The Golden Bough (1890)/Chapter 3/Section 5

by James George Frazer

 

§ 5.—Attis

The next of those gods, whose supposed death and resurrection struck such deep roots into the religious 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.^[1] Attis was said to have been a fair youth who was beloved by the great Phrygian goddess Cybele. Two different accounts of his death were current. According to the one, he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other, he mutilated himself under a pine-tree, and died from the effusion of blood. The latter is said to have been the local story told by the people of Pessinus, a great centre of Cybele worship, and the whole legend of which it forms a part is stamped with a character of rudeness and savagery that speaks strongly for its antiquity.^[2] But the genuineness of the other story seems also vouched for by the fact that his worshippers, especially the people of Pessinus, abstained from eating swine.^[3] After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree.^[4] The ceremonies observed at his festival are not very fully known, but their general order appears to have been as follows.^[5] At the spring equinox (22d March) a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a divinity. It was adorned with woollen bands and wreaths of violets, for violets were said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as anemones from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young man was attached to the middle of the tree.^[6] On the second day (23d March) the chief ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpets.^[7] The third day (24th March) was known as the Day of Blood: the high priest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering.^[8] It was perhaps on this day or night that the mourning for Attis took place over an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly buried.^[9] The fourth day (25th March) was the Festival of Joy (Hilaria), at which the resurrection of Attis was probably celebrated—at least the celebration of his resurrection seems to have followed closely upon that of his death.^[10] The Roman festival closed on 27th March with a procession to the brook Almo, in which the bullock-cart of the goddess, her image, and other sacred objects were bathed. But this bath of the goddess is known to have also formed part of her festival in her Asiatic home. On returning from the water the cart and oxen were strewn with fresh spring flowers.^[11]

The original character of Attis as a tree-spirit is brought out plainly by the part which the pine-tree plays in his legend and ritual. The story that he was a human being transformed into a pine-tree is only one of those transparent attempts at rationalising the old beliefs which meet us so frequently in mythology. His tree origin is further attested by the story that he was born of a virgin, who conceived by putting in her bosom a ripe almond or pomegranate.^[12] The bringing in of the pine-tree from the wood, decked with violets and woollen bands, corresponds to bringing in the May-tree or Summer-tree in modern folk-custom; and the effigy which was attached to the pine-tree was only a duplicate representative of the tree-spirit or Attis. At what point of the ceremonies the violets and the effigy were attached to the tree is not said, but we should assume this to be done after the mimic death and burial of Attis. The fastening of his effigy to the tree would then be a representation of his coming to life again in tree-form, just as the placing of the shirt of the effigy of Death upon a tree represents the revival of the spirit of vegetation in a new form.^[13] After being attached to the tree, the effigy was kept for a year and then burned.^[14] We have seen that this was apparently sometimes done with the May-pole;^[15] and we shall see presently that the effigy of the corn-spirit, made at harvest, is often preserved till it is replaced by a new effigy at next year’s harvest. The original intention of thus preserving the effigy for a year and then replacing it by a new one was doubtless to maintain the spirit of vegetation in fresh and vigorous life. The bathing of the image of Cybele was probably a rain-charm, like the throwing of the effigies of Death and of Adonis into the water. Like tree-spirits in general, Attis appears to have been conceived as exercising power over the growth of corn, or even to have been identified with the corn. One of his epithets was “very fruitful;” he was addressed as the “reaped green (or yellow) ear of corn,” and the story of his sufferings, death, and resurrection was interpreted as the ripe grain wounded by the reaper, buried in the granary, and coming to life again when sown in the ground.^[16] His worshippers abstained from eating seeds and the roots of vegetables,^[17] just as at the Adonis ceremonies women abstained from 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.^[18] It is therefore a reasonable conjecture that the high priest played the part of the legendary Attis at the annual festival.^[19] 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.^[20] 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.”^[21] We know from Strabo^[22] that the priests of Pessinus were at one time potentates as well as priests; they may, therefore, have belonged to that class of divine kings or popes whose duty it was to die each year for their people and the world. As a god of vegetation, annually slain, the representative of Attis would be parallel to the Wild Man, the King, etc., of north European folk-custom, and to the Italian priest of Nemi.

1. Hippolytus, Refut. omn. haeres. v. 9, p. 168, ed. Duncker and Schneidewin; Socrates, Hist. Eccles. iii. 23, §§ 51 sqq. p. 204.
2. That Attis was killed by a boar was stated by Hermesianax, an elegiac poet of the fourth century B.C. (Pausanias, vii. 17); cp. Schol. on Nicander, Alex. 8. The other story is told by Arnobius (Adversus nationes, v. 5 sqq.) on the authority of Timotheus, an otherwise unknown writer, who professed to derive it ex reconditis antiquitatum libris et ex intimis mysteriis. It is obviously identical with the account which Pausanias mentions (l.c.) as the story current in Pessinus.
3. Pausanias, vii. 17; Julian, Orat. v. 177 B.
4. Ovid, Metam. x. 103 sqq.
5. On the festival see especially Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, iii.² 370 sqq.; Daremberg et Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités grecques et romaines, i. p. 1685 sq. (article “Cybèle”); W. Mannhardt, Antike Wald-und Feldkulte, p. 291 sqq.; id., Baumkultus, p. 572 sqq.
6. Julian, Orat. v. 168 C; Joannes Lydus, De mensibus, iv. 41; Arnobius, Advers. nationes, v. cc. 7, 16 sq.; Firmicus Maternus, De errore profan. relig. 27.
7. Julian, l.c. and 169 C.
8. Trebellius Pollio, Claudius, 4; Tertullian, Apologet. 25. For other references, see Marquardt, l.c.
9. Diodorus, iii. 59 ; Firmicus Maternus, De err. profan. relig. 3; Arnobius, Advers. nat. v. 16; Schol. on Nicander, Alex. 8; Servius on Virgil, Aen. ix. 116; Arrian, Tactica, 33. The ceremony described in Firmicus Maternus, c. 22 (nocte quadam simulacrum in lectica supinum ponitur et per numeros digestis fletibus plangitur. . . . Idolum scpelis. Idolum plangis, etc.), may very well be the mourning and funeral rites of Attis, to which he had more briefly referred in C. 3.
10. On the Hilaria see Macrobius, Saturn. i. 21, 10; Julian, Orat. v. 168 D, 169 D; Damascius, Vita Isidori, in Photius, p. 345 A 5 sqq. ed. Bekker. On the resurrection, see Firmicus Maternus, 3, reginae suae amorem [Phryges] cum luctibus annuis consecrarunt, et ut satis iratae mulieri facerent aut ut paenitenti solacium quaererent, quem paulo ante sepelierant revixisse jactarunt. . . . Mortem ipsius [i.e. of Attis] dicunt, quod semina collecta conduntur, vitam rursus quod jacta semina annuis vicibus † reconduntur [renascuntur, C. Halm]. Again cp. id. 22, Idolum sepelis. Idolum plangis, idolum de sepultura proferis, et miser cum haec feceris gaudes; and Damascius, l.c. τὴν τῶν ἱλαρίων καλουμένην ἑορτήν · ὅπερ ἐδήλου τὴν ἐξ ᾅδου γεγονυῖαν ἡμῶν σωτηρίαν. This last passage, compared with the formula in Firmicus Maternus, c. 22

    θαρρεῖτε μύσται τοῦ θεοῦ σεσωμένου·
    ἔσται γὰρ ἡμῖν ἐκ πόνων σωτηρῖα,

    makes it probable that the ceremony described by Firmicus, c. 22, is the resurrection of Attis.

11. Ovid, Fast. iv. 337 sqq.; Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiii. 3. For other references see Marquardt and Mannhardt, ll.cc.
12. Pausanias, vii. 17; Arnobius, Adv. nationes, v. 6.; cp. Hippolytus, Refut. omn. haeres. v. 9, pp. 166, 168.
13. See above, p. 264 sq.
14. Firmicus Maternus, 27.
15. Above, p. 81.
16. Hippolytus, Ref. omn. haeres. v. cc. 8, 9, pp. 162, 168; Firmicus Maternus, De errore prof. relig. 3.
17. Julian, Orat. v. 174 A B.
18. 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).
19. The conjecture is that of Henzen in Anual. d. Inst. 1856, p. 110, referred to in Roscher, l.c.
20. See pp. 84, 231.
21. Article Phrygia, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, ninth ed. xviii. 853.
22. xii. 5, 3.