Wrought up to the
highest pitch of religious excitement they dashed the severed
portions of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess. These
broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapt up
and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to
Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed
instrumental in recalling Attis to life and hastening the general
resurrection of nature, which was then bursting into leaf and
blossom in the vernal sunshine. Some confirmation of this conjecture
is furnished by the savage story that the mother of Attis conceived
by putting in her bosom a pomegranate sprung from the severed
genitals of a man-monster named Agdestis, a sort of double of Attis.
If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom,
we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility
were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities
required to receive from their male ministers, who personated the
divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions:
they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy
before they could transmit it to the world.
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