Attis

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A youth kneels beneath a pine in the mountains above Pessinus and takes a blade to himself. The blood runs into the ground, and where it falls violets open. This is the act at the center of everything told about Attis — the beautiful god-favored boy of Phrygia who, in a seizure of madness, unmade his own manhood and bled to death under the tree. In one strand of the telling he does not so much die as turn into the pine, his body drawn up into the trunk that the cult would afterward fell, wrap, and mourn each spring. The blade, the tree, the flowers from the wound: the rest of the tradition is argument over how he came to that pine, but the pine is never in doubt.

The irreconcilable versions

The story comes down in versions that refuse to be harmonized, and the two fullest are at odds from the first line. The chain in its longest form is the one Pausanias gives in the seventh book of his Description of Greece. It begins not with Attis but with Agdistis, a being born from the earth where the seed of Zeus had fallen on Mount Agdos, sprung up bearing both male and female parts together. The gods, alarmed at a creature owing nothing to the distinction between the sexes, bound it in sleep and severed the male organ; from the buried member grew an almond tree. Nana, daughter of the river Sangarios, gathered the ripe almond into her lap, conceived, and bore Attis. The boy grew into a beauty more than human, and Agdistis — now drawn toward him as the Mother — loved him. When Attis was sent to wed the daughter of the king of Pessinus, the goddess appeared at the wedding in her terrible power, and in the frenzy that fell on the hall Attis ran out, castrated himself beneath a pine, and died. Repenting, Agdistis begged Zeus that the boy’s body should never decay: his flesh would not rot, his hair would keep growing, and his smallest finger would go on moving. Not resurrection — preservation, an arrested death held just short of corruption.

Ovid, recounting the rite for the Roman reader in the fourth book of the Fasti, smooths the chain into something legible: Attis is a Phrygian boy beloved of the tower-crowned Mother, who binds him to a vow of chastity; he breaks it for the nymph Sagaritis, and the goddess, in jealous fury, drives him mad until he mutilates himself and cries that he has deserved it. In the tenth book of the Metamorphoses the same Ovid gives the briefer, stranger ending: the Mother changes the boy she loved into a pine. The motives shift from teller to teller — a broken betrothal, a broken vow, a jealous deity, the sheer overspill of the goddess’s presence — because each author wrote for a different end, Pausanias preserving local Anatolian lore, Ovid explaining to Romans why the Mother’s priests were eunuchs and why a tree stood at the heart of her March festival.

Against these stands Catullus, who in his sixty-third poem turned the legend into something closer to a scream. Written in the headlong galliambic meter that imitated the cult’s own drumming hymns, the poem follows a Greek youth, Attis, who crosses the sea in zeal, lands on the Phrygian shore, and in the first rush of devotion takes the blade to himself beneath Cybele’s pines. The Latin marks the change in his own grammar: after the act the words that describe him slip into the feminine, and he is notha mulier, a counterfeit woman. He leads the ecstatic dance through the night, sleeps, and wakes to the gray morning and full knowledge of what he has done — and the poem becomes a lament for the gymnasium and the marketplace and the homeland he will never see again, for the man he was and has spent. Cybele looses one of her lions to drive him back into the forest madness, and the poet ends not in the story but beside it, praying that the goddess keep her frenzy far from his own house. The horror of irreversibility is the whole burden of the poem; whatever the rite promised its initiates, Catullus saw the unmanning and not the consoling.

From myth to rite

What the ancient sources establish past all doubt is not a fixed narrative but a practice. Attis was mourned, and his image was carried in procession, and the galli — the Mother’s eunuch priests — repeated his self-castration in their own entry into her service, so that each generation of the priesthood became a living re-enactment of the boy beneath the pine. The myth, on the soberest reading, is the cult’s account of itself: a story told to explain why these men had done to their bodies what they had done. The emasculated priest and the emasculated god are a single image seen from two sides, the rite supplying the god his biography and the god supplying the rite its sanction. The pine that the worshippers cut and bound in wool and mourned was Attis; the wounding the priests carried in their own flesh was his wounding; the grief was real grief, calendared and public, for a death that the cult held to have happened and to go on happening.

The cult had come to Rome long before any of this was Roman. In 204 BCE, in the grinding last years of the war with Hannibal, the Senate consulted the Sibylline Books and was told that the foreign enemy could be driven from Italy only if the Great Mother of Ida were brought to the city. An embassy went to Asia Minor and returned with her in the form she was worshipped — a sacred black stone, set in the face of a silver image — and the most virtuous man in Rome, named by the Senate as Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, received her at Ostia. She was lodged on the Palatine, and her temple there was dedicated in 191 BCE, with the games of the Megalesia kept in her honor each April. But the Romans, when they saw how she was served, recoiled: the self-mutilation of her priests was held incompatible with Roman manhood, and citizens were long forbidden to become galli or even, in the strictest period, to take a full part in her rites except as onlookers. The Phrygian Mother stood at the heart of the city in a quarantine of her own ecstasy. Attis himself was slower to gain standing; the open, official celebration of his death and the festival cycle built around it belong to the imperial centuries, with the cult’s full Roman recognition traditionally placed in the reign of Claudius.

By the time the calendar of Philocalus was drawn up in 354 CE, that cycle had hardened into a fixed sequence in late March. On the fifteenth came Canna intrat, “the reed enters,” carried by the college of the cannophori and recalling the infant Attis found among the reeds of the Sangarios. On the twenty-second came Arbor intrat, “the tree enters”: the dendrophori, the tree-bearers, felled a pine, swathed it in wool and violets, and bore it into the sanctuary as the body of the dead god laid out for burial. The twenty-fourth was the Dies Sanguinis, the Day of Blood — the climax of mourning, when to the noise of pipes and cymbals the galli scourged and gashed themselves, and on which new initiates were understood to make the offering that bound them forever to the goddess. Then, on the twenty-fifth, the Hilaria, the day of rejoicing, the grief broken in a sudden reversal into festival; the twenty-sixth a day of rest, the Requietio; and on the twenty-seventh the Lavatio, when the goddess’s stone was carried down to the river Almo and washed. The mourning and the joy stand side by side in the calendar, a death and an aftermath kept eight days apart, and it is in the narrow space between the felled pine and the Hilaria that the whole later argument over Attis’s resurrection would be fought.

To the festival cult attached the taurobolium, the rite from which the inscriptions most often record a believer naming the day he was reborn. A bull was consecrated and killed, and its blood was caught and applied to the initiate beneath. The fullest description is also the least disinterested: the Christian poet Prudentius, in the tenth poem of his Peristephanon, pictures the candidate standing in a trench roofed with pierced planks while the blood of the slaughtered bull rains down through the holes onto his upturned face, so that he comes up drenched and counted clean. How much of this is the rite and how much is Prudentius’s polemic is open: the trench, the fossa sanguinis, is named by almost no one else, and modern study — above all the inscription-by-inscription work of Robert Duthoy — has had to build the ritual back up from scattered dedicatory stones that record the act without narrating it. The earliest taurobolia were performed for the welfare of the emperor and the state; only later does the language of personal regeneration, of an initiate reborn for twenty years or for eternity, enter the record.

The dying-and-reviving god, and its critics

It was later readers, more than the ancients who kept the rite, who made Attis the type of the dying-and-reviving god. The hostile Christian witnesses are the hinge. Arnobius, in the fifth book of his Adversus Nationes, retold the whole Agdistis chain at length precisely in order to mock it, and so preserved it. Firmicus Maternus, in his appeal to the Christian emperors to extinguish the old cults, reported that the worshippers of Attis were consoled in their grief with a promise of salvation — and his is the first surviving text to wrap the god’s fate in unmistakably resurrectional language, a phrasing he supplied in order to set it against, and beneath, the resurrection his own faith proclaimed. Both men described the cult partly to destroy it and partly because its rhythm of death followed by a day of joy ran disturbingly close to claims of their own. The Neoplatonists read the same material in the opposite spirit: where the apologists saw a scandal, philosophers in the orbit of late Neoplatonism read Attis allegorically, as the descent and recall of soul into and out of matter, and the Mother’s grief and the Hilaria as a cosmic cycle of fall and return.

Modern scholarship has grown cautious about all of this. James Frazer, in the Adonis Attis Osiris volumes of The Golden Bough, set Attis at the center of a sweeping comparative class of dying-and-rising vegetation gods, and that frame governed the field for half a century. It has since been heavily qualified. Jonathan Z. Smith, dismantling the category in his entry for the Encyclopedia of Religion, pressed the distinction the sources themselves make: the deaths in these cults are far better attested than the risings, and what the pre-Christian texts give for Attis is not a god who comes back to life but a body that will not decay — Pausanias’s preserved corpse, hair still growing, the small finger still moving. The Hilaria is unmistakable, the joy is beyond dispute; what is contested is whether the rejoicing meant that Attis himself was held to live again, or only that the goddess and her devotees had passed through grief into festival, and how early any genuine resurrection doctrine entered a tradition whose clearest resurrectional statements come from its fourth-century Christian attackers. Maria Grazia Lancellotti’s full-length study set the figure back inside his Anatolian inheritance and treated the Roman resurrection-language as a late and partly external imposition rather than the buried core. The comparative pattern that once linked Attis confidently to Adonis, to Dionysus, and to the grain-cycle of Persephone and Demeter is now read as a family of resemblances to be traced rather than a single submerged god worshipped under many names.

That caution belongs with the wider rethinking of the mystery religions of which the Mother’s cult was one. Like the rites of Eleusis, like the spreading cult of Isis and the soldiers’ mysteries of Mithras, the cult of Attis offered its initiates something undergone rather than merely believed — a passage through mourning, blood, and the great reversal of the Hilaria, sealed in the taurobolium’s bath. The promise these cults made was experiential before it was doctrinal, and the difficulty of saying exactly what Attis’s worshippers held about his return is partly the difficulty of recovering doctrine from a tradition built on a thing done rather than a thing taught.

Sources and scholarship

The ancient evidence is scattered and partisan, and every reconstruction depends on weighing it. The longest connected myth is in Pausanias, whose account of Agdistis, the almond tree, Nana, and the preserved body stands at Description of Greece 7.17 in the Theoi compilation of the Greek and Roman testimonia; Ovid’s Roman framings are in Fasti 4 and Metamorphoses 10. Catullus’s galliambic lament survives as poem 63, hosted with translation in the Perseus Digital Library. The hostile but invaluable Christian record runs through Arnobius’s Adversus Nationes 5 and Firmicus Maternus’s De errore profanarum religionum, and the most detailed notice of the taurobolium is Prudentius, Peristephanon 10.1006–1050.

The modern scholarship begins with Maarten Vermaseren’s Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult (Thames & Hudson, 1977), still the standard survey of the archaeology and iconography, and the multivolume Corpus Cultus Cybelae Attidisque he assembled. Lynn Roller’s In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (University of California Press, 1999) reoriented the field toward the Phrygian and Anatolian origins. The decisive critique of the dying-and-rising frame is Jonathan Z. Smith’s “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Encyclopedia of Religion, summarized in the survey of the category on Wikipedia’s “Dying-and-rising god” article. Maria Grazia Lancellotti’s Attis: Between Myth and History: King, Priest and God (Brill, 2002), reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, is the fullest recent reassessment, and Robert Duthoy’s The Taurobolium: Its Evolution and Terminology (Brill, 1969) remains the basis for any account of the bull-rite.

Beneath the scholarly quarrel lies the older and stranger thing it circles — a vegetation deity whose worship asked some of its servants to render themselves, permanently, into his image.

→ Related: Dagon · Eurydice · Mesopotamia · Adonis · Dionysus · Persephone · Demeter · Eleusis · Mystery Religions · Mithraic Mysteries · Isis · Neoplatonism · Arnobius · Julius Firmicus Maternus