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All versions of the myth of Cybele and Attis contain a traditional tale of the creation of the gods through successive generations, which was an old one in the ancient Near East. We find it in the background story of Cybele related by Pausanias and Arnobius, who use it to describe the rape of the earth and the birth of the monstruous Agdistis. According to Arnobius, Zeus tried to rape the Mother as she was sleeping; his seed fell on the rock Agdos and produced Acdestis instead. In Pausanias’ version, Zeus simply pours out his semen onto the earth and Adgistis is born. Both of these versions conflate the Mother Goddess with Mother Earth and tell of the union of the male sky god with female earth. This myth is best known through Theogony of Hesiod, but the myth of divine succession is far older. Its roots lie in Bronze Age Anatolian, in the Hurro-Hittite tradition, where the elements of the story of Cybele and Attis are paralleled by two myths, the myth of Kumarbi and the Song of Ullikummi. There are several points of correspondence with the myth of Cybele. In the myth of Kumarbi, Anu, the god of Mesopotamian origin, is deposed from his position as principal god by Kumarbi, who castrates him by bitting off his genitals. Kumarbi swallows the genitals and becomes impregnated with five powerful deities. In a parallel move, the gods attempt to depose Agdistis from power by ripping off the male genitals; nobody swallows them, but the genitals are thrown on the ground, resulting in the pregnancy of Sangarios’ daughter. This last detail may be present in the Kumarbi myth also, as he spits out the genitals of Anu onto the earth, which then conceives. In both cases the locus of the deity’s power is his male organs, and the intent is to remove this power by removing those organs. In each case, though, the threatening god’s power is not eliminated but merely transferred to the next generation.
The Song of Ullikummi also contains at least one element that appears in the Phrygian tradition. In this poem, Kumarbi wishes to overthrow the Storm God, one of the deities whose birth resulted from Kumarbi’s swallowing Anu’s genitals. For this purpose Kumarbi begets the Storm Monster Ullikummi, by spilling his semen on a rock, which then becomes pregnant with Ullikummi, an episode paralleling that of the birth of Agdistis as related by Arnobius. The intent of Kumarbi’s action is to produce a creature who will have both the strength and the hardness of a rock, but the result is to create a being that is difficult to control, as Agdistis is too.
These unusual birth and castration patterns are also found in Hesiod’s Theogony. Although Ouranos is masculine, not bisexual, the castration is carried out for the same reasons as the attack on Agdistis – namely, to make him passive and eliminate the threat of violence. In another parallel action, Ouranos’s severed genitals drip blood onto the earth, which immediately becomes pregnant with the Erinyes, Giants, and Nymphs. The actual male genitalia, thrown into the sea, create Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, in a manner reminiscent of the beautiful Attis being born of the severed male genitalia of Agdistis. In another Greek parallel, the 6th century BCE historian Pherecydes recorded a theogony in which Zas (Zeus) and Chthonie/Ge (Earth), two of the three original divine beings, marry and produce a monstruous offspring, which then forms a threat to the power of Zeus and Earth.
Bibliography
| Roller 1999, 247-248 | Roller, Lynn E. In Search of God the Mother. The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press 1999. |
Amar Annus
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