Our information as to the nature of these mysteries and the date of
their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but they seem to
have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood. In the
sacrament the novice became a partaker of the mysteries by eating
out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two instruments of music
which figured prominently in the thrilling orchestra of Attis. The
fast which accompanied the mourning for the dead god may perhaps
have been designed to prepare the body of the communicant for the
reception of the blessed sacrament by purging it of all that could
defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism the devotee,
crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit,
the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull,
adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering with gold
leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed to death
with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents
through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the
worshipper on every part of his person and garments, till he emerged
from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to
receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows as one who had
been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the
blood of the bull.
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