Sources, the Galli, and a Disputed Identity

The version summarized here follows the fullest ancient recounting, preserved by the Christian apologist Arnobius of Sicca in his early fourth-century Adversus Nationes, written to expose the pagan mysteries he attacks; the geographer Pausanias, in his second-century Description of Greece, alludes to the same core story more briefly and locally. Both writers have their own reasons for shaping the material, one hostile, one antiquarian, which modern scholarship weighs when reconstructing what Phrygian cult at Pessinus actually held. The standard modern synthesis of the ancient evidence is Maarten Vermaseren's Cybele and Attis, The Myth and the Cult (1977).

The myth's central function in antiquity was etiological: it explained why the priests of Cybele at her major sanctuaries, the Galli, ritually castrated themselves on entering her service, reenacting Attis's act, and why the pine cone and the pine tree itself were carried in her processions. Ancient sources are not consistent about Agdistis's ultimate identity. Some, including the strand followed above, treat Agdistis and the Mother goddess Cybele as the same being under different names at different points in the story; others keep Agdistis as a distinct, subordinate figure who loves Attis but is not simply Cybele herself. This entry records that disagreement rather than resolving it, and notes that Rhea, with whom Greek sources sometimes equated Cybele, sits at one further remove from Agdistis specifically.