MAGNA MATER
The earliest invader from the East of the sober decorum of old Roman
religion, and almost the last to succumb, was Magna Mater of Pessinus.
There is no pagan cult which S. Augustine, and many of the Fathers before
him, assail with such indignant contempt as hers.(2811) And indeed it was
long regarded with suspicion by old Romans of the cultivated class. For
generations after her reception on the Palatine, no Roman was permitted to
enter her official service. But there was something in that noisy and
bloody ritual, and in the cruel, ascetic sacrifice of its devotees, which
exercised an irresistible power over the imagination of the vulgar; and
even Lucretius felt a certain imaginative awe of the tower-crowned figure
drawn by lions and adored by the cities of many lands.(2812) Varro, who
probably had no great love for the un-Roman ritual, found a place for the
Phrygian goddess in his théodicée.(2813) Her baptism of blood in the
taurobolium was a rite of such strange enthralling influence that it
needed all the force of the Christian Empire to abolish it. And on many of
the last inscriptions of the fourth century the greatest names in the
Roman aristocracy leave the record of their cleansing in the curious
phrase _renatus in aeternum_.(2814) In his youth S. Augustine had seen
processions of effeminate figures with dripping locks, painted faces, and
soft womanish bearing, passing along the streets of Carthage, and begging
alms of the crowd. His horror at the memory of the scene probably springs
almost as much from the manly instincts of the Roman as from the
detestation of the Christian moralist for a debasing superstition.(2815)
But S. Augustine knew well the power of the superstition. For more than
600 years the Great Mother had been enthroned on the Palatine; for more
than 300 years she had captivated the remotest provinces of the
West.(2816) In the terror of the Second Punic War, 204 B.C., she had been
summoned by solemn embassy from her original home at Pessinus in Galatia.
In obedience to a sibylline command, the Roman youth with purest hands,
together with the Roman matrons, had welcomed her at Ostia.(2817) The ship
which bore her up the Tiber,(2818) when it grounded on a shoal, had been
sent forward on its way, to vindicate her calumniated virtue, by the touch
of a virgin of the Claudian house.(2819) A decree of the Senate in 191
B.C. had given the strange goddess a home on the Palatine, hard by the
shrine of Apollo; and the great Megalesian festival in April was
founded.(2820) But the foreign character of the cult was long maintained.
It was a time when the passion for religious excitement was in the air,
and when its excesses had to be restrained by all the forces of the State.
No Roman was permitted to accept the Phrygian priesthood for a century
after the coming of the Great Mother.(2821) But towards the end of the
Republic, the goddess had captured all imaginations, and her priests and
symbols meet us in all the poets of the great age.(2822) Augustus restored
her temple; some of his freedmen were among her priests;(2823) Livia is
pictured with the crown of towers upon her brow.(2824) Then came a long
interval, till the death of Nero, during which the Phrygian goddess is
hardly heard of.(2825) With the accession of the Flavians the eastern
cults finally entered on a long and unchallenged reign. Vespasian restored
the temple of the Great Mother at Herculaneum, which had been thrown down
by an earthquake.(2826) In the reign of Trajan her worship had penetrated
to the Spanish peninsula,(2827) and she is found, along with other Eastern
deities, in the towns of the new province of Dacia.(2828) The first
glimpses of the taurobolium appear before the middle of the second
century, and the goddess figures on the coins of Antoninus Pius.(2829) A
taurobolium for that emperor was offered “with intention” at Lyons in 160
A.D.,(2830) and there are several dedications to Magna Mater in the same
reign made by colleges of the _Dendrophori_ at Ostia.(2831) Tertullian
tells how a high priest of Cybele vainly offered his blood for the safety
of M. Aurelius, seven days after the Emperor had died in his quarters on
the Danube.(2832) It does not fall within the scope of our present inquiry
to trace the immense popularity of the worship under the princes of the
third century. That was the period of the great triumph of the spiritual
powers of the East. At the end of the fourth century the Great Mother and
Mithra were in the van of the pagan resistance to the religious revolution
of Theodosius and his sons.(2833)
The worship of Cybele, coming from the same regions as the Trojan
ancestors of Rome, was at first a patrician cult.(2834) Members of the
proudest houses bore a part in welcoming her to a place in the Roman
pantheon.(2835) Yet, as we have seen, Romans were for generations
forbidden to enrol themselves among her effeminate priesthood. By a
curious contradiction of sentiment, people were fascinated by the ritual,
while they despised the celebrants. The legend which was interpreted by
Stoic and Neoplatonist as full of physical or metaphysical meanings,(2836)
had also elements of human interest which appealed to the masses, always
eager for emotional excitement. The love of the Great Mother for a fair
youth, his unfaithfulness, and penitential self-mutilation under the
pine-tree; the passionate mourning for lost love, and then the restoration
of the self-made victim, attended by a choir of priests for ever, who had
made the same cruel sacrifice(2837)—all this, so alien to old Roman
religious sentiment, triumphed over it in the end by novelty and tragic
interest. The legend was developed into a drama, which, at the vernal
festival of the goddess, was produced with striking, if not artistic,
effect. On the first day the Dendrophori bore the sacred tree, wreathed
with violets, to the temple. There was then a pause for a day, and, on the
third, the priests, with frantic gestures and dishevelled hair, abandoned
themselves to the wildest mourning, lacerating their arms and shoulders
with wounds, from which the blood flowed in torrents. Severe fasting
accompanied these self-inflicted tortures. Then came a complete change of
sensation. On the day called Hilaria the votaries gave themselves up to
ecstasies of joy, to celebrate the restoration of Attis. On the last day
of the festival a solemn procession took its way to the brook Almon, to
bathe the goddess in its waters.(2838) The sacred stone, brought
originally from her home in Asia, and the most sacred symbol of the
worship, wrapped in robes, was borne upon a car with chants and music, and
that gross, unabashed naturalism which so often shocks and surprises us in
pagan ritual till we trace it to its source.
The government long treated the cult of Cybele as a foreign worship.(2839)
The title of its great festival is Greek. Yet before the close of the
Republic, Romans are found enrolled in its priesthoods and sacred
colleges, and long lists of these official votaries can be gathered from
the inscriptions of the imperial period. The archigallus, or high priest,
appears often on the Italian and provincial monuments. He is found at
Merida, Capua, Ostia, and Lyons, in Numidia and Portugal.(2840) He must
have performed his part at many a taurobolium, crowned with laurel
wreaths, wearing his mitre and ear-rings and armlets, with the image of
Attis on his breast.(2841) The names of the ordinary priests abound, from
the freedman of the house of Augustus to the great nobles of the reign of
Theodosius and Honorius.(2842) The priesthood was sometimes held for life,
or for a long term of years. A priest at Salonae in Dalmatia had
punctually performed the sacred offices for seventeen years.(2843) Women
were naturally admitted to the priesthood of a cult whose central interest
was a woman’s love and grief. Sometimes they are lowly freedwomen with
Greek names, sometimes they bear the proudest names in the Roman
aristocracy.(2844) The Dendrophori, who on festive days bore the sacred
tree, formed a religious college, and their record appears on many
monuments of Italian and provincial towns—Como, Ostia, and Cumae, Caesarea
(Afr.), Valentia, and Lyons.(2845) Other colleges were the Cannophori and
Cernophori, the keepers of the mystic symbols.(2846) The chanters,
drummers, and cymbal players were indispensable at great ceremonial
scenes, such as the taurobolium,(2847) and were arranged in graded ranks.
Of a lower degree were the vergers and apparitors, who watched over the
chapels of the goddess.(2848) And, lastly, there were the simple
worshippers, who also formed themselves into guilds, with all the usual
officers of such corporations. This cult, like so many others, existed not
only for ceremonial rite, but for fellowship and social exhilaration, and,
through its many gradations of religious privilege, it must have drawn
vast numbers into the sacred service in the times of the Empire.
But the pages of Apuleius, and other authorities, show us that, beside the
official clergy and collegiate members, there were, as happens to all
popular religions, a mass of unlicensed camp followers and mere
disreputable vagrants, who used the name of the Great Mother to exploit
the ignorant devotion and religious excitability of the rustic folk. The
romance of Apuleius, as Dr. Mahaffy has suggested, is probably derived
from earlier sources, and dressed up to titillate the prurient tastes of a
degraded society.(2849) Yet its pictures of country life in Thessaly,
although they may not be always locally accurate, can hardly be purely
imaginative. The scenes may not be always Thessalian, but that they are in
the main true pictures of country life in the Antonine age may be proved
from other authorities. Apuleius was too careful an artist to sever
himself altogether from the actual life of his time. And what a picture it
is! The air positively thrills with daemonic terror and power. Witches and
lewd sorceresses abound; the solitary inn has its weird seductions; the
lonely country cottage has its tragedy of lawless love or of chaste
devotion to the dead. Brigands in mountain fastnesses divide their
far-gathered spoil, and hold debate on plans of future lawless adventure.
Mountain solitudes, and lonely villages or castles among the woods, are
aroused by the yelping hounds, who start the boar from his lair, while the
faithless traitor places his friend at its mercy. We meet the travelling
cheese merchant, and the noble exile on his way to Zacynthus. We watch the
raid on the banker’s house at Thebes, and the peasants setting their dogs
on the passing traveller; the insolence of the wandering legionary; the
horrors of the slave prison, with its wasted, starved, and branded forms;
the amours of buxom wives, and the comic concealment or discovery of
lovers, in the manner of Boccaccio. It is only too certain that the
vileness and superstition which Apuleius has depicted may easily find a
parallel on the Roman stage, or in the pages of Martial.
In all this social panorama, romantic, amusing, or disgusting, there is no
more repulsive, and probably no truer scene than that in which the
wandering priests of the Syrian goddess appear. That deity, like many
others of Eastern origin, was often identified with the Great Mother.
Apuleius probably confounded them; the rites of their worships were often
the same, and the picture in Apuleius may be taken to represent the orgies
of many a wandering troop of professed devotees of the Great Mother in the
age of the Antonines.(2850) The leader is an old eunuch, with wild
straggling locks—a man of the foulest morals, carrying about with him an
image of the goddess, and levying alms from the superstition of the
rustics. He is attended by a crew worthy of him, wretches defiled with all
the worst vices of the ancient world, and shamelessly parading their
degradation. But they combine a shrewd eye to business with this wild
licence. They know all the arts to catch the fancy of the mob of clowns,
whose grey dull lives and inbred superstition make them eager for any
display which will intoxicate them with the novelty of a violent
sensation. These people are on that level where lust and the passion for
blood and suffering readily league themselves with religious excitement.
After a night of moral horrors, the foul brotherhood go forth in various
costume to win the largesses of the countryside. With painted cheeks and
robes of white or yellow, crossed with purple stripes, their arms bared to
the shoulder, and carrying swords or axes, they dance along wildly to the
sound of the flute.(2851) With obscene gesticulation and discordant
shrieks they madly bite their arms or lacerate them with knives. One of
the band, as if seized with special inspiration, heaving and panting under
the foul afflatus, shrieks out the confession of some sin against the holy
rites, and claims the penalty from his own hands.(2852) With hard knotted
scourge he belabours himself, while the blood flows in torrents. At last
the cruel frenzy exhausts itself, and obtains its reward in the offerings
of the spectators. Fine flour and cheese, milk and wine, coins of copper
and silver, are eagerly showered upon the impostors, and as eagerly
gathered in.(2853) Surprised in frightful orgies of vice, the scoundrels
have at last to retreat before the outraged moral sense of the villagers.
They decamp during the night, and on the morrow once more find comfortable
quarters in the house of a leading citizen who is devoted to the service
of the gods, and blind to the imposture of their professing
ministers.(2854)
The episode in Apuleius suggests some curious questions as to the moral
effect of these emotional cults. That in their early stages they had no
elevating moral influence,—nay, that their votaries might combine a strict
conformity to rite with great looseness of life,—is only too certain. The
Delias and Cynthias of the poets, who kept the fasts of Isis, were
assuredly not models of virtue. The assumption of the tonsure and linen
habit by a debauchee like Commodus does not reassure us. Yet princes of
high character in the second and the third centuries lent the countenance
of imperial power to the worships of the East.(2855) And the Mother of the
Gods found her last and most gallant defenders among great nobles of high
repute and sincere pagan piety in the last years of heathenism in the
West. It was a strange transformation. Yet the problem is not perhaps
insoluble. A religion may deteriorate as its authority over society
becomes more assured with age. But, in times of moral renovation, and in
the face of powerful spiritual rivalries, a religion may purge itself of
the impurities of youth. Religious systems may also be elevated by the
growing moral refinement of the society to which they minister. It is only
thus that we can explain the undoubted fact that the Phrygian and Egyptian
worships, originally tainted with the grossness of naturalism, became
vehicles of a warm religious emotion, and provided a stimulus to a higher
life. The idealism of humanity, by a strange alchemy, can marvellously
transform the most unpromising materials. And he would make a grave
mistake who should treat the Isis and Osiris, the Mater Deum or the Attis,
of the reign of Augustus as representing the same ideals in the reign of
Gratian. But these Eastern cults contained a germ, even in their earliest
days, of their great future development and power. The old religion of
Latium, along with much that was sound and grave and fortifying to
character, was also hard and cold and ceremonial. It could mould and
consecrate a militant and conquering state; it did little to satisfy the
craving for moral regeneration or communion with a Higher Power. It could
not appease the sense of error and frailty by ghostly comfort and
sacramental absolution. It was, moreover, wanting in that warmth of
interest and sympathy, linking the human and Divine, which has helped to
make Christianity the religion of Western civilisation, and which in a
feeble adumbration made the paganism of the East a momentary rival of the
Church. These Eastern cults, often originating in gross symbolism of the
alternations and recurring processes of nature,(2856) often arousing a
dangerous excitability and an unregulated emotion, yet contained the germ
of a religious spirit far more akin to ours than the old austere Latin
creed. A divine death and restoration, the alternation of joy and sorrow
at a divine event, instinct with human interest, calming expiation and
cleansing from the sins which burdened the conscience,—above all, the hope
of a coming life, stamped on the imagination by symbol and
spectacle,—these were the elements which, operating on imperious religious
yearnings, gave a fresh life to paganism, and prepared or deferred the
victory of the Church. The religion of the Great Mother seems at first
sight to offer the poorest promise of any moral message or spiritual
support. It expressed at first the feelings of rude rustics at the
recurring mortality and resurrection of material life in the order of the
seasons. The element of human feeling which it contained was grossly
expressed in bloody rites of mutilation. This cult was often defiled and
disgraced by a crew of effeminate and lustful impostors. Yet the
Thessalian villagers in Apuleius, who chased these vagabonds from their
fields, evidently expected something better from them. They despised the
foul hypocrites, but they did not cease to believe in their religion. The
spiritual instinct of humanity triumphed, as it has so often done, over
the vices of a historical system, extracted the good in it, rejected the
evil, and made it an organ of some sort of spiritual life. Thus the Great
Mother became the Mother of all, enthroned beside the Father of gods and
men. She wears the chaste honours of the Virgin Goddess. Attis and her
love for Attis are similarly transformed. In the syncretism of the age,
which strove to gather up all the forces of heathenism and make them
converge towards a spiritual unity, Magna Mater and Attis leagued their
forces with the conquering Mithra.(2857) In the taurobolium there was
developed a ritual, in which, coarse and materialistic as it was, paganism
made, in however imperfect form, its nearest approach to the religion of
the Cross.
The greatest and most impressive rite in the worship of Cybele was the
taurobolium. There was none which so excited the suspicion and indignation
of the Christian apologists, from Tertullian to Prudentius, because in its
ceremony of the cleansing blood, and in its supposed effects in moral
regeneration and remission of sins, it seemed invented by the ingenuity of
daemons to be a travesty of the sacrifice on Calvary.(2858) It is possible
that the last champions of the ancient cults may have had some such
defiant purpose when they inscribed, in the record of their cleansing, the
words “_in aeternum renatus_.” But in its origin there can be no doubt
that the rite was purely heathen. Its appearance in the Phrygian
ceremonial is comparatively late. The worship of Magna Mater was
essentially an orgiastic cult, and theologically arid. But the syncretism
of the second and third centuries came to its support. And the worships of
Persia, Syria, and Phrygia were ready to coalesce, and to borrow from one
another symbols and doctrines which gave satisfaction to the spiritual
wants of the time. The taurobolium, with its ideas of cleansing and
immortality, passed in the Antonine age from the worship of Anaitis of
Cappadocia to the worship of Magna Mater, and gave the Great Mother a new
hold upon the religious consciousness. In the earlier votive tablets the
name of the rite is _tauropolium_. Anaitis had been identified with the
Artemis Tauropolus of Brauron, whose legend, by popular etymology, came to
be identified, as Milesian exploration spread in the Euxine, with the cult
of the cruel goddess of the Tauric Chersonese.(2859) And by another
etymological freak and the change of a letter, we arrive at the
bull-slaughtering rite of the later Empire. Whether the taurobolium ever
became part of the service of Mithra is a disputed point.(2860) Certainly
the syncretistic tendency of the age, the fact that the most popular
Mithraist symbol was the slaying of the mystic bull, and the record of the
taurobolium on so many inscriptions dedicated to Mithra, would prepare us
for the conclusion that the rite was in the end common to the Persian and
the Phrygian deities. Whatever may be the truth on this point, the two
worships, in the last ages of heathenism in the West, were close allies.
Attis tended more and more to become a solar deity in the age which
culminated in the sun-worship of Julian.(2861) Heliolatry, the last refuge
of monotheism in heathendom, which refused to accept the religion of
Galilee, swept all the great worships of strong vitality into its system,
softened their differences, accentuated their similarities, by every
effort of fancy, false science, or reckless etymology, and in the end,
“Sol invictus” and Mithra were left masters of the field. But Magna Mater,
however originally unworthy, shared in the victory. If she could lend the
support of an accredited clergy, recognised for ages by the State, and the
impressive rite of the bloody baptism, Mithra, on the other hand, had a
moral and spiritual message, an assurance of a future life, and an
enthralling force of mystic and sacramental communion, which made his
alliance even more valuable. The Great Mother, indeed, admitted women to
the ranks of her clergy, while the rites of Mithra probably excluded
them.(2862) And thus a Fabia Aconia Paulina, while her husband, Vettius
Agorius Praetextatus, could inscribe himself “pater patrum,” had no
Mithraist grade which she could place beside her consecration to Hecate
and the Eleusinian goddesses.(2863) But the pair were united in the
sacrament of the taurobolium. And the Great Mother probably never had
purer or sincerer devotees.
When the taurobolium was first introduced into the West is
uncertain.(2864) The earliest monument belongs to A.D. 134 in the reign of
Hadrian, when the ceremony seems to be connected with the Celestial Venus.
The most famous inscription, which connects the rite with the Great
Mother, is of the year 160 A.D., when one L. Aemilius Carpus, an
Augustalis, and a member of the college of the Dendrophori at Lyons, had
the ceremony performed “for the safety” of Antoninus Pius and the imperial
house.(2865) The rite was celebrated at the command of the goddess, or on
the inspired advice of the priest.(2866) It took place generally in early
spring, and was often prolonged over three or four days.(2867) It was a
costly rite, and the expense was sometimes borne by the community, who
made an offertory for the purpose.(2868) The ceremony was superintended by
the xvviri, and attended by a great concourse of the people, with the
magistrates at their head. It is needless to describe again the scene, so
well known from the verses of Prudentius, in which the consecrated bull is
with solemn forms slaughtered on a high-raised platform, and bathes with
the streams of his blood the votary placed in a trench below.(2869) The
rite was believed to impart some sort of strength and purification, the
effect of which lasted for twenty years, when the sacrament was often
renewed. It was, as we have seen, sometimes performed “with intention,”
for the reigning emperor and his house,(2870) and furnishes another
example of the manner in which religion was employed to buttress the power
of the Caesars. A considerable number of monuments in Italy and the
provinces commemorate, in a phrase perhaps borrowed from the Church, the
gratitude of one “born again to eternal life.” It is probable that the
coarse ritual often expressed only an external and materialistic
conception of religious influence. On the other hand, following upon, or
closely connected with initiation into the mysteries of Mithra, it may
easily have become a symbol of moral and spiritual truth, or at any rate a
record of moral aspiration.
For, indeed, in the syncretism and monotheistic drift of the age, the more
powerful worships lost the hardness of their original lines and tended to
absorption and assimilation. There was little strife or repulsion among
these cults; they borrowed freely legends and ritual practice from one
another; even characteristic insignia were interchanged. The legend and
tone of the Cybele worship naturally linked her with others sprung from
the same region, such as the Syrian goddess, Celestial Venus, and
Bellona.(2871) Fanaticism, self-mutilation, expiation by blood, were the
common bond between them. The fierce goddess of Cappadocia, who had
visited Sulla in a dream, was probably first introduced to Roman devotion
in his time. Her dark-robed priests and priestesses were familiar figures
in the Augustan age, gashing themselves like the Galli of Magna Mater,
catching the blood in shields, and dashing it over their train of
followers who believed in its powers of expiation. But Magna Mater, as her
name promises, assumed a milder character, and was identified sometimes
with Maia, Ops, and Minerva; sometimes with Demeter, Bona Dea, and Fauna,
as Attis was identified with Hercules.(2872) In the last age the great
goddess became the universal Mother, full of tenderness and grace, and
giving peace through her cleansing rites. Hers is, along with the cults of
Isis and Mithra, which will next claim our attention, an example of the
process of Divine evolution, by which, in the painful progress of
humanity, the crude efforts of religious symbolism are purged and
elevated. It is an example of the way in which the human spirit, refusing
to break with its past, sometimes succeeds, if only for a time, in putting
new wine into old bottles.