Attis

Pausanias records a distinctly Phrygian version of the myth in which the hermaphroditic being Agdistis is castrated by the gods, and an almond or pomegranate that grows from the severed organs impregnates the nymph Nana, who bears Attis as a result, a chain of transformation with no direct Roman equivalent in the surviving sources.

The Roman poet Catullus, writing in the first century BCE, gives an entirely different kind of account in his poem usually numbered 63: a frenzied first person narrative of Attis castrating himself in a fit of ecstatic devotion and immediately regretting it, once the frenzy has passed, in a long lament for the manhood and homeland he has lost. Catullus's poem is genuinely early evidence, roughly contemporary with Rome's own reception of the cult, which makes it earlier and independent of the fuller liturgical March cycle, the sequence of mourning and rejoicing days that survives only in sources from the fourth century CE onward; the poem and the later calendar describe two different things, a myth and a public ritual programme, and should not be read as evidence for the same moment in the cult's history. Neither ancient version specifies exactly why Attis castrates himself with the clarity later summaries sometimes imply: Pausanias's chain of transformation is left largely unexplained as a fact of myth, while Catullus frames the act as a moment of ecstatic devotion the narrator himself struggles afterward to understand, so the story's core act is consistently present across sources while its motivation is not.

James Frazer's Golden Bough grouped Attis together with Osiris, Adonis and Tammuz as instances of a single recurring type, the dying and rising god whose death and return were read as symbolic of the agricultural cycle of vegetation, and this comparative framework shaped a great deal of twentieth century popular and scholarly writing about ancient Mediterranean religion.

More recent scholarship, notably the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, has argued that the category was constructed by selectively emphasizing resurrection language that appears only in late, syncretic sources and is largely absent or ambiguous in the earlier material for several of the figures Frazer grouped together, Attis included, where a clear statement of the god's return to life is not solidly attested before the Roman imperial period sources that already sit inside a religious environment influenced by the spread of Christianity itself. This entry records the disagreement between the older comparative mythology tradition and the more skeptical modern position rather than asserting that Attis was, or was not, a dying and rising god in the sense Frazer meant. The debate matters beyond Attis specifically, since the dying and rising god category was for much of the twentieth century used as a comparative lens for reading Christian resurrection belief against a supposed wider pattern of Mediterranean religion, a use current scholarship treats with considerably more caution than it once received.