Attis, Death and the Ecstatic Cult of the Galli

Phrygian myth paired the Mountain Mother with a young consort, Attis, whose death and, in some versions of the story, restoration became the center of an ecstatic mystery cult that spread with her worship into the Greek and Roman world. The cult's priesthood, the Galli, marked their devotion by castrating themselves, a practice ancient writers connected directly to the myth of Attis's own self mutilation, and lived afterward as a recognized third category outside the ordinary categories of Roman manhood, dressed and adorned in ways contemporaries read as feminine. Roman civic religion never fully domesticated what it had imported. Roman citizens were for a long time forbidden to serve as Galli or to castrate themselves in the goddess's honor, even as the state cult of the Magna Mater she had become held an official festival, the Megalensia, each April on the Palatine. The tension between an officially sponsored cult and a priesthood whose central rite Roman law tried to keep at arm's length is itself part of what ancient sources found remarkable about the religion the Phrygians had exported. No Phrygian scripture survives to give the myth in the tradition's own words; it is known through rock cut facades, inscriptions and the retellings of later Greek and Roman writers.