Chapter 34. The Myth and Ritual of Attis.
ANOTHER of those gods whose supposed death and resurrection
struck such deep roots into the faith and ritual of Western Asia is
Attis. He was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he
appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and
resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival
in spring. The legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike
that the ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was
said to have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by
Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of fertility,
who had her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis was her
son. His birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to have been
miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived by
putting a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in the
Phrygian cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all things,
perhaps because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the first heralds
of the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before the leaves
have opened. Such tales of virgin mothers are relics of an age of
childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the
intercourse of the sexes as the true cause of offspring. Two different
accounts of the death of Attis were current. According to the one
he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he
unmanned himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the
spot. The latter is said to have been the local story told by the
people of Pessinus, a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and the
whole legend of which the story forms a part is stamped with a
character of rudeness and savagery that speaks strongly for its
antiquity. Both tales might claim the support of custom, or rather
both were probably invented to explain certain customs observed
by the worshippers. The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is
clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his priests,
who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service of the
goddess. The story of his death by the boar may have been told to
explain why his worshippers, especially the people of Pessinus,
abstained from eating swine. In like manner the worshippers of
Adonis abstained from pork, because a boar had killed their god.
After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a
pine-tree. 1
The worship of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods was adopted by
the Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle with
Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely cheered
by a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient farrago of
nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader would be
driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were brought to
Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred
city Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which embodied
the mighty divinity was entrusted to them and conveyed to Rome,
where it was received with great respect and installed in the temple
of Victory on the Palatine Hill. It was the middle of April when the
goddess arrived, and she went to work at once. For the harvest
that year was such as had not been seen for many a long day, and
in the very next year Hannibal and his veterans embarked for
Africa. As he looked his last on the coast of Italy, fading behind him
in the distance, he could not foresee that Europe, which had
repelled the arms, would yet yield to the gods, of the Orient. The
vanguard of the conquerors had already encamped in the heart of
Italy before the rearguard of the beaten army fell sullenly back from
its shores. 2
We may conjecture, though we are not told, that the Mother of the
Gods brought with her the worship of her youthful lover or son to
her new home in the West. Certainly the Romans were familiar with
the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close of the
Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume, with
little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been a
familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in
procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their
hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns,
while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by
the wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the
image and its bearers under showers of roses. A further step was
taken by the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian
worship of the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of
Attis, in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival
of Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was
celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman
ceremonies were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed
hardly, if at all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the festival
seems to have been as follows. 3
On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the
woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was
treated as a great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was
entrusted to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a
corpse with woollen bands and decked with wreaths of violets, for
violets were said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as roses
and anemones from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young
man, doubtless Attis himself, was tied to the middle of the stem. On
the second day of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief
ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third
day, the twenty-fourth of March, was known as the Day of Blood:
the Archigallus or highpriest drew blood from his arms and
presented it as an offering. Nor was he alone in making this bloody
sacrifice. Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals,
rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior
clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and
streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of excitement and insensible
to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them
with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with
their flowing blood. The ghastly rite probably formed part of the
mourning for Attis and may have been intended to strengthen him
for the resurrection. The Australian aborigines cut themselves in
like manner over the graves of their friends for the purpose,
perhaps, of enabling them to be born again. Further, we may
conjecture, though we are not expressly told, that it was on the
same Day of Blood and for the same purpose that the novices
sacrificed their virility. Wrought up to the highest pitch of religious
excitement they dashed the severed portions of themselves against
the image of the cruel goddess. These broken instruments of fertility
were afterwards reverently wrapt up and buried in the earth or in
subterranean chambers sacred to Cybele, where, like the offering
of blood, they may have been deemed instrumental in recalling
Attis to life and hastening the general resurrection of nature, which
was then bursting into leaf and blossom in the vernal sunshine.
Some confirmation of this conjecture is furnished by the savage
story that the mother of Attis conceived by putting in her bosom a
pomegranate sprung from the severed genitals of a man-monster
named Agdestis, a sort of double of Attis. 4
If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom,
we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility
were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine
deities required to receive from their male ministers, who
personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their
beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the
life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world.
Goddesses thus ministered to by eunuch priests were the great
Artemis of Ephesus and the great Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis,
whose sanctuary, frequented by swarms of pilgrims and enriched
by the offerings of Assyria and Babylonia, of Arabia and
Phoenicia, was perhaps in the days of its glory the most popular in
the East. Now the unsexed priests of this Syrian goddess resembled
those of Cybele so closely that some people took them to be the
same. And the mode in which they dedicated themselves to the
religious life was similar. The greatest festival of the year at
Hierapolis fell at the beginning of spring, when multitudes thronged
to the sanctuary from Syria and the regions round about. While the
flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed
themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread
like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did
that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday
spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with
the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood,
flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing
one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated
himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the
bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses
which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured
had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments,
which he wore for the rest of his life. When the tumult of emotion
had subsided, and the man had come to himself again, the
irrevocable sacrifice must often have been followed by passionate
sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of natural human feeling
after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is powerfully depicted by
Catullus in a celebrated poem. 5
The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in the
similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place on the
Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the violets,
supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded lover, were
in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis unmanned
himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain why his
priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his
festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of Blood
witnessed the mourning for Attis over an effigy of him which was
afterwards buried. The image thus laid in the sepulchre was
probably the same which had hung upon the tree. Throughout the
period of mourning the worshippers fasted from bread, nominally
because Cybele had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but
really perhaps for the same reason which induced the women of
Harran to abstain from eating anything ground in a mill while they
wept for Tammuz. To partake of bread or flour at such a season
might have been deemed a wanton profanation of the bruised and
broken body of the god. Or the fast may possibly have been a
preparation for a sacramental meal. 6
But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was
turned to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb
was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest
touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly
whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The
resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise
that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the
grave. On the morrow, the twenty-fifth day of March, which was
reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resurrection was
celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably
elsewhere, the celebration took the form of a carnival. It was the
Festival of Joy (Hilaria). A universal licence prevailed. Every man
might say and do what he pleased. People went about the streets in
disguise. No dignity was too high or too sacred for the humblest
citizen to assume with impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band
of conspirators thought to take advantage of the masquerade by
dressing in the uniform of the Imperial Guard, and so, mingling with
the crowd of merrymakers, to get within stabbing distance of the
emperor. But the plot miscarried. Even the stern Alexander Severus
used to relax so far on the joyous day as to admit a pheasant to his
frugal board. The next day, the twenty-sixth of March, was given to
repose, which must have been much needed after the varied
excitements and fatigues of the preceding days. Finally, the Roman
festival closed on the twenty-seventh of March with a procession
to the brook Almo. The silver image of the goddess, with its face of
jagged black stone, sat in a waggon drawn by oxen. Preceded by
the nobles walking barefoot, it moved slowly, to the loud music of
pipes and tambourines, out by the Porta Capena, and so down to
the banks of the Almo, which flows into the Tiber just below the
walls of Rome. There the high-priest, robed in purple, washed the
waggon, the image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the
stream. On returning from their bath, the wain and the oxen were
strewn with fresh spring flowers. All was mirth and gaiety. No one
thought of the blood that had flowed so lately. Even the eunuch
priests forgot their wounds. 7
Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the
death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public
rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or
mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the
worshipper, and especially the novice, into closer communication
with his god. Our information as to the nature of these mysteries
and the date of their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but
they seem to have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of
blood. In the sacrament the novice became a partaker of the
mysteries by eating out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two
instruments of music which figured prominently in the thrilling
orchestra of Attis. The fast which accompanied the mourning for the
dead god may perhaps have been designed to prepare the body of
the communicant for the reception of the blessed sacrament by
purging it of all that could defile by contact the sacred elements. In
the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with
fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a
wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its
forehead glittering with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating
and there stabbed to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot
reeking blood poured in torrents through the apertures, and was
received with devout eagerness by the worshipper on every part of
his person and garments, till he emerged from the pit, drenched,
dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to receive the homage, nay
the adoration, of his fellows as one who had been born again to
eternal life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the bull.
For some time afterwards the fiction of a new birth was kept up by
dieting him on milk like a new-born babe. The regeneration of the
worshipper took place at the same time as the regeneration of his
god, namely at the vernal equinox. At Rome the new birth and the
remission of sins by the shedding of bull's blood appear to have
been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian
goddess on the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great
basilica of St. Peter's now stands; for many inscriptions relating to
the rites were found when the church was being enlarged in 1608
or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre this barbarous system of
superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman
empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that
provincial sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican.
From the same source we learn that the testicles as well as the
blood of the bull played an important part in the ceremonies.
Probably they were regarded as a powerful charm to promote
fertility and hasten the new birth. 8