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Then he ran through
the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them
into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The
household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female
attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.
When the tumult of emotion had subsided, and the man had come to
himself again, the irrevocable sacrifice must often have been
followed by passionate sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of
natural human feeling after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is
powerfully depicted by Catullus in a celebrated poem.
The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in the
similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place on
the Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the
violets, supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded lover,
were in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis unmanned
himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain why his
priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his
festival.


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