Cybele

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This article is about the Anatolian Earth Goddess. For other uses of Magna Mater, see Magna Mater (disambiguation). For other uses of Cybele, see Cybele (disambiguation).
Cybele enthroned, with lion, cornucopia and Mural crown. Roman marble, c. 50 CE. Getty Museum

Cybele play /ˈsɪbəliː/ (Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Greek: Κυβέλη Kybele, Κυβήβη Kybebe, Κύβελις Kybelis), was an originally Anatolian form of Earth Mother or Great Mother. Little is known of her oldest Anatolian cults, other than her association with mountains, hawks and lions. She was Phrygia's State deity; her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Anatolian Asia Minor, and spread from there to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies from around the 6th century BCE.

In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partly assimilated to aspects of Gaia (the "Earth"), her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the Corn-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 transgendered or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to her divine "Phrygian" castrate shepherd-consort Attis, whose rites and myths appear to have been Greek inventions. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.

In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman State adopted and developed a particular form of her cult, and claimed her conscription as a key religious component in their success against Carthage during the Punic Wars. They also reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus as an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas, in Rome's foundation myth. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanised forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.

Contents

[edit] Cult origins and development

[edit] Anatolia

Greek deities
series
Primordial deities
Titans and Olympians
Aquatic deities
Chthonic deities
Personified concepts
Other deities
Anatolian deities
Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük c. 6,000 BCE

Cybele may have evolved from an Anatolian Mother Goddess of a type found at Çatalhöyük, dated to the 6000 BCE.[2] This corpulent, fertile Mother Goddess appears to be giving birth on her throne, which has two feline-headed hand rests.

Anatolian 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 any of several similar tutelary goddesses, each known as "mother" and associated with specific Anatolian mountains or other localities.[5] Her cults were particularly prominent in Phrygia, where she was probably the highest State deity. Her name, and the development of her cults, may also have been influenced by cult to the deified Sumerian queen Kubaba.[6]

In the 2nd century CE, 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.[7] The gigantic remains of such a figure at Mount Sipylus, though lacking inscriptions and much eroded, are consistent with later representations of a seated Cybele, with a supporting or attendant lion beneath each arm. At Pessinos in Phrygia, Cybele took the form of an unshaped stone of black meteoric iron,[8] and may have been associated with or identical to Agdistis, Pessinos' mountain deity.[9]

In early Phrygian art, Cybele's cult attributes include a bird of prey, a small vase for her libations or other offerings, and attendant lions.[10] She is Phrygia's only known deity;[11] no contemporary text or myth survives to attest her original Phrygian cult or character but the common use of her Phrygian name, Matar ("Mother"), image and iconography in funerary contexts suggests her as mediator between the "boundaries of the known and unknown".[12] Her associations with hawks, lions, and the very stone of the wild, mountainous Anatolian landscape, suggest her as mother of the land and its wild, untrammeled nature, with power to dominate, moderate or soften its latent ferocity, and control its potential threats to a settled, civilised life; thus, her enrollment as a protective goddess of the state by Anatolian elites, possibly concurrent with some form of ruler-cult.[13] At the same time, her power "transcended any purely political usage and spoke directly to the goddess' followers from all walks of life".[14]

[edit] Greece

From around the 6th century BCE, cults to Cybele were introduced from Phrygia into the ethnically Greek colonies of western Anatolia, mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the westerly colonies of Magna Graecia. As an alien goddess of "vivid and forceful character",[15] her reception varied. 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 Cybele's cult.[16] In around 500 BCE, a mendicant priest of Cybele was killed in Athens, for his attempt to "corrupt" the city's women with this subversively alien cult. A subsequent plague in the city was thought a sign of Cybele's anger. The city built her a metroon, to placate her and secure her future protection.[17]

The eroded rock-statue of Cybele at Mount Sipylus, in an early 20th century French postcard

Walter Burkert places Cybele (as Meter) among the "foreign gods" of Greek Religion, where she "presents a complex picture insofar as an indigenous, Minoan-Mycenean tradition is here intertwined with a cult taken over directly from the Phrygian kingdom of Asia Minor".[18] As a "Mother of the Gods", Cybele was assimilated to the Minoan-Greek earth-mother Rhea, and as an exemplar of devoted motherhood, to Demeter;[19] otherwise, she was considered a distinct, foreign goddess with a liking for wild places and wild behaviour, and was deliberately portrayed as such. Her early Greek images are small votive representations of her monumental rock-cut images in the Phrygian highlands; she stands alone within a naiskos, representing her temple or its doorway, and is crowned with a polos (a high, cylindrical hat), with a long, flowing chiton that cover her shoulders and back. She is sometimes shown with lion attendants. Around the 5th century BCE, a fully Hellenised and influential image of Cybele, by Agoracritos, was set up in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, and a tympanon; a Greek introduction to her cult and a salient feature in its later developments.[20]

In Greek religion, the tympanon is a marker of "foreign" deities. It features in the cults to Dionysus and the Cretan-Greek mother-goddess Rhea, with whom Cybele became closely, sometimes interchangeably connected. Though Cybele's mythic connections to Dionysus are minimal and late,[21] both their cults focused on the deity's arrival in a chariot, drawn by exotic big cats – Dionysus by tigers, Cybele by lions – and each was accompanied by wild music and an ecstatic entourage that admixed the exotically foreign with society's lowest. In Athens, and elsewhere, their rites were sometimes combined.[22] Despite their acculturation, both these deities and their cults remained wild, foreign, and of distinctly un-Hellenic temperament.[23] In Greece, most of Cybele's cults were extra-urban, and were funded privately, rather than by the polis. She never became an Olympian goddess.[24]

Cybele drawn in her chariot by lions towards a votive sacrifice (right). Above are the Sun God and heavenly objects. Plaque from Ai Khanoum, Bactria (Afghanistan), 2nd century BCE

[edit] Cybele and Attis

Cybele's major mythographic narratives attach to her relationship with Attis, who is described by ancient Greek and Roman sources and cults as her youthful consort, and as a Phrygian deity. In Phrygia, his name was both commonplace and priestly, and inscribed on several of Cybele's Phrygian shrines and monuments; as no Phrygian images of him have been found, his worship may have been a Greek invention based on what was known of Cybele's Phrygian cult.[25] Attis seems to have accompanied the diffusion of Cybele's cult through Magna Graeca; there is evidence of their joint cult at the Greek colonies of Marseilles (Gaul) and Lokroi (southern Italy) from the 6th and 7th centuries BC. After Alexander the Great's conquests, "wandering devotees of the goddess became an increasingly common presence in Greek literature and social life; depictions of Attis have been found at numerous Greek sites".[26]

Attis' earliest certain cult image is found alongside Cybele's, on a 4th century BCE Greek stele from Piraeus, near Athens, where he appears as the Hellenised stereotype of a rustic eastern barbarian, sitting at ease, sporting the Phrygian cap and shepherd's crook of his later Greek and Roman cults. Beside him stands a Phrygian Mother Goddess who hands him a jug, as if to welcome him into her cult with a share of her own libation.[27] Later images of Attis show him as a shepherd, in similar relaxed attitudes, holding or playing the syrinx (panpipes).[28] When shown with Cybele, he is the lesser deity, or perhaps her priestly attendant; a difference of relative degree, rather than essence, as priests were sacred in their own right and were closely identified with their gods. In the mid 2nd century, letters from the king of Pergamum to Cybele's shrine at Pessinos consistently address its chief priest as "Attis".[29]

In later mythology, Attis became a vegetation spirit who was born and died each year,[30] the son of Nana and the lover of Cybele.[31] 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.[32] The evergreen tree and violets were sacred in the cult of Cybele and Attis[33] Catullus uses this myth as theme in his carmen 63.[1][clarification needed]

[edit] Devotees and priesthoods

See also: Galli and Corybantes

Lynn Roller (1999) suggests that "Attis" was originally a name or title of Cybele's ancient Phrygian priests, or priest-kings; Cybele's head priest at Pessinos was "The Attis".[34] Most myths present Attis as the deified founder of Cybele's Galli priesthood but "historical reality could just as easily be the opposite"; in Servius' account, Attis castrates himself to avoid the unwanted attentions of a king. He dies, and is found by Cybele's priests, who bury him, then memorialise him in their annual rites.[35]

Cybele's priests are referred to in the feminine as Gallai by a Hellenistic poet.[36] Other contemporary commentators in ancient Greece and Rome referred to them Gallos or Galli. Classical references refer to them only as priestesses.

In Greece, the dactyls were part of her retinue. The Phrygian kurbantes or Corybantes held night-time cults to Cybele, with music, especially drumming, clashing of shields and spears, dancing and singing.

Cybele with attendant lions. She is crowned with a polos and holds a tympanon. From Nicaea in Bithynia (Istanbul Archaeology Museum).

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".

In myth, 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.

[edit] Roman Cybele

1st century BCE marble statue of Cybele from Formia, Lazio

Rome officially adopted Cybele's cult during the second Punic War (218 to 201 BCE). In the traditional Roman accounts, Hannibal had invaded Italy; 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.[37] 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.[38] 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.[39] In due course, Rome defeated Hannibal.

This account of Cybele's recruitment to the Roman cause, 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.[40] It presents Cybele and the patricians who brought and welcomed her as Rome's saviours; Cybele herself seems a familiar goddess, Romanised from the first. For some scholars, ancient and modern alike, the later observations and descriptions of Cybele's cult, particularly of her Galli as shockingly "unRoman", represent the unforeseen consequences of Rome's blind obedience to the Sibyl; a case of "biting off more than one can chew", something of an embarrassment but impossible to undo.[41]

Pessinos' stone was later used as the face of an otherwise conventional statue of the goddess.[42] 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).[43] 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.[44]

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.[45] 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.[46]

[edit] Cults and priesthoods

See also: Galli and Corybantes
Statue of an Archigallus (high priest of Cybele) 2nd-3rd century AD (Archaeological Museum of Cherchell).

As Magna Mater had been introduced into Rome by the power of the state, her cults were ultimately governed by Roman priests, the pontifices, who were usually drawn from Rome's highest ranking, wealthiest citizens.[47] Senior priests in Rome were expected to fund the running costs of their temples, assistants, cults and festivals. The Galli represented an inversion of this principle; as eunuchs, they were forbidden Roman citizenship and rights of inheritance; their living depended on the pious generosity of others. For a few days of the year, during the Megalesia, Cybele's laws allowed them to roam the streets and beg for money. They were unmistakably marked out as Galli by their regalia, and their notoriously effeminate dress and demeanour, but as priests of a state cult, they were sacred and inviolate. From the start, they were objects of Roman fascination, scorn and religious awe.[48] 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.[49]

Under Claudius, the Galli were regulated by a senior priest, known as the Archigallus, who was not eunuch and held full Roman citizenship.[50] 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.

[edit] Festivals

See also: Megalesia and Hilaria

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.

Modern illustration of an imagined Taurobolium

From 160 CE the Roman cult to Magna Mater included a bull sacrifice known as the taurobolium.[51] 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.[52] 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.[53]

[edit] Temples

See also: Temples of Cybele in Rome
Modern statue of Cybele in her chariot drawn by lions. Fountain in the Plaza de Cibeles, Madrid

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[citation needed] lies at the feet of the goddess Tellus. Cybele was portrayed with Livia's face on cameos[54] and in the Cybele statue now in Malibu's Getty Museum.[55] 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.[56] 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.[57]

[edit] See also

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[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Catullus, Gaius Valerius (ca. 84 BC – ca. 54 BC). Attis. Carmina. 63. ISBN 9004141324.  As translated and published in: Morford, Mark P.O.; Lenardon, Robert J.; Sham, Michael. "Cybele and Attis". Classical Mythology. Archived from the original on 2005-01-30. http://web.archive.org/web/20050130092338/http://www.classicalmythology.org/archive/classical/catullus_attis.html. Retrieved 2010-05-03. 
  2. ^ With reference to Cybele's origins and precursors, Takács describes "A terracotta statuette of a seated (mother) goddess giving birth with each hand on the head of a leopard or panther, from Çatal Höyük (dated around 6000 B.C.E.)" Sarolta A. Takács, "Cybele and Catullus' Attis[1]", in Eugene N. Lane, Cybele, Attis and related cults: essays in memory of M.J. Vermaseren 1996:376.
  3. ^ Johnstone, in Lane, 1996, p. 109.
  4. ^ Roller 1999, pp. 67–68. This displaces the meaning of "Cybele" as "she of the hair": see C.H.E. Haspels, The Highlands of Phrygia, 1971, I 293 no 13, noted in Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, 1985, III.3.4, notes 17 and 18.
  5. ^ Motz, 1997. p. 115.
  6. ^ Kubaba was a queen of Kish's Third dynasty. She was worshiped at Carchemish, and her name was Hellenized as Kybebe. Motz 1997, pp. 105–106 takes this as the likely source of kubilya (cf. Roller 1999, pp. 67 - 8, where kubileya = mountain).
  7. ^ 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 Roller, 1999, p. 200.
  8. ^ Summers, in Lane, 1996, p.364.
  9. ^ Schmitz, Leonard, in Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1867, p. 67. link to perseus.org. Roller, 1994, pp. 248 - 56, suggests "Agdistis" as Cybele's personal name at Pessinos.
  10. ^ Elizabeth Simpson, "Phrygian Furniture from Gordion", in Georgina Herrmann (ed.), The Furniture of Ancient Western Asia, Mainz 1996, pp. 198-201.
  11. ^ Roller, 1999, p. 53.
  12. ^ Roller, 1999, pp. 64, 65.
  13. ^ This is very likely in Phrygia, and possible in Lydia, northern Anatolia, where cult to Cybele seems to have included cult to Lydia's semi-legendary king Midas as the goddess' sponsor, deceased co-divinity, demi-god, or consort. See Roller, 1999, pp. 69ff.
  14. ^ Roller, 1999, pp. 111, 114, 140; for quotation, see p. 146.
  15. ^ Roller, L., in Lane, E. (ed), 1996, p. 306. See also Roller, 1999, p. 139.
  16. ^ Johnstone, P.A., in Lane, E. (ed), 1996, citing Herodotus, Geography, 4.76-7.
  17. ^ Roller, 1999. Page number(s) to be found. See also Roscoe, p. 200.
  18. ^ See Burkert, Greek Religion, 1985, section III.3,4 p. 177.
  19. ^ Roller, 1999, pp. 170 - 172.
  20. ^ Roller, 1994, p. 249.
  21. ^ Only one connection is known, in the Pseudo-Apollodorus, where Cybele is said to have cured Dionysus of his madness. See Roller, 1999, p. 157.
  22. ^ Towards the end of the 1st century BC, the Greek geographer Strabo, attesting the popularity of Rhea-Cybele's "foreign [Phrygian] rites" in Athens, writes that they were sometimes held in conjunction with Dionysus' procession. See Strabo, Geography, book X, 3:18. See also Euripides, Bacchae, 64 - 186, and Pindar, Dithyramb II.6 - 9.
  23. ^ Roller, 1994, p. 253.
  24. ^ See Burkert, Greek Religion, 1985, section III.3,4 p. 177. See also Roller, 1999, pp. 140 - 144.
  25. ^ Roller believes that the name "Attis" was originally associated with the Phrygian Royal family and inherited by a Phrygian priesthood or theocracy devoted to the Mother Goddess, consistent with Attis' mythology as deified servant or priest of his goddess. Greek cults and Greek art associate this "Phrygian" costume with several non-Greek, "oriental" peoples, including their erstwhile foes, the Persians and Trojans. In some Greek states, Attis was met with outright hostility; but his vaguely "Trojan" associations would have been counted in his favour for the eventual promotion of his Roman cult. See Roller, 1994, pp. 248 - 56. See also Roscoe, 1996, pp. 198 - 9, and Johnstone, in Lane, 1996, pp. 106 -7.
  26. ^ Roscoe, p. 200.
  27. ^ The stele names her Agdistis, which Roller offers as Phrygian Kybele's personal name. See Roller, 1994, pp. 248 - 56.
  28. ^ The syrinx was considered a simple rustic instrument. It was associated with Pan, Greek god of shepherds, flocks, wild and wooded places, and unbridled sexuality. See Johnston, in Lane (Editor), 1996, pp. 107 - 111, and Roller, pp. 177 - 180: Pan is a "natural companion" for Cybele, and there is evidence of their joint cults.
  29. ^ Roller, 1994, p. 254.
  30. ^ Howard Hayes Scullard (1988). From the Gracchi to Nero: a history of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68. Psychology Press. pp. 361–. ISBN 9780415025270. http://books.google.com/books?id=1DcIx7ADqOgC&pg=PA361. Retrieved 14 October 2010. 
  31. ^ Patricia Turner; Charles Russell Coulter (2001). Dictionary of ancient deities. Oxford University Press US. pp. 81–. ISBN 9780195145045. http://books.google.com/books?id=jEcpkWjYOZQC&pg=PA81. Retrieved 14 October 2010. 
  32. ^ Michael Grant; John Hazel (2002). Who's who in classical mythology. Psychology Press. pp. 153–. ISBN 9780415260411. http://books.google.com/books?id=IKRDEAeout8C&pg=PA153. Retrieved 14 October 2010. 
  33. ^ James G. Frazer (May 2006). Adonis Attis Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion. Kessinger Publishing. pp. 166–. ISBN 9781425499914. http://books.google.com/books?id=5gKJH_YSncIC&pg=PA166. Retrieved 14 October 2010. 
  34. ^ Roller, 1999, pp. 178 - 181.
  35. ^ Roscoe, Will, "Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion", History of Religions, 35, 3, 1996, p. 199. See also Servius, Commentary on Vergil's Aeneid, 9.115.
  36. ^ "Gallai of the mountain mother, raving thyrsus-lovers," Γάλλαι μητρὸς ὀρείης φιλόθυρσοι δρομάδες, tentatively attributed to Callimachus as fr. inc. auct. 761 Pfeiffer.
  37. ^ Beard, p.168.
  38. ^ Boatwright et al., The Romans, from Village to Empire ISBN 978-0-19-511875-9
  39. ^ Livy, History of Rome, 29.10-11, .14 (written circa 10 CE).
  40. ^ Beard, 1994, pp. 168, 178 - 9: see also Summers, in Lane, 1996, pp. 357 - 9. Attis' many votive statuettes at Cybele's Roman temple are evidence of his early Roman cult; Lane interprets them as evidence of early private cult to Attis in Cybele's temple, and points to the absence of household and mystery cults to Attis in Rome, contra the widespread existence of such in Greece.
  41. ^ Beard, 1994, p. 177, citing Vermaseren, M.J., Cybele and Attis: the myth and the cult, Thames and Hudson, 1977, p. 96.
  42. ^ Summers, in Lane, 1996, pp. 363 - 4: "a rather bizarre looking statue with a stone for a face." Prudentius describes the stone as small, and encased in silver.
  43. ^ Summers, in Lane, 1996, pp. 348 - 50.
  44. ^ Summers, in Lane, 1996, pp. 337 - 9.
  45. ^ Book IX, lines 99–109, 143–147.
  46. ^ Beard, p. 169.
  47. ^ Beard, 1994, p. 173 ff.
  48. ^ Roller, 1999, pp.318 - 319.
  49. ^ Plutarch, "Life of Marius," 17.
  50. ^ Fear, in Lane, 1996, p. 47.
  51. ^ Fears, in Lane, 1996, p. 41.as
  52. ^ Beard, p. 172: "[this is] quite contrary to the practice of traditional civic sacrifice in Rome, in which the blood was carefully collected and the officiant never sullied."
  53. ^ C.I.L. X.1596
  54. ^ P. Lambrechts, "Livie-Cybele," La Nouvelle Clio 4 (1952): 251-60.
  55. ^ C. C. Vermeule, "Greek and Roman Portraits in North American Collections Open to the Public," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108 (1964): 106, 126, fig. 18.
  56. ^ Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 581.
  57. ^ "St. Theodore of Amasea". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Encyclopedia Press. 1914. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14573a.htm. Retrieved 2007-07-16. 

[edit] References

  • Beard, Mary, The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the 'Great Mother' in Imperial Rome, in Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Shamanism, History, and the State (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1994) pp. 164–90.
  • Burkert, Walter, 1982. Greek Religion (Cambridge:Harvard University Press), especially section III.3.4
  • Lotte (1997). The Faces of the Goddess. New YorkMotz: Oxford University Press US. ISBN 0195089677. 
  • Munn, Mark, "Kybele as Kubaba in a Lydo-Phrygian Context": Emory University cross-cultural conference "Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors in Central Anatolia", 2004 (Abstracts)
  • Roller, Lynn Emrich (1999). In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. ISBN 0520210247. 
  • Vassileva, Maya (2001). "Further considerations on the cult of Kybele". Anatolian Studies (British Institute at Ankara) 51, 2001: 51. doi:10.2307/3643027. JSTOR 3643027. 
  • Virgil, The Aeneid trans from Latin by West, David (Penguin Putnam Inc. 2003) p. 189-190 ISBN 0-14-044932-9
  • Lane, Eugene, (Editor) Cybele, Attis, and Related Cults: Essays in Memory of M.J. Vermaseren, Brill, 1996.
  • Laroche, Emanuel, "Koubaba, déesse anatolienne, et le problème des origines de Cybèle", Eléments orientaux dans la religion grecque ancienne, Paris 1960, p. 113-128.
  • Roller, Lynn E., "Attis on Greek Votive Monuments; Greek God or Phrygian?" Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1994), pp. 245–262.
  • Roscoe, Will, "Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion", History of Religions, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Feb., 1996), University of Chicago Press, pp. 195–230.

[edit] Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cybele
  • Brixhe, Claude "Le Nom de Cybele", Die Sprache, 25 (1979), 40-45
  • George E. Bean. Aegean Turkey: An archaeological guide ISBN 978-0-510-03200-5, 1967. Ernest Benn, London. 
  • Hyde, Walter Woodburn Paganism to Christianity in the Roman Empire (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1946)
  • Knauer, Elfried R. (2006). "The Queen Mother of the West: A Study of the Influence of Western Prototypes on the Iconography of the Taoist Deity." In: Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World. Ed. Victor H. Mair. University of Hawai'i Press. Pp. 62–115. ISBN 978-0-8248-2884-4; ISBN 0-8248-2884-4 (An article showing the probable derivation of the Daoist goddess, Xi Wangmu, from Kybele/Cybele)
  • Lane, Eugene, (Editor) Cybele, Attis, and Related Cults: Essays in Memory of M.J. Vermaseren, Brill, 1996.
  • Showerman, Grant The Great Mother of the Gods (Argonaut, 1969)
  • Vermaseren, Maarten Jozef. Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult trans. from Dutch by A. M. H. Lemmers (Thames and Hudson, 1977)
  • Virgil. The Aeneid trans from Latin by West, David (Penguin Putnam Inc. 2003)

[edit] External links

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