Note 256.1 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

But another version of the death of Attis, current at some time among his worshippers, was that he died from the effects of self-mutilation, a motive suggested by the emasculation of the Phrygian Galloi. We have here a phenomenon in the cult and myth that was alien to the religious habits of the Mesopotamian communities. The eunuch as a secular functionary is a figure belonging to an immemorial social tradition of the East; but the eunuch-priest is the morbid product of a very few religions, and there is no trace of such in Mesopotamia. The Babylonian church-law demanded an unblemished priesthood of strong virility, agreeing in this respect with the Judaic and the Hellenic, and according with an ancient sentiment that the vigour of the priest was the pledge of that continued flow of divine power which supported the vigour of the community. Self-emasculation was penalised in the religious rule of Jahwé, and the Gallos was excluded from temple-worship by the ritual code of Lesbos. The records of modern savagery and the history of asceticism, whether in modern and mediaeval India or in early Christianity, afford us varied illustration of the wildest excesses of self-inflicted cruelty against the human body, but not—so far as I am aware—of this particular form of self-destruction.256.1