probably nothing but a continuation, under a different name, of the Adonis worship.
§ 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 Pes-
- ↑ Hippolytus, Refut. omn. haeres. v. 9, p. 168, ed. Duncker and Schneidewin; Socrates, Hist. Eccles. iii. 23, §§ 51 sqq. p. 204.
- ↑ 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.
