object:1.34 - The Myth and Ritual of Attis
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XXXIV. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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