--"and even the god with the Phrygian cap [i. e., Attis] is
a Christian."[42]

But all efforts to maintain a barbarian religion stricken with moral
decadence were in vain. 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 evolution 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
disappearance. 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
interpretations. Never was the lack of harmony greater between 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 abject hero of an obscene love affair; the taurobolium, performed to
satisfy man's most exalted aspirations for spiritual purification and
immortality, looked like a {72} shower bath of blood and recalled
cannibalistic orgies. The men of letters and senators attending those
mysteries saw them performed by painted eunuchs, ill reputed for their
infamous morals, who went through dizzy dances similar to those of the
dancing dervishes and the Aissaouas. We can imagine the repugnance these
ceremonies caused in everybody whose judgment had not been destroyed by a
fanatical devotion. Of no other pagan superstition do the Christian
polemicists speak with such profound contempt, and there is undoubtedly a
reason for their attitude. But they were in a more fortunate position than
their pagan antagonists; their doctrine was not burdened with barbarous
traditions dating back to times of savagery; and all the ignominies that
stained the old Phrygian religion must not prejudice us against it nor
cause us to slight the long continued efforts that were made to refine it
gradually and to mould it into a form that would fulfil the new demands of
morality and enable it to follow the laborious march of Roman society on
the road of religious progress.

* * * * *

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