sacred trees of Attis. Besides trees, the country people worshiped stones,
rocks or meteors that had fallen from the sky like the one taken from
Pessinus to Pergamum and thence to Rome. They also venerated certain
animals, especially the most powerful of them all, the lion, who may at one
time have been the totem of savage tribes.[2] In mythology as well as in
art the lion remained the riding or driving animal of the Great Mother.
Their conception of the divinity was indistinct and impersonal. A goddess
of the earth, called Ma or Cybele, was revered as the fecund mother of all
things, the "mistress of the wild beasts"[3] that inhabit the woods. A god
Attis, or Papas, was regarded as her husband, but the first place in this
divine household belonged to the woman, a reminiscence of the period of
matriarchy.[4]

When the Phrygians at a very early period came from Thrace and inserted
themselves like a wedge in the old Anatolian races, they adopted the vague
deities of their new country by identifying them with their own, after the
habit of pagan nations. Thus Attis became one with the Dionysus-Sabazius of
the conquerors, or at least assumed some of his characteristics. This
Thracian Dionysus was a god of vegetation. Foucart has thus admirably
pictured his savage nature: "Wooded summits, deep oak and pine forests,
ivy-clad caverns were at all times his favorite haunts. Mortals who were
anxious to know the powerful divinity ruling these solitudes had to observe
the life of his kingdom, {49} and to guess the god's nature from the
phenomena through which he manifested his power. Seeing the creeks descend
in noisy foaming cascades, or hearing the roaring of steers in the uplands
and the strange sounds of the wind-beaten forests, the Thracians thought
they heard the voice and the calls of the lord of that empire, and imagined
a god who was fond of extravagant leaps and of wild roaming over the wooded
mountains. This conception inspired their religion, for the surest way for
mortals to ingratiate themselves with a divinity was to imitate him, and as
far as possible to make their lives resemble his. For this reason the
Thracians endeavored to attain the divine delirium that transported their
Dionysus, and hoped to realize their purpose by following their invisible
yet ever-present lord in his chase over the mountains."[5]

In the Phrygian religion we find the same beliefs and rites, scarcely
modified at all, with the one difference