Tertullian wrote: “The devil by the mysteries of his idols, imitates even the main parts of the divine mysteries”.

Did the Christian Devil truly beat his Almighty God in the execution of the Divine Plans? Are the Pagan Mysteries mere imitations of the Christian Mysteries yet to come? Or did the Church simply assimilate Pagan Sacred Mysteries?

One of the most popular religious cults of Ancient Rome was that of the Great Mother Cybele and her son Attis. Imported from Phrygia, the cult grew in popularity and reached Rome and the further corners of the Ancient World.

Was Tertullian right, or could it be that the Pagan Mater Deum Magna and her son, the Good Shepherd, were the precursors to the Christian Virgin Mary and her son Jesus Christ?

Yes, in my opinion, the central theme to the cult of Attis (one of the most potent saviour-gods of the Ancient World) left its imprint on early Christian minds and repeated itself in the Christian religion.

“Who is then the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods: she is both the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; She came into being next to and together with the great Creator; She is in control of every form of life, and the Cause of all generation; She easily brings to perfection all things that are made. Without pain She brings to birth ... She is the Motherless Maiden, enthroned at the very side of Zeus, and in very truth is the Mother of All the Gods ... ~ Emperor Julian II "the Blessed", from an Oration to Cybele composed at Pessinus, AVC MCXVI.

The Great Mother Divine, Great Mother of all the Gods, Mother of all that lives, was brought to Rome from Phrygia/Thrace, accompanied by her son Attis, in 191 B.C.. Her entourage reached Rome in 204 BC and the Goddess was then enthroned as the Sacred Protectress of the City of Rome. The deities were reverently placed in a Temple on the Palatine Hill, right at the centre of the city.

The Shrines of the Great Mother from Mount Ida were normally in caves and mountains. She was a black meteorite set as a face in a Silver Statue and in her benign nurturing aspect she was akin to Ceres, Demeter, Hera, Juno, however in Her dark aspect She was instead associated with the unconscious mysteries of magick, intuition and destruction, very similar to those of Kali, Astarte, Hecate and Luna.

The Delphic Sybil had announced that in order to save Rome from an invading foe, the Goddess would have to be brought from Pessinus to Rome, and that this would have liberated Italy from the pending invasion of Hannibal and his Carthagian hordes who were already stationed at the gates of Rome, ravaging the Italian countryside.
“From distant Pessinus in Galatia (Asia Minor) came Her Image of silver and black meteoric stone from the starry heavens, accompanied by a conclave of the Gallae, male-born priestesses whose Order had served the Goddess in Phrygia for millennia. What destiny had summoned them to the cause of Rome?” Arnobius.
In 204 BC Italy was hungry and firmly held in the vice of the Punic Wars. After consulting the Sibylline books and in an act of hope and faith, the Romans sought help from the Great Idean Mother, already known to their Trojan ancestors. The Mother and Son deities were shipped to Rome from Galatian Pessinus. At Ostia, the entourage of male-born priestesses and the image of the Goddess were pulled ashore by the noble and virtuous Vestal Virgin, Claudia Quinta, and were housed in the temple of Victoria in the very heart of Rome.
“Censors M. Liuius Salinator and C. Claudius Nero initiated a thirteen-year construction plan to honour Cybele with a worthy edifice on the Palatine Hill. From Claudia's own lineage would come many of Rome's greatest, as the fortunes of Hannibal, and Carthage itself, withered as a dying branch. “Arnobius (Adversus Gentes, V – 17 and Exhortations II, Clement of Alexandria.

The priests of the Idean Mother of the Gods, the Galli, wore long hair, tied back and perfumed with essential oils. Her priests, priestesses and initiates celebrated her rites with lively and wild music; music whose beat increased until in its crescendo, the aspirant adepts would enter a frenzied trance and would cut and castrate themselves, thereby becoming candidates for the priesthood. Through this act of self-emulation and dedicatory sacrifice, they became god-like and were readied to face the mysterious ordeal of rebirth.

Lucius Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, Chapter VIII, gives us a beautiful description of Cybele’s devotees who: "went . . . forth, shouting and dancing . . . they bent down their necks and spun round so that their hair flew out in a circle; they hit their own flesh; finally, every one took his two-edged weapon and wounded himself in divers places. ''

Many renditions of the story of Cybele and Attis abound, but here I will only touch on some ofthe versions in which the Christian Mysteries of the Immaculate Conception, Baptism, Communion/Eucharist and Divine Virgin-Mother-and-Child are mirrored.

In one version of the myth, Attis was a son of Nana (the Goddess incarnate), virgin who ate an almond (in some versions a pomegranate) and thereby conceived Him. The Fatherless God grew up to become the sacrifice for all mankind; the sacrificial lamb who took away the sins of the world. Like his priests he was castrated, nailed on a pine tree and his blood poured forth to redeem the earth. In other versions Cybele’s tragic love for the mortal Attis ends as a story of self-mutilation and regeneration.

Attis, the Good Shepherd, was the son of the Goddess Incarnate. He was handsome and Cybele grew to love Him immensely. Attis roamed the countryside and fell in love with a nymph. Cybele, who required complete devotion, was overcome with jealousy and drove the young man to madness. In passionate frenzy Attis castrated himself at the foot of a pine tree. It is said that where his blood dripped, the first violets sprang up.

Finding Attis dead, the Goddess’ sadness spread all over the Earth and remorseful she carried his body into her cave and wept bitterly over it throughout the night. The following day she buried Attis and in solitary confinement focused all her Will toward returning him to life. Like Attis, Nature returns to life every Springtime, bringing with it salvation and hope to the world and to all of mankind.

The virgin birth, the death and resurrection of a dying god-man, the salvation of those washed in His blood in both Paganism and Christianity is no mere coincidence and deeper inspections reveal more similarities.

Arnobius tells us that the Great Idean Mother one day lay sleeping on a mountain top in Phrygia and Jupiter passing by was stirred to lust at the site of the beautiful maiden and tried to make love to her. The Idean Mother rejected him and Jupiter spent his lust upon a large rock, bringing Agdistis, a fierce and hermaphroditic creature into existence. Fearing him, the Gods got Dionysus to get him drunk and then emasculated him; from the drops of his blood sprang forth a pomegranate tree. Nana, daughter of the River God Sangarius, one day, ate a pomegranate from this tree and conceived a child, which her father exposed on the mountain as illegitimate. The child was suckled by wild beasts and raised by the local herdsmen and grew up into a handsome young man. When the Mother of the Gods beheld His beauty she fell in love with Him, loving Him exceedingly, as did the lustful Agdistis who continuously showered gifts upon the handsome youth. King Midas of Pessinus wishing to withdraw the prince from this dangerous friendship, offered Him his daughter in marriage. Consumed by jealousy the Idean Goddess struck Attis with madness and a form of furious passion that caused Him to castrate himself under a pine tree, shouting “Take these Agdistis, for which you have stirred up so great and perilous commotions”.

The wound was mortal and the life drained out of Attis. From His blood sprang forth the first violets of Spring and His spirit is rumoured to have been accommodated within the pine tree.

The Passion of Attis was celebrated on 25th of March, exactly 9 months before the 25th of December, the solstice celebration of His birth. The time of His death was also the time of his generation, when he would symbolically enter his Mother’s womb, just to be conceived again, and be reborn in the Spring. Strangely enough Jesus shares His date of birth and death. To mark this event, Black Friday, or Day of Blood, was celebrated. The phallic Tree, wrapped up in a white woolen shroud was taken into the sacred cave. The image of Attis was carried by reed bearers (who echo the bearers of palms during Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem) and impaled on a tree in the Temple. During the ceremony, the initiates castrated themselves and presented their severed genitals to the Goddess, along with those of a gelded bull or lamb sacrificed at the Taurobolium. On the night of the third day the tomb/cave was found empty and full of lights, as the God had risen from the dead. His death and resurrection were celebrated at that time every year as are the Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter.

This seasonal celebration was accompanied by fasting, terrible mourning, sexual abstinence, self-flagellation and self-mutilation. An effigy of the God would be affixed to the pine and it would be paraded through the streets and placed in the cave, for three days, when the God would rise from the dead on the Sunday, resurrected by the Great Mother and reborn of Her. The announcement would be made: “The God is saved and for you will come salvation from your trials.” The carnival-like Springtime Festival of Hilaria (or Joy) would be celebrated by the Romans, who would remove their “winter skins” (material which had been stitched on them as a winter-time suit and which enabled them to brace the harshness of winter), they would bath and indulge in horseplay, gaiety, lovemaking, dancing, feasting and merry-making.

Every year, upon the commemoration of Attis’ death and resurrection, devotees of the Goddess also took part in a sacramental meal in which the novices would eat the body of the Saviour out of a cymbal and drink his blood from a drum (bread and wine). This was preceded by the taurobolium in which the devotees to be inducted, wreathed with violets, would move under the slated platform and attain purity through the bloody sacrifice of the emblem of the Good Shepherd.

The Taurobolium was one of Cybele’s most solemn rituals during which a six-year-old bull was placed on a sacrificial platform above the kneeling initiate below, and was slaughtered. The blood poured through the slats in the platform bathing the initiate who then became “born again”. This baptismal blood-bath annulled the sins of the initiate. They had been washed clean by the precious blood of the God. Those who could not afford a bull used a lamb and were thereby “washed in the blood of the Lamb”. Another coincidence?

In the earlier years of the cult, the High Priest or Archigallus would be crucified on a pine tree, but in later years he would simply cut his forearm offering the vital essence of his blood to the Goddess, as a substitute for human sacrifice.

The site on Vatican Hill today, where now stands the Basilica of St. Peter, is the site of the underground cave Temple of Cybele and the sanctuary of Attis in ancient Rome. It appears to me that the Christians adopted the Passion and crucifixion [dates included] of the Phrygian God for their own Saviour, dying-resurrecting Godman, his conception at the Hilaria on 25th of March and his birth, 9 months later, on 25the of December, as well as the day of conception or Annunciation . Attis and Jesus were conceived on “Lady Day”. (Please note here that Domina is the Latin word for “Lady”, Lady being one of the titles of Cybele.)

The Divine Son, the Light of the World, must die and rise from the grave so that his devotees and followers might also, like the setting and rising Sun, through Him be resurrected into life immortal. Does any of this sound familiar? All of it, isn’t it? How can any rational person claim that the Pagan Mysteries futuristically borrowed from the still-to-be Christian Cult?

How did mankind imitate that which God had not yet manifested? How did the Christian Devil outwit his Master? And how could the Almighty, All-knowing God be so outwitted and out-maneuvered by His own creation? If the true significance of these Mystery Schools is not to be found in their differences neither in the similarities, then it has to be found elsewhere …

Deuteronomy 21:22-23: “If a man guilty of a capital offence is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not desecrate the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.”
This injunction puzzles me. Why should a man guilty of capital offence be spared God’s curse? And if that was the case why hand any man on a tree? Surely these people should have been trying to please their God rather than race against time in fear of His reaction? Why impale criminals and then quickly remove them before God’s curse befell them? I believe there is confusion here and that what was detestable to those who wrote this book was the fact that this was another religious practice (probably that of the Cult of Attis) which regularly took place in the land of their Almighty God too.

I wonder too, if the Christ of the Christian Mysteries was not an initiate of sorts who followed in the steps of other dying-resurrecting god-men, like Attis? His baptism was not a Christian custom, as Christianity did not yet exist, and neither was it a Jewish custom. Could it be possible that this baptism which Jesus underwent was a Pagan initiation of sorts ?

One of the tenets of Paganism is that everything is interconnected. The Gods penetrate and permeate everything. This means that love and respect should be extended to all, as ALL is contained in and contains the Divine Essence.

Just as through the beads of a necklace a thread runs, so through the hearts and minds of men the timeless thread of Divinity traverses ages immemorial, connecting One to All and All to One.
What came first? The Egg or the Chicken? Does it really matter? Is it not true that the real significance of all of the mysteries is not to be found in the chronology of events but rather in that which speaks straight to the individual heart making it part of the Goddess’ Brísingamen? Only in the heart which houses Eros can this thread of the Goddess’ necklace be perceived and the true life-altering revelation or initiation take place.

May our Pagan faith die to its faults and resurrect in the light of Truth possessing an all-encompassing outlook and embrace the similarities rather than the differences of the myriads of expressions and manifestations through the world of men’s minds.

Let go and let the Gods!

References:

The Golden Bough – Sir James Frazer, Chpt One.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/nemythology/a/cybeleattis.htm

http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/attis.html

http://paganizingfaithofyeshua.netfirms.com/no_4_attis_cybele.htm

http://hunter.apana.org.au/~gallae/pantheon/myth/attis.htm