Cybele
CYBELE
Cybele was the great mother-goddess of Asia Minor. Primarily a goddess of fertility, but also a source of cures and oracles and a protector of her people in war, she was worshipped along with her lover, Attis, a god of vegetation, at Pessinus in Phrygia. The cult was introduced into the Greek world by the end of the 6th century b.c. and was brought to Rome near the end of the Second Punic War (205–204 b.c.). Cybele, under her Latin name, Magna Mater deorum, was worshipped by an elaborate ritual, her chief festival being celebrated in the last part of March. Eunuch priests or attendants, the Galli, had an important place in her cult.
Under the Roman Empire, the ritual of the tauro bolium, a form of initiation, was required; the candidate was placed in a pit and bathed in the blood flowing from a bull killed above the pit. The cult of Cybele and Attis, including the rite of Taurobolium, spread throughout the West, and was especially popular in Gaul and Africa. In some respects, it resembled the contemporary cults of Mithras and Isis.
See Also: mystery religions, greco-oriental.
Bibliography: f. r. walton, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. m. cary et al. (Oxford 1949) 246–247. f. cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago 1911) ch. 3. k. prÜmm, Religionsgeschichtliches Handbuch für den Raum der altchristlichen Umwelt (2d ed. Rome 1954) 255–263.
[t. a. brady]