On Kybele, the Mother of Gods. This will cover the basics as an all around introduction to an immensely important Goddess. This is not an archeological reconstruction guide but an exegetic map covering her name, identity, attributes and offices, her relation to various mysteries, her worship and what was up with the Phrygian Gallai, and also her role in mysticism and polytheology all from the perspective of our living worship.
[a Roman coin inscribed with MATER DEUM - Mother of God(s)]
Origins of Metroac worship
Kybele was worshipped by the Phrygian people and nation, Phrygians were an Indo-European people who dwelled in lands that in older times were part of the western dominions of the Hittites during their new kingdom period. A Goddess or some kind of power seated and flanked by lions was known to the people of prehistoric Anatolia, so by my reckoning Kybele was a Goddess worshiped since the most ancient times in western Anatolia. She was also worshipped on a popular and state level in Lydia.
Her worship was transmitted to the Greeks, then Romans, and from the Romans the entire greater Mediterranean world and beyond. In classical and Hellenistic Greece we see her depicted in votives seated within or standing in the threshold of a naiskos (small shrine entrance), giving the worshipper a direct gateway to the Goddess (and this image is as very enduring as we see it in Roman examples). In Roman times, her cult was given the highest degree of importance, and it simultaneously represented Roman nostalgia for a mythic Trojan past and extreme anxiety toward her Phrygian mode of worship. The Metroac cult of Kybele and her mysteries were likewise credited as influencing Orphicizing traditions, and Kybele was said to be the initiator of Dionysus into her mysteries. While this is perhaps not archaeologically literal, it is spiritually true, as both the Phrygian and Orphic mysteries focused on a core concept we will discuss later.
Apollodorus, Library, 2ndc CE, 3.5.1
“Dionysus discovered the vine, and being driven mad by Hera he roamed about Egypt and Syria. At first he was received by Proteus, king of Egypt, but afterwards he arrived at Cybela in Phrygia. And there, after he had been purified by Rhea and learned the rites of initiation, he received from her the costume and hastened through Thrace against the Indians.” [Dionysus in myth conquered India]
Strabo, Geography, 10.3.15-16
“They [the poets] invented names appropriate to the flute, and to the noises made by castanets, cymbals, and drums, and to their acclamations and shouts of "ev-ah," and stampings of the feet; and they also invented some of the names by which to designate the [daemon] ministers, choral dancers, and attendants upon the sacred rites, I mean "Cabeiri" and "Corybantes" and "Pans" and "Satyri" and "Tityri," and they called the God "Bacchus," and Rhea "Cybele" or "Cybebe" or "Dindymene" according to the places where she was worshipped. Sabazius also belongs to the Phrygian group and in a way is the child of the Mother, since he too transmitted the rites of Dionysus. (Line break) Also resembling these rites are the Cotytian and the Bendideian rites [of Bendis] practiced among the Thracians, among whom the Orphic rites had their beginning.”
The Great Mother was also apart of the Samothrakian Mysteries alongside the Kabiri-Daktyls, Korybantes, and Hekate, which I will elaborate on another time due to the length at which I would be required to exposit on the topic.
Souda “Samothrake” (Byzantine eastern-Roman Greek lexicon, 10thc CE)
“Samothrake - An island; it lies directly opposite Thrace. They say that Samians settled it and gave it this name; and [the story] has been told as follows by Antiphon, in the Samothracian Speech: ‘in fact those who settled the island in the beginning were Samians, from whom we were born. They were settled by necessity, not from desire for the island: for they were exiled from Samos by tyrants and enjoyed the following fate. Taking plunder from Thrace, they arrived at the island. But if any of you [is] an initiate in Samothrace, now it is well to pray that the feet of the fetcher be turned back.’ In Samothrace there were certain rituals which they believed were performed as averting spells against certain dangers. There, too, were the mysteries of the Korybantes, those of Hekate, and the cave of Zerinthos in which they used to sacrifice dogs. The initiates were thought to be saved by these things from dangers and storms.”
[Hellenistic era Samothrakian coins of the Great Mother]
Attributes and Iconography
The Mother of Gods coalesces around a variety of images and beings relating to her offices; mountains and mountainous rocky earth and wild nature filled with untamed animals, sacred trees (pine especially and the oak), poppies and bull heads, caves, bee nymphs and their honey, the Goddess seated upon a throne flanked by lions (this particular image is prehistoric), or in a lion drawn chariot, with a small lion upon her lap, holding a hand drum, holding a patera and pouring libations as Hera does, sometimes a cornucopia, she is near always wearing the polos or kathalos crown or a crown of city walls, the crescent moon and stars (her moon associations are rather ignored), she is depicted often with thick flowing hair. In fact the seated Goddess, with her tall cylindrical headdress, flanked by lions and wearing flowing robes, can evoke the silhouette of a mountain peak.
Her daemons are Kouretes and Korybantes, Dactyls, Satyrs, rustic Nymphs, and fire possessing Lions (see flavius julian’s hymn), her animals are lions and big cats, bulls, honey producing bees, wolves, serpents, Aelian says her sacred bird is the mérmnos (an unknown type of hawk), I theorize it may have been the Eurasian sparrowhawk, which is extant in Asia Minor. This is because the name is similar to the Mermnadae who ruled in Lydia, and the female of the species is noticeably larger than the male. Her plants are the pine, the vine, and the oak. Her stones are the amethyst, a black meteorite in Pessinus, and certain cylindrical stones reportedly found in Phrygian rivers. Her numbers are two and eight.
Name and Identity
Kybele was named after the mountain Kybela in Phrygia.
Souda - Kybele (Byzantine eastern-Roman Greek lexicon, 10thc CE) :
"Kybele : Rhea. [So named] from the Kybela mountains; for she is a mountain goddess; that is why she rides in a chariot drawn by a team of lions…effeminates [eunuchs*] are present in the mysteries of Rhea."
*Gallai
Strabo, Geography 12.5.3 (trans. Jones)
“There is also a mountain situated above the city, Dindymon, after which the country Dindymene was named, just as Kybele was named after Kybela.”
Agdistis was regarded as Mother, likely so named after a local mountain in Galatia-Phrygia. But in some places as a certain Goddess of her own.
Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.4.5 (2ndc AD, trans. Jones) “Well then, the Pergameni [city of Pergamon] took Ancyra and Pessinus [which had been settled by Galatian Celts] which lies under Mount Agdistis, where they say that Attis lies buried.” (Interestingly he then reports that the Pergamese locals say their country was sacred to the Kabiri).
The Mother of Gods received many names from her holy mountains.
Strabo, Geography, 10.3.12 (trans. Hamilton)
“But as for the Berecyntes, a tribe of Phrygians, and the Phrygians in general, and those of the Trojans who live round Ida, they too hold Rhea in honor and worship her with orgies, calling her Mother of the gods and Agdistis and Phrygia the Great Goddess, and also, from the places where she is worshipped, Idaea and Dindymene and Sipylene and Pessinuntis and Cybele and Cybebe.”
Before I continue need to briefly mention the three kinds of theology, because it’s an analytic that makes discussing ancient polytheology and practical religion very easy. There is the mythic theology of the poets which fashions the stories of the Gods and their genealogies, the natural theology of the philosophers which is what we call theology today, and the civic theology of each local cult, town, and home. When resuming where the ancients left off, many modern worshippers are confounded because the natural and civic theology of religion does not always match with the stories and genealogies of Homer, Hesiod, etc. This is for two reasons - speaking of them narratively and understanding their place in the Universe use sceparate but related forms of analysis, and secondly practical religion is not bound by the poets genealogies and never has been.
In the case of Kybele, there is a modern and very firm insistence that her and Rhea are two separate Goddesses merely sharing a title or syncretized with each other, and that equating the two is an error worthy of causing frustration and anger. In the traditions of our forebears this is flat out wrong, and it was regarded as common knowledge that she was the same Goddess as Rhea, not a separate Phrygian Deity akin to Rhea, but the very same Goddess; having two names and one nature, just as she had one sacred name for two holy mountains (Ida). Although the Cretan tradition was a kind of its own, deeply ancient, likely originating from Minoan times, and focused on Rhea and the youthful Zeus (elaborating on Cretan forms of Hellenic polytheism deserves a separate article). To sum her up in three words;
She is Earth
In that Kybele is Rhea, she is also more broadly Earth (Ge / Gaea) and Demeter. Rhea being a chthonic pantheistic Goddess (the All Mother of the cycles of life and death) is a teaching derived from the various Mysteries. The epithet given to Rhea “Mother of Gods and Men” in the hymns is especially indicative of this, because Rhea as the mother of human beings (as Earth is) is not apart of the mythic genealogies of Homer or Hesiod.
Derveni papyrus row 22, 4th century BCE copy of 5th century original.
“‘Earth,’ ‘Mother,’ ‘Rhea,’ and ‘Hera’ are the same. She was called ‘Earth’ by convention, ‘Mother’ because everything comes to be from her, ‘Ge’ and "Gaia" in accord with individuals' dialect. She was called ‘Demeter’ like ‘Ge Meter [Earth Mother],’ a single name from both; for it was the same (name). There is a statement in his [Orpheus] Hymns too: ‘Demeter Rhea Ge Meter Hestia Deio.’"
Souda “Demeter,” (Byzantine eastern-Roman Greek lexicon, 10thc AD) “Demeter : The earth, as if being Ge-meter (earth-mother). Since the earth is a foundation of every city, as holding up the cities she is represented wearing towers [as a crown].”
In a choral passage of Sophocles’ Philoctetes too (409 BC)
“All-nourishing mountain mother Earth, mother of Zeus himself, you who live and rule in great Pactolus [a river in Lydia], rich in gold, most dread and sacred mother, over there I called on you, in Troy, when sons of Atreus heaped all their insults on this man, while they were handing over his father's armour to Odysseus, paying highest honours to that man — such awe-inspiring things. Hail, blessed goddess, as you sit on your splendid decorated throne, where carved-out lions slaughter bulls.”
The Titaness Themis was also the Earth. As Aeschylus writes in Prometheus Bound "My [Prometheus'] mother Themis, or Gaea (Earth) - though one form, she had many names." Her and Gaea also were powers behind the Delphic oracle prior to Apollo; many oracular powers are found in chasms of the earth, from caves, from trees rooted in the earth (Dodona), and through springs flowing from underground. The link between Themis, Gaea, and Kybele is probably why the Orphic hymns speak of her as the teacher of Bacchic mysteries.
Orphic Hymn 79. To Themis (trans. Athanassakis)
“Amid reverence and honor you shine in the night, for you were first
to teach men holy worship, howling to Bacchos in nights of revelry”
Also, the earth Goddess was central in the Cretan mysteries of Idean Zeus and Zagreus. The mention of mountain Mother with her band of Kouretes makes it clear that the mistress Earth paired with Zagreus is none other than Rhea-(Kybele).
Fragments of Euripides, the Cretans
“Night-ranging Zagreus, performing his feasts of raw flesh; and raising torches high to the mountain Mother among the Curetes”
Fragment of the lost Alcmeonis
“Mistress Earth, and Zagreus highest of all the Gods.”
In Platonic philosophy, she is discussed in her Hypercosmic (transcendent) role as the Mother of the intellective orders of Gods (those pertaining to the transcendent intellect that orders the Cosmos), Intelligible Life (preceding Intelligible Intellect), source and co-sovereign with Zeus the intellective and cosmic demiurge. This is explained pretty directly by Flavius Julian in his 4th century hymn (and essay) to the Mother of Gods;
“Who then is the Mother of the Gods? She is the source of the intellectual and creative gods, who in their turn guide the visible gods [planetary Gods]: she is both the mother and the spouse of mighty Zeus; she came into being next to and together with the great creator; she is in control of every form of life, and the cause of all generation; she easily brings to perfection all things that are made; without pain she brings to birth, and with the father's aid creates all things that are; she is the motherless maiden, enthroned at the side of Zeus, and in very truth is the Mother of all the Gods.”
Origin myth of her Athenian cult
Julian also tells an origin myth for her cult in Athens, which spread during the 5th century BC. I will combine it hence with a similar one given in the Souda entry for Barathron; A long time ago in Athens a Phrygian who was a mendicant and one of the Gallai arrived to spread the cult of Mother, and the cult received many initiates among the women of Athens. But the Athenians seized the Phrygian faithful and threw them in a great chasm full of hooks, a gruesome end. These renowned men of Athens did this perhaps because they feared influence from another culture would disrupt their control of the city, and also because they were ignorant that Mother was “that very Deo whom they worship, and Rhea and Demeter too.” Well, those men were wrong, and as much as the Earth is Kybele she is Themis, and for violating her sacrosanct laws her wrath followed on swift feet, and a famine struck the land. Athens was only saved by the decree of the Pythia - enshrine the Mother of Gods and seal the murderous chasm. The cult statue made for her temple was carved by Pheidias himself [Paus. 1.3.5] and the image of her enthroned, flanked by lions, with a libation bowl and drum became the archetypal statue of the Goddess in the Hellenistic world. When you look at basically any cult statue of Rhea, just know you are looking at her.
It’s worth noting that Julian was a masculine man of his time, a skilled general who commanded armies, and we know from his work ‘Misopogon’ that he did pride himself on his masculinity in contrast to “delicate living.” In contrast the Gallai were the opposite; eternal outsiders to custom and norm in ways that repulsed and in the words of Ovid even frightened Roman men. Yet in his treatise he does not step one toe out of line to insult the Gallai. This is possibly because he was also an initiate into the mysteries of Eleusis and worshipped the Great Mother. So even by his silence, he’s more respectful than a host of authors ancient and modern.
Understanding this all Mystically
In his work on cult statues and their meanings Porphyry explains this in a less Platonic way, and more in line with what the average worshipper can use - Hestia, Rhea, Demeter, Themis, these Goddesses are not exactly all identical to the Earth in a 1 to 1 sense. They are all divine powers that manifest from her order, within and about the earth. While Porphyry (in the footsteps of his teacher) assigned Hestia to the ruling principle, we do not. We maintain that Kybele is the earth Goddess in her eldest and most primary sense. In the Cosmos she is mother of the creative Gods who shape the physical Universe (identified with the Olympians in Platonic tradition), in our tradition we call Empyrean triple Hekate “Ananke, Rhea, Adrasteia.” What Hekate is to the Sublunar sphere as a whole, Kybele is to the earth proper; a Goddess of the moist black earth, the soil that births all, nourishes all, and consumes all. Hence, the name Rhea mystically signifies “all things flow from me and are torn apart,” as Chrysippus says Rhea comes from ῥέω (“to flow”) and great rivers are divided as they flow from their source. This represents her essence, and one of the principal truths of the Bacchic and Kybelian mysteries; all things are divided, and all things are reunited, for there is no discontinuity between Heaven and Earth. The Great Soul is divided into many souls, but within the divided body is the restitution of the immortal soul, the black earth upon which we are torn apart is the engine of immortal regeneration - the deifying power of the Underworld, as our world under the Moon is the locus of all spiritual realization and ascent.
The Ecstasy of Kybele
Both Dionysus and Kybele inspire theia mania (divine madness) - God given altered states of ecstasy, frenzy, realization, and vigorous “fury,” those of Bacchus and Mother especially had an effect on women. Plato (through Socrates in Phaedrus) says of madness there are two kinds; one coming from human diseases, and the other from “a divine release from the customary habits.” He also says “the greatest of blessings come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the Gods.” And that these gifts are known by their fruits; they improve people’s lives. Of divine madness he lists four kinds assigned to four Gods; the Apollonian madness of prophecy, the Dionysian madness of mysticism, the poetic madness of Muses, and the lovers madness of Aphrodite and Eros.
Dionysus is gynaimanes "he who drives women mad” and Kybele is the one whom Catullus at the end of his poem begs to spare him, “spare me this ecstasy.” This was none other than the Kybelian ecstasy, which is both Dionysian and Apollonian, mystical and prophetic. Dionysus turns women into fearsome maenads by striking them with his thyrsus, the Korybantic rituals of Kybele and Sabazios summon her divine presence with music and dance; the piping of sharp flutes, the clashing of cymbals, the pounding of drums, the clacking of the castanets as her worshippers dance, whipping the hair wildly with each toss of the neck [Porphyry Oracles fr. 43. “Some of those who are ecstatic, hearing the flutes, cymbals, drums, or some melodies, become inspired, like those who carry out Corybantic rites, those who are possessed by Sabazios, and those who revere the Mother of the Gods”].
“The roaming thyrsus-loving Gallai of the Mountain Mother clash their instruments and bronze castanets.”
The bacchantes are women, and likewise the Great Mother delights in flutes, the beating of drums, and crowds of women (Porphyry Oracles fr. 7). A unique and singular fragment of Nichomachus of Gerasa detailing the Pythagorean theology of numbers gives the Dyad and Octad to Mother and her many names (Theoretical Arithmetic in three books trans. Thomas Taylor). Among them is Themis, Rhea, Dindymene, and “the maker of women” which has multiple meanings; in a Pythagorean sense “the maker of even things,” Taylor’s conservative interpretation is that like mortal women she is the source of all life. But her sacred names are bound to her cult (like City-Protector and Dindymene) - and in the mode of theia mania she is “the maker of women” in another sense, the Galla of her Phrygian cult. It is for that reason we use the feminine Galla and Gallae (lat.) not Gallus. This also has a double meaning, because Galla is pronounced the same as galla, the Latin word for the oak-apples formed by mother gall wasps, signifying the Goddesses sacred oak and her generative powers over plant and animal life. This is also found among the cults of the Assyro-Palestinian Goddesses Ishtar and Ashtart, the Syrian Atargatis, the Punic Tanit-Caelestis, and possibly Ephesian Artemis and Carian Hekate. The Apollonian side is simple, Metroac worship involved religious ecstasy that allowed for oracular prophecy, which involved possession by the divine presence of the Goddess. This was called μητρίζω, to be as the Mother. If I had to use the phrase divine feminine, then its highest religious expression is here; the union with the Mother of Gods and the Bacchic fury of the Gods of transcendent Life itself.
We covered this because it’s relevant, but also in our research we found that in the conversation around the ancient Galla there is a level of obtuseness (weather ignorant or intentional) that in a circular fashion insists upon the maleness of the Galla. The funeral epigrams of Galla like Trygonion (the original epigram of Philodemus 7.222 as far as I can tell speaks of her in the female, contrary to the deliberately hostile Paton translation, Roller also interjects an overtly negative reading of her name where it doesn’t exist) and Aristion [7.223] make it clear, the bacchantes of Kybele were transgender women (who are also mentioned briefly in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos although the male author is hostile), it’s very obvious and we can abandon deliberate obtuseness disguised as academic convention. I’ll end this section with the funeral epigram of the dancer (and party animal) Aristion.
The castanet dancer Aristiŏn, who used to toss her hair among the pines in honour of Cybele, carried away by the music of the horned flute ; she who could empty one upon the other three cups of untempered wine, rests here beneath the poplars, no more taking delight in love and the fatigue of the night-festivals. A long farewell to revels and frenzy ! It lies low, the holy head that was once covered by garlands of flowers.
The Rebirth of Attis
Attis is the Sun, as is mentioned in a late 4th century screed Carmen adversus paganos against Deity worship in Rome “We have seen eminent senators following the chariot of Cybele which the hired band dragged at the Megalensian festival, carrying through the city a lopped-off tree trunk, and suddenly proclaiming that castrated Attis is the Sun.” To keep it simple he is among the Solar Gods united by the synectic power of Lord Helios. In a worldly sense he is a power set over the shoots of plants and their budding fruits, also those that do not reach full completion (hence castration). This includes ephemeral spring flowers like crocuses, narcissuses and hyacinths, whom the Greeks attributed legends of beautiful young men who died tragically, all that jazz. But in a mystical sense Attis is among the greatest and mightiest of salvific Gods, those who lead us back toward community with the Divine in its highest sense - taking the divine within us and lifting it back to its source so that we may be divine too. He is an intellective Hypercosmic God who proceeds from the Empyrean realms, into the Milky Way galaxy (represented allegorically as the river Gallus) and finally down to the world of generation where we are born, live, and die, into the world where the “river” of phenomena flows. This is why Attis is called “Greatest of the Gods, Attis Tyrannus” in a Latin curse tablet from Roman Germania and in his lunar-generative aspect Attis Menotyrannus, the Lord of the Months.
In myth the mortal Attis was born of a virginal Phrygian river Nymph, the daughter of Sangarios. The nymph daughters of rivers and oceans (like Kalypso) in myth are sometimes used as symbols of binding to generation since life is ruled by the watery element [see Porphyry “on the cave of the nymphs” for an example]. The castration symbolizes the checking of the unlimited course, that the divine union of matter and form is Attis unbound, who rules life and death and presides over the procession and reversion of all souls back to their source. The power of the highest creator reflected in the lowest root here at the lowest circle of reality, where he reaches down and pulls us back up. And that is the essence of Theurgy which is what makes Kybele and Attis such powerful theurgic Gods of salvation and why their mysteries are so raucous, for the promise of continuity with the Gods is the most joyous promise in the world. And the weeping too on the day of mourning before the day of blood. For when Kybele appears as the union of generative powers with chthonic Attis she is Agdistis, the bringer of the madness. That madness is the truth of the world of sensation, of embodying, experiencing all the beauty and the horror. Because, as Hekate teaches, all those who wish to cross the river of life and death must first experience it. No exceptions. And when we have crossed the madness and wonder of life, we celebrate the Hilaria - the Day of Joy which was originally called ‘the Ascent.’ For the words of Hekate, Kybele, Attis, and Dionysus too are the promise and the fulfillment.
Abandon ego, all ye who enter here. You are not above me.
All things flow from me and are torn apart.
Weep as all things die, but dance and rejoice, never forget that you are one of us.
