eating corn ground in a mill. Such acts would probably have been esteemed a sacrilegious partaking of the life or of the bruised and broken body of the god.
From inscriptions it appears that both at Pessinus and Rome the high priest of Cybele was regularly called Attis.[1] It is therefore a reasonable conjecture that the high priest played the part of the legendary Attis at the annual festival.[2] We have seen that on the Day of Blood he drew blood from his arms, and this may have been an imitation of the self-inflicted death of Attis under the pine-tree. It is not inconsistent with this supposition that Attis was also represented at these ceremonies by an effigy; for we have already had cases in which the divine being is first represented by a living person and afterwards by an effigy, which is then burned or otherwise destroyed.[3] Perhaps we may go a step farther and conjecture that this mimic killing of the priest (if it was such), accompanied by a real effusion of his blood, was in Phrygia, as it has been elsewhere, a substitute for a human sacrifice which in earlier times was actually offered. Professor W. M. Ramsay, whose authority on all questions relating to Phrygia no one will dispute, is of opinion that at these Phrygian ceremonies “the representative of the god was probably slain each year by a cruel death, just as the god himself died.”[4] We know from Strabo[5] that the priests of Pessinus were at one time potentates as well as priests; they may, there-
- ↑ Duncker, Geschichte des Alterthums,5 i. 456, note 4; Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon d. griech. u. röm. Mythologie, i. c. 724. Cp. Polybius, xxii. 20 (18).
- ↑ The conjecture is that of Henzen in Anual. d. Inst. 1856, p. 110, referred to in Roscher, l.c.
- ↑ See pp. 84, 231.
- ↑ Article Phrygia, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth ed. xviii. 853.
- ↑ xii. 5, 3.
