”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-”