The Myth in Its Versions

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.