The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism [1911] - Get a Free Blog

ASIA MINOR. 71
claimed that the church had copied their most sacred
rites by placing her Holy Week at the vernal equinox
in commemoration of the sacrifice of the cross on which
the divine Lamb, according to the church, had re
deemed the human race. Indignant at these blas
phemous pretensions, St. Augustine tells of having
known a priest of Cybele who kept saying: Et ipse
Pileatus christianus est "and even the god with the
Phrygian cap [i. e., Attis] is a Christian."*2
But all efforts to maintain a barbarian
stricken with moral decadence were in vain.
religion
On the
very spot on which the last taurobolia took place at
the end of the fourth century, in the Phrygianum,
stands to-day the basilica of the Vatican.
* * *
There is no Oriental religion whose progressive evo
lution we could follow at Rome so closely as the cult
of Cybele and Attis, none that shows so plainly one of
the reasons that caused their common decay and dis
appearance. They all dated back to a remote period
of barbarism, and from that savage past they inherited
a number of myths the odium of which could be masked
but not eradicated by philosophical symbolism, and
practices whose fundamental coarseness had survived
from a period of rude nature worship, and could never
be completely disguised by means of mystic interpre
tations. Never was the lack of harmony greater be
tween the moralizing tendencies of theologians and the
cruel shamelessness of tradition. A god held up as
the august lord of the universe was the pitiful and ab
ject
hero of an obscene love affair; the taurobolium,
performed to satisfy man s most exalted aspirations
for spiritual purification and immortality, looked like a