Kleopatra by Karen Essex Read Free Book Online

the upper chambers. Egyptian,
     Libyan, Ethiopian, and Nubian servants laid down the tools of their tasks and listened to the music, while in a chamber tucked
     away at the end of a corridor, it resonated without harmony for an angry Macedonian princess and her besmirched eunuch mentor.
    He was insulted—he, the keeper of Ptolemaic tradition. That was how Meleager regarded himself, for it befitted his history
     as a noble courtier of altered sex. “We have been here as long as the Ptolemies,” he told himself. “We are high priests in
     the temples and shrines, we are advisers to kings, regents and tutors to the royal children of each generation, keepers of
     the oral history of the family, and arbiters of court ceremony.”
    In each generation, Meleager’s family, longtime aristocrats, selected a special male child to serve the goddess. At seventeen
     years old, Meleager, the favorite son, entered the mysteries of Kybele. “You are to become the consort of the goddess,” his
     mother told him. “You shall be the earthly representation of the god Attis, Kybele’s priest, lover, and servant. There is
     no higher honor. Besides, it is the quickest way to a high position at court.”
    All his life Meleager had dreamed of being chosen to represent Attis, son of the virgin Nana, He-who-is-fatherless, the beautiful
     youth who offered his masculinity so that he could marry no mortal woman but only the goddess. He was the savior god who was
     sacrificed by the people, castrated, crucified on a pine tree, and whose very blood washed over the earth and purified the
     land. The god whose flesh, in the form of flatbread, nourished the people. The most holy god who was raised from the dead
     on the third day, whose resurrection demonstrated the power of the Mother Goddess. The god who was carried to Rome with her
     after the defeat of Hannibal to give her honor for the victory.
    On a sultry summer evening lost to the past, the young Meleager donned a wreath of violets—the flower that sprang from the
     spilt blood of Attis—and drank the solution given to him by the priest that made him see hallucinations from the life of the
     god: his sexual love with the goddess; the sacrifice of his body and his blood; his flesh and blood sprinkled over the crops,
     and the crops shooting up in response. From somewhere he could not see, Meleager heard drums, cymbals, horns, and flutes,
     making a symphony to the glories of the god. The music seemed to flow from his own heartbeat, from his own veins. The priestesses
     tossed their heads to the pounding drums, the priests slashed their arms and chests with knives and shards, and Meleager—drugged,
     inflamed, impervious to pain—took his testicles in his left hand and, with his right, castrated himself with a sacred dagger.
     He felt an agony too severe to be described as mere pain, passed out, and awoke two days later in the care of a physician.
     Death and rebirth, he had said to himself upon regaining consciousness, just like the god Attis, Now his genitals rested in
     the cave of the goddess as an offering, and he served the court of Auletes.
    Meleager believed that it was neither his family nor the Royal Family who chose him for service, but the Mother Goddess herself;
     therefore, he tolerated the disdain of no one. “I took my evening meal with the princesses and the queen,” he would say in
     response to derision of his kind. “Where did you dine?”
    “Alexander himself once took a eunuch as a lover,” he would remind those Greeks who criticized the tradition of altering men,
     those who considered themselves above him because they retained a few additional ounces of flesh between their legs. They
     were foolish enough to believe that manhood and pleasure were centered in those small round saggy things. Was it not the great
     conqueror Cyrus—hero of Alexander—who praised the strength and loyalty of the castrated male? Cyrus observed that castrated
     horses ceased to bite,