Kybele & Communal Shamanism

Communal Shamanism

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Robert Graves first suggested her myths were hazy Greek recollections. Distant shamanic-totemic tribes lived in mountain woods and made brews from raw Amanita muscaria in order to induce prophetic vision, heightened sexual energy, senselessness, and incredible physical strength. With trance and possession, drama is another shamanic experience -- the evocation of deceased ancestors.

"In the eastern Mediterranean, these ecstatic cults were most often held in honor of a great mother goddess and her perennially dying-and-rising consort. The goddess‘ religious dramas enacted in cultic ritual stressed the importance of fasting, drumming, trance-inducing music, self-mutilation,and a non-alcoholic ritual intoxication. Far and wide the dying consort worshiped by these cults was a god of vegetation, ecstasy, revelation,and salvation; by ingesting his body initiates underwent a profound mystical experience." (Attrell)

She is distinct from, but connected to Rhea by idea, assimilation, and history. The effects of the cult of Kybele were closely connected with the Chaldean Oracles. They were savants, diviners, astrologers, and magicians of Babylonia. The Greeks incorporated Oriental legends into their own mythologies.

"The Hittites worshiped Teshub, the great god of mountain summits and of the thunder — whose symbolic emblems were the hatchet and the bull — and the great goddess, prototype of the Greek Kybele. After settling in Asia Minor and occupying Cappadocia, Phrygia, Lydia, Pontus and parts of Armenia and Cilicia, the Hittites began, in the twentieth century B.C., to make forays also into northern Syria and Mesopotamia."

Great depth is hidden in her roots. Anatolia was steeped deeply in mythology. Storytelling was likely an important part of her culture and tradition with songs, tales and myths being passed down regularly from one generation to another, ensuring their stories remain told and their value enriched.

The range of meaning contained in every symbol can be regarded as an illustration not only of metaphysical principles but also of higher levels of reality. As an Oriental or Semitic earth goddess, she was celebrated with fiery nocturnal passions, furious and orgiastic rituals -- beating of drums, crashing of loud cymbals, blowing of horns, and clashing of armor.

We presume an antic origin for continuity of the symbol and icon which must be taken at face value. If they depicted the goddess as a mushroom, she is still a mushroom. Her mycological history is likely her longest cultural thread, convoluted as the mycelium that gives it root as a widely-practiced phenomenon (also in Dionysus and Mithras cults).

Her records were carved on living stone monuments which time has not effaced. Symbolism and historicity are only superficially irreconcilable. Almost all transcendental events appear to be both historical and symbolic at once—seen simply as symbolic matter transformed into legend then into history.

Probably the earliest Anatolian female figure connected with felines, dating to the pre-pottery, pre-agricultural Neolithic, no later than 8000 BCE, has been found in level II of the southeast Anatolian site of Göbekli Tepe, north of the Harran plain, in southeastern Turkey. The figure is carved in an area between pillars containing depictions of felines (Schmidt 2006:238, figure 104).

She had a role in Phyrigian burials. The rosette, a radiant fungal solar cap, one of her attributes, has been found in ancient royal burial sites. Ionian motifs of rosettes and lion heads imply the relation to the Phrygian goddess. 

"Symbolism adds a new value to an objector an act, without thereby violating its immediate or “historical” validity. Once it is brought to bear, it turns the object or action into an “open” event: symbolic thought opens the door on to immediate reality for us, but without weakening or invalidating it; seen in this light the universe is no longer sealed off, nothing is isolated inside its own existence: everything is linked by a system of correspondences and assimilations." (Eliade, Cirlot)