The meaning of the name Attis

[laura_seabrook]

I've been researching for Tales of the Galli, in which I'm currently telling the myth of Cybele and Attis. Anyway, I was looking up Attis and found an entry for Attis under Baby Name Guesser. It had the following text:

When naming your baby Attis, it's important to consider the gender of the name itself. When people look at the name Attis, they might ask the question, "is Attis a man or a woman?", or "what is the gender of the name Attis?" Some names are more gender neutral than others, and some names are more strongly associated with either males or females.

Who else can see some humour in this (very definitely an "in joke")?

Comments

[rashelleym.livejournal.com]

Um, ever-so-deftly a distinction is being made between names that are more and less gender neutral, at the same time giving our owners specific instructions about how to perpetuate that quite mercurial distinction? ("...[our owners] might ask the question...")

And... Attis castrated himself, thereby becoming a woman (by default, because "not a man"). And "as it turns out", he could have accomplished the "very same thing" just by changing his name to a "less gender-neutral" one?

Too, I just happened to find this source, which indicates (without a cite?) "ATYS" as a variant spelling.

[rashelleym.livejournal.com]

Found this, too, which has some quite relevant verbiage in reference to "story of Attis." Of course discounting the odd notion that Cybelle-"Great Mother" worship was somehow displaced rather than evolving to accomodate changing circumstances as time went on.

[laura-seabrook.livejournal.com]

Don't believe everything you read there.

"believe"? know...

[rashelleym.livejournal.com]

It's an "internet" (web) source, first of all, and I didn't even bother looking for citations in the summary/description/comments (or whatever) that the link points to. I'm not actually actively researching it, after all. Also because I know from experience that "scholarship" is a "common term" that may have various modern meanings.

Oddly, some of those meanings seem to have hardly changed since the pre-"Enlightenment" time, when the guys who had the leisure and opportunity to read were all excited about actually applying then-new Aristotlean logic or something to verify their "beliefs" the orbits of the planets "must be" perfectly circular, the Sun "couldn't possibly" be blemished with sunspots, and so forth.

Generally, if a source doesn't credibly cite a primary historical source or at least some current source that I "trust" to some degree, in my mind it's just a story. The link is just such a one, wonderfully designed and laboriously constructed.

If it's a post-fifties source, and it uses Latin phrases that aren't specifically in a legal or medical context: be aware. Be very aware. "Cum grano salis" would be such a one: "with a grain of salt". Some "scholars", you see, are still kinda living in The Year of Our Lord 10000 BC... "I do go on."