The Demanding Goddess: Cybele in Catullus 63

 

Engraving by Giacomo Bossi

      Everyone with any interest in ancient Roman poetry is likely to know several of Catullus’ playful erotic carmina: probably the lament on Lesbia’s sparrow (3), the lyrics on counting kisses (5 and 7), or the invitation to a party at which one might wish to be all nose (13).  Those somewhat better acquainted with Latin are likely to be familiar with his extremely abusive poems of invective charged with obscene imagery such as 88 with its attack on Gallus for incest or the memorable Catullus 16 the opening line of which is “I will fuck your face and your ass.” [1]

     Less familiar, probably, are the poems which some in antiquity, perhaps even the author, may have considered the chef d’oeuvres of the collection, the so-called carmina maiora or carmina docta (61-69), the chief theme of which is marriage.  Now, though Catullus is best-known for the incidental expressions of sexuality associated with lust and indecent raillery, he recognized that, both biologically and socially, erotic desire aims ultimately at marriage, stable families, and offspring.  The poet was engaged with each of these three manifestations of desire, though the first two, the non-reproductive, uses of eroticism excite more modern interest than the recommendation of stable marriage and thus have dominated his reputation.  Number 63 demonstrates how, even as he recommends socially conservative behavior, he provides an altogether sensational exemplum, though accompanied by a moralizing theme.  

     The chief figure in Catullus 63 is Attis whose worship, in association with that of Cybele, had been imported from Phrygia into Greece in the fourth century B.C.E.   The cult spread to Rome where it was accepted as a part of government-endorsed religious practice in the early third century B. C.E. in obedience to a Sibylline oracle promising divine aid in the Second Punic War.  In spite of that official approval, however, Attis must have seemed to most Romans a foreigner, and the self-castration of her devotees, the Galli, a thoroughly barbaric custom.  Catullus’ account of Attis’ story, related the rare excited galliambic meter, is meant to seem exotic and thrilling, though owing more to the style of the Grand Guignol than the travelogue.  Just as Gothic novels were set in Italy (if not more distant lands), which seemed vaguely mysterious to many Britons, for Catullus the far-off origins of Cybele’s rites heightens the drama while reassuring the Roman reader such things were for civilized men a mere side-show.

     Cybele was far from alone among Near Eastern deities to obtain a following in Rome.  The patriotic and historic observances that constituted the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, involving worship of Jove and the Olympians principally through sacrifice, had come to seem unsatisfying to many.  Some sought spiritual sustenance through a variety of foreign divinities, such as the Celtic Epona, but by far the largest group of gods imported from other lands were from the Near East, including the Persian Mithras and the Syrian Sol Invictus.  Others include the original worship of Dionysos (and the related ceremonies of Zagreus and Orpheus), the Eleusinian mysteries (which feature a dying and reborn goddess instead of a god), the Pythagorean Mysteries (though Pythagoras was a Greek, many aspects of Pythagorean belief have been thought to be non-Greek), and Christianity, which in its early forms included mysteries from which the uninitiated were barred.  The most common pattern, though, the one on which Frazer constructed the magnificent volumes of The Golden Bough, featured myths of an earth goddess, a Magna Mater, and her consorts.  Surely extending back into the Neolithic Age, these couples include the Mesopotamian Tammuz and Inanna, the Levantine Adonis and Aphrodite, the Egyptian Osiris and Isis, and the Phrygian Cybele and Attis.

     The Great Mother embodying the fertility of the earth which meant so much to our archaic ancestors, meant less to the urban Romans of Catullus’ time.  He, and others of the poets called by Cicero neoteric, or new style, like poets in the last hundred years, abandoned a grand and lofty epic style to focus on personal life and varied the old myths to express what were to them more contemporary themes. 

     Thus Catullus 63, far from a conventional hymn, piously remembering and praising the goddess Cybele and her consort Attis, and then asking favors, is in fact, the opposite, a horrified rejection of her orgiastic rituals and, in particular, the self-castration of her ministrants [2].  This shifts the story’s significance from  a celebration of fertility and life, in effect a tribute to sexuality, to a tale of a “belle dame sans merci,” a cautionary tale about the hazards of ecstatic religious practice.  Cybele here resembles that negative feminine archetype of the lover to be feared, different aspects of which are exemplified in ancient Greece by the Sphinx, Pandora, Eos (as Tithonus’ lover), and, in the Odyssey, Circe and Calypso, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis.  The lovers of goddesses typically come to grief, and those associated with the cyclic turn of the agricultural year must die, since, for the farmer, death is fruition and ripeness [3].

     The mythic about-face is marked by the identification of Attis, not as a Phrygian, but as a Greek who had traveled to Asia Minor.  He has then from the start an identity in part as a mythic figure and in part as a Greek Everyman.  Once his furor departs and he realizes what he has done, he laments his rashness in joining in Cybele’s rituals in a foreign land and thus deserting his home, leaving behind such Hellenic institutions as “the market, the wrestling-place, the racecourse, the playground” [4]  His mistress Cybele is more tyrannical than loving, manifesting in a “fearsome” [5] aspect to Attis, since his emasculation a “sterile man,” a mere “serving-girl” held in thrall by “madness.” [6].  Thus the poem ends with the persona, not inviting the deity as in Sappho’s hymn to Aphrodite but rather praying “may all your madness be kept far from me” [7].

     Attis’ principal ἁμαρτία is not, as Cybele alleges, his disloyalty to her, but rather his unnatural hostility to love, his “overwhelming loathing of sex” (“Veneris nimio odio,” l. 17), an attitude shared by a variety of other religious enthusiasts to whom erotic energy was wasteful, an obstacle to salvation or enlightenment.  Though a world-wide commonplace of ascetic practice considers celibacy to intensify spiritual power, physical castration is nonetheless profoundly abhorrent to most, a radical and unreversible assault on the individual’s well-being, going beyond such measures as fasting and mortification of the flesh.  Whatever the effect on religiosity, emasculation is a deeply antisocial act, undertaken in the interest of one’s own soul, but hostile or, at any rate, indifferent to any civic role.  The foundation  of every social order is householders in stable family units who produce wealth, defend against enemies, and reproduce the next generation. 

     Indeed, as many critics have noted, the chief theme of the entire group of carmina maiora is marriage.  Numbers 61 and 62 are epithalamia, while 64 is about the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, and about Theseus breaking his promise of marrying Ariadne.  65 is an introduction to 66, which details the marital concord between Queen Berenice and her husband; 67 is about the failure of a marriage and 68 about Catullus' reflections on his own adulterous relationship.  Attis’ story in this context is a cautionary exemplum urging identification with the most conventional of virtues: social conservatism, orthodox religion, and patriotism.  That it accomplishes these anodyne ends by a lurid tale, related in a jangly meter describing weird sexual rituals and ecstatic states of possession is typical of that sort of moralizing which titillates by relating misconduct, at once relishing and condemning the violators of norms rather like an exploitation movie.  In a way the poem also resembles a horror film in which an average person is swept up in bizarre violent behavior to which the reader may vicariously thrill while safely out of danger.  Apart from its thematic emphasis on marriage which is never foregrounded, the poem is a sort of thriller with its breathless rush of tumbling lines leading to a fierce theophany.  The reader of the poem can experience enthusiastic excitement and its opposite, rueful depression while secure in the conviction that he would never be tempted to emulate Attis. 

 

1.  “Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō.”

2.  Among the countless parallels of this universal theme are Eve in  the Bible as well as Judith and Salome (one virtuous and one wicked beheader).  In English tradition the ambiguous figure of Mogan le Fay is relevant as are the numerous fairies who, in balladry, capture lovers to carry off to another world as captives.  The persecution of witches is a world-wide indication that the motif did not remain always in the realm of the imagination. 

3.  Self-castration is not, of course, a monopoly of Cybele’s devotees.  For a discussion of the practice in general, see, for instance, J. Wade, “The castrated gods and their castration cults: Revenge, punishment, and spiritual supremacy,” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, vol. 38, no. 1 (2019).  Daniel F. Caner in “The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity,” Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Nov., 1997) focuses on the early Christian church of whom the most notable example is Origen.  Cf. in more recent times the Russian Skoptsy and the Hindu hijra (whose act finds precedent in Shiva’s severing of his penis, described in the Mahabharata and which is echoed among the members of Dera Sacha Sauda in India today).  

4.  Ll. 50-73 the specifics are “foro, palaestra, stadioo, et guminasiis” l. 60.

5.  “Ferox,” l. 78.

6.  “Vir sterilis,” l. 69; “famula,” l. 90, “furoris”, l. 79.

7.  “Procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis,” l. 92.