On the second day
of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems
to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth
of March, was known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or
highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering.
Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the
wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning
horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in
the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a
frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their
bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to
bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood.
The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and
may have been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. The
Australian aborigines cut themselves in like manner over the graves
of their friends for the purpose, perhaps, of enabling them to be
born again. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not expressly
told, that it was on the same Day of Blood and for the same purpose
that the novices sacrificed their virility.
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