Attis

Information about Attis

Greek deities series
Primordial deities
Titans and Olympians
Aquatic deities
Chthonic deities
Personified concepts
Other deities
Anatolian deities
Attis Artemis of Ephesus Cybele

Attis wearing the Phrygian cap. Terracotta thymiaterion from Tarsus, 1st or 2nd century BC, Louvre

Attis (sometimes written as "Atys"), a life-death-rebirth deity, was the lover of Cybele,^[1] 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, Nana who was 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 her son 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. According to some versions the King of Pessinos was Midas. 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)

Sculpture of Attis. Museum of Ephesus, Efes, Turkey.

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 in the time of Claudius, the cult of Attis, her reborn eunuch consort, accompanied her. The first literary reference to Attis is the subject of one of the most famous poems by Catullus.^[2] but it appears that the cult of Attis at Rome was not attached to the earlier-establish cult of Cybele until the early Empire.^[3] The much later Imperial Roman calendar given in the Fasti Philocali was set thus: March 15 - Canna Intrat (procession of the reed-bearers and syrinx-blowers); March 22 - Arbor Intrat [equinox]- (entrance of the sacred pine tree; burial of Attis in effigy strapped to a stake); March 24 - Sanguis (day of mourning, sacrifice, and bloodletting); March 25 - Hilaria (day of Attis' resurrection); March 27 - Lavatio (day of ablution).

A marble bas-relief of Cybele in her chariot and Attis, from Magna Graecia, is in the archaeological museum, Venice. A finely executed silvery brass Attis that had been ritually consigned to the Mosel was recovered during construction in 1963 and is kept at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum of Trier (see link for illustration). It shows the typically Anatolian costume of the god: trousers fastened together down the front of the legs with toggles and the Phrygian cap.

Notes

1. ^ Compare Semele and Endymion, Aphrodite and Adonis.
2. ^ Poem LXIII. Grant Showerman, "Was Attis at Rome under the Republic?" Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 31 (1900:46-59)
3. ^ Lambrechts 1962 takes the position that previously Attis had been a mortal follower of Cybele, and that his resurection was a reflection of Christianity in the second century CE. .

External links

Literature:

P. Lambrechts , Attis: Van Herdersknaap tot God (Brussels:Vlaamse Akademie) 1962. (French summary) Reviewed by J.A.North in The Journal of Roman Studies 55.1/2 (1965:278-279).
E.N. Lane (ed.), Cybele, Attis and Related Cults. Essays in Memory of M.J. Vermaseren (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 131), Leiden-Köln, 1996.

Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the Ancient Greeks concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices.
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The ancient Greeks proposed many different ideas about the primordial gods in their mythology. The many theogonies constructed by Greek poets each give a different account of which gods came first.

In Homer, Ocean and Tethys are the parents of all the gods.

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Titans (Greek: Τιτάν Titan; plural: Τιτάνες Titanes
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Twelve Olympians, also known as the Dodekatheon (Greek: Δωδεκάθεον
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Chthonic (from Greek χθόνιος-khthonios, of the earth, from khthōn, earth; pertaining to the Earth; earthy) designates, or pertains to, gods or spirits of the underworld, especially in relation to Greek religion.
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Cybele (Greek: Κυβέλη) was a deification of the Earth Mother who was worshipped in Anatolia from Neolithic times. Like Gaia (the "Earth") or her Minoan equivalent Rhea, Cybele embodies the fertile earth, a goddess of caverns and mountains, walls and
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eunuch is a castrated man; the term usually refers to those castrated in order to perform a specific social function, as was common in many societies of the past. The earliest records for intentional castration to produce eunuchs are from the Sumerian cities of Lagash in the 21st
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Castration (also referred as: gelding, neutering, orchiectomy, orchidectomy, and oophorectomy) is any action, surgical, chemical, or otherwise, by which a male loses the functions of the testes or a female loses the functions of the ovaries.
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In antiquity, Phrygia (Greek: Φρυγία) was a kingdom in the west central part of the Anatolia. The Phrygian people settled in the area from c. 1200 BC, and established a kingdom in the 8th century BC.
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Pessinus was the city in Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey on the upper course of the river Sakarya River (Sangarios), from which the mythological King Midas is said to have ruled a greater Phrygian realm. It certainly dated back to 700BC.
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For the evil spirits of the Christian religion, see Demon

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In Greek mythology heavily influenced by cultures from the East, Agdistis was a powerful hermaphroditic daemon. Agdistis was chaotic, neither good nor evil, but impossible to control, containing all of the powers of creation within his/her body and using these powers to wreak havoc.
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Pausanias (Greek: Παυσανίας) was a Greek traveller and geographer of the 2nd century A.D., who lived in the times of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.
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Twelve Olympians, also known as the Dodekatheon (Greek: Δωδεκάθεον
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''For other uses, see Sakarya (disambiguation)

According to Greek mythology, Nana was a nymph of Sangarius, a river located in present-day Turkey.

She became pregnant when an almond from an almond tree fell on her lap.
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The Sakarya (Greek Σαγγάριος, Latinized as Sangarius) is a river in Asia Minor. It runs through what in ancient times was known as Phrygia, and is now a part of Turkey.
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In Greek mythology, Midas (in Greek, Μίδας, often referred as King Midas) is popularly remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold: the "Midas touch".
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The Korybantes (ancient Greek Κορύβαντες) were the crested dancers who worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing.
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Strabo^[1] (Greek: Στράβων; 63/64 BC – ca. AD 24) was a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher. He is mostly famous for his 17-volume work Geographica
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Lydia (in Greek Λυδία) is a historic region of western Asia Minor, congruent with Turkey's modern provinces of İzmir and Manisa. Its traditional capital was the city of Sardis (Turkish: Sard).
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Zeus (in Greek: nominative: Ζεύς Zeús, genitive: Διός Diós
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Origins and rationale

Certain foods may be considered taboo by the rules promulgated by a religion concerning what is and what is not allowed to be eaten.
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Galli (singular Gallus) was the Roman name for castrated followers of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, which were regarded as a third gender by contemporary Roman scholars, comparable to transgendered people in the modern world.
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Galatia was an area in the highlands of central Anatolia in modern Turkey. Galatia was bounded on the north by Bithynia and Paphlagonia, on the east by Pontus, on the south by Lycaonia and Cappadocia, and on the west by the remainder of Phrygia, the eastern part of which the Gauls
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