Agdistis

Near Mount Agdos in Phrygia, the myth relates, Zeus spilled seed on the earth while sleeping, and from the ground itself a being was born who was both male and female, called Agdistis, wild and immensely powerful. Fearing what this being might do, the other gods resolved to weaken it. Dionysus tricked Agdistis into drinking at a spring until sleep overcame it, then tied its male organ by a cord to a nearby tree; waking and springing up, Agdistis was castrated by its own violent movement. From the blood, or from the severed organ itself depending on the telling, grew an almond tree, or in some versions a pomegranate.

Nana, a daughter of the river Sangarius, picked a fruit from that tree and placed it in her lap, and became pregnant by it though no man had touched her; her father, disbelieving her, exposed the resulting child, who was rescued and raised as Attis, and grew into a beautiful young man. Agdistis, now castrated into female form and effectively the Mother goddess herself in most tellings, fell in love with Attis. When Attis was about to be married to a princess, Agdistis appeared at the wedding feast and drove him into a frenzy; Attis fled to the mountains, castrated himself under a pine tree, and bled to death, or in another strand of the tradition was killed by a wild boar. Violets are said to have sprung from his blood, and the pine became, ever after, sacred to his cult.

The version summarized here follows the fullest ancient recounting, preserved by the Christian apologist Arnobius of Sicca in his early fourth-century Adversus Nationes, written to expose the pagan mysteries he attacks; the geographer Pausanias, in his second-century Description of Greece, alludes to the same core story more briefly and locally. Both writers have their own reasons for shaping the material, one hostile, one antiquarian, which modern scholarship weighs when reconstructing what Phrygian cult at Pessinus actually held. The standard modern synthesis of the ancient evidence is Maarten Vermaseren's Cybele and Attis, The Myth and the Cult (1977).

The myth's central function in antiquity was etiological: it explained why the priests of Cybele at her major sanctuaries, the Galli, ritually castrated themselves on entering her service, reenacting Attis's act, and why the pine cone and the pine tree itself were carried in her processions. Ancient sources are not consistent about Agdistis's ultimate identity. Some, including the strand followed above, treat Agdistis and the Mother goddess Cybele as the same being under different names at different points in the story; others keep Agdistis as a distinct, subordinate figure who loves Attis but is not simply Cybele herself. This entry records that disagreement rather than resolving it, and notes that Rhea, with whom Greek sources sometimes equated Cybele, sits at one further remove from Agdistis specifically.