She was originally at home in Phrygia, in pre-Hellenic Asia Minor, but is best known from her presence in Greek, and even more especially Roman society. Not surprisingly, such a wide ranging and influential cult has generated an enormous bibliography.
Within this discourse, Borgeaud stakes out a rather idiosyncratic territory from the beginning. Also excluded are a general review of the shrines and sanctuaries of the goddess, discussion of epigraphical data related to her cult, and analysis of her visual images, iconography, and attributes. Borgeaud, correctly in my opinion, rejects both of these claims. These events are known to us from highly variant, often conflicting narrative traditions, many of which lie at the intersection of history and myth.
A principal subject is the arrival of the cult of the Mother in the Greek world and the place of her cult in the Athenian Agora. Although the deity had been at home in the Greek world since the seventh c. In so doing, Borgeaud gives a rather human and self-conscious quality to the evidence, as if the goddess herself were deliberately orchestrating her image.
Borgeaud moves on to what is probably the best known and most controversial feature of the Cybele cult, the legend of Attis, the youthful eunuch and divine companion of the goddess, and the role of the self-castrating priests in her cult.
He accepts the historical reality of the eunuch priest of the Mother in Anatolian cult and proposes Lydia, specifically Sardis, as the meeting point for the Anatolian and Greek tradition. When Cybele was born, the gods discovered that she was a hermaphrodite, meaning that she had both male and female organs.
This terrified the gods and they castrated Cybele. They threw away the male organ and an almond tree grew from it. As time went by, the almond tree continued to grow and began to bear fruit. She plucked one and held it to her chest, but when the fruit disappeared, Nana suddenly realized that she was pregnant.
Nana gave birth to a son whom she named Attis and he grew up into a handsome young man. Some say that he was a shepherd. Cybele fell in love with Attis, and she made him promise that he would always be hers and never leave her. Later, he met the beautiful daughter of a king and fell in love with her. As soon as Cybele discovered that Attis had broken his promise to her, she became enraged and was blinded by jealousy.
He thrashed about and screamed, cursing himself for his foolishness and then, in frustration, Attis castrated himself. He bled to death at the foot of a large pine tree. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number.
Search within The marriage-song was being sung, when Agdistis appeared, and Attis went mad and cut off his genitals, as also did he who was giving him his daughter in marriage. But Agdistis repented of what he had done to Attis, and persuaded Zeus to grant that the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay. The hyper virility present in this passage jumps off of the page.
This myth contains all of the sexual elements largely missing from Hesiod: explicit mention of genitalia both male and female, reproduction between male and female entities, and a fantastical three castration sequence in the space of only three lines.
The priests of the cult of Cybele were male eunuchs. They would castrate themselves in the midst of sexual pleasure as a means of symbolically offering up their own fertility to the mother goddess.
Then, a eunuch priest would enter into the pit in the ground. After being baptized by blood, initiated priests would often drink the milk of the animal, simulating having just been born. Cybele and her cult in Rome were also linked to fertility in less garish ways. Lucretius, in his poem On the Nature of Things, closely associates Cybele with the fertility of the natural world:.
In this depiction, Cybele is not only the mother of man and woman, but also the mother of corn. This association with the bounty of the natural world perhaps made Cybele more acceptable to Romans unfamiliar with the Phrygian world, thus easing her integration into Roman society.
By equating the Magna Mater with the Earth, Cybele was suddenly made much more comparable to Roman goddess counterparts such as Gaia. Were Cybele not made out to be at least somewhat familiar, Roman women would have had far less success in using her to address their fertility concerns. This necessary cultural blending is most apparent in ca.
What makes this particular statue intriguing is that this Cybele is also shown with the defining characteristics of another goddess—Ceres, the Roman deity of the harvest. Directly above the head of her lion, Cybele holds a sheaf of wheat and on her opposite arm rests a cornucopia filled with assorted fruits, presenting stark and intentional evocations of Ceres. This linking of sexual fertility Cybele with natural fertility Ceres is a natural byproduct of the perceptual accommodations that needed to occur if Romans were to patch up the thematic gaps in their own pantheon.
The everyday life of a Roman was greatly influenced by religious experiences, and in turn, the events of everyday life greatly influenced Roman religion. Issues of fertility were quite literally issues of life and death, and not just of people, but of an entire ruling class. The infertility brought on by mass lead poisoning in the Roman world could not easily be addressed by the science or medicine of the time, so the Romans looked for divine answers.
When answers were not forthcoming from their own gods, they were forced to take their search elsewhere and found respite with Cybele. The threat of Hannibal at the doorstep may have been enough to grant Magna Mater entrance into the ancient city, but the threat of declining bloodlines was the deciding factor that kept her there in perpetuity. Burton, Paul J.
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