Cybele /ˈsɪbəliː/ (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Κυβέλη Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis), was a Phrygian form of the Earth Mother or Great Mother. As with Greek Gaia (the "Earth"), her Minoan equivalent Rhea and some aspects of Demeter, Cybele embodies the fertile Earth. She is a goddess of caverns and mountains, walls and fortresses, nature, and wild animals (especially lions and bees). She had a joint cult with her consort Attis, and was served by a priesthood of eunuchs.
In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). Her cult was adopted as a religious component in Roman strategy during the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage.
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Cybele may have evolved from an Anatolian Mother (matar) Goddess. A ceramic figurine found at Çatalhöyük, (Archaeological Museum, Ankara) and dated to the 6000 BCE is described[2] as a corpulent and fertile Mother Goddess giving birth on her throne, which has two feline-headed hand rests. Lion arm-rests feature in later, known images of Cybele.
Cybele was "born from stone".[3] The inscription matar kubileya at a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BCE, is usually read as "Mother of the mountain", a reading supported by ancient Classical sources,[4] and consistent with Cybele as several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities.[5] At Pessinos in Phrygia, she was embodied as an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron.[6] She is also associated with an androgynous Phrygian deity called Agdistis, a daemon of a mountain at Pessinos.[7] Cybele's cult attributes in early Phrygian art include a bird of prey, a small vase and attendant lions.[8] Her name and development may also have been influenced by the cult to Kubaba, deified queen of Kish's Third dynasty.[9]
From around the 6th century BCE, cults to Cybele spread westwards from Phrygia to the ethnically Greek city states of Asia Minor, then mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia.[10] Pausanias (2nd century CE) attests to a Magnesian cult to "the Mother of the Gods" whose rock-sculpture image was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess. It was attributed to Broteas, son of Tantalus, and was carved into a spur of Mount Sipylus.[11] The remains of this figure, though lacking inscriptions and much eroded, are consistent with later representations of a seated Cybele, with a supporting or attendant lion (or tiger) beneath each arm.
Most of Cybele's Greek cults were funded by individuals and associations, rather than by the state or polis. Burkert places her (as Meter) among the "foreign gods" of Greek Religion, where she "presents a complex picture insofar as indigenous, Minoan-Mycenean tradition is here intertwined with a cult taken over directly from the Phrygian kingdom of Asia Minor".[12] Early Greek representations recall her rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands: she stands within a naiskos (representing a temple or its doorway) and wears a long, flowing chiton that cover her shoulders and back. She is crowned with a polos (a high, cylindrical hat). Around the 5th century BCE, a fully Hellenised image, by Agoracritos, was set up in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, her left hand holding a tympanon, a Greek introduction to her cult;[13] the Dionysiac rites used the same instrument. In mythological imagery that illustrates her rites, she is sometimes drawn in a chariot by two lions, sometimes four, suggesting her association Dionysus, who was said to have been cured of his madness by Cybele. Despite their acculturation, Cybele and Dionysus remained wild foreigners of disturbingly un-Hellenic temperament.[14] Towards the end of the 1st century BC, the Greek geographer Strabo attests to the popularity of Rhea-Cybele's "foreign [Phrygian] rites" in Athens, sometimes held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession.[15]
Later, Cybele's most ecstatic followers were males who ritually castrated themselves, after which they were given women's clothing and assumed female identities. They were referred to by one 3rd-century commentator, Callimachus, in the feminine as Gallai. Other contemporary commentators in ancient Greece and Rome referred to them Gallos or Galli.
There is no mention of these followers in Classical references although they related that her priestesses led the people in orgiastic ceremonies with wild music, drumming, dancing, and drinking. She was associated with the mystery religion concerning her son, Attis, who was castrated, died of his wounds, and resurrected by his mother. The dactyls were part of her retinue.
Other followers of Cybele, the Phrygian kurbantes or Corybantes, expressed her ecstatic and orgiastic cult in music, especially drumming, clashing of shields and spears, dancing, singing, and shouting—all at night.
In Alexandria, ethnic Greeks worshiped Cybele as "The Mother of the Gods, the Savior who Hears our Prayers" and as "The Mother of the Gods, the Accessible One".
The goddess was not universally welcomed. According to Herodotus, when Anacharsis (6th century BCE) returned to Scythia after traveling and acquiring knowledge among the Greeks, his brother (the Scythian King) put him to death for joining the foreign cult of Cybele.[16]
Atalanta and Hippomenes were turned into lions by Cybele or Zeus as punishment for having sex in one of her or his temples because the Greeks believed that lions could not mate with other lions. Another account says that Aphrodite turned them into lions for forgetting to do her tribute. As lions they then drew Cybele's chariot.
Attis' origins are unclear. Though ancient sources describe him as a Phrygian deity, no Phrygian images of him have been found. The personal name "Attis" was common in Phrygia, and is inscribed on several of Cybele's Phrygian shrines and monuments. Attis the deity may have been a Greek invention, based on what little was known of Cybele's Phrygian cult and its priesthoods. His earliest known cult image, on a 4th century BCE stele from Piraeus, near Athens, shows him as a Hellenised stereotype, a rustic eastern barbarian with the Phrygian cap and shepherd's crook of his later Greek and Roman cults. He sits at ease, while a standing Phrygian Mother Goddess (Meter, or Kybele) hands him a jug, as if to share her own libation and welcome him into her cult.[17][18] Some representations of their joint cult show Attis as the lesser deity, or perhaps as a priestly attendant, suggesting a difference in their degree rather than essence. As emissaries between the human and divine, priests identified with their gods and were sacred in their own right. In the mid 2nd century, letters sent by the king of Pergamum to Cybele's shrine at Pessinos consistently address its chief priest as "Attis".[19]
In mythology, Attis was a vegetation spirit who was born and died each year,[20] the son of Nana and the lover of Cybele.[21] When he married Sangarius, Cybele drove him mad; he castrated himself and subsequently died. A grieving Cybele brought him back to life as a fir tree.[22] The evergreen tree and violets were sacred in the cult of Cybele and Attis[23] Catullus uses this myth as theme in his carmen 63.[1]
Rome officially adopted Cybele's cult during the greatest crisis of the second Punic War (218 to 201 BCE). Hannibal had invaded Italy, and dire prodigies, including a meteor shower and a failed harvest, seemed to warn of Rome's imminent defeat. The Roman Senate and its religious advisers consulted the Sibylline oracle and decided that Carthage might be defeated if Rome imported the Magna Mater ("Great Mother") of Phrygian Pessinos.[24] As this cult object belonged to a Roman ally, the Kingdom of Pergamum, the Roman Senate sent ambassadors to seek the king's consent; en route, a consultation with the Greek oracle at Delphi confirmed that the goddess should be brought to Rome.[25] The goddess arrived in Rome in the form of Pessinos' black meteoric stone. Roman legend connects this voyage, or its end, to the matron Claudia Quinta, who was accused of inchastity but proved her innocence with a miraculous feat on behalf of the goddess. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, supposedly the "best man" in Rome, was chosen to meet the goddess at Ostia; Rome's most virtuous matrons (including Claudia Quinta) conducted her to the temple of Victoria, to await the completion of her temple on the Palatine Hill. Cybele's official Roman cult was inaugurated as the first Megalesian festival, on 12 April 210 BCE.[26] In due course, Rome defeated Hannibal.
This traditional Roman account, part history and part myth, emphasises the piety, morality and high status of the Romans involved, male and female. It ignores Cybele's consort (Attis), her eunuch priests (Galli), and the wild, ecstatic features of her Greek and Phrygian cult, though these would have accompanied the goddess' arrival.[27] In effect, Cybele is presented as fully Romanised from the first. For some modern scholars, later accounts of her cults - in particular those relating to the Galli - suggest Cybele's import as "biting off more than one can chew".[28]
Pessinos' stone was later used as the face of an otherwise conventional statue of the goddess.[29] Romans knew her simply as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"), or as Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods"), equivalent to the Greek title Meter Theon Idaia ("Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida"). Rome's cult to Cybele shows several adaptations of its Greek model. Some are iconographic; where Greek mythological representations of her processions show her standing, driving her lion-drawn chariot, the Roman equivalent shows her seated image, drawn in a biga (two-horse chariot).[30] Others demonstrate the peculiar role and status of the Galli in Rome's social and religious life, and suggest reasons for the near complete omission of Attis in early literary references to Cybele's cult. While the various Greek and Phrygian cults to the goddess and her consort seem to have been open to all, Rome observed its own traditional proprieties. For the duration of the goddess' festivals, her temple was opened to the public. Ordinary citizens might observe her procession (pompa), but no more than that; as citizens, they could not participate in the goddess' mysteries. The upper classes who sponsored her festivals delegated their organisation to the plebeian aediles. In the goddess' honour they staged lavish, private festival banquets, at which her distinctive eunuch priests were conspicuously absent.[31]
Catullus 63:[1] transposes Attis and Cybele from urban Rome, back to "the Phrygian home of Cybele, to the Phrygian forests of the goddess, where the clash of cymbals ring, where tambourines resound, where the Phrygian flute-player blows deeply on his curved reed, where ivy-crowned maenads toss their heads wildly."
By Virgil's time, during the early Imperial era, Magna Mater was fully absorbed into Rome's mythology, where she served the religious and social ideology of a new Augustan order. Virgil's Aeneid (written between 29 and 19 BCE) presents Rome's Magna Mater as Berecyntian Cybele, protector of the Trojan prince Aeneas, a fugitive from the destruction of Troy. She gives the Trojans her sacred tree for ship-building, and begs Zeus to make the ships indestructible. These ships become the means of escape for Aeneas and his men, destined to become the ancestors of the Roman people. Once arrived in Italy, the ships have served their purpose and are transformed into sea nymphs.[32] The bringing of Cybele from anciently "Trojan" lands to Rome can therefore be taken as the returning of an ancestral, protective Goddess to her people.[33]
As Magna Mater had been introduced into Rome by the power of the state, her cults were ultimately governed by Roman priests, the pontifices. These priesthoods of Rome's leading deities were traditionally reserved to her highest ranking citizens, who might also be her highest magistrates. Other citizens might be appointed to somewhat lesser offices, and to priesthoods such as the sacerdotes.[34] In Rome, senior priesthoods attracted little or no public subsidy and only wealthy citizens could afford the overheads, which included the running costs of temples, assistants, cults and festivals. The Galli represented an inversion of this principle. As eunuchs, they were forbidden Roman citizenship and rights of inheritance; and must depend on the generosity of those who funded the cults to Magna and Attis. For a few days of the year, during the Megalesia, the laws of the goddess allowed the Galli to roam the streets and beg for money. From the start, they were objects of Roman scorn, fascination, and religious awe. In 103 BCE, the chief Gallus Battakes of Phrygia came to Rome, took up position on the Rostra and publicly prophesied an imminent victory of Gaius Marius. A plebeian tribune named A. Pompeius insulted the Archgallus, chased him away, and died of a fever just a few days later.[35]
Under Claudius, the Galli were regulated by a senior priest, known as the Archigallus, who was not eunuch and held full Roman citizenship.[36] As self-castration would have involved loss of Roman citizenship, the sacrifice of a bull and the offer its testicles became an acceptable substitute. A 160 CE dedication to the goddess by a man named Carpes describes his taking a bull's testes from Rome to Cybele's shrine at Lyon, France.
Under the Roman Empire the most important festival of Cybele was the Hilaria, taking place between March 15 and March 28. It symbolically commemorated the death of Attis and his resurrection by Cybele, involving days of mourning followed by rejoicing. Celebrations also took place on 4 April with the Megalesia festival, the anniversary of the arrival of the goddess (i.e. the Black Stone) in Rome. On the 10th April, the anniversary of the consecration of her temple on the Palatine, a procession of her image was carried to the Circus Maximus where races were held. These two dates seem to be incorporated within the same festival, though the evidence for what took place in between is lacking.
From 160 CE the Roman cult to Magna Mater included a bull sacrifice known as the taurobolium.[37] Initiates supposedly took their place in a pit beneath a slatted wooden floor, to be drenched by the blood of a bull sacrifice above. This, if an accurate description, is an exception to the usual Roman rules of sacrifice.[38] A lesser version of the rite, known as a criobolium, involved the sacrifice of a ram. The first recorded taurobolium took place at Puteoli in AD 134 in honour of Venus Caelestia.[39]
Cybele's main Roman temple was restored by Augustus as part of his series of religious reforms. It was close by his own house on the Palatine Hill. Augustan ideology and Imperial cult identified Magna Mater with the empress Livia, as Rome's protectress and symbolic "Great Mother". On the cuirass of Augustus' Prima Porta statue, Cybele's tympanon lies at the feet of the goddess Tellus. Cybele was portrayed with Livia's face on cameos[40] and in the Cybele statue now in Malibu's Getty Museum.[41] Under Claudius, the cult to Attis and Magna Mater was included in the official religious calendar.
Cybele had public and private cults throughout the Roman empire. Near Setif (Mauretania), the ceremonial "tree-bearers" and the faithful (religiosi) restored the temple of Cybele and Attis after a disastrous fire in 288 CE. Lavish new fittings paid for by the private group included the silver statue of Cybele and the chariot that carried her in procession received a new canopy with tassels in the form of fir cones.[42] Cybele drew ire from Christians throughout the Empire; St. Theodore of Amasea is said to have spent the time granted to him to recant his beliefs, burning a temple of Cybele instead.[43]