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Updated: June 14, 2025
Both tales might claim the support of custom, or rather both were probably invented to explain certain customs observed by the worshippers. The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service of the goddess.
The family would be the social unit and the father its public representative, and though the law might intervene if he murdered or ill-used wife or children, or they him, it would do so in just the same spirit that it might prevent him from self-mutilation or attempted suicide, for the good of the State simply, and not to defend any supposed independence of the injured member.
According to Herodotus, the Arabs sealed their engagements by making an incision in their hands with a sharp stone; in Egypt the body of a corpse before being embalmed was opened with a flint knife; a similar implement was used by the Hebrews for the rite of circumcision; and it was also with cut stones that the priests of Cybele inflicted self-mutilation in memory of that of Atys.
As a rule, there is a good deal more shedding of blood over a grave than I saw. This blood offering is said to please the dead, being a proof to them of the affection of the living. It is funeral etiquette to prepare yourself with a weapon with which to shed this blood, but likewise etiquette for a friend to intervene and stop your self-mutilation.
Turning now to the subject of self-mutilation and self-destruction from the peculiar customs or religious beliefs of people, we find pages of information at our disposal. It is not only among the savage or uncivilized tribes that such ideas have prevailed, but from the earliest times they have had their influence upon educated minds.
"Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque pertinet hilum; quando quidem natura animi mortalis habetur!" cries Lucretius. With the advent of Christianity, condemning as it did the barbarous customs of self-mutilation and self-murder, these practices seem to disappear gradually; but stoicism and indifference to pain were exhibited in martyrdom.
The constituents of the average marriage are a man over-stimulated sexually by mystery and ignorance, and a woman abnormally undersexed by the course of self-repression and self-mutilation which have been taught her from her earliest childhood as necessities of modesty, purity and virtue.
The dance of the Korybantes is distinguished from that of the Kouretes by its less restrained, and more orgiastic character; it was a wild and whirling dance resembling that of the modern Dervishes, accompanied by self-mutilation and an unrhythmic clashing of weapons, designed, some writers think, to overpower the cries of the victims.
Origen's self-mutilation, referred to by Abélard, was subsequently used by his enemies as an argument for deposing him from his presbyterial status. Abélard's tract regarding the power of God to create Himself was one of the many distant echoes of the great Arian-Athanasian controversy of the fourth century. St.
Cases of self-mutilation may be divided into three classes: those in which the injuries are inflicted in a moment of temporary insanity from hallucinations or melancholia; with suicidal intent; and in religious frenzy or emotion.
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