Galli- Roman GroupCollective"Priests of Magna Mater"

The Black Stone

The Galli were the eunuch priests of the Phrygian goddess Magna Mater, whose cult Rome officially adopted in 204 BCE during the Second Punic War. The Sibylline Books had prophesied that Hannibal could only be driven from Italy if the sacred black stone of the Mother of the Gods was brought from Pessinus in Phrygia to Rome. When the stone arrived, accompanied by its Phrygian priests, the Galli became a permanent presence in the city. Their temple was established on the Palatine Hill.

The Day of Blood

Each March, the Galli carried a pine tree to the Palatine temple, wrapped it in wool, and hung it with violets. The tree was Attis, the mortal beloved of Magna Mater, who had castrated himself in divine madness beneath a pine and bled to death. On March 24, the Dies Sanguinis, the festival reached its climax. The Galli gashed themselves with knives and whirled in ecstatic dances to the pounding of drums and Phrygian flutes. New initiates, driven to frenzy, severed their genitals with a sharp stone or pottery shard and flung them against the door of a house, whose inhabitants were then obliged to provide the new Gallus with women's clothing. The next day the mood reversed: the Hilaria, celebrating Attis's return, brought joyous feasting.

Catullus's Attis

Catullus's poem 63 tells the story bare. A young man named Attis sails to Phrygia and, in a frenzy, castrates himself with a flint on the shore. When morning comes and clarity returns, he stands at the water's edge and laments everything he has lost: his youth, his gymnasium. He wants to go back. Magna Mater sends her lions to drive him into the wilderness. He never returns.