He was originally a local semi-deity of Phrygia, associated with the great Phrygian trading city of Pessinos, which lay under the lee of Mount Agdistis.

When the fruits ripened, Nana, daughter of the river Sangarius, took an almond, put it in her bosom, and later became pregnant with baby Attis, whom she abandoned.

Attis' father-in-law-to-be, the king who was giving his daughter in marriage, followed suit, prefiguring the self-castrating corybantes who devoted themselves to Cybele.

Attis is said to have introduced to Lydia the cult of the Mother Goddess Cybele, incurring the jealousy of Zeus, who sent a boar to destroy the Lydian crops.

[9] It began in Anatolia and was adopted in Greece, and eventually Republican Rome; the cult of Attis, her reborn eunuch consort, accompanied her.

In that work Julian says: "Of him [Attis] the myth relates that, after being exposed at birth near the eddying stream of the river Gallus, he grew up like a flower, and when he had grown to be fair and tall, he was beloved by the Mother of the Gods.

His head is crowned with a pine garland with fruits, bronze rays of the sun, and on his Phrygian cap is a crescent moon.

A plaster cast of it sits in the apse of the Sanctuary of Attis at the Campus of the Magna Mater, while the original was moved to the Vatican Museums.

A finely executed silvery brass Attis that had been ritually consigned to the Moselle River was recovered during construction in 1963 and is kept at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum of Trier.

It shows the typically Anatolian costume of the god: trousers fastened together down the front of the legs with toggles and the Phrygian cap.

[b] In 2007, in the ruins of Herculaneum a wooden throne was discovered adorned with a relief of Attis beneath a sacred pine tree, gathering cones.