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Attis, a life-death-rebirth
deity, was both the son and the lover of Cybele, her eunuch attendant and driver of
her lion-driven chariot; he was driven mad by her and castrated himself. Attis was originally a local semi-deity of Phrygia, associated with the great Phrygian trading city of Pessinos, which lay under the lee
of Mount Agdistis. The mountain was personified as a daemon, whom foreigners
associated with the Great Mother Cybele.
The story of his origins from Agdistis, as told to the traveller Pausanias have some distinctly non-Greek elements:
Pausanias was told that the daemon Agdistis initially bore both male and female attributes. But the Olympian gods,
fearing Agdistis, cut off the male organ and cast it away. There grew up from it an almond-tree, and when its fruit was ripe, a
daughter of the river Sangarios picked the fruit and laid it in her bosom. It at once disappeared, but she was with child. In
time a boy was born and exposed on the hillside, but the infant was tended by a he-goat. As Attis grew, his long-haired beauty
was godlike, and Agdistis as Cybele, then fell in love with him. But the foster parents of Attis sent him to Pessinos, where he
was to wed the king's daughter. Just as the marriage-song was being sung, Agdistis/Cybele appeared in her transcendent power, and
Attis went mad and cut off his genitals. Attis' father-in-law-to-be, the king who was giving his daughter in marriage, followed
suit, prefiguring the self-castrating corybantes who devoted themselves to
Cybele. But Agdistis repented and saw to it that the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay. (Pausanias,
Greece, 7.19)
Attis, was reborn as the evergreen pine. At the temple of Cybele/Rhea in Pessinos, the mother of the gods was still called
Agdistis, the geographer Strabo recounted. (Geography, 12.5.3)
As neighboring Lydia came to control Phrygia, the cult of Attis was given a Lydian
context too. Attis is said to have introduced to Lydia the cult of the Mother Goddess Cybele, incurring the jealousy of Zeus, who
sent a boar to destroy the Lydian crops. Then certain Lydians, with Attis himself, were killed by the boar. Pausanias adds, to
corroborate this story, that the Gauls who inhabited Pessinos abstained from pork. This myth element may have been invented
solely to explain the unusual dietary
laws of the Lydian Gauls. In Rome, the eunuch followers of Cybele were known as Galli, or "Gauls." (For the Gauls in Anatolia see Galatia.)
As the orgiastic cult of Cybele spread from Anatolia to Greece and eventually to
Rome, the cult of Attis, her reborn eunuch consort, accompanied her.
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