Cybele

• 1. Introduction

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  Cybele was already ancient when Rome came for her in 204 BC. A Sibylline oracle had declared that a foreign enemy threatening Italy could be repelled if Rome brought the goddess of Pessinos to the city. The Roman Senate sent ambassadors to the king of Pergamum, and en route consulted the oracle at Delphi for confirmation. At the Phrygian city of Pessinos, they collected a black lump of meteoric iron that generations had venerated as the goddess herself. The stone was carried by ship to the port of Ostia. There, a noblewoman named Claudia Quinta, accused of unchastity, reportedly dragged the sacred barge ashore with a single rope. She did it to prove her innocence before the assembled crowd. Where had this goddess come from before Rome claimed her? What did her people actually believe? What rites surrounded her in the Anatolian highlands long before Greek or Roman hands ever shaped her image?

• 2. Mountain Mother

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  The inscription Matar Kubileya appears on a Phrygian rock-cut shrine, dated to the first half of the 6th century BC. Ancient sources read it as "Mother of the mountain." Cybele was ancient Phrygia's only known goddess, the divine companion of its mortal rulers and probably the highest deity of the Phrygian state. Her name and associated practices may have drawn on the Kubaba cult, which venerated a Sumerian queen elevated to divine status.

  Phrygian funerary imagery frames her as a guardian between realms. Hawks, lions, and the stone of the mountainous Anatolian wilderness were her symbolic attributes. They cast her as the mother of the land in its wild, undomesticated form, with the power to moderate its ferocity and protect settled communities from the threats it carried.

  At Pessinos, the mother goddess may have been associated with or identical to a mountain deity named Agdistis. Elsewhere in Phrygia, the Midas monument connects her directly with king Midas as sponsor, consort, or co-divinity. When she protected a city rather than a wilderness, she wore a mural crown representing the city walls. The geographer Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, described a Magnesian cult in Lydia dedicated to "the mother of the gods." The cult's sacred image was carved into a rock-spur of Mount Sipylus. The ancients believed this to be the oldest image of the goddess anywhere, and attributed it to the legendary sculptor Broteas.

  Phrygian art of the 8th century BC showed her already attended by lions, a bird of prey, and a small vase for her libations. That image was about to travel far beyond the Anatolian highlands.

• 3. Greek Encounter

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  From around the 6th century BC, Cybele's cult moved from Phrygia into the Greek colonies of western Anatolia. From there it spread to mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, and the western colonies of Magna Graecia. The Greeks called her Mater, meaning "Mother," or from the early 5th century, Kubele. Pindar addressed her as "Mistress Cybele the Mother." The Homeric Hymn 14 named her "the Mother of all gods and all human beings."

  The sculptor Agoracritus, around the 5th century BC, created a fully Hellenized image of Cybele for the Metroon in the Athenian agora. It showed her enthroned, with a lion attendant, holding a phiale for libations and a tympanon, a kind of hand drum. Both objects were Greek innovations to her iconography.

  The tympanon marked Cybele as foreign within Greek religious thought. Walter Burkert placed her among the "foreign gods" of Greek religion. For Burkert, she combined a putative Minoan-Mycenaean tradition with a Phrygian cult imported directly from Asia Minor. She shared striking traits with Dionysus: both arrived in chariots drawn by exotic big cats; Cybele rode lions, Dionysus tigers or panthers. Both were accompanied by wild music and ecstatic crowds. Both were regarded with a mixture of attraction and caution. She appears alongside Dionysus in Euripides' Bacchae, at lines 64 to 186, and in Pindar's Dithyramb II.

  Herodotus tells of Anacharsis, a Scythian who traveled to Greece in the 6th century BC. Upon returning home with knowledge of Cybele's rites, his brother, the Scythian king, had him put to death. Athenian tradition held that the city's Metroon was founded to placate the goddess after one of her wandering priests was killed for attempting to introduce her cult. A plague followed until the Athenians built her a temple. The earliest surviving source for this account is the Hymn to the Mother of the Gods, written in 362 AD by the Roman emperor Julian.

  The Metroon in Athens was established in the early 5th century BC, on the west side of the Agora. It served not only as the goddess's temple but as the city's state archive. She was one of the four deities to whom serving councillors offered sacrifice, alongside Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. The temple was destroyed in the Persian sack of Athens in 480 BC and repaired around 460 BC. At the end of the 5th century BC, a Metroon was built at Olympia. It was a small hexastyle temple, the third structure on that sacred site, built after the archaic Heraion and the Temple of Zeus.

  Reliefs show her alongside young attendants carrying torches and vessels for purification. They are the material evidence of private initiation rites whose full content has never been recovered.

• 4. Attis

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  In Phrygia, "Attis" was not a deity's name but an ordinary personal name and a priestly title. The word appears in casual graffiti and in dedications at Cybele's shrines alike. His earliest certain image as a divine figure appears on a 4th-century BC Greek stele from Piraeus, near Athens. It shows him as the Hellenized stereotype of an eastern barbarian: reclining at ease in a Phrygian cap and holding a shepherd's crook. Before him stands a Phrygian goddess, identified by inscription as Agdistis, holding a tympanon in her left hand. With her right hand, she extends a jug, as if welcoming him into a share of her libation.

  Evidence of their joint cult appears at Marseille in Gaul and Lokroi in southern Italy, dating to the 6th and 7th centuries BC. After Alexander the Great's conquests, wandering devotees of the goddess became regular figures in Greek communities, and images of Attis turned up across Greek archaeological sites. Demosthenes, in his speech On the Crown in 330 BC, mentions "attes" as a ritual cry shouted by followers of mystic rites. By the mid 2nd century AD, letters from the king of Pergamum to Cybele's shrine at Pessinos consistently addressed the chief priest as "Attis." The divine name had become a permanent title.

  Pausanias preserved one version of the Attis myth in which the god achieves divinity through supporting Cybele's cult. A boar sent by Zeus kills him, and Zeus rewards his devotion with godhood. Catullus' poem 63 follows an entirely different path. It opens with Attis crossing the sea to Phrygia and castrating himself in ecstatic devotion to the goddess. He wakes from exhausted sleep to find himself exiled from his homeland, his body altered, and his freedom gone. Catullus narrates his protagonist as male until the moment of emasculation, and as female thereafter.

  Servius, writing during the Roman Imperial era, preserved one last version of the myth. Attis castrates a king who had pursued him, and the dying king castrates Attis in turn. Cybele's priests find Attis at the base of a pine tree, bury him, and emasculate themselves in his memory. It is a story that would come to explain the nature of the priesthood built in Cybele's name.

• 5. Magna Mater

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  The Romans knew Cybele as Magna Mater, meaning "Great Mother," or more formally as Magna Mater deorum Idaea, the Great Idaean Mother of the Gods. Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, reportedly the best man in Rome, was chosen to receive the goddess at Ostia. The city's most virtuous matrons then conducted the stone to the temple of Victoria. There it waited while her permanent home on the Palatine Hill was prepared.

  Roman tradition reinvented Cybele as the mother-goddess of ancient Ilium, the city we know as Troy. Since Rome's leading families claimed Trojan ancestry, this made her a foundational deity of the Roman people themselves. Virgil's Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC, gave this narrative its literary form. She is called "Berecyntian Cybele" in the poem, the mother of Jupiter himself. In the Aeneid, she gives the Trojans her sacred trees for shipbuilding and begs Jupiter to make the ships indestructible. Once those ships have carried Aeneas to Italy, they are transformed into sea nymphs.

  Augustus identified Magna Mater with Imperial order and Rome's religious authority throughout the empire. The empress Livia was presented as the goddess's earthly counterpart, Rome's protector and symbolic Great Mother. The goddess appears with Livia's own face on cameos and statuary of the period. Ovid stressed the barrenness of the earth before the Mother's arrival.

  The emperor Claudius promoted Attis to the Roman pantheon, placing his cult under the supervision of the quindecimviri, one of Rome's priestly colleges. Claudia Quinta's reputation had, by this time, become what one source called "increasingly glorified and fantastic," and images showed her dressed as a Vestal Virgin. Claudius claimed her among his own ancestors.

  Magna Mater's Palatine temple stood high on the slope overlooking the Circus Maximus, facing the temple of Ceres on the Aventine. The first temple was damaged by fire in 111 BC and later repaired. It burned again in the early Imperial era and was restored by Augustus. When it burned a second time, Augustus rebuilt it with greater splendor. A statue of the enthroned goddess sat permanently on the dividing barrier of the Circus Maximus, showing her seated on a lion's back.

  From at least 139 AD, the port of Ostia had grown into a full sanctuary to Magna Mater and Attis.

• 6. Sacred Calendar

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  The Megalesia festival in honor of Magna Mater commenced each year on the 4th of April, the anniversary of her arrival in Rome. Its structure remains only partly clear, but it included ludi scaenici: plays and entertainments on religious themes. These were probably performed on the long stepped approach leading up to the Palatine temple. Some were commissioned from well-known playwrights. On the 10th of April, the goddess's image was taken in public procession to the Circus Maximus, where chariot races were held in her honor.

  The Greek writer Dionysius of Halicarnassus described the procession, at the cusp of Rome's transition to Empire, as wild Phrygian "mummery" and "fabulous clap-trap." He admired, by contrast, the dignified sacrifices and games that Romans conducted in what he considered a traditional Roman manner. Lucretius captured the procession in vivid detail: yellow-robed, long-haired, perfumed Galli waving their knives. Armed war dancers in three-plumed helmets clashed shields of bronze on bronze. Rose petals were scattered along the route, and clouds of incense arose.

  Citizens and freedmen participated in March rites through membership of two colleges, the Cannophores and the Dendrophores. The Cannophores were "reed bearers"; the Dendrophores, "tree bearers." An extended festival across March had developed during the Principate, sometimes called a "holy week." The Ides, the 15th of March, was the Canna intrat, meaning "The Reed Enters." It commemorated the birth of Attis and his exposure in the reeds along the Phrygian river Sangarius.

  The 22nd of March was the Arbor intrat, "The Tree Enters." Dendrophores cut down a pine tree, hung an image of Attis from it, and carried it to the temple with lamentations. Three days of mourning followed. The 24th of March was the Dies Sanguinis, meaning "Day of Blood." Devotees whipped themselves to sprinkle the altars and the effigy of Attis with their own blood. Some performed self-castrations on this day.

  The following day, the 25th of March, was the Hilaria, a day of rejoicing at Attis' rebirth. It coincided with the vernal equinox on the Roman calendar. Some early Christian sources associated this date with the resurrection of Jesus. The 27th of March was the Lavatio, the "Washing," noted by Ovid and probably established under Augustus. Cybele's sacred stone was carried from the Palatine temple to the Porta Capena. From there, it traveled down the Appian Way to the stream called Almo, a tributary of the Tiber. A red-robed priest bathed the stone and sacred iron implements "in the Phrygian manner." The return trip was made by torchlight. The full sequence of March observances is thought to have been official in the time of Antoninus Pius, who reigned from 138 to 161 AD. It appears in the Calendar of Philocalus, dated to 354 AD.

  During the Megalesia, the aristocratic sponsors of the goddess's rites held lavish private banquets. Her Galli priests were conspicuously excluded.

• 7. The Galli

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  In 101 BC, a slave was exiled from Rome for castrating himself in honor of Magna Mater. Roman law forbade any person from doing so, citizen or slave alike. The Galli, Cybele's eunuch priests, occupied a uniquely contradictory position in Roman life: servants of a state religion who were themselves legally barred from citizenship.

  Pessinos had long been governed as a theocracy, and its leadership was organized through the Galli. The highest-ranking Gallus held the title "Attis," and his immediate subordinate was called "Battakes." In 189 BC, the Galli of Pessinos predicted or prayed for a Roman victory in Rome's war against the Galatians. The following year, the Roman senate formally recognized Ilium as the ancestral home of the Roman people, granting it extra territory and tax immunity. In 103 BC, a Battakes traveled to Rome to address the senate about impieties at his shrine. The tribune who violently opposed his right to speak died of a fever shortly afterward. This was widely taken as a demonstration of Magna Mater's power.

  In Rome, the Galli fell under the supreme authority of the pontifices, who were typically drawn from Rome's wealthiest and highest-ranking citizens. As eunuchs, the Galli were forbidden from Roman citizenship and rights of inheritance. They were technically mendicants whose living depended on the piety of others. During the Megalesia, Cybele's laws permitted them to leave their temple quarters and roam the city streets begging for money. Their regalia and notoriously effeminate dress set them apart in any Roman street. As priests of a state cult, however, they were sacred and untouchable. The Galli's voluntary emasculation in service of the goddess was thought to give them powers of prophecy.

  The emperor Augustus brought the cult directly under Imperial control by selecting its priests from among his own freedmen. Claudius reformed the priesthood further by introducing the senior office of Archigallus. Unlike the Galli, the Archigallus held full Roman citizenship and was not required to be a eunuch. Some Galli devoted much of their lives to the goddess, maintained relationships with relatives and partners, and eventually retired from service. From the 160s AD, Roman citizens seeking initiation into Magna Mater's mysteries could substitute a Taurobolium or Criobolium. These were ritual animal sacrifices offered as lawful alternatives to self-castration. The Taurobolium sacrificed a bull; the Criobolium, usually a ram. Notable initiates included the praetorian prefect Praetextatus and the twice-consul Volusianus. These rites drew their celebrants from Rome's highest class; among the masses, devotion to Attis was common but formal initiation was virtually unknown.

  St. Augustine, decades after Christianity became the sole Imperial religion, saw Galli still parading through Carthage's streets. They moved with "oiled hair and powdered faces, languid limbs and feminine gait." They demanded from tradespeople "the means of continuing to live in disgrace." When workers prepared the Vatican Hill for the construction of St. Peter's basilica, they found a Phrygian shrine beneath the ground. It held twenty-four dedications to Magna Mater and Attis.

• 8. Mother of All

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  Lucretius, the Roman poet and philosopher, gave Magna Mater a cosmic significance reaching beyond politics. In his account, her image held high in procession symbolizes the Earth "which hangs in the air." She is the mother of all. The yoked lions drawing her chariot represent the duty of a ferocious offspring to obey the parent. She herself, in Lucretius' framing, is uncreated and independent of the world she made.

  The Roman poet Manilius, in the early Imperial era, inserted Cybele as the thirteenth deity of an otherwise twelve-member zodiac. Each zodiacal house was already governed by one of the twelve Olympians. Manilius placed Cybele as co-ruler with Jupiter over Leo, in astrological opposition to Juno, who ruled Aquarius. As Leo rose above the horizon, Taurus, the Bull, set. The lion had dominated the bull in the sky as well as in her iconography.

  Vergil expressed Rome's deep ambivalence toward its Phrygian ancestry in the Aeneid. He described his hero Aeneas as a perfumed, effeminate gallus. Yet Aeneas would "rid himself of the effeminacy of the Oriental in order to fulfill his destiny as the ancestor of Rome." Shedding his Phrygian culture, in Vergil's vision, was not incidental to Roman identity; it was the price of it.

  In 288 AD, the dendrophores and the faithful near Setif in Mauretania restored their temple of Cybele and Attis after a disastrous fire. They equipped it with a silver statue of the goddess and a processional chariot with a canopy tasseled in fir cones. St. Theodore of Amasea, when granted time to recant his Christian beliefs, spent it burning a temple of Cybele instead.

  Cybele's presence did not end with the ancient world. The Paseo del Prado in Madrid has the Plaza de Cibeles at one of its extremes, with the Fountain of Cybele at its center. Real Madrid fans and the Spanish national football team celebrate their victories around that fountain. Cybele now stands as a symbol of the city and the club alike.