Cybele ( ; 'Kubeleya Mother', perhaps 'Mountain Mother'; ; Kybélē, Kybēbē, Kybelis) is an Anatolian mother goddess; she may have a possible forerunner in the earliest Neolithic at Çatalhöyük. Greek colonists in Asia Minor adopted and adapted her Phrygian cult and spread it to mainland Greece and to the more distant western Greek colonies around the sixth century BC.
In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, of her possibly Minoan equivalent Rhea, and of the harvest-mother goddess Demeter. Some city-states, notably Athens, evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuch mendicant priesthood, the Galli. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele became associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.
In Rome, Cybele became known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle in 205 BC recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage (218 to 201 BC). Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. As Rome eventually established hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout Rome's empire. Greek and Roman writers debated and disputed the meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods, which remain controversial subjects in modern scholarship.
Anatolia
No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult. She may have evolved from a statuary type found at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, of a "corpulent and fertile" female figure accompanied by large felines, dated to the 6th millennium BC and identified by some as a mother goddess. In Phrygian art of the 8th century BC, the cult attributes of the Phrygian mother-goddess include attendant lions, a bird of prey, and a small vase for her libations or other offerings.Elizabeth Simpson, "Phrygian Furniture from Gordion", in Georgina Herrmann (ed.), The Furniture of Ancient Western Asia, Mainz 1996, pp. 198–201.
The inscription Matar Kubileya/KubeleyaR. S. P. Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2009, p. 794 (s.v. "Κυβέλη"). at a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BC, is usually read as "Mother of the mountain", a reading supported by ancient classical sources,. This displaces the root meaning of "Cybele" as "she of the hair": see C.H.E. Haspels, The Highlands of Phrygia, 1971, I 293 no 13, noted in notes 17 and 18. and consistent with Cybele as any of several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities: a goddess thus "born from stone".Johnstone, in . She is ancient Phrygia's only known goddess, the divine companion or consort of its mortal rulers, and was probably the highest deity of the Phrygian state. Her name, and the development of religious practices associated with her, may have been influenced by the Kubaba cult of the deified Sumerian queen Kubaba.Kubaba was a queen of Kish's Third Dynasty. She was worshipped at Carchemish, and her name was Hellenized as Kybebe. takes this as the likely source of kubilya (cf. , where kubileya = mountain).
In the 2nd century AD, the geographer Pausanias attests to a Magnesian (Lydian) cult to "the mother of the gods", whose image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. This was believed to be the oldest image of the goddess, and was attributed to the legendary Broteas.Pausanias, Description of Greece: "the Magnesians, who live to the north of Spil Mount, have on the rock Coddinus the most ancient of all the images of the Mother of the gods. The Magnesians say that it was made by Broteas the son of Tantalus." The image was probably Hittite in origin; see . At Pessinos in Phrygia, the mother goddess—identified by the Greeks as Cybele—took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,Summers, in . and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.Schmitz, Leonard, in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1867, p. 67. link to perseus.org., suggests "Agdistis" as Cybele's personal name at Pessinos. This was the aniconic stone that was removed to Rome in 204 BC.
Images and iconography in funerary contexts, and the ubiquity of her Phrygian name Matar ("Mother"), suggest that she was a mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown": the civilized and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead. Her association with hawks, lions, and the stone of the mountainous landscape of the Anatolian wilderness seems to characterize her as mother of the land in its untrammeled natural state with power to rule, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, and to control its potential threats to a settled, civilized life. Anatolian elites sought to harness her protective power to forms of ruler-cult; in Phrygia, the Midas monument connects her with king Midas, as her sponsor, consort, or co-divinity. As protector of cities, or city states, she was sometimes shown wearing a mural crown, representing the city walls.Takacs, in At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life".; for quotation, see p. 146.
Some Phrygian shaft monuments are thought to have been used for libations and blood offerings to Cybele, perhaps anticipating by several centuries the pit used in her taurobolium and criobolium sacrifices during the Roman imperial era.Vecihi Özkay, "The Shaft Monuments and the 'Taurobolium' among the Phrygians", Anatolian Studies, Vol. 47, (1997), pp. 89–103, British Institute at Ankara. Over time, her Phrygian cults and iconography were transformed, and eventually subsumed, by the influences and interpretations of her foreign devotees, at first Greek and later Roman.
Greek Cybele From around the 6th century BC, cults to the Anatolian mother-goddess were introduced from Phrygia into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean Islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia. The Greeks called her Mātēr or Mētēr ("Mother"), or from the early 5th century Kubélē; in Pindar, she is "Mistress Cybele the Mother"., citing Pindar, fragment 80 (Snell), Despoina Kubéla Mātēr (). In Homeric Hymn 14 she is "the Mother of all gods and all human beings." Cybele was readily assimilated with several Greek goddesses, especially Rhea, as Mētēr theōn ("Mother of the gods"), whose raucous, ecstatic rites she may have acquired. As an exemplar of devoted motherhood, she was partly assimilated to the grain-goddess Demeter, whose torchlight procession recalled her search for her lost daughter, Persephone; but she also continued to be identified as a foreign deity, with many of her traits reflecting Greek ideas about barbarians and the wilderness, as Mētēr oreia ("Mother of the Mountains"). She is depicted as a Potnia Theron ("Mistress of animals"),Potnia Therōn (Πότνια Θηρῶν) can sometimes be found as a title in ancient sources, but is used in modern scholarship for an iconographic schema, in which a female figure is flanked by or grips two animals. with her mastery of the natural world expressed by the lions that flank her, sit in her lap, or draw her chariot. This schema may derive from a goddess figure from Minoan religion. Walter Burkert places her among the "foreign gods" of Greek religion, a complex figure combining a putative Minoan-Mycenaean tradition with the Phrygian cult imported directly from Asia Minor.
Cybele's early Greek images are small votive representations of her monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands. She stands alone within a naiskos, which represents her temple or its doorway, and is crowned with a polos, a high, cylindrical hat. A long, flowing chiton covers her shoulders and back. She is sometimes shown with lions in attendance. Around the 5th century BC, Agoracritos created a fully Hellenised and influential image of Cybele that was set up in the Metroon in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, holding a phiale (a dish for making libations to the gods) and a tympanon (a hand drum). Both were Greek innovations to her iconography and reflect key features of her ritual worship introduced by the Greeks which would be salient in the cult's later development.
For the Greeks, the tympanon was a marker of foreign cults, suitable for rites to Cybele, her close equivalent Rhea, and Dionysus; of these, only Cybele holds the tympanon. She is mentioned in Euripides' Bacchae, 64 – 177, and Pindar's Dithyramb II.6 – 9. In the Bibliotheca formerly attributed to Apollodorus, Cybele is said to have cured Dionysus of his madness.
Their cults shared several characteristics: the foreigner-deity arrived in a chariot, drawn by exotic big cats (Dionysus by tigers or panthers, Cybele by lions), accompanied by wild music and an ecstatic entourage of exotic foreigners and people from the lower classes. At the end of the 1st century BC Strabo notes that Rhea-Cybele's popular rites in Athens were sometimes held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession.Strabo, Geography, book X, 3:18 Both were regarded with caution by the Greeks, as being foreign, to be simultaneously embraced and "held at arm's length".
Cybele was also the focus of mystery cult, private rites with a chthonic aspect connected to hero cult and exclusive to those who had undergone initiation, although it is unclear who Cybele's initiates were. Reliefs show her alongside young female and male attendants with torches, and with vessels for purification. Literary sources describe joyous abandonment to the loud, percussive music of tympanon, castanets, clashing cymbals, and flutes, and to the frenzied "Phrygian dancing", perhaps a form of circle-dancing by women, to the roar of "wise and healing music of the gods". and footnotes 20 – 25, citing Homeric Hymn 14, Pindar, Dithyramb II.10 (Snell), Euripides, Helen, 1347; Palamedes (Strabo 10.3.13); Bacchae, 64 – 169, Strabo 10.3.15 – 17 et al.