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. And she entrusted all things to him, and moreover set on his head the starry cap.(826) But if our visible sky covers the crown of Attis, must one not interpret the river Gallus as the Milky Way?(827) For it is there, they say, that the substance which is subject to change mingles with the passionless revolving sphere of the fifth substance. Only as far as this did the Mother of the Gods permit this fair intellectual god Attis, who resembles the sun’s rays, to leap and dance. But when he passed beyond this limit and came even to the lowest region, the myth said that he had descended into the cave, and had wedded the nymph. And the nymph is to be interpreted as the dampness of matter; though the myth does not here mean matter itself, but the lowest immaterial cause which subsists prior to matter. Indeed Heracleitus also says:) ψυχῇσιν θάνατος ὑγρῇσι γενέσθαι· (“It is death to souls to become wet.”) τοῦτον οὖν τὸν Γάλλον, τὸν νοερὸν θεόν, τὸν τῶν ἐνύλων καὶ ὑπὸ σελήνην εἰδῶν συνοχέα, τῇ προτεταγμένῃ τῆς ὕλης αἰτίᾳ συνιόντα, συνιόντα δὲ οὐχ ὡς ἄλλον ἄλλῃ, [166] ἀλλ᾽ οἷον αὐτὸ εἰς ἑαυτὸ(828) λέγομεν(829) ὑποφερόμενον. (We mean therefore that this Gallus, the intellectual god, the connecting link between forms embodied in matter beneath the region of the moon, is united with the cause that is set over matter, but not in the sense that one sex is united with another, but like an element that is gathered to itself.)