You're not in Minnesota, Margo.
But the bull's agonizing death shook her, nonetheless.
They don't take so long to die in modern slaughterhouses, she told herself. But it would be a long time before she wanted to eat beef again. Eventually the bull sank to its knees, dead The High Priest held up something long and crooked at one end, like the walking cane on Attis' statue.
Then she realized what it was. "My God!"
Her shocked expletive was lost in the cheer from the crowd. Trumpets sounded again, wild and shrill in the April sunlight. The young initiates emerged, reeling and covered with blood. They looked like they'd been drinking it. They stumbled past the High Priest, each touching the bull's severed member in turn, then vanished into the temple. The priestesses followed. The High Priest, too, entered the temple. Other priests took up a chant that lasted a long time. Then, at some signal from inside the temple, the crowd began to cheer wildly. The high priest of Attis returned, still holding the bull's severed genitals.
Margo's head swam. None of this made any sense. The crowd had taken up its own chant. Malcolm looked like he was trying to memorize every word. Then she realized he'd loosened the flap on the bag which held his personal log. How long had he been recording? She caught a glint in his palm and recognized a miniature digitizing camera, one that worked like a video recorder but fed directly to the computerized log. Surely he'd attended one of these parades and ceremonies before?
No, she remembered suddenly, this was supposed to be a historic first for Rome.
No wonder he'd been desperate to get here and see this, record it in its entirety. She wondered how many other scholars had come on this tour? Given the questions about the Messalina lottery, probably none. Perhaps Malcolm was the only scholar present to record the Procession of Attis. She felt like a heel that she hadn't thought to turn on her recorder, too.
"Malcolm," Margo hissed, "just what are Attis and Cybele?"
He hushed her. He seemed to be waiting for something, as though unsure what might happen next. The High Priest bowed low before the great gilded statue of Cybele in her lion chariot. He placed the severed bull's phallus before it and backed away, flailing himself and chanting. Initiates stumbled out, assisted by other priests. Then, at something which completely escaped her, he said, "Ahh" and suddenly relaxed
The High Priest had obtained a basket filled with reed scepters. He presented one to each reeling initiate. While Margo stared, the new priests broke the reed scepters violently in half, then carried them one by one and tied the broken reeds to the gilded pine tree. The crowd was chanting along with the priests.
"What are they saying?" Margo demanded. "What are they doing?"
Once again, Malcolm hushed her. She stood in the midst of an insane crowd and tried hard to figure out the lunacy she'd just witnessed, but didn't come up with anything rational as explanation. Some scholar I am. To interpret something, one first had to know something on which to base an interpretation.
Why was it there was never enough time to fulfill one's dreams properly? To be a proper scout would take years. If she took years, the one burning goal that had made the past three years tolerable would never amount to anything more than daydreams. Margo sighed as the priests re-entered the Temple, carrying their sacred images inside. Then it was all over and the crowd broke up. People chattered excitedly, sounding for all the world like sports fans comparing the performances of favorite basketball stars. Malcolm fussed briefly with the bag containing his personal log, sliding the digitizing camera back into it and shutting off everything. Then he stood blinking like a sleepy English spaniel just coming awake in the morning.
"Well ..." Malcolm's glance rested on her. His face reddened. "Hi. I, uh, think you had a question?" he asked sheepishly.
"Or three, yes." She stood glaring at him, hands on hips, then had to laugh. "You look so funny when you're embarrassed, Malcolm. What the hell was that all about? I tried to make sense of it, but it was pretty weird."
"Today is known as Black Friday, the day of the Sun's death," Malcolm explained as he led the way down from the sacred Palatine Hill. "Attis is a Solar god, castrated and sacrificed to fructify the earth, then reborn again after coupling with his mother/consort Cybele. The Taurobolium-the ritual slaughter of the bull-is a purification ritual."
"Did they really drink its blood?"
"Yes, indeed. Then each initiate mated with a priestess of Cybele in the Temple of the Magna Mater. I'm surprised they didn't couple in the courtyard. I believe in some areas, the sacred marriages are done publicly." He smiled. "Roman morals, however, are generally much stricter, despite what you may see in movies. Of course, his eyes twinkled, "all bets are off during Hilaria."
A shiver ran up Margo's back. Hilaria was only a couple of days away. Just exactly what would the festival be like? And her seventeenth birthday was going to fall right in the middle of it. She couldn't have asked for a better birthday present.
"Anyway, after going inside to mate with the Goddess, our young initiates symbolically castrated themselves by breaking those reed scepters. I'd wondered how they would get away with the ritual in Rome, Imperial law being what it is."
"What do you mean? What's so terrible about breaking a bundle of reeds in half?"'
Malcolm grimaced expressively. "It used to be a requirement of the priesthood of Attis for the initiate to castrate himself and present the severed organ to the Goddess."
Margo halted in the middle of the street. "Yuck!"
"Margo, you're blocking the way."
She started walking again, but her expression caused Malcolm to chuckle. "It's a very, very common myth in this part of the world, actually," Malcolm said as they turned into another narrow side street. "It's already ancient by these people's reckoning. The Sun God or Grain God mates the Mother Goddess, sometimes in her incarnation as the Moon, sometimes as Earth. The Solar God reigns as sacred king, is ritually killed, then is reborn again to begin the cycle of seasons and crops all over again. Hercules is another ritually murdered sacred king. But he was burned alive rather than being castrated and hung to bleed to death on a pine. In Carthage, ancient sacred kings were burnt alive on pyres as the solar Hercules. Aeneas barely escaped that fate when he ran away from Queen Dido of Carthage. In Egypt, Ra-Osiris was cut into pieces and scattered-"
"Malcolm, that's gross!"
His glance was highly sardonic. "Well, yes, from our perspective it is. But they really believed sacrificial blood was required to fertilize the earth. Crops wouldn't grow without it. And they really believed the god and his severed phallus were regenerated by the blood and by mating with the Goddess. That's why the full-fledged priests in the procession carried reed scepters. They're symbols of the god's phallus reborn as grain. It's the same reason you'll find Herms-phallus symbols-all over Herculaneum, for instance, which has Hercules as its patron deity. They re considered good luck symbols. People put them up by their doorways, touch them for luck."
Margo could understand rubbing a stone penis for luck better than she could a man mutilating himself. "But Malcolm ... what kind of man would want to do that to himself? Did they do it voluntarily? Or were they prisoners"
"No, they were volunteers. Look on the bright side: the tradition was modified years ago to kill the bull instead of the castrated priests. And now the tradition's been modified again, substituting broken reed scepters for the real castration. Roman law wouldn't tolerate the cult, otherwise. Of course, the Romans like to pay lip service to civilized notions about human sacrifices, but they have their own darker element to religious practices."
Like what?"