CHAPTER IV
MAGNA MATER
The earliest invader from the East of the sober decorum of old Roman religion, and almost the last to succumb, was Magna Mater of Pessinus. There is no pagan cult which S. Augustine, and many of the Fathers before him, assail with such indignant contempt as hers.[2811] And indeed it was long regarded with suspicion by old Romans of the cultivated class. For generations after her reception on the Palatine, no Roman was permitted to enter her official service. But there was something in that noisy and bloody ritual, and in the cruel, ascetic sacrifice of its devotees, which exercised an irresistible power over the imagination of the vulgar; and even Lucretius felt a certain imaginative awe of the tower-crowned figure drawn by lions and adored by the cities of many lands.[2812] Varro, who probably had no great love for the un-Roman ritual, found a place for the Phrygian goddess in his théodicée.[2813] Her baptism of blood in the taurobolium was a rite of such strange enthralling influence that it needed all the force of the Christian Empire to abolish it. And on many of the last inscriptions of the fourth century the greatest names in the Roman aristocracy leave the record of their cleansing in the curious phrase renatus in aeternum.[2814] In his youth S. Augustine had seen processions of effeminate figures with dripping locks, painted faces, and soft womanish bearing, passing along the streets of Carthage, and begging alms of the crowd. His horror at the memory of the scene probably springs almost [pg 548]as much from the manly instincts of the Roman as from the detestation of the Christian moralist for a debasing superstition.[2815]
But S. Augustine knew well the power of the superstition. For more than 600 years the Great Mother had been enthroned on the Palatine; for more than 300 years she had captivated the remotest provinces of the West.[2816] In the terror of the Second Punic War, 204 B.C., she had been summoned by solemn embassy from her original home at Pessinus in Galatia. In obedience to a sibylline command, the Roman youth with purest hands, together with the Roman matrons, had welcomed her at Ostia.[2817] The ship which bore her up the Tiber,[2818] when it grounded on a shoal, had been sent forward on its way, to vindicate her calumniated virtue, by the touch of a virgin of the Claudian house.[2819] A decree of the Senate in 191 B.C. had given the strange goddess a home on the Palatine, hard by the shrine of Apollo; and the great Megalesian festival in April was founded.[2820] But the foreign character of the cult was long maintained. It was a time when the passion for religious excitement was in the air, and when its excesses had to be restrained by all the forces of the State. No Roman was permitted to accept the Phrygian priesthood for a century after the coming of the Great Mother.[2821] But towards the end of the Republic, the goddess had captured all imaginations, and her priests and symbols meet us in all the poets of the great age.[2822] Augustus restored her temple; some of his freedmen were among her priests;[2823] Livia is pictured with the crown of towers upon her brow.[2824] Then came a long interval, till the death of Nero, during which the Phrygian goddess is hardly heard of.[2825] With the accession of the Flavians the eastern cults finally entered on a long and unchallenged reign. Vespasian restored the temple of the Great Mother at Herculaneum, which had been thrown [pg 549]down by an earthquake.[2826] In the reign of Trajan her worship had penetrated to the Spanish peninsula,[2827] and she is found, along with other Eastern deities, in the towns of the new province of Dacia.[2828] The first glimpses of the taurobolium appear before the middle of the second century, and the goddess figures on the coins of Antoninus Pius.[2829] A taurobolium for that emperor was offered “with intention” at Lyons in 160 A.D.,[2830] and there are several dedications to Magna Mater in the same reign made by colleges of the Dendrophori at Ostia.[2831] Tertullian tells how a high priest of Cybele vainly offered his blood for the safety of M. Aurelius, seven days after the Emperor had died in his quarters on the Danube.[2832] It does not fall within the scope of our present inquiry to trace the immense popularity of the worship under the princes of the third century. That was the period of the great triumph of the spiritual powers of the East. At the end of the fourth century the Great Mother and Mithra were in the van of the pagan resistance to the religious revolution of Theodosius and his sons.[2833]
The worship of Cybele, coming from the same regions as the Trojan ancestors of Rome, was at first a patrician cult.[2834] Members of the proudest houses bore a part in welcoming her to a place in the Roman pantheon.[2835] Yet, as we have seen, Romans were for generations forbidden to enrol themselves among her effeminate priesthood. By a curious contradiction of sentiment, people were fascinated by the ritual, while they despised the celebrants. The legend which was interpreted by Stoic and Neoplatonist as full of physical or metaphysical meanings,[2836] had also elements of human interest which appealed to the masses, always eager for emotional excitement. The love of the Great Mother for a fair youth, his unfaithfulness, and penitential self-mutilation under the pine-tree; the passionate mourning for lost love, and then the restoration of the self-made victim, attended by a choir of priests for ever, who had made [pg 550]the same cruel sacrifice[2837]—all this, so alien to old Roman religious sentiment, triumphed over it in the end by novelty and tragic interest. The legend was developed into a drama, which, at the vernal festival of the goddess, was produced with striking, if not artistic, effect. On the first day the Dendrophori bore the sacred tree, wreathed with violets, to the temple. There was then a pause for a day, and, on the third, the priests, with frantic gestures and dishevelled hair, abandoned themselves to the wildest mourning, lacerating their arms and shoulders with wounds, from which the blood flowed in torrents. Severe fasting accompanied these self-inflicted tortures. Then came a complete change of sensation. On the day called Hilaria the votaries gave themselves up to ecstasies of joy, to celebrate the restoration of Attis. On the last day of the festival a solemn procession took its way to the brook Almon, to bathe the goddess in its waters.[2838] The sacred stone, brought originally from her home in Asia, and the most sacred symbol of the worship, wrapped in robes, was borne upon a car with chants and music, and that gross, unabashed naturalism which so often shocks and surprises us in pagan ritual till we trace it to its source.
The government long treated the cult of Cybele as a foreign worship.[2839] The title of its great festival is Greek. Yet before the close of the Republic, Romans are found enrolled in its priesthoods and sacred colleges, and long lists of these official votaries can be gathered from the inscriptions of the imperial period. The archigallus, or high priest, appears often on the Italian and provincial monuments. He is found at Merida, Capua, Ostia, and Lyons, in Numidia and Portugal.[2840] He must have performed his part at many a taurobolium, crowned with laurel wreaths, wearing his mitre and ear-rings and armlets, with the image of Attis on his breast.[2841] The names of the ordinary priests abound, from the freedman of the house of Augustus to the great nobles of the reign of Theodosius and Honorius.[2842] The priesthood was sometimes held for life, or for a long term of years. [pg 551]A priest at Salonae in Dalmatia had punctually performed the sacred offices for seventeen years.[2843] Women were naturally admitted to the priesthood of a cult whose central interest was a woman’s love and grief. Sometimes they are lowly freedwomen with Greek names, sometimes they bear the proudest names in the Roman aristocracy.[2844] The Dendrophori, who on festive days bore the sacred tree, formed a religious college, and their record appears on many monuments of Italian and provincial towns—Como, Ostia, and Cumae, Caesarea (Afr.), Valentia, and Lyons.[2845] Other colleges were the Cannophori and Cernophori, the keepers of the mystic symbols.[2846] The chanters, drummers, and cymbal players were indispensable at great ceremonial scenes, such as the taurobolium,[2847] and were arranged in graded ranks. Of a lower degree were the vergers and apparitors, who watched over the chapels of the goddess.[2848] And, lastly, there were the simple worshippers, who also formed themselves into guilds, with all the usual officers of such corporations. This cult, like so many others, existed not only for ceremonial rite, but for fellowship and social exhilaration, and, through its many gradations of religious privilege, it must have drawn vast numbers into the sacred service in the times of the Empire.
But the pages of Apuleius, and other authorities, show us that, beside the official clergy and collegiate members, there were, as happens to all popular religions, a mass of unlicensed camp followers and mere disreputable vagrants, who used the name of the Great Mother to exploit the ignorant devotion and religious excitability of the rustic folk. The romance of Apuleius, as Dr. Mahaffy has suggested, is probably derived from earlier sources, and dressed up to titillate the prurient tastes of a degraded society.[2849] Yet its pictures of country life in Thessaly, although they may not be always locally accurate, can hardly be purely imaginative. The scenes may not be always Thessalian, but that they are in the main true pictures of country life in the Antonine age may be proved from other authorities. Apuleius was too careful an artist to sever himself [pg 552]altogether from the actual life of his time. And what a picture it is! The air positively thrills with daemonic terror and power. Witches and lewd sorceresses abound; the solitary inn has its weird seductions; the lonely country cottage has its tragedy of lawless love or of chaste devotion to the dead. Brigands in mountain fastnesses divide their far-gathered spoil, and hold debate on plans of future lawless adventure. Mountain solitudes, and lonely villages or castles among the woods, are aroused by the yelping hounds, who start the boar from his lair, while the faithless traitor places his friend at its mercy. We meet the travelling cheese merchant, and the noble exile on his way to Zacynthus. We watch the raid on the banker’s house at Thebes, and the peasants setting their dogs on the passing traveller; the insolence of the wandering legionary; the horrors of the slave prison, with its wasted, starved, and branded forms; the amours of buxom wives, and the comic concealment or discovery of lovers, in the manner of Boccaccio. It is only too certain that the vileness and superstition which Apuleius has depicted may easily find a parallel on the Roman stage, or in the pages of Martial.
In all this social panorama, romantic, amusing, or disgusting, there is no more repulsive, and probably no truer scene than that in which the wandering priests of the Syrian goddess appear. That deity, like many others of Eastern origin, was often identified with the Great Mother. Apuleius probably confounded them; the rites of their worships were often the same, and the picture in Apuleius may be taken to represent the orgies of many a wandering troop of professed devotees of the Great Mother in the age of the Antonines.[2850] The leader is an old eunuch, with wild straggling locks—a man of the foulest morals, carrying about with him an image of the goddess, and levying alms from the superstition of the rustics. He is attended by a crew worthy of him, wretches defiled with all the worst vices of the ancient world, and shamelessly parading their degradation. But they combine a shrewd eye to business with this wild licence. They know all the arts to catch the fancy of the mob of clowns, whose grey dull lives and inbred superstition make them eager for any display which will intoxicate them with the novelty of a violent sensation. These [pg 553]people are on that level where lust and the passion for blood and suffering readily league themselves with religious excitement. After a night of moral horrors, the foul brotherhood go forth in various costume to win the largesses of the countryside. With painted cheeks and robes of white or yellow, crossed with purple stripes, their arms bared to the shoulder, and carrying swords or axes, they dance along wildly to the sound of the flute.[2851] With obscene gesticulation and discordant shrieks they madly bite their arms or lacerate them with knives. One of the band, as if seized with special inspiration, heaving and panting under the foul afflatus, shrieks out the confession of some sin against the holy rites, and claims the penalty from his own hands.[2852] With hard knotted scourge he belabours himself, while the blood flows in torrents. At last the cruel frenzy exhausts itself, and obtains its reward in the offerings of the spectators. Fine flour and cheese, milk and wine, coins of copper and silver, are eagerly showered upon the impostors, and as eagerly gathered in.[2853] Surprised in frightful orgies of vice, the scoundrels have at last to retreat before the outraged moral sense of the villagers. They decamp during the night, and on the morrow once more find comfortable quarters in the house of a leading citizen who is devoted to the service of the gods, and blind to the imposture of their professing ministers.[2854]
The episode in Apuleius suggests some curious questions as to the moral effect of these emotional cults. That in their early stages they had no elevating moral influence,—nay, that their votaries might combine a strict conformity to rite with great looseness of life,—is only too certain. The Delias and Cynthias of the poets, who kept the fasts of Isis, were assuredly not models of virtue. The assumption of the tonsure and linen habit by a debauchee like Commodus does not reassure us. Yet princes of high character in the second and the third centuries lent the countenance of imperial power to the worships of the East.[2855] And the Mother of the Gods found her last and most gallant defenders among great nobles of high repute and sincere pagan piety in the last years of [pg 554]heathenism in the West. It was a strange transformation. Yet the problem is not perhaps insoluble. A religion may deteriorate as its authority over society becomes more assured with age. But, in times of moral renovation, and in the face of powerful spiritual rivalries, a religion may purge itself of the impurities of youth. Religious systems may also be elevated by the growing moral refinement of the society to which they minister. It is only thus that we can explain the undoubted fact that the Phrygian and Egyptian worships, originally tainted with the grossness of naturalism, became vehicles of a warm religious emotion, and provided a stimulus to a higher life. The idealism of humanity, by a strange alchemy, can marvellously transform the most unpromising materials. And he would make a grave mistake who should treat the Isis and Osiris, the Mater Deum or the Attis, of the reign of Augustus as representing the same ideals in the reign of Gratian. But these Eastern cults contained a germ, even in their earliest days, of their great future development and power. The old religion of Latium, along with much that was sound and grave and fortifying to character, was also hard and cold and ceremonial. It could mould and consecrate a militant and conquering state; it did little to satisfy the craving for moral regeneration or communion with a Higher Power. It could not appease the sense of error and frailty by ghostly comfort and sacramental absolution. It was, moreover, wanting in that warmth of interest and sympathy, linking the human and Divine, which has helped to make Christianity the religion of Western civilisation, and which in a feeble adumbration made the paganism of the East a momentary rival of the Church. These Eastern cults, often originating in gross symbolism of the alternations and recurring processes of nature,[2856] often arousing a dangerous excitability and an unregulated emotion, yet contained the germ of a religious spirit far more akin to ours than the old austere Latin creed. A divine death and restoration, the alternation of joy and sorrow at a divine event, instinct with human interest, calming expiation and cleansing from the sins which burdened the conscience,—above all, the hope of a coming life, stamped on the imagination by symbol and spectacle,—these were the [pg 555]elements which, operating on imperious religious yearnings, gave a fresh life to paganism, and prepared or deferred the victory of the Church. The religion of the Great Mother seems at first sight to offer the poorest promise of any moral message or spiritual support. It expressed at first the feelings of rude rustics at the recurring mortality and resurrection of material life in the order of the seasons. The element of human feeling which it contained was grossly expressed in bloody rites of mutilation. This cult was often defiled and disgraced by a crew of effeminate and lustful impostors. Yet the Thessalian villagers in Apuleius, who chased these vagabonds from their fields, evidently expected something better from them. They despised the foul hypocrites, but they did not cease to believe in their religion. The spiritual instinct of humanity triumphed, as it has so often done, over the vices of a historical system, extracted the good in it, rejected the evil, and made it an organ of some sort of spiritual life. Thus the Great Mother became the Mother of all, enthroned beside the Father of gods and men. She wears the chaste honours of the Virgin Goddess. Attis and her love for Attis are similarly transformed. In the syncretism of the age, which strove to gather up all the forces of heathenism and make them converge towards a spiritual unity, Magna Mater and Attis leagued their forces with the conquering Mithra.[2857] In the taurobolium there was developed a ritual, in which, coarse and materialistic as it was, paganism made, in however imperfect form, its nearest approach to the religion of the Cross.