplatonic philosophy. So biblical literalists’ choices of what sources they will claim as evidence of the crucifixion darkness seem entirely arbitrary. They will accept some dubious works but not others, despite all having much the same problems. 

Another example of a dubious work that attests to the crucifixion darkness but is rejected by biblical literalists is the Book of Mormon, which was written in the 19th century (regardless of whether you credit the claim that Joseph Smith was actually translating it from some ancient gold tablets that only he and his closest allies ever claimed to have seen). The Book of Mormon varies the account even further, describing a period of darkness in the form of a great storm that lasted days rather than hours, accompanied by earthquakes. Biblical literalists easily dismiss the Book of Mormon as a source, but by my reckoning, all its problems, the dubious nature of its narrative, the questions regarding the origin of the source, and the late date at which it appeared, are simply the same problems shared by all the sources attesting to this miracle, only writ larger. But while they reject the Mormon source, thinking it, rightly, absurd that ancient indigenous Americans knew who Christ was and recognized global signs of his death, they somehow find believable the equally absurd claim that ancient Chinese sources from the later Han Dynasty show there was somehow not only knowledge of the works of Christ but also faith in him among the Chinese. The claim can be found all over the Internet. Supposedly, in one passage of a chronicle, it stated, “In the summer, fourth month of the year...the sun and moon were eclipsed. The sins of all people are now on one man. The emperor now proclaims pardon to all under heaven,” and elsewhere in some annals, was supposedly found an additional report of this eclipse, with the notation, “Man from Heaven died.” Now, as intrepid historian and friend of the show Mike Dash has been able to show with even cursory research, this claim only appeared in 2006, in the work of Chan Kei Thong, a singaporean business coach, not a historian, who has published a couple of works of apparent pseudohistory claiming that the founders of Chinese civilization worshipped the god of the Old Testament. As Dash points out, these chronicles and archives have never been translated into English, and every repetition of this claim since has simply been a quotation of Thong’s claims. The only logical conclusion, then, is that if any such quotations really do appear in the records Thong quotes, then he likely took them out of context and/or mistranslated phrases that can be explained in accordance with what scholars already know about Chinese history in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. 

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

By now we have heard numerous versions of the story from a number of uniformly problematic sources. Among even the gospel accounts, the events vary, and we see later accounts claiming specifically that this darkness was an eclipse, or a storm, or simply an occlusion of the sun. There is also some disagreement about whether this was a local event or a global one, as would have been necessary for the darkness to be seen as far away as Egypt, China, or America. And herein lies a further problem for biblical literalists. What exactly was this miracle? The earliest source, that of Thallus as cited by Africanus, calls it an eclipse—if, again, we can trust that the event Thallus was talking about was indeed simultaneous with the death of Christ—and even the earliest versions of the Gospel of Luke appear to have called it an eclipse. Scholars have suggested that the gospel was amended to call it simply a “darkness” instead because of the very issues that Africanus took with it being identified as an eclipse. For this event to be real, it simply could not have been an eclipse, for numerous reasons. First, a solar eclipse could not have occurred at this time, since the crucifixion is supposed to have occurred during Passover, which is always observed during a full moon. Solar eclipses can only occur during new moons. Moreover, an eclipse of the sun can only last for a total of seven and a half minutes, not three hours, as the gospels report. Then there is the fact that a total eclipse can only be observed in certain locations, along the path of totality, which rules out the idea that it was a global blackout. The thing is, almost every translation of the gospels acknowledges that an alternative and likely translation of the passages in question have this darkness falling “over the whole earth,” not just over the “land.” Then there is the issue that astronomers can determine the dates of eclipses far back into antiquity. This has led some to point to a particular eclipse that occurred on April 3rd in the year 33 CE, a date some Bible scholars favor for Christ’s crucifixion, and declare, “Checkmate, atheists!” believing they have finally proven the reality of the crucifixion darkness. Not only does this not explain the 3-hour length of the darkness, but it also just doesn’t work because that was a lunar eclipse. Remember, a solar one could not have happened at that time. And this is an issue, since the gospel traditions are clear that “the sun was darkened” or “the sun’s light failed.” After all, this eclipse was said to occur at noon, and a lunar eclipse cannot occur during the day, since it requires the Earth to be positioned between the moon and sun. These problems require biblical literalists to move the goalposts and change their definition of the event, suggesting it was a divinely timed storm, explaining the sudden obscuration of the sun by suggesting it was cloud cover, or perhaps a sandstorm, or volcanic activity that blotted out the sun with ash. Others, of course, simply hand wave it as a miracle that defies explanation. Since a sudden sandstorm or bad weather would not explain simultaneous earthquakes or living dead saints shambling out of their tombs, they are right in that natural explanations do not alone account for these claims. What does account for them, however, is the far more compelling explanation that these were literary inventions that should not be viewed as historical events. 

Starting in the 18th century, historians and bible scholars came to view many elements of the Bible as metaphorical or allegorical literary constructions, and following the Enlightenment, theologians were not taken very seriously if they argued that the Bible reported real history. And the same is true today, as any real Bible scholar will confirm. It is impossible to credit the idea that crucifixion darkness, to further our extended example, was a real event when major contemporary writers like Pliny the Elder and Seneca made no mention of it. More than this, the imagery of darkness on the land and earthquakes was common of Jewish apocalyptic writing, and the idea of cosmic signs at the deaths of important people was a common literary feature in the work of many ancient writers, such as Philo, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, Virgil, and Flavius Josephus. Indeed, in the work of Josephus, we even see the idea of the sun’s light being obscured as a metaphor for cosmic shame over certain crimes against the gods, when he says “the very sun turned away, as if it too were loath to look upon the foul deed.” And elsewhere in the bible, in Jeremiah, we likewise see the idea of a sun going down midday used metaphorically, describing someone who had been shamed and disgraced and who had “swooned away” as “her sun went down while it was yet day.” This suggests the metaphorical meaning that the darkness represents Christ’s life being cut short. But this passage in Jeremiah is also viewed as prophecy, the foretelling of a “destroyer at midday,” and here we see another dimension of the literary quality of the gospels. I have written extensively elsewhere of how the gospels construct the life of Christ in such a way that he would have been seen as fulfilling prophecy, a kind of back-engineered manufactured prophecy fulfillment, and the same literary device can be seen here as well, with the crucifixion darkness and earthquake being seen as allusions to other texts. It has been suggested that the three hours of darkness harkened back to the plague of three days’ darkness in Exodus—the Book of Mormon certainly seems to have confused the two. And in the Book of Amos, when God is promising wrath and ruin to Israel, they say, “Shall not the land tremble on this account,” and “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.” Now either the gospel writers used this same imagery to allude to these prophecies, or as is more likely, they simply made use of the common apocalyptic imagery long used in this sort of literature. The prophecy fulfillment that gospel writers more intentionally seem to have indicated was an event foretold by Christ himself, according to the earliest of the gospels, Mark. After having Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple, something that had already happened by the time that scholars believe the gospel was written, the author has Christ make some end times predictions about false prophets, and then he says, “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” Most view this as prophecy of Christ’s Second Coming, but the fact that the gospels then go on to claim the sun was darkened at Christ’s crucifixion tends to suggest that the detail was inserted as a reference to this prophecy, or even that the prophecy was included as foreshadowing of the crucifixion darkness. All signs point to the conscious choices of authors constructing literature, and that is why serious bible scholars have not taken a literal view of the Gospels or the Bible generally in nearly 250 years.

Print circa 1849 by Nathaniel Currier depicting the crucifixion of Jesus Christ

While biblical literalists do not, by far, represent the majority of Christians, with Gallup polls suggesting they only represent about a quarter of the religious group, nevertheless, the other claim of a supernatural occurrence related to the crucifixion and Easter Sunday is, of course, the resurrection, and as this is a key article of faith in Christianity, we find far more Christians willing to accept this miracle, compared to the crucifixion darkness. As with the darkness, there have been attempts to explain the resurrection naturally, such as the idea that Christ merely swooned or fainted and was therefore placed alive in his tomb, or the suggestion that there was a body swap, or that Christ’s brother had been crucified in his place, or that the figure who appeared to the disciples afterward was actually his brother, or that Christ appearing to the disciples was just an ecstatic vision, a hallucination. These may be appealing for atheists and skeptics, but for the most part, Christians, even those who can in no way be called biblical literalists, simply accept the resurrection on faith. If they do approach it from a biblical literalist perspective, searching for actual evidence they can point to, they inevitably fall short. Claiming that Christ’s empty tomb, for example, was proof of his resurrection is one point of supposed evidence, though an empty tomb does not a resurrection make, and the fact is that the empty tomb was only first mentioned in the gospels, just like the dubious details of the miraculous darkness and the resurrection of saints during the crucifixion, and among those gospel accounts, none agree on who was there to witness its emptiness. More than this, skeptic Bart Ehrman, whose convincing argument about the historicity of Christ I relied on in my episode on the topic, points out that it is very unlikely he was even buried, especially in a tomb, since Romans did not allow the criminals whom they crucified, especially enemies of the state like Christ, to be laid to rest in such a fashion. Instead, their remains were typically taken down from the cross and tossed into mass graves. The only other piece of evidence pointed to for the resurrection is the idea that the disciples saw him, and it is claimed that the fact they devoted their lives to his cult afterward and were even willing to sacrifice their lives because of personally witnessing his resurrection, serves as evidence that it happened. But of course, something need not be true for it to inspire great faith and belief in it, and even any Christian will admit this if they are asked to give their opinions on non-Christian martyrs. Faith in the tenets of Christianity and the admirable teachings of Christ are one thing, and even faith in the notion of the resurrection, metaphorical or not, is understandable, but to suggest, as biblical literalists sometimes do, that there exist some undeniable historical proofs of their faith is just false.

Now I am sensitive to the critique that atheist challenges to religious beliefs can be viewed as petty and even pointless. If someone wants to believe in the resurrection, or even in the crucifixion darkness, who am I to say they shouldn’t believe it? Typically, religious belief is not founded on rational or scientific thinking anyway, and a believer will often admit as much. They’ll cite personal conviction and religious experience rather than any supposed evidence. I would reply that the issue at hand is not personal faith but the culture of anti-intellectualism and denialism that is bred by biblical literalism. I am not punching down here; I’m punching up, at a group of fundamentalist evangelical Christian nationalists who claim that you cannot trust experts, you cannot trust scholars. Biblical literalists have contributed, in large part, to the anti-rationalist post-truth era, with its insistence that it doesn’t matter how much empirical evidence there might be against an idea, or how logically flawed and historically problematic that idea might be, it can still be pronounced true with confidence and only dubious evidentiary support. These are the people who claim facts don’t care about feelings, but then insist that claims only supportable by feelings should be declared facts. And it may seem like this post-truth era was inaugurated by Donald Trump and his conspiracism and bald-faced insistence on falsehoods as truth, but actually, he may himself be the ultimate iteration of this trend toward the platforming and normalization of  “alternative facts,” which has been spearheaded by biblical literalists. Just like biblical literalists, Trump rejects rational thought and portrays academia as conspiracy, suggesting scholarly consensus is just indoctrination or institutionalized misinformation. And his alternative, besides conspiracy theory, is often fundamentalist dogma. This is why he is so popular among religious fundamentalists, despite being a philandering, greedy reprobate who clearly only pays lip service to Christianity. He thinks like biblical literalists, he uses the same rhetorical evasions as biblical literalists, and he is taking direct action to empower fundamentalists, obliterating the separation of church and state and forging a theocracy. And in return, he has become like an idol to many of the religious right, who call him the “chosen one,” a moniker he has now adopted himself. If we need any further illustration of these facts, we need only look at his establishment an official and clearly unconstitutional Faith Office in the US government, and his appointment of a woman to lead that office who asserts that whatever Trump wants is divine will, stating “To say no to Trump would be saying no to God.” Many Christians are waking up and scrutinizing this woman, Paula White, whose promotion of the “prosperity gospel” really demonstrates Trump’s motives for aligning himself with the religious right. This “prosperity” doctrine claims that God rewards the faithful with wealth and that poverty is an indication of wickedness. It is the most unchristian teaching imaginable, the exact opposite of Christ’s teachings, which instructed his followers to give away their belongings and to be charitable toward the poor and needy. The “prosperity gospel” is clearly a doctrine only in service of enriching the wealthy, as are essentially all of Trump’s policies, and like Trump, Paula White is a con woman, selling the “supernatural blessings” of health and wealth for just one grand a pop. So my point is that I argue not against the Christian faith, but against biblical literalism, which has contributed to the rise of Trump and therefore to the absolute perversion of Christ’s legacy. The perfect example of this perversion was provided by Trump himself last year, when he spent Easter hawking his own line of God Bless the USA Bibles. Jesus Christ would have wielded a whip against Trump and driven him out of the church along with all the other merchants trying to use religion for profit. 

Further Reading

Billson, Charles J. “The Easter Hare.” Folklore, vol. 3, no. 4, 1892, pp. 441–66. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1253567.

Chadwick, Jeffrey R. “Dating the Death of Jesus Christ.” BYU Studies Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4, 2015, pp. 135–91. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43957236. 

Dash, Mike. Single comment thread in reply to discussion “Christian scholars say that there is a record of the resurrection of Jesus in the History of Latter Han Dynasty, Volume 1, Chronicles of Emperor Guang Wu, 7th year. Is this true or is there missing context?” Reddit/AskHistorians, 13 May 2022, www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/uo5zh9/comment/i8fpmu3/. 

Ehrman, Bart. “Why Romans Crucified People.” The Bart Ehrman Blog, 1 May 2022, ehrmanblog.org/why-romans-crucified-people/. 

Goodacre, Mark. “Scripturalization in Mark‘s Crucifixion Narrative” The Trial and Death of Jesus: Essays on the Passion, edited by Geert van Oyen and Tom Shepherd, Peeters, 2006, pp. 33-47. 

Weber, Peter. “Trump and the revenge of Biblical literalists.” The Week, 20 March 2017, theweek.com/articles/675145/trump-revenge-biblical-literalists. 

Winick, Stephen. “Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think.” Library of Congress, 28 April 2016, blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2016/04/ostara-and-the-hare/. 

The Legend of Joan, She-Pope of Rome

I am the father of a soon-to-be 9-year-old girl. In 2020, she was delighted to learn that a half-Indian woman was going to be the Vice President of the United States, not just because she is half Indian herself, and she could therefore see herself, her ethnic identity, reflected in the nation’s leadership, but I think even more so because it meant that she, as a girl, could one day rise to such a position, could attain that kind of respect, that kind of admiration, and could influence the world. A few years into the Biden administration, when she was in first grade and turning seven, she learned that we had never had a woman president, and according to her teacher, she got very upset over this, raising her voice and expressing outrage at the unfairness of it. When she eventually asked her mom and me why there had never been a woman president, we had to try to explain misogyny to her, which is a rather devastating idea to convey to a child, much like telling a child about racism. We told her that, in other countries, there are women presidents and leaders, but we didn’t tell her that, even today, only 2 percent of elective democracies in the world currently have a woman as chief executive, and less than five percent have ever raised a woman to executive office. Nor did we tell her that the first woman to achieve such a governing position did not do so until 1960, in Sri Lanka. Nor did we tell her that most female prime ministers and presidents only achieved their positions within the last few decades, since the 1990s. We explained that it is unfortunately rare, and that this is not because women are not qualified or capable of being leaders. We told her that, the year she was born, a woman almost did become president, that more people voted for her than for the man who ran against her, but that the man became president anyway. And last year, we shared her deep frustration when again a woman came very close to the presidency. Any who might deny that misogyny was a decisive factor in the recent election I would like to remind that a prominent aspect of the right’s rhetoric during the campaign was that any male who voted for a woman should have their “man card” revoked. Regardless of anyone’s support of Trump or ambivalence over Democratic Party leadership, I think anyone who looks at the state of women in leadership throughout the world should agree, if they are honest with themselves, that America is far behind the rest of the world in this regard, and that the reason for this is a deep-seated sexism and misogyny in our culture. While the list of countries who have promoted women to the highest executive office represents only a fraction of all democracies, they are by and large, the most developed countries, which rank highest on the Human Development Index. In other words, failing to promote a woman to executive office reflects very poorly on our country, making us more like developing countries. Likewise, many countries who have had women executives place higher on the democracy index, while the USA has experienced a democratic backsliding in the last 20 years, being considered now a “flawed democracy.” But pathetically, even among modern neo-fascists bent on undermining democracy, the US is still behind in the promotion of women to the highest office. Take, for example, Italy, a country recognized for culturally deep-rooted misogyny and sexism. Recently, their own neo-fascist party succeeded in putting a woman, Giorgia Meloni, into the office of Prime Minister. Granted, she is a longtime Mussolini praising fascist, leading the country’s first far-right government since World War II, but doesn’t this just prove that America is even further behind in gender equality than we might like to think, if even a far-right authoritarian movement in one of the world’s most deeply misogynist countries has promoted a woman to executive authority? How deeply does misogyny and sexism run in Italy? It is most obvious to credit it to the cultural influence of the Catholic Church, but I would take it further back, to the Roman Empire. My recent episode about Elagabalus demonstrated this. At its heart, it was a story about the accidental raising of a woman to the highest seat of power in Rome, and the controversy over her politically empowering other women. And now, to further illustrate the long history of misogyny and sexism that Italy is today managing to slowly tame, which should should shame the US and inspire us to follow suit, I’d like to tell another story related to Rome and Italy, this time about the Catholic Church, a tale about the time they accidentally promoted a woman to the church’s highest position of authority. It so happens that this story is entirely untrue, but still it demonstrates the very old roots of misogyny and the notion that even the idea of a woman in power was long considered a joke.

I originally was going to time this episode for release around April Fool’s Day. I thought that it would be funny to have a cold open telling the legend of Pope Joan as if it were true, only to reveal it for a myth. The timing for an April 1st release didn’t work out, though, and after the last time I did that, with the topic of the Lost Kingdom of Tartaria conspiracy theories, I found that it’s maybe not a great idea to present false information as if it were true at first, even if I take pains to refute it later, as I found that my material could be taken out of context to support falsehoods and perpetuate myths. Nevertheless, since I see some thematic connection to my recent take on Elagabalus, and since the office of the Pope and the process of the election of new popes has been in the news, I still think it a good time to explore this story. Just last year, a political thriller about the papal conclave, the convening of cardinals for the selection of a new pope, earned many accolades. And earlier this year, Pope Francis was hospitalized with double pneumonia. We are only now learning how very close he came to passing away. His recovery is being hailed as miraculous. Had things gone another way, though, the College of Cardinals would gather in conclave, as the recent film depicted. After numerous rounds of balloting, when a cardinal has accepted their election, they choose their papal name, are dressed in the pontifical robes, and are proclaimed. A blessing is imparted and crowds are addressed. In the past, there was a more formal coronation ceremony, but since the 1960s, new popes have declined such pomp and circumstance. And there exist legends and rumors regarding the former ceremonies involved in the coronation of a new pope. Starting in the late 8th century, after their proclamation at St. Peter’s, a new pope traveled in procession across Rome to take possession of the Lateran Palace, and there, on the porch of the Lateran, it is said that a special chair was set, with a hole in its seat, on which new popes settled in their robes so that the “least of the deacons” could reach beneath and confirm that the new pope did indeed possess male genitalia. And the reason for this ceremony, it was claimed in a legend that flourished throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, was that once, in the 9th century, a woman disguised as a man had accidentally been elected pope. This woman, during one procession across Rome, unexpectedly gave birth and died in the streets. Ever since then, it was said, the procession of popes avoided that detested spot in their processions, and the institution of a genital check had been made necessary, to ensure that no woman would ever again fool the cardinals and get herself elected pope. It is a wild story, and one attested as absolutely true for so long that it has been difficult for scholars to refute. Nevertheless, it is entirely false.

Illustrated manuscript depicting Pope Joan with the papal tiara

The story, as it developed, was that after Pope Leo IV, an apparent man named John, or Ioannes Anglicus, of English extraction but born in the German Rhineland, in Mainz, came to Rome by way of Athens, and impressed the entire church with broad scriptural knowledge, brilliant interpretations of scripture and impressive oratory. This Pope John reigned about 2 years, and the legend at first mentions nothing controversial about the reign or this pope’s actions, except that, one day while on procession, he was revealed to be a she when suddenly she went into labor, and died “upon the place.” While some accounts make it sound as if she died in childbirth the earliest of these accounts state that, upon the revelation of her true sex, she was bound, dragged through the streets behind a horse, and stoned to death, as per Roman law. Some of these accounts mention various pieces of evidence for this event. One was the papal procession’s avoidance of a certain spot, “a narrow passage between the Coliseum and San Clemente,” supposedly because they wished to avoid the spot where Pope Joan revealed herself to be a woman and died or was killed. Another was the statue of a mother and child on a street corner near that place, which was said to depict Pope Joan, as she was thereafter called. Third, a certain gravestone was said to bear 6 P’s, said to stand, in Latin, for the sentence “Refrain, Father of the Fathers, from Publishing the Parturition of the Popesse,” essentially a plea for the erasure of Pope Joan and the hushing up of this embarrassing incident. Fourth, the “pierced chair” or porphyry seat at the Lateran, formerly part of the papal coronation, stands as perhaps the most prominent and convincing physical evidence of a tradition to confirm the sex of the pope. And finally, it was claimed that Pope Joan was responsible for the fast of the Four Times, the quarterly periods of fasting and prayer more commonly called Ember Days today, which would mean that she had a profound legacy within the church just from her two short years as pope. A closer look at each of these claims, however, only proves that the story of Pope Joan is entirely legendary.

First, I think it is necessary, after my discussion of Elagabalus as a trans woman, to explain why I will use feminine pronouns to talk about a figure who apparently lived as a man. As far as can be determined by the different versions of the legend as it was repeated and spread, Pope Joan was not living as a man because she preferred it. Rather, it was said that her lover took her to Athens dressed as a man, suggesting some kind of disguise for the purpose of spiriting her away. Nevertheless, one might suggest that she chose to continue presenting herself as a man because it reflected her gender identity. But there is the further reason that she could only progress in her studies and in the church if she was believed to be a man, and the further motivation for continuing the charade that she might face execution, being stoned and dragged through the streets, if she were ever found out. Regardless, the simplest and most pertinent reason that I refer to Pope Joan as a woman is that this is how the legend is transmitted, and we have much reason to believe there was not an actual person upon whom the legend was based, meaning there was, therefore, no actual once-living individual whom I might be misgendering. To clarify the first and most prominent reason why the story of Pope Joan is considered a myth, the story was not told until the 13th century, hundreds of years after it supposedly occurred. It was first put down in writing by Dominican friars who appear to have taken the details of the story from each other’s writing. But before their accounts, there was nothing. No documentary evidence of Pope Joan’s existence from the 9th century has ever turned up, and there is ample evidence that Pope Benedict III directly succeeded Pope Leo IV, within the very same month, from contemporary records, datable letters he wrote and a credible contemporaneous biography in the Liber Pontificalis. Moreover, the contradictions and variantion of the details presented in the earliest versions of the legend also make them dubious, with the mysterious gravestone not appearing in some versions, others excluding any biographical information about where Joan had come from, and some claiming she was murdered in the streets while others suggest she simply died on the spot. But beyond these doubts regarding the provenance of the claim, the many proofs suggested within the legend also turn out to be false. 

Woodcut illustration of Pope Joan giving birth

Historians and researchers have looked into every one of the claims put forth in the medieval legend of Pope Joan, and each is found to be less than convincing. So, for example, there is the claim that papal processions always avoid a certain location at San Clemente because that is where Pope Joan revealed her true sex by giving birth. It has since been proven that, formerly, the path taken by the procession, the Via San Giovanni, dead-ended at San Clemente, which necessitated a detour, taking the procession around the dead end. So the path of the procession veered left, onto Via dei Querceti. Only in later years was the street extended through San Clemente. By that time, the path of the papal procession had been made a tradition, so rather than avoiding a certain spot, it simply continued taking the path always previously taken. In the 12th century, the path of the procession actually did change, turning right instead of left onto Via dei Querceti, but rather than to avoid the previous path or the newly opened path, this was likely because of the narrowness of the other routes. And only later was this street renamed Vicus Papisse, Village of the Popess, after the legend of Pope Joan had become popular. Likewise, the statue of the mother and child, said to have been nearby, was probably only later said to have something to do with this legend. Numerous writers have stated that they saw this statue, erected on a street corner opposite San Clemente, including Martin Luther, who claimed to have seen it as late as the 16th century. However, descriptions of the statue make it sound like a depiction of the Madonna and Christ Child, if not a pagan mother goddess from Rome’s antiquity. But we must view this logically. If Pope Joan went into labor and died on that spot, then her child likely died at birth, making the depiction an unusual choice. But even more strange is the idea that the Roman Catholic Church would have allowed such a statue to be erected and stand for so long there, commemorating a pope who, according to the story, they wanted forgotten. Therefore, the most logical explanation is that, when this legend began circulating in the late 12th or early 13th century, after the papal procession path had changed and before the written accounts of the legend appeared, some hoaxer stood at that street corner and spun the humorous tale that the real reason the procession’s path had changed was because of the lady pope. “Haven’t you heard the story?” we can imagine them telling others: “That’s a statue of her right over there, in fact!” And thus an urban legend was perpetuated. 

Similarly dubious and illogical is the claim that there exists a gravestone marking Pope Joan’s grave. First of all, again, only some versions of the legend mention this gravestone, and there is good reason to doubt that even those who mention it, like Etienne de Bourbon, had ever actually seen it for themselves. There is further reason to doubt, as in the case of the statue, that the Catholic Church would mark the grave of a pope they had put to death for supposedly evilly tricking her way into the papacy, or that, if they did choose to mark her grave, it would be with a cryptic and kind of cheeky code. Roman gravestones were commonly marked with abbreviations, but it wasn’t a kind of code that people had to figure out, guessing what the acronym might mean. Rather, they were marked with common repeating acronyms. In the case of a gravestone with 6 P’s, it has been suggested that, if it existed, it was more likely the base for a statue of Mithras, since that god was commonly called father of fathers, or pater patrum, or that, if it did mark a grave, it was the grave of a follower of Mithras, and the inscription more likely stood for parce, pater patrum, pecunia propria posuit, or Have mercy, father of fathers, paid for with his own money.” This last phrase, also translated “Erected at his own expense,” was actually a common gravestone abbreviation of 3 P’s indicating who had paid for the monument. In contrast, the other explanation seems to have been entirely dreamed up by those who spread the Pope Joan legend. So yet again, we have this idea that, as the urban legend spread in Rome, some prankster pointed to a very common gravestone inscription and reinterpreted it as evidence of Pope Joan’s existence and the covering up of her memory. 

Illustration of Pope Innocent X having his testicles examined.

Perhaps most outrageous is the claim that popes after Joan were made to sit in a bottomless chair and have their testicles fondled to ensure their manhood. It has been suggested that this legend confuses two different chairs. One is the sedes stercoraria, which in Latin means “dung chair.” A new pope would sit on it and be told, “May he lift up the poor man from the dust and raise up the poor man from the dung and may he sit with princes and hold the seat of glory.” In seating the pope while others stood and talking of him serving the poor, the ceremony was meant to emphasize humility. This seat was not perforated for the checking of genitals. However, it does appear that, starting in the 11th century, Pope Paschal II began to use a perforated chair as a throne during coronation. This was a short-lived practice, but one of these chairs, which was carved from expensive porphyry stone, survives today in the Louvre, brought back to Paris by Napoleon after his sack of Rome. Now these chairs were clearly crafted to serve a specific purpose, with a hole in the seat, opening toward the front of the chair. Some scholars have suggested they were bathing chairs, or birthing chairs, or even toilet chairs, and historians debate what their purpose was in the Lateran palace. Some claim they were used as the sedes stercoraria, further humiliating new popes by emphasizing that they too are mere men and must defecate. Others suggest, since they were made from porphyry, which in antiquity was a material that could only be owned and used by the imperial family, that these chairs were rare artifacts, perhaps the chairs in which emperors were born or bathed, and therefore it was considered to impart some sort of imperial authority onto popes. If they were used only as thrones, then, perhaps they served as a sort of status symbol. Still others assert that they were merely toilets on which popes relieved themselves. Regardless, we know that the sedes stercoraria was part of the ceremony long before the supposed reign of any Pope Joan in the 9th century, and we know that the Roman porphyry latrine chairs were not in use long, despite continued claims that this ceremony was still taking place. For example, in the 17th century, an anti-Catholic Lutheran writer, Laurens Banck, traveled to Rome and wrote a description of the coronation of Pope Innocent X, and he claimed these chairs were still in use, including an illustration of a deacon reaching under the chair from an opening on the side to check the pope’s manhood. Clearly, though, these chairs, which were no longer in use by that time, didn’t even have an opening on the side, so the false legend of Pope Joan continued to be spread into the early modern period simply as ammunition to attack the Catholic Church. Indeed even the fact that this supposed manhood checking ceremony has not been practiced for a very long time has been used as a barb to hurl at the church, for it was then claimed that such a confirmation was no longer needed, because since that time, popes tended to sire so many illegitimate children that their manhood was never in question. 

Many theories have been put forward as to how this legend of a female pope might have originated. One theory has it that the story refers to the 9th century Pope John VIII, saying he was considered “womanly” for giving in to the patriarch of Constantinople and reinstating him after his excommunication. In truth, though, John VIII only did so in his efforts to enlist Byzantine aid in expelling the Saracens from Italy. Today, he is considered to be a strong and able wartime pope who did his best to defend Rome against incursion, but he was unpopular enough in his own time to be assassinated by his own clerics, poisoned and clubbed to death, not unlike the version of the Pope Joan story that has her murdered and dragged through the streets. Others suggest that the Pope Joan story was based on the prophetess Thiota, a woman from East Francia who developed a large following in Mainz, the very place where some versions of the Pope Joan legend claim the She-Pope came from. She drew followers with a prophecy that the world would soon end, but loath to accept the growing influence of a woman in the church, clerics had her publicly flogged until she recanted her prophecy, confessing under torture that she had been paid to make the claims. Here we have an actual woman in the church being turned on and attacked in the 9th century, but she wasn’t killed, and she came nowhere near the papacy or Rome. The connection here seems to only be the locale from which it was said Pope Joan hailed, though this detail did not appear in all the early written versions of the legend. Still others point to the saeculum obscurum of the 10th century, also called the “pornocracy” or the Rule of the Harlots, when an influential noble family, the Theophylacti family,  manipulated and controlled the selection of popes. Some women in this family, Theodora and Marozia, were said to have held especial influence over papal selection. Theodora was supposedly the lover of Pope John X and was rumored to have been instrumental in his election to the papacy. Her daughter, Marozia, was said to be the lover of Pope Sergius III, and Marozia’s son with this pope was later elected Pope John XI. Therefore, it is suggested that the legend of Pope Joan, a story about a Pope named John that was really a woman in disguise, was a commentary on these women’s secret power over the papacy, as reflected in the several Johns they put into power. Another Pope John related to Marozia was John XII, who was something of a philanderer. It was said one of his mistresses was named Joan and had a great influence over him, making her the supposed inspiration of the legend. So the time of the pornocracy, we see, was rich in potential origins for this tale. And lastly, there is the suggestion that the entire tradition grew out of the “four times,” the days of fasting and prayer that some versions of the legend suggested Pope Joan had instituted. These “four times,” now called Embertides or Ember Days, are quarterly seasonal celebrations. The word “ember” here is believed to have derived from the Latin quatuor tempora, four times, and their establishment as Catholic fast days are yet another example of Christianity’s adoption of pagan celebrations, which they adapted to their own purposes. These “four times” were agrarian holidays in pre-Christian Rome, and it is just false to claim that any Pope in the 9th century established the “four times” festivals as times of fasting and prayer, for the papal biographies in the Liber Pontificalis indicate that they were adopted as fasting days as early as the third century. But it was Alain Boureau, the French scholar whose research into the Pope Joan legend is unparalleled, who theorized that the “four times” celebrations in pre-Christian times likely involved an element of misrule. The Saturnalia festival certainly did, and since one of the “four times” ember days falls in December, there may have been some overlap. This element of misrule meant a topsy turvy theme, in which the poor and lowly were elevated over the rich and powerful, when men dressed as women and women as men. Thus, the notion of a woman, dressed as a man, being elevated to the highest position and also being associated with these festivals suggested that the entire legend may have derived from the sort of inverted social order celebrated in them. 

Engraving of Pope Joan giving birth.

What is sad is that, despite advances in women’s rights through the centuries, it seems that in many countries, including the US, the idea of women in leadership is still considered by too many to be an inversion of the social order. As the legend developed in the 16th century, the anti-Catholic writers in the Reformation claimed it was real, all of it, and like any conspiracists, they claimed that any lack of evidence was the result of a cover-up, of Pope Joan being expunged from the records. These protestant polemicists pointed to the idea that women might have an influence in the church, or that priests might be effeminate, as reasons to despise and reject Catholicism. They even went so far as to start new legends, including one that Pope Joan was not only a woman but a witch who wrote a grimoire teaching the practice of sorcery. In this way, the legend of Pope Joan became a lightning rod for sexism and misogyny through the ages. In its retelling, it was almost always told to make a point about how catastrophic and terrible it would be for a woman to be raised to power. It was presented as an example of women’s deceptive nature, even though the story illustrates very clearly how neither Joan nor any female was able to achieve anything without the deception of presenting themselves as a man, since they were by their very sex denied such opportunities. And in the end, it is her very body that betrays her, a powerful symbol of how the ability to bear children has always been what leads men to subordinate the female sex. And so it remains even today, with maternity affecting the standing and opportunities of women in workplaces everywhere, and with women in so many places, and now since the repeal of Roe v. Wade throughout the US too, losing control over their own bodies and therefore over their own lives, just like the fictional Joan, whose unexpected pregnancy meant losing everything she had worked for, even her very life. And any who doubt the depths of sexism and misogyny in America today should just look at our recent presidential election, when a qualified and capable woman, a sitting Vice President, lost to a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a proven pathological liar, a blatant racist, an authoritarian oligarch, a belligerent nationalist, a nativist, a fascist, in short, the most un-American candidate in US history, who after fomenting an insurrection should, under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, be disqualified from holding office. Obviously there were issues in play other than the sex and gender of each candidate, but many political analysts do suggest that it was sexism and misogyny that cost Kamala Harris the election, and with her polling strongly ahead with women and substantially behind among men, it’s hard to argue otherwise. Consider, after all, the rhetoric in the media over whether Kamala Harris and her clothing choice of pants suits “looked presidential.” This seems to have just been a thinly veiled assertion that only men have the look of a president, especially when known misogynist Donald Trump claimed that “She didn’t look like a leader.” One wonders if she would have fared better had she just, like Pope Joan, hidden her biological sex and lived as a man. 

Until next time, I leave you with the words of one early promoter of the Pope Joan myth: “Behold to what an abominable end such rash presumption leads.” He, of course, was talking about the presumption that Pope Joan really was a man, but out of context, I think it’s an apt quote to describe the unfortunate results of blindly crediting myths and pseudohistory. 

Further Reading

Boureau, Alain. The Myth of Pope Joan, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Noble, Thomas F. X. “Why Pope Joan?” The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 2, April 2013, pp. 219-38. Project Muse, doi: 10.1353/cat.2013.0078. 

Thomas, Zachary. “Papal Humiliations II: The Papal Sedia Stercoraria.” Liturgical Arts Journal, 15 Oct. 2018, www.liturgicalartsjournal.com/2018/10/papal-humiliations-ii-papal-sedia.html. 

Zarevich, Emily. “The Myth of the Papal Toilet Chair.” JStor Daily, 26 Aug. 2023, https://daily.jstor.org/the-myth-of-the-papal-toilet-chair/. 

Empress Elagabalus

As all presidents have for decades, President Trump recently proclaimed February Black History Month and March Women’s History Month, even while his anti-DEI policies have had a chilling effect discouraging the observing of any “identity months.” But there is one annual day of observance this month that we can be certain he will not proclaim. In 2021, President Joe Biden became the first U.S. President to proclaim a national Transgender Visibility Day since the observance was first founded by activist Rachel Crandall-Crocker in 2009, and Trump, along with most of the right, made their distaste for the proclamation especially clear last year, when the day that Transgender Visibility Day always falls on, March 31st, happened to coincide with Easter Sunday. Grandstanding, the Trump campaign called on Biden for an apology of what they called his “assault on the Christian faith.” Trump’s stance on LGBTQIA issues has always been best described as grandstanding. Initially, in his 2016 campaign, he promised to fight for LGBT rights, and at one campaign event he even walked around the stage holding up a pride flag with “LGBT’s for Trump” crudely markered onto its yellow stripe. He even broke with the Republican Party and came out publicly against North Carolina’s controversial bathroom law requiring individuals to use the bathroom marked for the sex they were assigned at birth, saying instead they should be able to “use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate” and that there was no need for such a law because there have been no real problems with trans individuals using public restrooms. But he very quickly went from grandstanding to curry the favor of the LGBTQIA community to showing his opposition to the same community once he took office, whether just to reassure his base or in revelation of his true intentions (which seems most likely, considering some of his other remarks prior to his presidency and considering his exceptionally anti-LGBTQIA pick for Vice President, Mike Pence). Regardless, his record speaks for itself. If I were to list the many ways that Trump has weakened or rescinded protections against anti-LGBTQIA discrimination, it would end up being the full length of this episode, and the second time around, he campaigned on the promise to further enable such discrimination. But I can here list several of his specifically anti-trans actions, which have become more and more brazen, moving beyond the removal of protections to the removal of their rights, the enshrinement of discrimination against them as policy, and blatant efforts at erasing their existence. Almost immediately, when he first took office in 2017, he reversed Obama-era interpretations of Title IX that extended protections against sex discrimination in schools to transgender students, taking away their right to use bathrooms that accorded with their gender identity, essentially refusing to enforce the civil rights of transgender individuals. Then in the summer of his first year in office, he banned trans soldiers from serving in the military. That fall, his Department of Justice issued guidance that they would no longer extend Title VII protections against discrimination in the workplace to trans people, further eroding their civil rights. And by the end of his first year, his efforts at erasure were made explicit in his ban on the CDC even using the word transgender. The following spring, he ordered the Bureau of Prisons to transfer transgender prisoners according to their biological sex, putting them in very real physical danger. By October of 2018, he was already telegraphing his intentions to redefine “sex” in such a way that would erase transgender people. As his first term went on, he further enabled discrimination against this already at-risk group, with his Department of Housing and Urban Development issuing an order that would allow shelters to turn away trans people based on their biological sex and his Department of Health and Human Services rolled back a rule that would prevent discrimination against transgender patients in healthcare. On top of this, Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, were both explicitly anti-trans in their views and interpretations of law. His actions against the trans community not only stripped them of their rights and equality before the law but even resulted in avoidable deaths. As bad as this was, he only promises to be worse. In his 2024 campaign, he scapegoated and demonized the transgender community, promising to get trans women out of women’s sports and block gender affirming care, with ads stating “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” as if trans people were not American citizens, or even people. While President Biden took action to undo many of Trump’s anti-trans changes, Trump, on the first day of his second term, rescinded executive orders intended to restore the protections of transgender persons from discrimination and ensure their access to health care. He then went on to issue a flurry of executive orders aimed at the total erasure of trans people. Through his anti-DEI efforts, he has further attempted to remove the very language surrounding trans issues from any usage in federal programs and is currently threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that even mention the existence of trans people or support their trans students in any way, which to me reeks of extortion. He calls it an effort to “end radical indoctrination,” but attempts to force the erasure of a whole group of people in school curriculum, many of whom are students themselves, is itself indoctrination. And the worst, the most destructive order, which will cost the most lives, is his order attempting to deny gender affirming care to any youths, who just happen to be the group most at-risk of suicide. And to put an absurd cherry on the top of this crap sundae, his executive order attempting to redefine sex according to an “immutable binary biological classification” defines gender according to sex “at conception,” which is nonsensical, since at conception, or fertilization, there is no such thing as biological sex, only chromosomes, of which every embryo contains both male and female, X and Y chromosomes. Sex differentiation does not occur until 9 to 13 weeks, and before that, all fetal genitalia are of a female phenotype. So, ludicrously, in signing an executive order that states, “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell,” meaning sperm, Trump has stupidly erased himself. By his own order’s logic, the male sex can no longer be recognized, since there are no males at conception. In his eagerness to erase transgender persons, he has erased all men. It’s dumb, I know, and more than that, it’s potentially toothless, since executive orders are not law, and they can be and have been blocked by court orders. But this all demonstrates quite apparently the very real and concerted efforts by the right to erase trans people from existence, an erasure that can be credibly compared to an attempted genocide. Because of these efforts at erasure, I consider it extremely important, ahead of Trans Visibility Day, to acknowledge the existence of trans people, and as I have done in the past, to demonstrate the historical reality that they have always existed. As before, I will do this by telling the story of Elagabalus, a historical figure who was manifestly transgender, and tracing how she was portrayed throughout history.

Before I take us all the way back to the 3rd century CE and examine Elagabalus as evidence of the existence of trans people and their mistreatment by historians, I want to address the comparison I just made of the current governmental efforts on the right to oppress the trans community with genocide. To some this may seem unwarranted, or even outrageous. I have already made clear and logical comparisons between erasure, such as colonial erasure, and genocide, so as I further develop the fact of trans erasure, I am with every point further making that case of trans genocide, but a more direct comparison to a more recent and largely recognized genocide can also be made. In 1920s Germany, under the Weimar Republic, transgender individuals, first of all, existed, and even enjoyed some institutionalized tolerance. Though called “transvestites” at the time, these individuals were certainly recognized as more than just cross-dressers or drag queens. In Weimar Germany, cross-dressing was outlawed, but these individuals, many of them transgender women living according to their gender identities, could be recognized as exempt from this law, issued a permit to dress and live as they wanted, and even legally change their names. Because of this recognition and tolerance, even if it was limited and begrudging, a thriving trans culture existed in the country. Trans cabarets were operated, trans political organizations formed, and trans magazines published. Many even accessed gender-affirming care at the famous Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. However, all of that changed when the Nazis took power. Trans people were branded “morals criminals,” and just as the Nazis demonized Jews with false claims and conspiracy theories, they lied that trans people were prone to criminality and were bent on recruiting German youth. Anyone who has heard anti-trans rhetoric in the U.S. today, about trans people being more likely than cis-gendered people to commit violent crime, when actually they are four times more likely to be the victims of such crimes, or that there is some trans agenda to corrupt children, should recognize the very apparent parallels here. Even more concerning is the fact that in Texas, in the beginning of this month, a bill was proposed that would essentially criminalize being trans, allowing the state to charge anyone identifying as a gender that differs from the sex they were assigned at birth with fraud. Branding trans people criminals was exactly how it started in Nazi Germany, after which their permits to express themselves according to their gender identities were revoked and many were shipped to concentration camps, branded “degenerates” and “dangers to youth.” To any who dispute the fact that transgender people were victims of the Holocaust, I would point out that in 2022, a German court weighed the evidence, provided by historians and experts, in an effort to determine whether claims that transgender people were not victims of the Holocaust should be considered “denial of Nazi crimes.” The court found that, indeed, trans people were the victims of Nazi war crimes, and Germany’s parliament promptly recognized them as such. So that is the company we, as Americans, are keeping, with a goose-stepping, stiff-arm saluting presidential administration, which has been credibly and compellingly compared with Nazis in numerous ways, now following the Nazi playbook insofar as they’d like to criminalize trans existence and erase them from reality. Trump has even forbidden federal agencies from using the words transgender or other words associated with gender, such as non-binary and any talk of gender assignment at birth or biological sex. Ludicrously, he has even tried to remove the word “gender” from usage. Therefore, to talk about this now, and especially to look at an example of the existence of trans people throughout history, even back to the Roman Empire, has become an act of resistance to fascism.

Images from The 3rd Sex, the first magazine devoted to trans issues, published in Weimar Germany. Via the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

One simple way to illustrate the attempted erasure of Empress Elagabalus, the transgender ruler of the Roman Empire for less than four years, between 218 and 222 CE, is to remark on the fact that Elagabalus was not her name. First, it must be acknowledged that I am using feminine pronouns for Elagabalus and referring to her as Empress rather than Emperor, and I do this because, as will be made apparent, this appears to have been her preference. But I do not speak now of her deadname. We have approximations of her birth name, based on the family into which she was born. It is believed that she was given the name Sextus or perhaps the name Caius, with the family name Varius Avitus Bassianus. When she became the sovereign ruler of the Empire, she took the the name of her predecessor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, but this was not to express her gender identity. Rather, it was a common choice made by new emperors to signal their legitimacy. It is recorded that she raced chariots under the name Varius, but this was her family name, having been one of her father’s names. There is no record of her adopting a traditionally female name, but considering the accounts of her desire to adopt feminine roles, and it is very likely that she may have adopted such a name and it has gone unrecorded by history. The very reason why she is today known as Elagabalus, or Heliogabalus, is that she was purposely erased from Roman history in a process called damnatio memoriae, the damnation of memory. This was an institutionalized condemnation of despised emperors after their deaths, entailing the erasure of their names from history and the defacement of statuary depicting their likeness. The only reason that stories of Elagabalus survive is that, despite damnatio memoriae, it was also considered valuable to tell the stories of terrible or hated rulers as cautionary tales. Thus the contemporary historians who wrote about her, Cassius Dio and Herodian, used the name Elagabalus instead, a reference to the Syrian god Elagabal, of whom Elegabalus was a high priestess, and whose worship in Rome she instituted, this religious reform being one of the principal grievances against her resulting in the condemnation of her memory. And so complete was her erasure from that time forward that another biography would not be penned about her for more than a hundred years, when it is believed that Historia Augusta, a late Roman compilation of biographies, was written. Even then, the author, who identifies her as “Elagabalus Antoninus, also called Varius,” starts by saying that the life of this ruler he “should never have put in writing.” His only excuse for doing so is that the story of Elagabalus, as with the story of other despised emperors like Caligula and Nero, is instructive to “‘diligent readers’ who may learn of the Romans’ discernment,” in that, while other, revered emperors lived long lives and died naturally, these others, including Elagabalus, “were murdered, dragged through the streets, officially called tyrants, and no man wishes to mention even their names.”

Elagabalus’s rise to power was anything but ordinary. She was born to a Roman aristocrat and senator, her mother a Syrian noblewoman, within a family associated with the emperor through her grandmother, Julia Maesa, the sister-in-law of Emperor Septimius Severus and the aunt of the Emperor’s son and co-ruler, Caracalla. When Severus fell ill and died in 211 CE, Caracalla was raised to Emperor. Caracalla was a militaristic ruler, with a reputation for cruelty, as depicted recently in the blockbuster Gladiator sequel. After 6 years, he was assassinated by one of his own prefects, Macrinus, who then became Emperor himself. According to Herodian, Macrinus, seeing her as a threat to his rule, exiled his predecessor’s aunt, Julia Maesa, to her family estate in Syria, and she took her young grandchild Elagabalus with her. It was there that Elagabalus entered the priesthood of Elagabal, and it was there that her grandmother schemed to return her family to power. According to the sources, she spread a rumor, which may already have been circulating, that rather than being his cousin, Elagabalus was the illegitimate child of Caracalla, the emperor whom Macrinus had conspired to kill and supplant. This claim to the throne was supported by the Roman Legion in Syria, whether because of genuine loyalty to Caracalla or potentially because of bribery, and that legion’s commander declared Elagabalus emperor. Macrinus seems to have underestimated this threat to his rule, but after another Roman Legion, sent to make war against this rebellion by a prefect of Macrinus’s named Ulpius Julianus , instead turned on their leaders and joined the cause, Macrinus could no longer ignore it. He convinced the Senate to reject Elagabalus’s claim. Again, she had taken the imperial name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to further associate herself with the late emperor Caracalla, but the Senate called her a “False Antoninus.” Macrinus attempted to shore up his forces, delivering cash bribes to legionaries in an effort to buy their loyalty, but his cowardice was his undoing. At a banquet with the Second Legion, the severed head of his prefect, Julianus, who had made war against Elagabalus, was delivered to Macrinus in a very Godfather moment, and when it terrified Macrimus enough to send him fleeing to Antioch, the Second Legion abandoned him, despite his bribes, and added their strength to the forces of Elagabalus. Likewise, at the ensuing Battle of Antioch, Macrinus turned tail and left the field of battle, causing his Praetorian Guard to reconsider their loyalties. Eventually, Macrinus and his son were fugitives, and each was inevitably captured and executed. With no one to stand in the way, Elagabalus assumed power. Among the first actions taken under this new rule was the erasure of Macrinus by damnatio memoriae: the Senate ordered that his and his son’s names be stricken from all records, effaced from inscriptions and rubbed out of papyri, their busts and portraits defaced, coins bearing their likenesses destroyed, and all their earthly possessions demolished. Less than four years later, the same fate awaited Elagabalus, but if the sources are believed, she must have been little concerned with such a possibility, for it is said she was entirely reckless and inept in her rule and far more preoccupied with erotic pursuits. 

This statue is thought to have once depicted Elagabalus but to have afterward, because of damnatio memoriae, been changed to depict her nephew and successor.

According to most modern narrative retellings of the reign of Elagabalus, while the effeminacy, or rather, gender identity, of Elagabalus and her transgressive sexual activities may have contributed to the tide turning against her rule, much of this may have been fabricated or embellished by the sources as libel, just part and parcel of the tradition of depicting “bad emperors” as outrageously debauched in retrospect. By this view, rather, the true reasons for opinion turning against her were that she was a generally inept ruler and that she imposed unpopular religious reforms. Among the foremost of the complaints that Cassius Dio and other make of her rule is that she executed political rivals on trumped up charges, but those whom Elagabalus executed on her journey to Rome were major supporters of Macrinus, who had tried to have her killed and who did have the previous emperor assassinated, so there is good reason to suspect an alternative view of these executions. Dio also suggests that Elagabalus demonstrated her ineptitude through her poor choice of political appointments. For example, she elevated the legion commander who had supported her claim, Publius Valerius Comazon, to the highest of offices, first to command the Praetorian Guard and then to serve as her consul. However, Dio’s chief complaint was that Comazon was unqualified to lead the guard, when in fact he had been a soldier since the time of Emperor Commodus, the emperor made famous as the villain in the first Gladiator film. Indeed, Comazon had led not one but two legions of the Roman Army. He had been raised to leadership under Macrinus, and he would survive the coming coup against Elagabalus to continue as prefect under her successor, so Dio’s evaluation of his suitability seems entirely inaccurate. In fact, Cassius Dio admits that he wasn’t even in Rome during Elagabalus’s reign, so all of his evaluations of Elagabalus’s decision making should be viewed as Dio toeing the line and presenting the rule of Elagabalus as negative in every regard, an approach made necessary by the official condemnation of her memory. Therefore, when Cassius Dio claims that Elagabalus promoted a man to high office solely because he had a large penis, when we know she actually promoted individuals based on experience and loyalty, we must look at what Dio says about her, much of which was just repeated by later accounts, very skeptically. For example, some other appointments made by Elagabalus give us an alternative sense for why her governorship proved unpopular. Elagabalus appointed her mother and grandmother to the Senate, making them the first women Senators, honoring them in inscriptions and immortalizing them on coins, which was unheard of in the strictly patriarchal Roman society. After Elagabalus was overthrown, women were promptly barred again from participation in the Senate. Moreover, having been raised to the throne at just 14 years old, it is important to recognize that Elagabalus was, like other child emperors, a figurehead, likely controlled or guided in large part by those in her regime. It is generally recognized, for example, that her mother and grandmother held great sway in her regime. Therefore, even though Roman tradition required that everything be blamed on the young ruler and she be portrayed as the sole and principal mover during her reign, the facts suggest that the overthrow of Elagabalus may have been more a reaction against women being given any power over men. 

The religious reforms that Elagabalus, or rather that her regime and the women behind it, introduced to Roman society are often, as already stated, seen as the principal reasons for Elagabalus’s ouster and her memory being damned. When she came to Rome, she brought with her not only the ideas of her religion, but its chief symbol or idol, a conical black stone. As the high priestess of this Syrian religion, a role she came to through her family’s hereditary connection to the priesthood, she promoted and observed this religion, it seems, mostly through dance. The god of her religion, Elagabal, was actually a sun god, which she described as dei invicti Soli Elagabali, the unconquered god, the Sun Elagabal, and this phrasing suggests that it was Elagabalus herself, or rather, she and those in her family and regime, who were responsible for introducing monotheism to Rome, in a form that would coalesce within 50 years in the sun cult of Sol Invictus, that same religion often claimed to have been an influence on Christianity. So what, one might ask, did the cone-shaped rock have to do with the sun? Herodian states that some markings on the stone looked vaguely like the sun, and so it was venerated by the cult. However, it is unclear whether this stone was meant only as a symbol or was considered the god itself. Herodian describes summer solstice ceremonies in which Elagabalus had the stone placed on a chariot that she led around, never taking her eyes off of it, as if it were the very god, and the name Elagabal itself, which meant “God of the Mountain” suggests that the stone itself was the god or contained it. It being a black stone further suggests it may have been a meteorite, and therefore viewed as the sun having fallen to earth, as was the case in numerous ancient religions that worshipped baetyls, or sacred meteorites believed to contain a deity. Regardless of the nature of the belief, though, according to Cassius Dio, it was rather more the institutionalization of the new religion and some particularly sacrilegious acts that turned Rome against her. She was said to have forced Senators to attend her religious ceremonies and to watch her dance, to have unified the roles of emperor and pontifex maximum, or supreme pontiff, and to have relocated the sacred relics of other gods and goddesses of the pantheon to the ostentatious temple she had built for Elagabal. Those who argue that the worship of Elagabal was the forcing of a monotheistic tradition claim that this move was intended to prevent other gods from being worshipped unless it was in connection to Elagabal, but the worship of other deities was not outlawed by Elagabalus. Rather, it seemed an effort was being made to syncretize and include Elagabal within the Roman pantheon. For example, Elagabalus apparently declared a union between Elagabal and one of the Roman goddesses, in a gesture of respect for the Roman religion that was meant to legitimize Elagabal’s inclusion in the pantheon. And as the principal figure representing her god, Elagabalus herself apparently married a Vestal Virgin, a high priestess of the goddess Vesta, in a further effort to unite her religion with the religion of her empire. This, along with her decision to not eat pork and to have herself circumcised, was viewed as sacrilege, since according to Roman law Vestal Virgins were to be executed—buried alive, specifically—if they were to ever lose their virginity. However, judging from what we know and can deduce about Elagabalus’s sexual orientation, it is reasonable to assume that no such physical union ever occurred, and even though it was claimed that the marriage would produce “godlike children,” it may have been an entirely symbolic union.

Two coins depicting the stone of Elagabal, believed to be a meteorite associated with a sun god, which Elagabalus brought to Rome and introduced into the Roman pantheon.

Elagabalus married and divorced a total of three different women, with none of whom did she ever produce any offspring, at least as far as we know. Whenever romantic love is mentioned in Dio’s account and others, it is love between Elagablus and a man. First it is a charioteer named Hierocles, and they had quite a meet cute, in which Hierocles falls out of his chariot, losing his helmet, and Elagabalus is immediately smitten. Whether meant as an insult or an accurate characterization of how Elagabalus wanted to be seen, Dio states that their relationship was a literal marriage, and that Elagabalus wished to be seen as his “wife.” Regardless, he is clear about Elagabalus’s love for him, saying that her “affection for this ‘husband’ was no light inclination, but an ardent and firmly fixed passion.” But then came a rival for her attentions, a remarkably attractive man named Zoticus, and Dio describes how Elagabalus swooned for him and Hierocles became so jealous that, in order to prevent their being together, he slipped Zoticus a drug that would prevent him from achieving an erection. Now first, I want to remark on the fact that Elagabalus was only 14 years old when she took the throne, and though the stories about her excesses are not told according to any chronology, such that they may have occurred when she was closer to her majority, I still do not wish to romanticize or pass over this uncomfortable fact without remark, even if it may have been legal in Rome for boys as young as 14 and girls as young as 12 to marry. Indeed, Elagabalus’s young age is actually another factor that indicates the extreme excesses attributed to her may have been exaggerations or libels. For example, Cassius Dio claims that she prostituted herself, and some historians suggest this may have been a stereotype that Dio was imposing on her because of her role as a priestess in a Near Eastern religion. This notion stems from an account by Herodotus about Babylonian temple prostitution: ”The foulest Babylonian custom,” he called it, “which compels every woman of the land to sit in the temple of Aphrodite and have intercourse with some stranger at least once in her life.” There is no such claim about Elagabalus prostituting herself in our other contemporaneous source, by Herodian, so we may safely dismiss it. However, talk of her love affairs, which Dio accounts with such detail that they are essentially a digression from the narrative and serve more to humanize her than demonize her, seem by my reading more likely to be a reflection of genuine events. It is also important here to acknowledge that the sexual preference of Elagabalus does not necessarily have any bearing on her gender identity, but as we will see, it is in Dio’s descriptions of her romances with these men that we find most of the indications that she identified as a woman. 

To return to Dio’s characterization of Elagabalus’s relationship with Hierocles, he states that she “was bestowed in marriage and was termed wife, mistress, and queen.” Likewise, the later and even less reliable Historia Augusta claims that similar nuptials occurred between Elagabalus and Zoticus, but even more telling is the story Dio shares of their first meeting, when Zoticus greeted her as “My Lord Emperor,” and she assumed a “ravishing feminine pose” and replied, “Call me not Lord, for I am a Lady.” Moreover, in more than one of her marriages, she was said to have offered to abdicate the throne to her husband, but reading between the lines there, it seems just as likely that she intended to fully assume the gender identity of a wife, and thus would be the Empress to her husband’s Emperor. Even if these direct and quite apparent indications of her preferred pronouns and gender identity were to be disregarded or mistrusted as slander, there are still the many descriptions of her preference for female-presenting dress and even body modification. While Herodian only depicts her as dressed in the richest of garments, her “purple robes embroidered with gold,” adorned with necklaces and bracelets and a tiara for a crown, he describes it more as a Phoenician style of dress than as women’s clothes, but Dio is explicit, saying that, while in court, she “had more or less the appearance of a man,” otherwise, or as he says, “everywhere else,” she “showed affectation” in her demeanor and voice, something any trans woman will tell you is a common practice, called voice feminization, which just like any gender-affirming care or practice, helps reduce the discomfort and distress of gender dysphoria. According to Dio, she applied make-up to her eyes, and she “used to dance, not only in the orchestra, but also, in a way, even while walking.” And it was her dancing in particular that, according to Herodian, led to her downfall, as supposedly her grandmother feared not the Senators but the soldiers that saw her dancing, believing that they were “outraged by [her] eccentricities.” Again, though, this too may be exaggeration or even fabrication. Herodian is believed to have relied on Dio’s work, and as we’ve seen, Dio wasn’t there and is unreliable. The fact that her grandmother was born in Syria, into a family of Arab priests, makes it seem more likely that she actually supported all of Elagabalus’s efforts to introduce this religion to Romans, including the dances performed by its high priestess. 

A triptych depicting Elagabalus’s entrance into Rome, dressed here as a woman, behind her the black stone baetyl of her religion, depicted here as a phallus rather than just as a cone.

Beyond these indications of Elagabalus adopting feminine dress, manner, and voice, and the direct claim that she preferred to be referred to using feminine nouns and wanted to be considered a woman, there is the extraordinary evidence that Elagabalus practiced extensive body modification in an effort to better align her physical self with her gender identity. Both Dio and the author of Historia Augusta make a point about her hair removal. Dio says she “had the hairs plucked out, so as to look more like a woman.” And the author of the latter work talks about her further depilatory regimen, applying a hair removal ointment to her entire body before appearing nude as Venus before an audience. When mentioning her choice to circumcise herself, Dio further notes her desire to have herself castrated, which he differentiates as not being associated with her priesthood but rather with her effeminacy. He even states that she “asked the physicians to contrive a woman's vagina in [her] body by means of an incision, promising them large sums for doing so.” This is absolutely definitive as evidence for the reality of the trans experience stretching all the way back to the furthest reaches of history, as it indicates not only a desire for gender-affirming surgery but also gives us a sense of how desperate she was and how seriously she took her gender identity. These passages in Dio are also important for us to cut through what is true and what fabrication. Cassius Dio is careful to suggest that this desire of hers had nothing to do with the priesthood, likely because he wished to differentiate her effeminacy from well-known eunuch priests of the goddess Cybele. These priests, or gallae, castrated themselves and wore women’s clothing, and they have themselves been interpreted by some historians as transgender women, were called “half-men,” and Dio is careful to differentiate Elagabalus from them. At the same time, he is also careful to subordinate the controversy over her religious reforms to the perceived aberrations of her transgressive behavior with regard to gender. This is different from accounts of other “bad emperors,” whose debauchery and licentiousness is typically subordinated to the other grievances against them and as such may be details further embellished to demonize them. In the case of Elagabalus, however, it appears Dio is suggesting that it was her violation of gender norms, first and foremost, that explain her downfall, and other transgressions, like the religious stuff, should be considered secondary, which may here indicate that the claims about her gender identity are true. If we consider this, in conjunction with the other things we know about her rule, and the fact that such gender transgressive behavior was not unheard of, considering the existence of the gallae, then we may suspect that the real reason for Rome’s rejection of Elagabalus was that she was, in all the ways that matter, a woman holding power over men, and she also raised other women to positions of power over men. And this was something they could not abide. 

Whether undertaken by her grandmother or not, the historical tradition we have is that members of her own family sought to raise her cousin, Alexander, to co-Emperor in an effort to encourage Elagabalus to temper her behavior, or perhaps to appease the critics of the Empress. According to the sources, which again may be defaming her, she tried to have Alexander killed, but found that her Praetorian Guard preferred him to her and none would do the deed. So then she instead started a rumor that he was ill, but when her soldiers began to riot, Elagabalus was forced to bring Alexander into their camp to show he was well. It was then that, perhaps through some intrigue from Alexander’s mother, Elagabalus and her mother were slain together. Their heads were then taken off  and their bodies stripped and dragged through the city in what might seem to be the ultimate humiliation, but Elagabalus would be humiliated for all time. Her memory damned, she would only be written about under this false name, which I have adopted here only for clarity reasons, since if you want to look up more about her, this is the name to use. She would be misgendered for most of history, despite her own critics acknowledging her preference. Even now, you can see her misgendered on her Wikipedia page and in almost all scholarship about her. And even long after her memory was damned and her life so distorted, when she was to be finally resurrected in more modern discourse and reclaimed as a misunderstood or falsely maligned figure, even then, she was consistently used represented as a gay man and not a trans woman, and in such a way as was standard to the sexual politics of each era, such that her memory was often used to malign gay men as well. So, for example, British author Alfred Duggan, in his 1960 novel Family Favourites, written during a moral panic over male homosexuality, delivers an admirable depiction of a character whose sexuality is not a choice but rather an immutable aspect of the character but still treats it as a rather unfortunate condition and does a real disservice to Elagabalus by depicting her as a virile gay man rather than as woman that she was. Then in 1966, Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner, of the Falconhurst historical erotica series, tried their hands at crafting a gay bodice-ripper centered on Elagabalus in Child of the Sun. They too depict Elagabalus as a gay man rather than a trans woman, but their characterization partakes of many longtime stereotypes, portraying the character as an over-mothered narcissist whose homosexuality stems from his acute misogyny, and even perpetuates the false stereotype that all gay men, at heart, just want to be women. So through the millennia, many have made of Elagabalus whatever it suited them for her to be, to make whatever statement they wanted to make. And I am certain some will say that’s exactly what I and others do in presenting her as a trans woman, but as I have argued I think convincingly here, this representation hews more closely to what we actually know about her. And in a time when the U.S. president is conducting witch hunts against trans individuals and trans women especially, punishing those who even accommodate their existence, and even just recently reposted a conservative newspaper article that featured the pink triangle, the Nazis very own concentration camp badge for gay men and trans women—that’s right, yet another social media post accidentally containing Nazi imagery shared by Trump, making three now, if you’re counting—I think it is more important than ever not to deny, not to qualify or hem and haw, but to acknowledge the truth, that transgender people have always existed and must be treated as people, not aberrations. 

Coin immortalizing Elagabalus’s grandmother, Julia Maesa, whom Elagabalus appointed to be a Roman Senator, or rather, Senatrix, as would eventually be the feminine form of the word.

Until next time, consider this. Many men, myself not included, claim to think about the Roman Empire every day. Yet I wonder how many have heard of the trans Empress Elagabalus? Go ahead and link this to a Roman Empire nut. I’d love for them to give more thought to this issue. 

Further Reading

Chrysanthou, Chrysanthos S. “Sex and Power in Cassius Dio’s Roman History: The Case of Elagabalus.” Mnemosyne, vol. 74, no. 4, 2021, pp. 598–625. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27286794. 

Kemezis, Adam. “The Fall of Elagabalus as Literary Narrative and Political Reality: A Reconsideration.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 65, no. 3, 2016, pp. 348–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45019236. 

Icks, Martijn. The Crimes of Elagabalus. I.B. Taurins, 2013. 

Navarro, Pedro David Conesa. “Iulia Maesa and Iulia Soaemias at the Court of Elagabalus: The Female Power of the Severan Domus.” Studia historica. Ha. antiqua, vol. 37, 2019, pp. 185–223, https://doi.org/10.14201/shha201937185223.

Nugent, Mark. “From ‘Filthy Catamite’ to ‘Queer Icon’: Elagabalus and the Politics of Sexuality (1960–1975).” Helios (Lubbock), vol. 35, no. 2, 2008, pp. 171–96, https://doi.org/10.1353/hel.0.0009.

The Erasure of Aspasia

As I’m sure is the case with many of you listeners, my head has been spinning, my faith in humanity plummeting, and my existential dread rising like bile in my throat over the last month or so since Trump took office and started his deplorable shock and awe campaign. I feel compelled to comment on this, even though I was not planning to address current politics directly so soon this year. I like to have a buffer between episodes with explicitly political commentary in the podcast, so that not every episode ends up a political diatribe, since I often get negative feedback when I do get political and it causes me to question whether I should broach such topics at all, even though it has been a focus of my content from the very beginning, and even though my official podcast description makes clear that I use history to gain insight into modern political culture, and even though I have actually officially categorized the podcast under politics. Now, though, I honestly don’t really care if I turn off some listeners. Any listeners that might bristle at my comparison of Trumpism to fascism and then try to rationalize when Elon Musk overtly Sieg Heils at Trump’s inauguration and Steve Bannon follows suit with his own stiff-arm salute at CPAC, are just lost to reason, and I don’t care to take their objections seriously anymore. They truly are obeying the “final, most essential command” of the authoritarian, as given by the Party in Orwell’s 1984, “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” But the theme and purpose of this show is the examination of history that has been distorted, misrepresented and mythologized, and not every political issue relates to a specific historical topic that fits the show’s theme, or at least apt historical analogies do not always come to my mind. Therefore, I often don’t address political issues in a very timely manner. Nor does my timing always work out the way I’d like it to. No one is more disappointed than me in the podcast’s shortcomings in that regard. For example, considering Trump’s current assault on all efforts to address systemic racism through initiatives designed to encourage diversity, equity and inclusion, I thought it would be important to devote some topics to Black American historical figures for Black History Month. I haven’t typically devoted February topics to celebrating Black history, again because strong topics fitting the show’s theme haven’t always occurred to me at the right time, and I wanted to start this year—I even had some topics in mind. It seems especially important since, despite still proclaiming February Black History Month as presidents always do, Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders have had a chilling effect on its celebration, even leading the Department of Defense to forbid the observance of any “identity months.” However, I also wanted to cover my recent topic about Lincoln in February, to coincide with Lincoln’s birthday. So instead, I started my Lincoln topic in January, and the series just ended up ballooning and becoming four parts that took up all of February as well. I still hope to revisit the Black history topics I had in mind in the future, whether in February or not, but now, as we enter March, I think it important to observe Women’s History Month, since women’s rights are under such clear assault by the right. Even between his respective terms in office, Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court and right-wing judicial activism have resulted in women losing long-settled reproductive rights and body autonomy when Roe v. Wade was overturned, and there are indications that the right are coming for the morning-after pill next, and maybe even birth control access generally. More than that, Trump has revoked protections against sexual misconduct in schools and in the workplace, unsurprising considering the long history of such allegations against the president himself. Following the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook like an instruction manual even though he distanced himself from it during his campaign, Trump has been clear that he won’t work to better ensure equal pay for women or to improve maternity leave and paid family leave laws, and that generally he thinks pregnancy is more of an inconvenience for employers. Some Christian Nationalists associated with his administration have even advocated for rolling back women’s right to vote in favor of a “household vote,” which just means male-only voting. House Republicans actually passed a bill requiring that voters have a birth certificate or passport matching their name, which seems designed to disenfranchise the estimated 69 million married women who took their husband’s name and have no passport. Clearly when he envisions making America great again, he conceives it as a regression to a time when women’s rights and roles were circumscribed, when they were subordinate in the workplace and at home. Even as I am finalizing this episode on March 6th, Trump just signed a proclamation declaring March Women's History Month, something every president has done since 1995. But when Trump signed it, saying "Women, we love you," it drew criticism, because he is clearly only paying lip service to women’s rights in the midst of and despite his ongoing war on women. In fact, even as he signed it, he and those around him managed to take the focus off of women and put it on him. He had one of his female lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, hand him this proclamation, saying it was in honor of the women in America, sure, but more specifically, the women in his administration, and "in honor of everything you've done for women." Trump smugly responded, asserting he's done a lot for women, and framing the accomplishments of women everywhere as valuable insofar they do it "for us." But that is just exactly the issue with the erasure of women, that they have, historically only been seen as relevant inasmuch as they serve men. So for my first episode of March, I want to tell the story of one woman, far back in antiquity, who was also treated as a second-class citizen, who was sexualized and seen as troublesome for her influence in politics, and who was almost erased from history, but whose memory nevertheless persisted, and who today is remembered also as a brilliant rhetorician and teacher—a pillar of Greek philosophy. As feminist historian Rebecca Solnit writes, “Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear.”

Historical erasure is a concept that perfectly encapsulates the Historical Blindness theme. In some sense, erasure can be a natural part of the building of cultural identity, the process by which some people and events fade in the collective memory while others are remembered and celebrated or scorned. This is not to say that power structures aren’t involved in this natural winnowing of the past—they are—but sometimes this erasure is even more insidious: the distortion of history to serve one’s ideology, the purposeful misrepresentation of history, the invention of pseudohistory, the outright denial and negation of history. These are all forms of erasure, and it is the ideal goal of the historian to expose such falsehood, to fill in gaps, to recover forgotten history and therefore reclaim that which has been systematically erased from historical memory. And part of that requires us to expose the power structures that result in this erasure, for it is inevitably marginalized and disadvantaged groups that disproportionately suffer erasure, whose historical erasure is actually a principal feature of their marginalization. Thus we see that historical and cultural erasure is a prominent feature of genocide, as can be seen with colonial attempts to expunge indigenous peoples, Nazi attempts to wipe out Jews, not just from existence but even from memory. And the historical erasure of women stands even more prominent, spanning all cultures and all history. The contributions and accomplishments of a great many women in every culture, every region, every time period, have gone unrecorded, have been minimized or ignored, or as is most common, are attributed to men instead. A brief list should illustrate the point: nuclear particles, the double-helix of DNA, dark matter, microbial genetics, nuclear fission, pulsars, brain receptors, and computer algorithms were all momentous scientific discoveries or developments made in modern times by women that were wrongfully attributed to men. But as ubiquitous as this erasure is, it is even more pronounced the further back in time we look, when surviving records are rare because of the rarity of literacy, and women more often left no record of themselves, for those who wrote what records we have were men who thought them less worthy of remembrance. This is an erasure of the history of half of humankind that should be mourned. As we look at antiquity and ancient Greece, the only reason we are able to talk about Aspasia and reclaim her memory to whatever degree may be possible from the 5th century BCE is because more of a biographical tradition exists about her than any other woman, with perhaps the exception of the 6th-century poet Sappho, and no women of the ancient world would again have her life spared such erasure until Cleapatra in the first century BCE. Just three women whose lives were preserved in any substantial way by history over the course of 500 years, and as we will see, even then only sketchily and dubiously, with conflicting reports that make of her either a scheming prostitute or respected philosopher. 

A 1920s depiction of Sappho, one of the only other women whose biographical traditions survived ancient Greece. Patrons on Patreon can hear an exclusive episode all about her.

Very little can be known for certain about Aspasia of Miletus. Most of what is known or assumed to be true about her was written hundreds of years later by philosopher and historian Plutarch in his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies. But more specifically, Plutarch’s comments on the life of Aspasia were contained within his biography of Pericles, the famed Greek general and politician during the Golden Age of Athens, with whom Aspasia was sexually or romantically or matrimonially involved, and whose illegitimate son she is said to have borne. So the most coherent account of her life was written centuries later, by a man who was actually only writing about her insofar as she was associated with another man, a very famous man, in fact, about whom much had already been written, including by his contemporaries, like Thucydides, who called him the “first citizen of Athens.” In fact the period during which he ruled Athens as its Archon, forging an Athenian empire of the confederate states of the Delian League and leading it in multiple wars against Sparta and its Peloponnesian League, has even been called “The Age of Pericles.” Meanwhile, the only contemporary writing about Aspasia came in the form of defamatory comedies, which we will look at shortly. Indeed, it is because of the claims about Aspasia’s power over Pericles, because of the claim that Pericles only took Athens to war on her behalf, that Plutarch even deigns to discuss her, saying, “this may be a fitting place to raise the query what great art or power this woman had, that she managed as she pleased the foremost men of the state, and afforded the philosophers occasion to discuss her in exalted terms and at great length.” Plutarch seems torn between more than one competing tradition regarding Aspasia, presenting her as a political mastermind and revered philosopher and also as a brothel keeper and sex worker. I am not here to suggest that a woman could not have been all these things, but as we will see, these conceptions of her do seem to have been derived from differing views of her and were, at least then, seen as contradictory characteristics. Even Plutarch’s brief discussion of her can’t seem to decide if Pericles was drawn to her intelligence or was attracted for more carnal reasons, saying first that she “was held in high favour by Pericles because of her rare political wisdom,” but then asserting that “the affection which Pericles had for Aspasia seems to have been rather of an amatory sort.” Again, it could have been both, but the original Greek, which has the word translated as “rather” nearer the beginning of the sentence, and in alternative translation seems to suggest an erotic attraction, can be understood as suggesting that rather than an intellectual admiration, Pericles’s love for her could be better described as sexual. However, any such assertion, as we will see, cannot be supported. 

According to Plutarch, it “is generally agreed” that Aspasia was a foreigner to Athens, Milesian by birth, and the daughter of one Axiochus. This made her, by Pericles’s own laws on Athenian citizenship, a metic, or resident alien in Athens, denied the benefits and protection of a full citizen, including the ability to marry a citizen. This means that some early accounts of Aspasia that style her as Pericles’s wife are inaccurate, as she could at best have been considered his pallake, or concubine, a fact further attested by the tradition that the son she bore Pericles, called Pericles the Younger, was a nothos, or illegitimate child. Some historians, like Peter Bicknell, and my principal source, Madeleine Henry, in her book Prisoner of History, consider these details about her life at least mostly established by the discovery of a gravestone or stele in Piraeus, an Athenian port city known to have been a place where metic families settled after immigrating to Athens. This stone actually commemorates a man named Aspasios, but its inscription names a forebear called Axiochus, and mentions his children, one of whom was named Aspasia. It also identifies Axiochus as the son of Alcibiades—not the famous Alcibiades, the Athenian statesman of the later fifth century, but his grandfather, an elder Alcibiades who had been ostracized and exiled, probably to Miletus. Since this noble family can be traced to Miletus, where the elder Alcibiades seems to have had children with a Milesian woman, and since the names Axiochus and Aspasia, which would be mentioned by Plutarch centuries later,  appear here within the same family even though they were rare names, not known to have been in use at all in the region before the next century, it has been concluded that this proves Aspasia was an aristocratic metic woman from Miletus, born sometime after 470 BCE, who arrived in Athens sometime after Alcibiades’s exile ended, circa 450 BCE. It should be noted that even this is uncertain, though. The Axiochus and Aspasia mentioned on the monument aren’t even thought to be the same ones Plutarch names. Instead, it is thought that Alcibiades married the daughter of a Milesian man named Axiochus, and the Aspasia in question, who would go on to make such waves in Athens, was his wife’s sister. The names Axiochus and Aspasia thereby became family names, as Alcibiades named one of his sons Aspasios, the masculine form of his sister-in-law’s name, and his other son he named Axiochus after his father-in-law, and by him would be given a grand-daughter that would be named Aspasia as well. It’s all very convoluted, and the fact that Aspasia’s parentage and origins can only be pieced together through detective work, based on the funerary monument of a male relative, which doesn’t even mention her by name, just goes to show how nearly entire her erasure was. 

Bust of Pericles, circa 430 BCE.

With some corroboration of the claims that Aspasia was a metic, or resident foreigner in Athens, it is possible to ascertain some truths about her life, the obstacles she had to overcome, and the nature of her relationship with Pericles. Pericles’s law on citizenship, which was passed around 450 BCE, denied full citizenship rights anyone whose parents were not both Athenian. The law was passed in response to an influx of immigrants in the wake of the Persian Wars. The word metic meant, literally, “home-changer.” Denying citizenship to these immigrants meant that they had all the responsibilities of citizenship, including mandatory military service and taxation, with none of the benefits. They could not own property, were not eligible to accept certain state benefits, such as work opportunities and emergency rations, and were barred from serving in juries and the assembly—essentially refused the right to vote. They did not enjoy the same protections under Athenian law: they were subject to additional and more onerous taxes than citizens; they could be tortured; they could be enslaved; and the murder of a metic did not carry consequences as severe as did the murder of a citizen. If Aspasia did indeed arrive in Athens with her family at around the time scholars think she may have, for the reasons already discussed, it means that this law was brand new and the subordinate status that it forced on her and others in her family may not have been expected. However, unlike many other metics, who were former slaves and impoverished artisans, Aspasia seems to have come with a well-off family, so wealth may have shielded her from some struggles. For example, metics coming to Athens had to be sponsored by a citizen, otherwise all their belongings could be taken from them and they could be sold into slavery. If indeed she was the sister-in-law of the elder Alcibiades, who was returning to Athens a citizen after his exile, then this draconian aspect of the law would not have affected her. However, we must also remember that she was a woman, and thus doubly marginalized, made a second-class citizen on both counts. Even if she were not a metic, she would have been unable to participate in politics or own property as a woman. As has been the case in so many cultures throughout history, women in ancient Athens were expected to devote themselves solely to men. Under the kyrieía, or guardianship, of male relatives during their youth, they were the property of men, and once their marriage was arranged, they became the property of their husbands. However, as a metic, Aspasia was also denied the right to marry a citizen, which further limited her opportunities. 

As already mentioned, Aspasia’s relationship with Pericles has sometimes been characterized as a marriage, though according to Pericles’s own law, it could only have been a de facto marriage, with Aspasia only his pallake, his mistress or concubine. Pallakia was a common practice and was even institutionalized in a way similar to marriage. Some historians have suggested that pallakia was even quasi-marital for metics, because metic women were also under the guardianship of their male relatives, whose main obligation was to arrange an advantageous marriage for them, and for many, especially those like Aspasia from an aristocratic family, that may have meant arranging concubinage to a wealthy citizen rather than marriage to another metic, especially if it were to Pericles, the most powerful man in Athens. There is some evidence of pallakia being entered into as a contract, with protections for the woman, making it essentially a marriage in all but name. However, since the citizenship law was so new when Aspasia became involved with Pericles, it is less likely that such an arrangement may have been made. Still, it may have been that she chose the role of concubine instead of wife because it granted her the protection of this powerful citizen but allowed her more freedom, since more domestic duties may have been expected of a wife. As one speech attributed to an Athenian politician explains, “Mistresses [sometimes translated as “prostitutes”] we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons [sometimes translated as “the body’s daily needs”], but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.” Therefore being Pericles’s pallake may have meant that she was spared the daily duties of a wife and rather given the opportunity to develop her mind, which would accord well with the tradition that she was extremely intelligent and became an influential philosopher. Further supporting this notion that Pericles may have not only offered her protected status as his concubine but also nurtured her, in a sort of evolved and mutually supportive relationship, is the tradition that Pericles loved her “exceedingly,” as Plutarch put it. And there is support for this claim as well. Around the same time he took up with Aspasia, he divorced his wife, the mother of his two legitimate sons, and gave her in marriage to another man. This contributes to the notion that Aspasia was his de facto wife, whether or not his own law allowed a legal marriage with her. Then there is the fact that he remained with Aspasia for the rest of his life, and the further fact that, before his death, he amended his citizenship law so that Pericles the Younger, his illegitimate son with Aspasia, could become his legal heir. Alternative reasons exist for this amendment, such as that his two legitimate sons had died in a plague and many other citizens had likewise lost their legitimate heirs in the plague and the Peloponnesian War. There is also the fact that Aspasia entered a relationship with another politician immediately after Pericles’s death, but the details of this arrangement are unclear, to the point that some historians doubt it happened. The fact is that, the only contemporary sources about their relationship, the sources Plutarch relied on, were political comedies satirizing her and Pericles, many of these details are entirely dubious. 

Frontispiece to a 1656 printing of Lives of the Noble Grecians & Romans by Plutarch.

It appears that the bulk of Plutarch’s account of Aspasia is derived from fifth century comedies, the only contemporary sources that speak of her, of which only a handful make mention of her. As an exception, Plutarch makes special mention of a supposed trial, in which one Hermippus prosecuted Aspasia for “impiety,” a trial in which Pericles himself was said to have “shed copious tears” in her defense. Certainly, if true, this would be further evidence of Pericles’s great love for her, but scholars now believe that this trial was a fiction. Hermippus was a comic poet, and it is well-established that comic plays sometimes adopted the language of courts and were even thought of as a kind of trial in which the audience acts as a jury, such that talking about a comic poet “prosecuting” major public figures more than likely meant that Hermippus simply put the two of them on blast in one of his plays. The specific allegations of this supposed trial, that Aspasia was acquiring prostitutes for Pericles’s pleasure, also wouldn’t appear to have been an actual crime, since prostitution was legal. Moreover, the accusations of politicians being pimps and whoremongers, or of being profligate and licentious, were common allegations in political satires of the era, and sometimes may not even have been literal. Just as today, when likening politicians to prostitutes may not mean that they literally are prostitutes, in the comedies of fifth-century Athens, just as we cannot presume that a “prosecution” was a literal court trial, we cannot presume that accusations of prostitution were about literal sex work. And this is the sole evidence of Aspasia’s alleged sex work. The comic playwright Aristophanes would be the one to really emphasize Aspasia as a prostitute, and he was known for using prostitutes as symbols of corruption and of death and destruction. Think of the biblical Whore of Babylon for an example of how sex workers have always been used as metaphors for the criticism of corrupted nations and leaders. As a more pertinent example, the poet Cratinus, in calling Aspasia a “dog-eyed concubine,” is thought to have been likening her to Pandora, the first woman, thought to have been a curse upon mankind, who had been given the power of speech only to deceive, and who it was said had the mind of a disloyal dog. Clearly such comparisons make it plain that her depiction in plays were slanderous and not to be taken literally. And there are logical reasons to doubt any claims that she was a prostitute. While it is true that many prostitutes were metic women, since they often had few other options to pursue in life, and while it is also true that prostitutes sometimes became the concubines of their former patrons, making it possible that Aspasia had been a prostitute before taking up with Pericles, it is hard to reconcile with the fact that she seems to have come from a wealthy family. Moreover, the fact that her son was recognized legally as the son of Pericles makes it impossible that she was a prostitute during their relationship, since the paternity of any prostitute’s child could not be proven. So any and all claims of Aspasia’s being a prostitute must be viewed skeptically, as potentially just another way that the real Aspasia was systematically erased from public memory. 

Aspasia seems to have been so lampooned in political comedy because of her perceived influence over Pericles and his decisions, and it would seem that this fact supports the tradition that she was highly intelligent and that Pericles did respect her intellect. Much of the political comedy that defamed her and resorted to the potentially metaphorical accusation of her being a prostitute portrayed her power as being purely sexual. They did this by comparing her to mythological female figures who were known for manipulating and sexually dominating men. The playwrights Cratinus and Eupolis explicitly compare Aspasia to Omphale, the mistress of mythical hero Heracles, sometimes better known by the Romanized name Hercules. According to the story, Heracles was forced to be the slave of Omphale for a year, so the implication here was that Pericles was the slave of Aspasia, and perhaps that he had lost his manhood to her, as later depictions of this myth have Heracles dressed in women’s clothing and forced by Omphale to do “women’s work.” Another common comparison was to Helen of Troy, with the implication that, because of Aspasia’s great beauty and Pericles’s obsession with her, he had, like Paris before him, started a war. The war in question was either the Samian War, an Athenian military intervention in a conflict between Samos and Aspasia’s birthplace, Miletus, or the Peloponnesian War, more specifically, that the Megarian decree that imposed economic sanctions on the Spartan ally Megara and led to the war was because of her. Aristophanes is very explicit in blaming this on Aspasia’s influence, claiming that some Athenians abducted a prostitute from Megara, and in retaliation some Megarians kidnapped two of Aspasia’s own prostitutes. This is actually the origin of claims that Aspasia was not only a prostitute but also a brothel-keeper or madame. Scholars are divided over whether the Megarian Decree had purely economic motivations, whether it was in response to the Megarians cultivating some sacred land on Athenian borders, or whether Pericles meant it as a deliberate provocation of Sparta, but none take seriously this passage in Aristophanes’s play, which is thought most likely to be a joke. Nevertheless, this idea that Aspasia had enough power over Pericles to force him to declare war led to the further claim, repeated by Plutarch, that Pericles went to war against Samos on her behalf, even though the most obvious reasons were that Athens had forced Miletus to disarm itself after it had risen in rebellion against them, so it would look bad if they then let Samos move in and capture the city. But whatever the practical reasons, it seems to have been simpler and more popular to blame these geopolitical affairs on the woman behind the man. By Plutarch’s time, he was making still more comparisons, claiming without any clear reference to sources, that Aspasia had modeled herself on an Ionian courtesan named Thargelia who was said to have dominated Persian politics through her beauty, grace, and wits, and also by providing consorts for the Persian king. It is clear that Plutarch, writing more than 500 years after the fact, had accepted the claims made in Greek comedy, perhaps jokingly and metaphorically, of Aspasia’s prostitution, brothel-keeping, and sexual domination and manipulation of Pericles. But there was another tradition about Aspasia, one Plutarch mentions but does not emphasize. 

A 19th century painting depicting Aspasia teaching Socrates rhetoric.

The only thing Plutarch says of Aspasia’s reputation as a philosopher is that Plato mentioned Aspasia “had the reputation of associating with many Athenians as a teacher of rhetoric,” though he is quick to suggest that this may have been “written in a sportive vein,” a caveat he failed to provide when sharing the obviously defamatory and probably metaphorical claims of satirists who called her a whore. This is, however, entirely true. The work of Plato’s that depicts Aspasia as a master rhetorician does so with ironic and satirical purpose, and this is because some 4th century Socratic dialogues were still defaming some of the same historical figures as fifth century comedy, still making them the butts of their jokes and the focal points of their criticism. This genre of philosophical prose writing centered on the wisdom of Socrates, as depicted in conversations he had with various individuals, which displayed his Socratic method of asking rhetorical questions in order to lead his interlocutors to conclusions. Aspasia herself was never a character in them, that we know of, but more than one was named after her. To illustrate her continued negative portrayal in Socratica, Antisthenes, himself an illegitimate son and contemporary of Aspasia’s son, Pericles the Younger, wrote a dialogue named after her. It is lost now, but it appears to be the origin of the story that Pericles wept copiously in her defense, and also of the story that Pericles was always publicly embracing Aspasia, and that this was the origin of her name, which meant “Miss Embrace.” Certainly these were meant to be criticisms of Aspasia’s sexual dominance of Pericles, as Antisthenes was known to be always attacking Pericles and his family. Unlike Antisthenes, who seemed rather stuck in the past when it came to defaming Aspasia, Plato did so with far more nuance. Like others, he had Socrates talk about Aspasia like an honored rhetorician who teaches rhetoric to others, and portrays her skill and intellect as well known, for it is presented as well-established that she taught rhetoric to Pericles, who was the most influential man in politics. The dialogue in question is called Menexenus, in which the title character approaches Socrates because he desperately needs an epitaphios, or funeral lamentation, to honor the Athenian war dead on short notice, and Socrates says he has just the speech for him, given to him recently by Aspasia. By the date in which the scene is set, both Aspasia and Socrates would likely have been dead, so like the comedies of the previous century, it cannot and should not be taken as historically accurate, and it is abundantly apparent that Plato’s purpose is not to honor Aspasia. It is with great irony that, when asked for a speech to honor male Athenian citizens, Socrates gives Menexenus the words of a woman who was denied citizenship. The dialogue is considered a parody of the genre of the epitaphio, which often sought to define what it meant to be Athenian based on autochthony, or the fact of being indigenous, a nativist idea that was mocked by Antisthenes by saying snails and locusts too must have been citizens, since many had been born on Attic soil. The fact that Plato attributes a speech about birthright citizenship and manly courage to a female non-citizen, would seem to undermine its message. But there is more going on here. Socrates suggests that speakers are interchangeable, that what matters is the words, and he suggests that it was Aspasia, the writer of these words that so impress Menexenus, who taught the great Pericles to speak, as well as many others. Add to that the fact that Plato seems to include a great deal of sexual innuendo in the language, the known fact that she was sexually involved with Pericles, and the insinuation, as some scholars interpret the dialogue, is that Aspasia must have been sexually involved with all the men she taught, and that through the influence of her sexuality, she was putting words in the mouths of many great speakers and politicians. Taken this way, even Plato’s work partakes of the same tradition of depicting Aspasia as a Machiavellian sex worker. But there are some aspects of Plato’s dialogue that highlight the alternative biographical tradition then emerging: he very clearly presents Aspasia as a masterful orator and rhetorician, as a teacher of many prominent Athenians, and as a mentor to Socrates himself, one of the greatest philosophers of all time. Moreover, the fact that Menexenus responds knowingly to Socrates’s statements about Aspasia make it clear that these aspects of her life were actually well-known and widely accepted. 

It seems that the first philosopher to portray Aspasia in an entirely positive light was Aeschines, a contemporary of Plato. In his Socratic dialogue, also called Aspasia and perhaps meant as a direct response to Antisthenes’s negative dialogue of the same name, Socrates is approached by an affluent man named Callias and is asked to recommend a teacher who can instruct his son. Socrates recommends Aspasia and then goes on to give reasons why Aspasia is an excellent teacher. The dialogue is now lost, except for fragments, but through references to it, it has been credibly reconstructed. It seems that Socrates started by giving historical examples of women who were brilliant and made excellent teachers of men: one being Rhodogune, the Amazonian queen of Persia, and the other was Thargelia, the Ionian courtesan previously mentioned. This reference may be the source for Plutarch’s claim that Aspasia modeled herself after Thargelia, but that is not what Aeschines seems to have claimed, and in fact he may have been suggesting that Aspasia made for a happy medium between the two, one a warrior queen and the other, who wielded influence over kings through sex. Some have tried to interpret this dialogue as further depicting Aspasia as a prostitute, suggesting that in asking for a teacher for his son, Callias was actually asking for a woman to teach him sexual techniques, but this interpretation doesn’t conform to the rest of the dialogue as we know it. First, it is set during a time when Aspasia would have been an old woman, making it seem far less likely that she would be recommended as a sex tutor for a young man. And Aeschines does not seem to have represented Aspasia as leveraging her beauty and sexual appeal at all. Rather, she was presented by Socrates not as the consort of Pericles, but as his educator, and he her best student. Moreover, it is revealed that Aspasia was a teacher of many Athenian women as well, and respectable Athenian women at that, making it very unlikely that she would have been engaged in prostitution or brothel-keeping at all. Rather, the dialogue makes it sound as if Aspasia ran a sort of academy for women, educating them in politics, rhetoric, and philosophy, something that was frowned on if not outright prohibited. Some scholars have suggested that this may have been the origin of the defamatory claims that she ran a brothel, for it was easier to dismiss educated women as whores and discredit the place of their learning as a whorehouse than it was to acknowledge that they were just as capable of thinking as men. 

Marie Bouliard's 1794 portrait of Aspasia, incorporating more than one view of her.

As the dialogue went on, Aspasia is described as giving specific marital advice to one Xenophon and his wife, and the format that this advice takes is the Socratic method, asking the couple rhetorical questions intended to lead them to a realization about their expectations in the relationship. This explicit example of Aspasia’s intellect and discernment is proof that Callias wasn’t seeking erotic tutelage for his son, for why would Socrates recommend Aspasia for that purpose on the basis of her ability to give sound advice and demonstrate sound reasoning? Since Socrates acknowledges her as his own teacher, it also suggests that the Socratic method should be named after her instead: the Aspasian method. And the very fact that the person in the example, Xenophon, was himself a real person and a philosopher who would go on in numerous works to espouse the great wisdom of Aspasia, especially in giving advice about relationships and household management, seems to lend credence to the idea that Aeschines was indeed portraying her in an accurate light. Nevertheless, by the time Plutarch wrote about her, hundreds of years later, it is apparent that of these two competing traditions, of Aspasia as a sage or a whore, the latter had won out. And over the centuries since, the two traditions would continue to vie for dominance. In the Middle Ages and early modern periods, she was portrayed variously as Pericles’s sexpot concubine or as a teacher and philosopher, furthering this false dichotomy. And rarely were the two views of her reconciled, rarely was it ever suggested that she might have been both a genius and sexually empowered. Only one eighteenth-century portrait of her illustrates these typically conflicting conceptions of Aspasia united, portraying as a great beauty, one breast bared, but rather than looking out at the viewer of the portrait, she is gazing into a hand-held mirror. This may be taken to represent vanity, but it can alternatively be viewed as showing her focus on self-actualization. And in the same painting, in her other hand, she holds a scroll, clearly symbolic of learning. Of all the portrayals of her, this may be the most balanced, even if it may still be entirely inaccurate. During the same century as this portrait was painted, in 1777, a marble herm was discovered, a sculpted head and torso on a pillar, that is believed to be a Roman copy of Aspasia’s funeral stele. This monument now stands in the Vatican, and because it is believed to be a copy of a sculpture made of her during her lifetime, it lays claim to being the most accurate portrayal of Aspasia. She appears expressionless, serene, and solemn, clearly beautiful but noble of bearing and not sexualized. Of course, we don’t know for certain if it is an accurate representation of her, since her original fifth-century funerary stele is lost. So the sculpture stands, like all the depictions of Aspasia in her contradictory biographical traditions, as a construct, a symbol or placeholder for a woman whose real character we cannot truly know, since she has been erased from history, leaving only these exaggerated echoes and reflections. 

Marble portrait herm identified by an inscription as Aspasia, possibly copied from her grave.

Until next time, remember, there is a difference between being unknown or forgotten by history and being purposely marginalized and erased. For most women throughout history, including for Aspasia, their memory was never preserved unless it was in relation to a man. So consider this. We know Aspasia had a son with Pericles, but she may have had numerous daughters we simply don’t know of, and would never know of, unless a man decided to inscribe their names on his own gravestone. 

Further Reading

Bicknell, Peter J. “AXIOCHOS ALKIBIADOU, ASPASIA AND ASPASIOS.” L’Antiquité Classique, vol. 51, 1982, pp. 240–50. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41652643. 

Henry, Madeleine. Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 1995.

MacDonald, Brian R. “The Megarian Decree.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, vol. 32, no. 4, 1983, pp. 385–410. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4435862. 

Wohl, Victoria. “Comedy and Athenian Law.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy, edited by Martin Revermann, Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 322–335. Cambridge Core, www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-greek-comedy/comedy-and-athenian-law/40DE6B891BECD393E3DBE361010CB331. 

Wolkow, B. M. “The Mind of a Bitch: Pandora’s Motive and Intent in the Erga.” Hermes, vol. 135, no. 3, 2007, pp. 247–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40379125.

The Lincoln Legends - Part Four: Smoke and Fire

At the end of April 1865, with the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth in full swing, soldiers and detectives roaming across Maryland and Virginia with photographs of Booth and his accomplice Herold asking for any information, some reliable intelligence was received that the two men had recently crossed the Potomac and could be found in Virginia. A cavalry force was mustered and embarked by steamer. Upon arrival, one officer in their party, a Colonel Conger, went door to door, pretending himself to be a Confederate and making inquiries. Another officer with the unit, Lieutenant Baker, spoke with one villager who recognized Booth and Herold by their photographs, though he said that, when he had seen them, Booth had shaved his distinctive mustache. He said that the two men had crossed the Potomac by ferry with Confederate horsemen the day previous. With this villager as their guide, they made their way to the same crossing, whereupon they encountered some of those same Confederate horsemen, who fled at the sight of the cavalry. After running them down and taking them into custody, the horsemen led them to another member of their party, Willie Jett, whom the investigator’s found in a hotel bed, awakening him and interrogating him. Jett admitted to having led Booth and Herold to a farm in Port Royal owned by one Richard Garrett. Upon arriving, they found Garrett uncooperative, saying the men had gone and that he never helped them, but when they began to threaten the farmer, his son, Jack, a boy of fifteen, told the soldiers that the fugitives were in the tobacco barn. It seems the boy had become suspicious of the men who had come to stay with his family when, the day before, after hearing news of a cavalry unit in town, Booth and Herold had hidden themselves in the woods. Now the boy led the soldiers to the barn, and the soldiers surrounded it. Lieutenant Baker told the boy to go in and ask for the men’s weapons, which he did, but the poorly conceived ruse failed. “Damn you! You have betrayed me,” they heard Booth say. The Garrett boy tried to leave, saying that the fugitives were going to kill him, but the soldiers blocked the door, insisting they wouldn’t let him out unless he brought their arms with him. The Garrett boy protested that they wouldn’t surrender the weapons. Eventually, the men let the Garrett boy leave the barn and announced that they would set it on fire. Booth shouted, “[T]hat is damned hard, to burn an innocent man’s barn. I’m lame. Give me a chance. Draw up your men before the door and I’ll come out and fight the whole command.” When, predictably, the soldiers didn’t take him up on the offer to let him come out shooting, David Herold announced that he wanted to surrender. He was taken into custody, and the barn was set on fire. The soldiers would later testify to having some view into the interior of the barn, through slats and though the cracked open door, identifying the injured Booth as he limped around making futile attempts to put out the fire they’d started. And here is where some enduring myths related to the Lincoln assassination are born, moving further from the thoroughly mythologized President himself to focus on the man who had taken his life. A shot rang out, striking Booth in the neck. There was disagreement among the men over who had shot him. Some claimed he had shot himself, and this myth persisted because of some initial, mistaken statements by the soldiers. A later claim would appear that, in some poetic sort of synchronicity, Booth had been shot in the very same way as Lincoln, in the back of his head, that their mortal wounds were identical. This was certainly a popular claim for newspapers to repeat, for obvious reasons, but it was entirely untrue. He had been shot in the neck, and the bullet had entered his spine. He was removed from the barn and taken to the porch of the Garrett farm, where he spoke, asking who had betrayed him, requesting that his mother be told that he died for his country, begging that the soldiers kill him, and remarking that he could no longer feel his limbs, calling them “useless.” It was eventually determined that the shot had been taken by one Boston Corbett, who admitted to being the shooter, saying, “Providence directed me.” After Corbett was identified as the shooter, he became a notorious figure himself, with newspapers asserting that he was a maniac or fanatic. He had been a milliner, or hatmaker, before the war and had long been exposed to mercury, which was known to cause psychiatric problems, thus the phrase “mad as a hatter” and the famous Alice in Wonderland character, the Mad Hatter. But while it is true that Corbett had for a time been a fiery street preacher and was said to have castrated himself with a pair of scissors to ward off sexual temptation, and it is equally true that later in life, he was committed to an asylum for brandishing a firearm and threatening some Kansas politicians in Topeka, the fact of the matter is that Corbett was reputedly a steadfast, loyal, and even heroic soldier. The only issue his superiors ever took with him was that he sometimes censured them for profanity. And one of his commanding officers would later take issue with a biographer of Lincoln describing Corbett as “a soldier of a gloomy and fanatical disposition,” protesting that “My recollection of him…is the very opposite to this. I have never known a person so cheerful and heroic under circumstances of intense suffering and great provocation. His example has been a source of inspiration to me through all the years since last we parted.” So it seems that some mythologizing of Corbett was transpiring as well. Corbett did not claim merely that God had told him to fire his shot. He further explained that, as he had a line of sight on Booth within the barn and could see the assassin getting to his feet and readying his rifle, he believed the fugitive was preparing to start a gunfight, which of course Booth had openly said he wanted to do. So he took the shot, and even though it was against orders, he was spared a court-martial because, as Edwin Stanton put it: “The rebel is dead; the patriot lives— has saved us continued excitement, delay, and expense. The patriot is released.” Later in life, Corbett capitalized on his fame as “Lincoln’s Avenger,” touring and giving lectures, always armed with a pistol because unreconstructed rebels sometimes threatened his life. This justified paranoia and his continued work in millinery may have contributed to his further mental decline in later years. After he was finally institutionalized, he escaped the asylum and disappeared. But as is the case with the famous, sightings began to crop up, here and there. In both Oklahoma and Texas, two different men claimed to be him but were imprisoned as impostors. No one knows what happened to the real Boston Corbett. On the other hand, we all know what happened to John Wilkes Booth, but that did not stop similar myths and rumors about his survival after that fateful night at the Garrett farm. In this series on the Lincoln Legends, or the myths surrounding Abraham Lincoln and his assassination, I have tried to demonstrate that, despite the many conspiracy theories about his murder, there is no good reason to credit any of them. And likewise, just because there are a lot of reports about Booth’s survival, so many that a subculture of alternative scholarship has developed around researching the possibility, that does not mean there is anything to it, contradicting the old adage that, as in the Garrett’s barn, where there is smoke, there must be fire.

Boston Corbett, the man who killed the man who killed Lincoln.

The legend of John Wilkes Booth’s survival, as detailed by historians George Sands Bryan in 1940’s The Great American Myth, and more recently by C. Wyatt Evans in his The Legend of John Wilkes Booth about 20 years ago, really started in newspaper reports of his whereabouts during the manhunt for the assassin. Just two days after the deed, The New York Times reported that “Rumor has arrested Booth a dozen times already,” and certainly rumor was running wild. Newspaper reports warned authorities along the Canadian border to be on guard, for rumor had it the assassin was headed that way, while others had him headed for the Chesapeake coast, and others still suggested he had never left Washington and could be found hidden within the underground chambers beneath Ford’s Theatre. One report had it that Booth was with a unit of thirty armored cavalry men who had skirmished with federal troops in Maryland, but when the original report was tracked down, there had never been any mention of Booth’s presence at the skirmish, as that was a detail later added to embellish the story. However, newspapers at the time simply reprinted excerpted copy from other papers, a practice called “clipping,” so when a rumor was first set into print, it might be reprinted many times without question before the rumor could be put to bed. Added to this pure gossip were numerous genuine reports of Booth’s arrest that later turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. In Illinois and Maine, two different actors were taken into custody simply because of their perceived likeness to Booth. And a traveler on the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was pursued for three days, with federal detectives telegraphing ahead from station to station trying to stop the man, simply because someone who claimed to know Booth personally mistook the passenger for the assassin. This passenger was eventually arrested and turned out just to be a drunk, and the man who had identified him had actually lied about knowing Booth in the first place. There were dozens of such cases, and often as not, they weren’t even based on likeness, as people began reporting anyone who was acting too cheerful during the nation’s mourning of Lincoln. Then there were the letters, supposedly written by the killer himself, taunting the authorities, just like Jack the Ripper. One claimed the assassin had already made his escape into Canada. Another, an encrypted message, suggested, when deciphered, that there continued to be a larger conspiracy at work: “He is safe,” it read, referring to Booth, “and Old Abe is in hell.” Then it hinted at further attempts on the lives of Generals Grant and Sherman. All of them, of course, were hoaxes. And just as phony were the reports of intelligence gathered by mediums who had learned of John Wilkes Booth’s location from spirits in their seances, or by concerned citizens in their dreams. Booth was disguised as a woman, or was wearing blackface, he was being harbored in some certain prominent citizen’s home or being hidden in a brothel closet. He was secreted away in a church, a restaurant, a train car—nearly every possible location but where he actually was, out laying in a swampy forest or cowering in a barn. By the time of the Conspiracy trial, just several days after Booth’s death, there were already claims that the man killed in the barn was not the genuine article, and by that time, a lucrative industry had arisen in the selling of pictures of the assassin. With his likeness now spread far and wide, in newspapers and portraits, and doubts about his escape lingering, the rumors of his whereabouts would never cease.

After Booth was killed at the Garrett farm, his body was sewn up in a horse blanket and carried by wagon to a steamboat landing at Belle Plains, Virginia, where it was then taken by tugboat to the Washington Navy Yard and placed aboard the USS Montauk, where the other conspirators awaited their trial. Shortly thereafter, a rumor hit the press that the body had been disposed of, coalescing around the narrative that Booth’s remains had been unceremoniously dumped into the Potomac. A vivid illustration was even made depicting two officers pushing the body over the side of their boat. This clandestine disposal of the corpse certainly bolstered the already nascent rumors, so common whenever any noteworthy or notorious person dies, that they might still be out there somewhere. Why had the government not put the corpse on display and paraded it through the streets, as they had with Lincoln’s? Why hide it away, unless to cover up the fact that they had actually failed to catch the real killer. It was the following year that the myth of Booth’s survival took its first step from simple uninformed rumors and idle conspiracy theory into what might be called urban legend today. It happened while a congressional committee deliberated on how the reward money was to be apportioned among numerous men who had a hand in the capture of the conspirators. During the proceedings, a Kentucky Senator suggested that the committee must have  proof of the assassin’s death, saying, “I have never seen myself any satisfactory evidence that Booth was killed.” Of course, there was a great deal of evidence. Before the apparent disposal of the body, the government had the corpse identified and conducted an autopsy, and this senator was satisfied enough that the proceedings continued and the reward was disbursed. But his words would eventually be seized on, out of context, by later conspiracists who have suggested that something was fishy about Booth’s death. The fact of the matter is, it does appear that the government lied to the public about Booth’s body, as in 1867, during the House Judiciary investigations that served the impeachment of President Johnson, it came out that John Wilkes Booth had not been dumped in the Potomac at all. He had been buried in a secret grave on the grounds of the Washington Arsenal, and the rumor about his burial at sea does appear to have been leaked to the press by Stanton. However, conspiracists who claim that we don’t really know why Edwin Stanton buried Booth in secret are lying. We know the precise reasons Stanton himself gave when questioned about the matter. Booth had been sewn into a bag and delivered in secret to ensure the body was not lost or stolen. His body was not made available for public viewing because Stanton had no desire for Booth to become any more a symbol to Confederates than he already was. Even during the autopsy, a woman who had identified Booth clipped a lock of his hair. Stanton didn’t want Booth becoming a saint and leaving a trail of relics behind. As for the precautions taken with the body, there was good reason to fear a mob. It had always been the plan to take Booth out to the Montauk, where the other conspirators were being held, because there had nearly been a mobbing at the Old Capitol on April 17th, when some other prisoners were mistaken for Booth and Surratt. And there was again almost a mobbing at the Arsenal when William Garrett, the farmer who had harbored Booth, and his son Jack, who had given him up, were held captive there. Indeed, under such circumstances, there was just no good reason to let the public know where they were holding Booth’s body, and very good reason to spread the word that the body was gone. After the truth came out, Booth was exhumed in 1867 and buried in the Old Penitentiary, where the executed conspirators had been put to rest, and in 1869, he was disinterred again, his remains surrendered to his family. 

Newspaper illustrations of Booth’s capture and his post-mortem aboard the Montauk.

In reality, the positive identification of John Wilkes Booth’s body after it was brought aboard the Montauk was unusually thorough. While clearly the authorities did not want to make a spectacle of the remains in their custody, they very clearly wanted to ensure that they had the right man. The corpse was positively identified as Booth by more than one member of Booth’s own family, as well as by many personal acquaintances, like actor friends and the proprietors of Ford’s Theatre. A theme among the statements was how very certain they were in identifying him. “I was very familiar with his his face and distinctly recognize it,” said one Washington acquaintance, and the clerk of the hotel where Booth had been staying said, “I distinctly recognize it as the body of J. Wilkes Booth.” Dr. John May, a physician who had operated on Booth in the past, wrote in his memoir, “I was soon gazing at the remains, which needed no long inspection to enable me to recognize them.” But it wasn’t just the unmistakable appearance of the famous actor that allowed his identification. He was also identified by his tattoo. On the back of his left hand, between his forefinger and his thumb, he had his initials tattooed. This fact has caused those who want to claim a lookalike impostor was identified that day much trouble. Some have tried to claim the dead man just happened to be someone with the same initials. What striking coincidences! They were veritable doppelgangers, happened to have the same initials, AND happened to get the initials tattooed in the same place! And here I thought conspiracists didn’t believe in coincidence. But Booth was also identified by Dr. May as having the very same cicatrix scar on his neck from when May had removed an unsightly tumor there a couple years earlier. The doctor went into great detail identifying that scar. And if that weren’t enough, Booth’s dentist also identified several fillings that he had only recently put into Booth’s teeth. While dental analysis was rather new at the time for identification purposes, today it is considered a reliable form of forensic evidence. Beyond these pieces of evidence, there was his single riding boot, which matched the other one with his name in it that he had left at Dr. Mudd’s house in Maryland, and on the other foot the simple brogan Mudd had given him to wear. On that leg and foot could clearly be discerned the injuries from his leap to the stage at Ford’s Theatre, as the flesh was nearly black with contusion. While some have picked apart witness statements to try to claim that the wrong foot was injured, any such inaccuracies can be easily explained by simple witness misstatement, saying the right leg was injured because it may have been on their right when they viewed the remains. With the identification positively made “beyond all cavil,” as one present asserted, the autopsy could proceed. The bandage was taken off the leg so that the injury could be expertly examined, and then the mortal neck wound was examined. It was determined that Boston Corbett’s bullet had struck the right side of Booth’s neck, passed through two vertebrae, and then exited the left side of the neck. The medical examiners removed the damaged vertebrae as they traced the path of the bullet, and these vertebrae were kept in the Army Medical Museum as proof of Booth’s cause of death. Certain myths developed around this autopsy as well, suggesting that he had been decapitated and his entire head had been given to the museum, or that his heart had been cut from his chest, or that he had been entirely dissected. None of these were true. A few years later, in 1869, when his remains were exhumed again and given to his family, there was enough of him there for his family members to positively identify his corpse for the second time. 

The positive identification of Booth’s remains is the ultimate proof of Booth’s death, and all claims of cover-up and conspiracy surrounding Booth’s death become untenable when they require that every soldier involved, every doctor, every eyewitness and friend and family member who confirmed with certainty that Booth was dead must have for some reason been in on it. But urban legend and modern myth fly in the face of facts and are never much slowed down by them. So people continued seeing Booth everywhere, or at least claiming they did, and the newspapers who had been printing rumors of his whereabouts during the manhunt simply continued to do so after his death. In 1867, the New York Times printed a letter in which someone talked about being in Calcutta 6 months previously and overhearing one William Tolbert, a Confederate privateer whose ship had ranged South Pacific waters, saying that Booth was alive and well and that he could provide proof of this. This was nothing but absolute hearsay and rumor mongering, and indeed, since the actual existence of this sailor named Tolbert could never even be confirmed, it was also quite likely a hoax. But that year, further rumors appeared in other newspapers, often in the form of spurious letters being printed, that built on the rumor to claim Booth was plying the waters of the South Sea as a pirate. That same year, the New York World remarked on the strange phenomenon of these sightings: “like that phantom ship, the Flying Dutchman, [Booth] is from time to time, reported to have been seen in propria persona in various parts of the world; the latest story being that he is now the captain of a pirate vessel and the terror of the China seas. At intervals the press informs the public that some reliable correspondents have seen the notorious assassin in Europe. One time he has been seen playing rouge et noir at Baden Baden; another at the opera in Vienna. One positively swears that he saw him driving in the Bois de Boulogne at Paris. And another is equally confident that he beheld him visiting St. Peter's at Rome.” The rumors were so widespread that in 1875, when Boston Corbett attended a soldier’s reunion, someone said to his face that he hadn’t actually killed Booth and Booth was still out there. Much as when a moon landing denialist suggested to Buzz Aldrin’s face that the astronaut had never actually been to the moon, Boston Corbett pulled a gun on the man and threatened to shoot him over the lie. 

A marker for the Booth family plot in a Baltimore graveyard. The specific grave of John Wilkes Booth remains unmarked.

This phenomenon did not go away. During the 1870s, Booth showed up in Shanghai, when a former Confederate veteran who claimed to have been an “intimate friend” of his said he was surprised to be greeted in China by the assassin, alive and well. Apparently Booth was doing great over there; he had married and was acting again. Yet in the 1880s, it came to be believed that John Wilkes Booth had never left American shores and instead had assumed the identity of an Episcopal preacher in Richmond, Virginia, named Armstrong, a man who apparently bore a striking resemblance to the assassin. The facts that he walked with a cane and took an interest in local theatrical productions seemed to clinch it for many. And Armstrong may have enjoyed this speculation, as he seems to have done little to dissuade those who wanted to believe, but there are historical records of the man’s life and career as a clergyman going all the way back to his birth in Ireland. He simply could not have been Booth. One Booth was then exchanged for another Booth when a story appeared out of Tennessee, in the small town of Wartburg, where a stranger who had arrived in town the year after the assassination was rumored to be Booth. They said he would always avoid the topic of the President’s murder when it came up in conversation, and one time when he was ill, it was claimed that he called out the names of the conspirators, but this could be a fabrication invented to further the popular rumors about him. It was said if you greeted him using the name Booth, he would act strangely, and yeah, I bet he did. This poor fellow was the subject of town suspicion and scrutiny for almost twenty years, and nothing beyond rumors ever came of the claims. Eventually, he moved on, probably because everyone was being very weird to him. It was then the 1890s, and another Booth had cropped up, this time in Brazil, where newspapers were printing rumors about drifters there. In response, however, a woman named Christ—that’s right, Mrs. J. Christ of Wisconsin—wrote to her local newspapers to refute the Brazil claims. Booth was not in South America, she said, and she knew this because she had kept the secret of his true fate for more than thirty years. After her home in New Orleans had been taken by Union troops, she had lived aboard a Confederate schooner that sometimes ran the blockade at Wilmington, and she claims that just two months after the assassination, Booth came aboard the ship in Cuba, still limping. He traveled with them to Nassau harbor, where he took passage to England and lived the rest of his life in supposed peace and prosperity. Her only evidence, beyond her word, was a diamond ring inscribed with his initials that she claimed he gave to her. But of course, that was just a prop, and her story was full of inaccuracies, such as her anecdotes of having met Booth previously, which didn’t line up with historical records, her claim that Booth was traveling with a certain Confederate naval officer who is actually confirmed to have been elsewhere at the time, and the strange assertion she made that, since it hadn’t been Booth killed in the barn, it must have been his coconspirator, a man named Fox. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned a conspirator named Fox. That’s because no such man existed. The very day after her claim came out, someone from her own town by the name of Kenzie bolstered her story by claiming he had not only knew Booth well, but had been at the theatre when Lincoln was shot, and had also mustered with the soldiers who pursued Booth and had even been present at the barn where Booth was killed. The way he portrayed it, Boston Corbett was in command, had shot the man after he’d surrendered, and then claimed it was Booth when it very clearly was not. Kenzie claimed too that no reward was ever paid by the government because they knew Booth had escaped. It was all utter nonsense. There are extensive records of how the reward was divided and paid. Boston Corbett was not in command at all. The names of all cavalry men present in the unit that hunted Booth down are well documented and Kenzie was not among them. And finally, the way Kenzie told it, the capture of Booth occurred the morning after the assassination, when everyone knows Booth was on the lam for ten days before he was tracked down. Beyond these inaccuracies, which seem to show that Kenzie was making stuff up off the top of his head without even informing himself of the basic facts first, the mere idea that these two people with special but unrelated knowledge of Booth’s escape just happened to come from the same small town in Wisconsin strains credulity. What should be apparent, here, is that, in addition to baseless rumors that may have been genuinely believed by those who spread them, people were also just inventing these stories to get attention. 

A combination of these, of people reporting earnestly believed but groundless claims and others fabricating falsehoods for self-promotion, would result in the ultimate myth of Booth’s survival and the repopularization of the myth in the early 20th century. In 1903, a quiet Oklahoma man named David George committed suicide, and during the medical exam, a local reverend  burst in and exclaimed that it was actually John Wilkes Booth. The source of this info was the reverend’s wife, for this man, George, had apparently tried to kill himself before by taking poison and had, in expectation of death, confessed his true identity to the Reverend’s wife. Thinking this an important matter to resolve—and perhaps also seeing an opportunity—the undertaker preserved the corpse perfectly, embalming it into a veritable mummy, and then they let the press know and started allowing the public to view the body. This drew the interest of a certain lawyer of Memphis who had been busy planning on revealing his own Booth survival story. According to this attorney, Finis Bates, back when he had been practicing law in Hood County, Texas, he had represented a man named John St. Helen who, one night while gravely ill, had confessed to him that he was Booth and asked him to bring news of his death to his brother in New York. This St. Helen fellow ended up getting better, and he held Bates to their attorney-client privilege, confiding in him further by confessing everything in detail before leaving town. Bates claimed that he never believed him until years later, when he started to research the matter and ended up working on a book about it. When he read about the man David George who’d committed suicide in Oklahoma, he went to see him and declared that he was one and the same as his John St. Helen, and that he was indeed John Wilkes Booth. His book, “Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth,” was published in 1907, and the story of Booth’s survival took the world by storm again. Even two decades later, it was a big story, as Harper’s Magazine published an interview with him that emphasized his credibility and fully endorsed his claims. But the truth of the matter is that his story is full of gaping holes. He never wrote anything down about St. Helen’s supposed confession at the time, but then 35 years later claimed to be able to remember it word for word. The confession raised the old conspiracy theory about Andrew Johnson, claiming that the Vice President had persuaded him to kill Lincoln. But most of the confession, it turns out, was plagiarized from an 1897 newspaper article about the assassination. The confession Bates shared also just didn’t fit the facts as the real Booth would have given them, describing his wound as being high up the shin instead of the ankle, saying it happened when he struck the edge of the stage, which he was not near, and mistakenly saying his right leg had been injured—a mistake that someone viewing the body might make but which Booth himself surely would not have. More than that, people who had known John St. Helen all thought it was humbug. He was no sophisticated theatre aficionado prone to reciting Shakespeare, as Bates depicted him, but more of a frontier ruffian, and he left Texas for Colorado, not Oklahoma. As for the embalmed body in Oklahoma, that man, David George, was not the same person. He had been a house painter and vagrant, and likewise had been no Shakespearian. Bates had come with what he claimed was a tintype portrait of John St. Helen in order to make the identification—though judging by Bates’s character, it might very well have just been one of those portraits of Booth that had been popular years before. The undertaker who embalmed and displayed the corpse said he saw no resemblance, and generally, of Bates, he had a low opinion, saying, “His book account of all this is bunk.” Nevertheless, when no one claimed David George’s body, he gave it to Finis Bates, who stored the mummy in his garage and rented it out for fairs and sideshow attractions, displaying the withered body with signs announcing: “John Wilkes Booth—Himself—Murderer of Abraham Lincoln. An Exhibition for the Correction of American History.”

The mummy of David George, claimed to be Booth.

It would have been more accurate to say that this story resulted not in the correction of history, but in its revision, redaction, or better yet, falsification. The excitement occasioned by these claims even led some individuals who had helped to identify Booth in 1865 to leap on the bandwagon and changing their stories some 40 years after the fact. Basil Moxley, who had viewed the body and expressed confidence that it was Booth, at 80 years old suddenly changed his mind and said that the body he had seen had red hair, something none of the other witnesses saw and which he himself had never mentioned noticing. And how strange it would be that Booth’s own family would overlook the red hair not once but twice, in 1865 and 1869 when they identified the body. But further conspiracist insinuation about cover-ups would continued to change minds. In the 1920s, Eisenschiml contributed by suggesting that something had been suspicious about Booth’s death. Eisenschiml did not think Booth had survived. Rather, he suspected all the cloak and dagger had been to hide the fact that Booth had been purposely killed to silence him. But later writers repurposing Eisenschiml’s conspiracy thesis did promote the myth of Booth’s survival, like the forger Ray Neff who claimed over and over to find evidence of a larger conspiracy, and the authors of the debunked 1977 book and movie The Lincoln Conspiracy, all of whom I discussed in my recent Patreon exclusive release. And even though these authors were all discredited, it lent a scholarly veneer to this topic, and in the 90s, some conspiracist researchers convinced descendants of Booth to seek a court order, hoping to exhume Booth a third time and prove the body in his grave is not his. Two Maryland courts refused their petition on the grounds that the theory of Booth’s escape was itself unconvincing. In 2010, Booth family members succeeded in getting permission to exhume the body of Booth’s brother Edwin, this time claiming they wanted to harvest DNA to refute the rumors of Booth’s survival, but they still needed DNA of John Wilkes Booth’s for comparison, which they hoped to get from Booth’s neck vertebrae, now in the possession of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. The museum declined to provide the family access, and there the matter still stands. Booth was proven beyond doubt dead long ago, but conspiracists will act like all these judges and museum directors must be in on the cover-up still, discounting entirely the idea that there just isn’t good enough reason to take these requests seriously. Conspiracists think that, if people are making a claim, there must be something to it, and anyone who says otherwise are suppressing the truth. In reality, the spread of these myths is relatively easy to explain. When one unfounded rumor or boldface lie is well-received, it encourages others to make similar competing claims. But this sense that there simply must be something to any claims so popular and widespread, this idea that where there is smoke, there must be fire, persists. It is very much the same as the many contradictory claims of Hitler’s escape, which I discussed in my episode “The Specter of Hitler’s Survival.” It becomes clear that, just as conspiracists dislike coincidence as an explanation, they also can’t abide by the notion that public hysteria might result in numerous equally false claims. But nearly all of the claims about Booth’s escape are at variance with each other and cannot be reconciled. To believe one of them is to acknowledge that all the rest are lies or mistakes. To accept the old adage of smoke and fire would be to argue that all of those rejected claims must have been kindled from the one true claim, which logically must have come first. So if someone really wants to argue that where there is smoke there must be fire, in this case, they have to favor the initial claim that Booth turned into a pirate in the South Seas. If they don’t, then they are tacitly admitting that, from the start, these claims about Booth’s survival were false, that the majority are false, that therefore even the one they favor is likely false, and the smoke billowing off of that spreading fire served only to further obscure the truth. 

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Until next time, I’ll leave you with a quote from one of my main sources, George Bryan’s The Great American Myth, in which he described “The whole subject of Lincoln's murder” as having become embroiled “in a tangle of disorder and error, of falsehood and credulity, from which it has not yet been set free.” 

Further Reading

Bryan, George Sands. The Great American Myth. Carrick & Evans, Inc., 1940. 

Evans, C. Wyatt. The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy. University Press of Kansas, 2004.