Tag: Patristics

The gallos-priests of Attis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The full text of Lucian De Dea Syria is online here. cc. 50-51 discuss the galli.

50. On certain days a multitude flocks into the temple, and the Galli in great numbers, sacred as they are, perform the ceremonies of the men and gash their arms and turn their backs to be lashed. Many bystanders play on the pipes the while many beat drums; others sing divine and sacred songs. All this performance takes place outside the temple, and those engaged in the ceremony enter not into the temple.

51. During these days they are made Galli. As the Galli sing and celebrate their orgies, frenzy falls on many of them and many who had come as mere spectators afterwards are found to have committed the great act. I will narrate what they do. Any young man who has resolved on this action, strips off his clothes, and with a loud shout bursts into the midst of the crowd, and picks up a sword from a number of swords which I suppose have been kept ready for many years for this purpose. He takes it and castrates himself and then runs wild through the city, bearing in his hands what he has cut off. He casts it into any house at will, and from this house he receives women’s raiment and ornaments. Thus they act during their ceremonies of castration.

52. The Galli, when dead, are not buried like other men, but when a Gallus dies his companions carry him out into the suburbs, and laying him out on the bier on which they had carried him they cover him with stones, and after this return home. They wait then for seven days, after which they enter the temple. Should they enter before this they would be guilty of blasphemy.

There is a question whether this rite relates to Cybele and Attis, depending on whether we identify the Syrian goddess with Cybele.

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Julian on Attis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Libanius tells us that, as Julian the Apostate marched to his Persian campaign, he spent one night at Pessinus, the home of the cult of Cybele and Attis, and wrote an essay defending the cult and interpreting its myth in philosophical style.

His oration on the Magna Mater, Oratio 5, is online here. It’s mostly full of allegorising, but begins with a valuable account of the coming of the cult of Cybele to Rome.

I’ve tried to condense a large chunk of the material to the bits which give concrete information about Attis, and paragraphed it for readability:

Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the Source of the Intelligible and Creative Powers, which direct the visible ones; she that gave birth to and copulated with the mighty Jupiter: she that exists as a great goddess next to the Great One, and in union with the Great Creator; she that is dispenser of all life; cause of all birth; most easily accomplishing all that is made; generating without passion; creating all that exists in concert with the Father; herself a virgin, without mother, sharing the throne of Jupiter, the mother in very truth of all the gods; for by receiving within herself the causes of all the intelligible deities that be above the world, she became the source to things the objects of intellect.

Now this goddess, who is also the same as Providence, was seized with a love without passion for Attis. … And this the legend aims at teaching when it makes the Mother of the Gods enjoin upon Attis to be her servant, and not to stray from her, and not fall in love with another woman. But he went forward, and descended as far as the boundaries of Matter.

But when it became necessary for this ignorance to cease and be stopped—-then Corybas, the mighty Sun, the colleague of the Mother of the Gods … persuades the lion to turn informer. Who then is this lion? We hear him styled “blazing”—-he must, therefore, I think, be the cause presiding over the hot and fiery element; that which was about to wage war against the Nymph, and to make her jealous of her intercourse with Attis; and who this Nymph is we have already stated.

This lion, the fable tells, lent his aid to the Mother of the Gods … and by his detecting the offence and turning informer, became the author of the castration of the youth. … not without the intervention of the fabled madness of Attis…

It is not therefore unreasonable to suppose this Attis a sixper-natural personage (in fact the fable implies as much), or rather in all respects, a deity, seeing that he comes forth out of the Third Creator, and returns again after his castration, to the Mother of the Gods… the fable styles him a “demi-god,” … The Corybantes… are assigned by the Great Mother to act as his bodyguard…

This great god of ours is Attis; this is the meaning of the “Flight of King Attis” that we have just been lamenting; his “Concealments,” his “Vanishings,” his “Descents into the Cave.” Let my evidence be the time of year when all these ceremonies take place; for it is said that the Sacred Tree is cut down at the moment when the Sun arrives at the extreme point of the equinoctial arc: next in order follows the Sounding of the trumpets, and lastly is cut down the sacred and ineffable Harvest of the god Gallos: after these come, as they say, the Hilaria and festivities.

Now that a “cessation of Indefinity” is meant by the castration so much talked of by the vulgar, is self-evident from the fact that when the Sun touches the equinoctial circle, where that which is most definite is placed (for equality is definite, but inequality indefinite and inexplicable); at that very moment (according to the report), the Sacred Tree is cut down; then come the other rites in their order; whereof some are done in compliance with rules that be holy and not to be divulged; others for reasons allowable to be discussed.

The “Cutting of the Tree;” this part refers to the legend about the Gallos, and has nothing to do with the rites which it accompanies… The rite, therefore, enjoins upon us who are celestial by our nature, but who have been carried down to earth, to reap virtue joined with piety from our conduct upon earth, and to aspire upwards unto the deity, the primal source of being and the fount of life. Then immediately after the cutting does the trumpet give out the invocation to Attis and to those that be of heaven, whence we took our flight, and fell down to earth.

And after this, when King Attis checks the Indefinity by the means of castration, the gods thereby warn us to extirpate in ourselves all incontinence, and to imitate the example, and to run upwards unto the Definite, and the Uniform, and if it be possible, to the One itself; which being accomplished the “Hilaria” must by all means follow. For what could be more contented, what more hilarious than the soul that has escaped from uncertainty, and generation, and the tumult that reigns therein, and hastens upwards to the gods? Of whose number was this Attis, whom the Mother of the Gods would not suffer to advance farther than was proper for him, but turned him towards herself, and enjoined him to check all indefinity.

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Was Firmicus Maternus a Christian?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In every age there are those who adopt their religion and their values from the society in which they live, often without considering that this is what in effect they do.  Indeed most people today do this, for instance; and often would say that they “think for themselves”.  But in truth their way of life, their way of thinking, is merely a subset of the menu of values and ideas characteristic of the late 20th century USA.  This is often easier to see in men of a century ago, who all seem “Victorian” to us in every important regard, but who would most certainly have protested their intellectual independence.

In the fourth century, Christianity was becoming fashionable.  This had the evil consequence of creating people who were Christian in name, and unregenerate in heart, word and deed.  Such behaviour might be called hypocritical; but is merely natural, to any man who follows his nose rather than some predefined set of principles.  (Indeed if we mention “principles” to such a man, he may consider us a fool!)  Such men are beneath reason, but none the less normal honest human beings.  The issue of integrity is one that they are not awake enough to perceive.

Anyone who has read the letters of Augustine will encounter many such people.  The letters of Isidore of Pelusium, a little later, show the same process.  “Christianity” is the religion of the state; more, it is the religion which is socially on the rise.  To stand out against this peer pressure is socially dangerous; to profess it opens doors and at least removes one ground of possible offence.  Consequently men adopt it, with as little interference with their lives as may be.  It is merely words.

Today I have been translating Firmicus Maternus, On the error of profane religion, and have reached chapter 6.  I admit that I was predisposed against him.  His work was described as a crude and unsuccessful attack on paganism.  Unsuccessful in literary terms it certainly was;  Ambrosiaster is the only author who might show any knowledge of the work from the time that it was written, ca. 350, to the time that it was discovered in the 16th century.  A quick read of the chapter on Attis revealed nothing against this perceived wisdom.  The work contains a great deal of hard information about late paganism, and is not online. It is routinely referred to by the sort of scribbler who affects to believe that Christ was just a reinvention of Attis or Osiris, so it really should be online.

Yet… in every age, there are also those who sincerely have chosen Christ.  In an age when “Christianity” is fashionable, it will be hard for us to know them unless we meet them.  But as I transcribed his words, I found myself wondering whether he was one.  Firmicus Maternus was an adult convert.  He had participated in the mystery cults, and knew them well; and he detested their superstition and general moral grubbiness.  His anger towards these cheats, these attempts to divert the impulse that leads us towards the light into lust and superstition, is genuine, and appropriate.

In chapter 4 he attacks the Syrian cult of the goddess.  The depraved and effeminate priests draw his lash, and quite rightly too:

It is still necessary to consider what indeed this divinity can be, who enjoys staying in a debauched body, who attaches itself unchaste members, which is placated by the contamination of a polluted body. Blush, O most wretched! God made you otherwise. When your troop arrives before the court of the divine judge, you will bring nothing with you that the god who created you might recognize.

So far, so good.  But then he goes on to address the members of this cult:

Reject this error, source of so many difficulties, give up before it’s too late the profane studies of your mind. Do not damn your body, the work of God, while subjecting yourself to the criminal laws of the devil, and put an end to your disgraces while there is still time. God is rich in mercy, He forgives readily.

4. He leaves ninety sheep to seek the only one which was mislaid; the father returns his robe and prepares a feast for the returned prodigal son. Do not let the multitude of your crimes throw you into despair. The supreme god, through His son Jesus-Christ, our Lord, delivers those who wish it, He forgives readily those who repent, and He does not ask great things to forgive. Faith and repentance are enough for you to repurchase what you have lost by yielding to the wicked urgings of the devil.

Condemnation is easy.  But Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, not to condemn them.  And Firmicus Maternus is able to see this, applied to these vile dancing priests; to implore them to save their souls, to repent, and to come to Christ.  None of this reads like “Join my party.”  Those who see the battle of factions will know that these seek to win, not to convert; to persecute, not to convince.  The words of Firmicus Maternus seem to me to breath the pure air of the gospel.  Would that many of the anti-heretical writers of antiquity had remembered the same.

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The 1941 discovery of works by Origen and Didymus at Toura in Egypt

Posted on by Roger Pearse

At the beginning of August 1941, a group of Egyptian labourers employed by British forces in Egypt were labouring to clear some of the ancient quarries of Tura, some 10km from Cairo, so that they could be used to store munitions.  The quarries are pierced with galleries constructed by the ancient Egyptians in order to obtain stone to build the monuments of Memphis, and open into the flank of the mountain, where they fan out from a vast rotunda inside.

In one of the three galleries of quarry 35, around 20-25 metres from the rotunda, a worker placed his hand by chance on a considerable pile of papyrus.  This pile lay on the floor of the gallery, without anything to protect it or hide it, and covered only by the dust and chippings that had fallen on to it little by little during the centuries.  This formed a small mound about a metre high on one side of the gallery. 

The fellahs promptly divided the find among themselves.  Bindings until then intact were broken, folios dispersed.  Some say that some of the pages were used for fuel a fire for coffee.  Others were dunked in water to bring out the colour in order to make them seem more appealing to the dealers.

A week later, around 10 August, the police and the Service of Antiquities became aware that a find had been made, but too late.  Only one part of the found was retrieved by purchase, at a  high price, through the intermediary of the servant of an antiquary.  Three lots were successively acquired and deposited at the Cairo museum.  The rest — the main part — were removed and sold, page by page, at inflated prices to collectors.  The destination of some is no doubt even today unknown.

The manuscripts were written around the end of the 6th century on papyrus.  The language of the texts was Greek.  The state of the manuscripts was variable.  Each manuscript was composed of quaternions, each of four sheets folded to make sixteen pages.  The number of quaternions varied.  The quaternions were what was traded around, since there was little associating them together in the find into manuscripts.  The find was as follows:

Codex 1.  This was 29.5 x 16 cm, 6 quaternions, and contained Origen, Dialogue with Heracleides, and On Easter.  The quaternions were linked together, and so formed a unit.  It seems unlikely that the codex ever contained more.

Codex 2.  This was 28 x 18 cms, 6 quaternions, and contained extracts of Origen’s commentary on Romans; Extracts of his Contra Celsum; and a homily on the Witch of Endor.  This also seems to be complete.

Codex 3.  This was 27.5 x 24 cms, 15 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Ecclesiastes, probably by Didymus the Blind.  This codex, like 4-7, had suffered in antiquity, since each of its quaternions was cut in two horizontally, then the two halves rejoined, and rolled up.  The cuts were done with great care to avoid the lines.  Since Ecclesiastes is 12 chapters long, it can be inferred that this manuscript was originally 25 quaternions long.  Part of the manuscript is in the Cairo collection, the rest in 1955 was in a private collection.

Codex 4.  This was 27 x 23 cms, 16 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Genesis by Didymus the Blind.  The quaternions are numbered 1-16, and take the text up to Gen. 16:16.  Quaternion 1 is only fragmentary, however; the 6 pages of quaternion 16 are likewise falling apart.  If the work covered the whole of Genesis, this would require two codices of 30 quaternions; but it seems doubtful that these were at Tura.  The manuscript has blank pages, suggesting that the copyist did not complete the work.

Codex 5.  This was 27 x 24.5 cms, 14 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on the Psalms by Didymus the Blind.  Most of the pages of this were in private hands. 

Codex 6.  This was 27 x 22 cms, 26 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Zachariah by Didymus the Blind.  This codex is complete.

Codex 7.  This was 31.5 x 15.5 cms, 25 quaternions, and contained the Commentary on Job by Didymus the Blind.  All but the last quaternion were at the Cairo Museum, the other being in private hands.

Codex 8.  This was 28.5 x 22 cms, 1 quaternion of 12 pages, and contained a Commentary on the Psalms of the Mountains and on John 6:3-28, by an unknown author.  It escaped notice in early reports.  The first page is blank, and much of the second also.  The commentary follows the Alexandrian exegesis. 

The museum thus ended up with 1,050 pages of the find, by various means.  It is permissible to wonder how much of it escaped.

These notes from H. Puech, Les nouveaux ecrits d’Origene et de Didyme decouverts a Toura, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 31 (1951), 293-329, and L. Doutreleau, Que savons-nous aujourdhui des papyrus de Toura, Recherches des sciences religieuses 43 (1955) 161-193.

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Another snippet from Agapius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Agapius continues to make interesting statements.  There’s this one:

Starting from this period, among the Greeks, Josephus (Yousifous), i.e. Aesop (Yousfâs) the fabulist began to be illustrious.

Well, no wonder names get mangled!  Who would have thought Aesop = Josephus?

Just before that, I’ve seen a discussion of why rulers speak in the plural; “We order that…” rather than “I order that.”  According to Agapius, Romulus is responsible (the founder of Rome, O Star-Trek viewer!).  After the murder of Remus (whom for some reason I imagine as being short), Rome was shaken by perpetual earthquakes and the inhabitants kept knifing each other in the forum.  Romulus then prayed to the gods, who told him that his fratricide was responsible.  But if he put Remus on the throne beside him, all would be well.  Romulus then prepared a gold statue of Remus, which he placed on the throne and then issued his commands as “We order…” (i.e. Romulus and Remus order).

I wonder what the real reason is?

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Coptic Museum Library — restoration of mss in progress

Posted on by Roger Pearse

This lengthy article in Al-Ahram records that a team of conservators are working over the manuscripts in the Coptic Museum in Cairo.  This collection contains not merely Coptic texts but also Arabic Christian manuscripts.  Thanks to Andie Byrnes at Egyptology News for this one.

The interest in the collection is welcome.  But… how can we access the mss?  How can we get reproductions?  There still seems to be no way to contact them using the internet, which is astonishing.  Especially when there is a website here.

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A Byzantine exegesis of Paul in the “depth of the sea”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The following interesting passage can be found in a work by the Venerable Bede 1:

The same apostle (Paul) said, “a night and a day I was in the depth of the sea’ (2 Cor. 11:25).  I have heard certain men assert that Theodore of blessed memory, a very learned man and once archbishop of the English people, expounded the saying thus: that there was in Cyzicus a certain very deep pit, dug for the punishment of criminals, which on account of its immense depth was called the depth of the sea.  It was the filth and darkness of this which Paul bore, amongst other things, for Christ.

Theodore was a Greek from Tarsus, who happened to be in Rome in 667 AD at the moment when a Saxon archbishop-elect of Canterbury had died while in Rome to get his pallium. Pope Vitalian was open to eastern influence, and promptly appointed this 67-year old man (d. 690) as archbishop.  His episcopate was a considerable success, he increased the status of the clergy, reorganised the diocese, and Bede says of him that he was the first archbishop whom the whole English church willingly obeyed.  This in turn helped to foster English political and cultural unity.  He brought knowledge of Latin and Greek to Dark Ages England, and interesting snippets like this from a part of the ancient world where the darkness had yet to fall.

1. Liber Quaestionum, Patrologia Latina 93, cols. 456D-457A.  The reference comes to me from Henry Mayr-Harting, The coming of Christianity to anglo-saxon England (1972), repr. 1977, p.207, n. 58 (on p.312).

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Genre markers in Genesis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An old post in Hypotyposeis “Origen on Creation” reported post by a Chris Heard, “Absurdities” as genre markers (Nov. 28, 2008), in which he contends that Genesis ought to be read non-literally because the original audience would have heard it so:

I submit to you that “absurd” chronologies and geographies serve in biblical narratives as genre markers informing readers that the discrete textual unit in which these markers appear is not to be taken as “history,” but must be read in a “non-literal” mode. * * * But my point is that the person(s) who wrote Genesis 1, and expressed their creation faith in a schematic seven-day creation story, weren’t so foolish as to suppose that they were giving a precisely accurate timeline of the deity’s creative acts—and they told us so right there in the text.

“N. T. Wrong,” dismisses this as “modernist apologetics” in The Absurdity of Genesis 1 – Just-So Stories – Literal Meaning; Non-Literal Apologetic Interpretation (Nov. 28, 2008); ideas that none of the ancients would have had, on reading Genesis.  Carlson points out a passage from Origen, writing in his On First Principles 4.3.1 (trans. Henri DeLubec [Harper & Row, 1966], p. 288) as follows:

4.3.1 Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning existed without the sun and moon and stars? . . . I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.

The post is useful, and rightly points up the genre markers that we should expect to find in ancient texts.  The issue of ancient attestation of genre markers in texts deserves wider scrutiny.

For Heard’s argument to work — which is Origen’s — we need to have some evidence that the original audience of Genesis would have understood this, rather than a Hellenistic audience.  I don’t think we have enough data on Genesis itself to answer that for or against; but such data might exist with respect to later Old Testament books, and be instructive. 

I suspect that Heard has a point, although the argument probably needs to be more nuanced and based on a little more than just Origen.  Such an argument looks odd to us, because we don’t use myth for teaching purposes in our day, and so we are ill-equipped to recognise that it *was* widely so used and what the rules of the game were.  We can tell from Plato’s “Laws” that it was so used; and Cicero’s letters discussing the dramatis personae of the Tusculan Disputations make it clear that there *were* rules. 

These examples off the top of my head, of course, and neither evidently applicable to Hebrew literature — about which I know nothing — but offered as a start.

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More fun with a thesis

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve already blogged on how Boston College library demand that I get permission from a religious order before they will supply me with a copy for research purposes of a 1937 thesis written by a nun. 

The nun belonged to the Sisters of Mercy, and the library have sent me a link to their website.  So I duly wrote and asked permission.  I got back an email saying that they had no record of any such nun.  The library have sent me a PDF of the first couple of pages of the thesis, which says that she was a member of that order.  So I have forwarded it to the order.

What a pathetic paper-chase!  All over the supposed copyright status of a long forgotten thesis.  It highlights that our copyright laws are now actively working against the interests of scholarship.

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