Attis- Roman FigureMortal"Consort of Magna Mater"

The Pine Tree

In Pausanias's account, Attis was born from no ordinary union. Zeus spilled his seed on the ground in sleep, and from it grew a being called Agdistis, both male and female. The gods feared Agdistis and castrated it. From the blood an almond tree rose, and when the daughter of the river Sangarius placed one of its fruits in her lap, she conceived Attis. The goddess who had been Agdistis, now Magna Mater, loved the boy from birth.

In Ovid's Fasti, the story is simpler. Attis was a Phrygian shepherd, beautiful, and Magna Mater chose him. She asked only one thing: that he remain faithful to her. He agreed.

He broke the promise. When he turned to a mortal princess, the goddess struck him with madness. He ran to the mountains. Beneath a pine tree he took a sharp stone and castrated himself, crying out that the parts that had wronged her should perish. He bled to death at the base of the tree. Magna Mater's grief shook the earth, but she could not undo what had happened. Jupiter granted that the body would never decay, that the hair would keep growing, that the smallest finger would stay alive and moving. Violets sprang from the blood he had shed.

The Shore

Catullus tells the story differently and more brutally in his sixty-third poem. His Attis is a Greek youth who sails to Phrygia in devotion to the goddess and castrates himself in a frenzy the moment he reaches shore. The madness recedes. He wakes the next morning, walks to the water, and looks out across the sea toward the homeland he can never return to.

Catullus gives him a speech at the waves. Attis calls himself a woman now, a servant of the goddess, an exile from the gymnasium and the wrestling ground and the life he had. He weeps. He begs for release. Magna Mater hears him from her mountain and sends her lions. They drive him back into the forest, and he serves her for the rest of his life. Catullus ends the poem with a prayer: goddess, keep your madness far from my house.