The Lydian Origin of the Cult of Attis: a Study of Kingship and Divinity

Behind the tale of Atys the son of Croesus, as it is told by Herodotus, it is possible to detect the characteristics of the dying royal lover of the goddess that are attested in poetry, hymns, myth, and rituals from the third millennium BCE to the Hellenistic kingdoms of the third and second centuries BCE. Royal marriage in Lydia was the consummation of a symbolic union of the king, or king-to-be, with an avatar of the goddess of rulership, who was Kybebe, or Kuvav(s), among the Lydians, identified as Aphrodite by the Greeks. Funerary rites for the Lydian prince were sufficiently impressive and widely disseminated to make Atys the most memorable archetype of the dying lover of the goddess, who came to be known from the fourth century on as Attis, the beloved of Cybele, by which time his royal status had sublimated into the paradigm of the handsome herdsman.