Kybele's Primeval World
The Primeval World
https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/kybele-attis.html
Kybele is 'Mother of the Gods,' 'Mother of the Mountains,' and 'Mistress of Beasts.' The Anatolian Earth Mother embodied the original fluid relationship between the constellation of all beings that gave rise to her voice even before time began.
Primal Tradition
Goddess, Great Goddess, Kybele, Lady Goddess of the Mountains, Visit your small madness upon me, I pray, that the great madness shall pass me by.
The Asiatic goddess and her cult-partner arose long before the classical era of belief. She is the Phrygian goddess of magic, wild things, and faith -- the dark mysteries of earth and nature. Phrygians originally worshiped their goddess in an aniconic fashion, like the Thracians who before being influenced by the Greeks never depicted their goddess anthropomorphically. (Bogh, 2007)
Generally, she is characterized by a dual nature of unpredictable power and beneficent qualities. We are not proposing a discounted universal goddess theory or matriarchy (Gimbutas 2001). Instead we have to look for evidence derived from an experience of the sacred and artifacts. Arguably, it is a mystery religion, which requires undergoing ordeals, a death-like exerience and suffering.
She is usually represented seated on a throne with a phiale (a libation bowl) and a tympanon. She has formidable, awesome, magical powers. People come to her to seek vengeance or justice, and she can possess individuals with madness or illness, or cure them from disease (Borgeaud 1996:27ff.; Roller 1999:156).
Roller demonstrates, there is no divine Attis until Hellenistic and Roman times, but this doesn't preclude more archaic antecedents when the goddess was worshiped alone. Other symbols were later transferred to Kybele. The Roman version of the cult differs greatly from the cult in the ancient Phrygian homeland of Kybele.
In the Paleo-Phrygian period (9th–7th centuries bc) there was still no influence from the Greeks. The Phrygians were said by Herodotos (VII, 73) to be immigrants from Thrace settling in Anatolia. According to modern theories, this would be in the late Bronze age -- 12th and the 10th centuries bc.
The chthonic great goddess had myriad names (Matar, Kubileya, Kubaba) localized at different Mystery sanctuaries. Today's Anatolians are the indigenous population of the region according to scientific studies, and use a Turkish language name for Kybele, which is Sibel.
The realities and specifics of prehistoric culture are closed to us. Like it or not we have to rely on ancient evidence to even imagine what she and her controversial cult were actually like. The mythical body is the body in the myth.
In Phrygia, no records remain concerning her cult and worship, though there are numerous statues of seated women that archaeologists believe represent Kybele. Often she is also portrayed giving birth, indicative of her Mother Goddess status. The cult was never monolithic, but a power laced with ambiguity.
We know the rites were very bizarre, including visionary communion, mystical sympathy with the world, the non-rational dimensions of human experience. This was an oracular cult with no body of doctrine, and no sacred books. It did have mystical psychoactive communion.
"Orgia may have been earlier manifestations of cult than the formal mysteries, as suggested by the violently ecstatic rites described in myth as celebrated by Attis in honor of Cybele and reflected in the willing self-castration of her priests the Galli in the historical period. The orgia of both Dionysian worship and the cult of Cybele aim at breaking down barriers between the celebrants and the divinity through a state of mystic exaltation." Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis (Brill, 1985), p. 53 and 11–19.
There is little doubt that the prepared sacred drink was intoxicating and intended to access altered consciousness or mystical communion in a ritual context. It flourished because it provided everyone with the same basic connection to underlying reality. We still feel the impact of the world around us in a series of personal relationships with such genuine radical metaphors.
Kybele was worshiped in orgiastic rites, dissonant music, and wild dancing. This kind of bodily mysticism and psychosomatic liberation had only temporary effects each time — the period of the ekstasis (Turcan).
But we don't hear how and why of the archaic practices. Our approach tries to penetrate the phenomenon itself, surrounding it from all sides, circumambulating and expanding it by increasing the volume -- amplification. The phenomenon is mythopoetical, not intellectual. But belief in a deity was subsumed in direct experience.
Pre-rational experience is somatic -- our physical, animal, biological nature, felt sense experience, and emotions. Beneath the numbness or dissociation of disembodiment, the felt sense has been available as a constant stream of invaluable information. It manifests itself in direct contact which is more than a metaphor -- a vibrant experience.
The idea of life, projected onto the trans-rational cosmos, sexualizes it. We know the rite produces sympathy with the Mystery-Deity and the madness of her grief, jealousy, and ecstasy and therefore our own. The fused state and merging are pre-rational; oneness with everything is trans-personal.
Such experiences were insured with shamanic entheogenic initiation. At the dawn of religion, instead of mere confusion, the Great Mother instilled reverence for pre-rationality codified into a system for living. She is about perennial problems of human existence, the problem of humankind in nature, fate, and death.
Rebirth is the theme of the self-regenerating goddess. The material world is revealed in its animated glory. It can also be a terrifying encounter that assumes a new 'identity' from moment to moment.
It fosters healthy, secure attachment with a somatic approach to establishing what was missed in early life. Trauma healing cannot happen without somatic resources, it is also true that healing cannot happen without including the dimension of meaning-making through which humans make sense of our worlds.
The effects of collective trauma, violence and oppression are passed on from one generation to the next; our early relationships can be disrupted. This produces a population of people who struggle to form healthy, sustainable bonds. Relationships can feel unsafe, intimacy can produce anxiety, and people can oscillate between codependency and isolation.
Symbolic meaning is inherent in self-referential encoding of the material and symbolic aspects of events. Fabulism is a way of exploring myth, allegory, and fable as a means of comprehending the complexities of human nature. Our notions about the nature of the world is our worldview.
It collects information about its own functioning that lead to ambiguities, strange loops, and paradox -- a blurring of matter-symbol distinctions into myth. The initial condition implies a self-referent impotency principle (Attis) that unchanging events cannot completely describe changing events. We know the cult changed radically as it dispersed through Greece, Rome, and other cultures.
Self-reference and self-modification symbols can be both too vague and too narrow in comparison to processes of interest. Such self-organization of initial conditions is a subsymbolic paradigm. The initial conditions refer to a chaotic aspect -- the raw awareness of consciousness under the effects of an entheogen as an origin for an autonomous or dynamic symbol grounding of internal meanings -- emergence.
The mystical “motif” is marked by high emotional intensity, even trauma at times with a brief period of physical stress followed by a cathartic event, demarcated by a high level of emotional arousal followed by an active intensification of belief and practice.
Over time, the cult dropped and added new cultural components and characteristics. It made constellations with other gods and goddesses. But even today, archaic psyche continues to present as autonomous mind, with unconscious patterns and cycles, moreso in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
There is nothing “subjective” or “objective” about consciousness. This primary process is beyond dualism. Such primitive intuitions don't die. Patterns or psychological paradigms span thousands of years. Caves remain the womb of the mother, the tomb, and the place of initiation, part of her system of religious symbolism.
People can still grasp the timeless energetic nature of reality -- the great connected web of life that is in constant motion -- the electricity of the moment. Let every cell of every human pulse with perfection. Closing fearful eyes will not stop but only amplify the process. With entheogens what one believed about a deity became irrelevant.
"Wine was fortified in the mixing ceremony with a variety of toxins derived from plant and animal sources, sometimes even lethal substances in sub-lethal amounts, such as serpent venoms, salamander secretions, henbane, opium, Datura (jimsonweed), and deadly hemlock (Conium maculatum). This tradition survives in the modern Greek folk wine of retsina (fortified with psychoactive terpenes from pine resin)." (Ruck)
"A strong Thracian wine known as ‘Biblian’ ( Bíblinos/Búblinos) was an export of Samothrace; in the ritual initiation into the Mystery of the Great Gods as celebrated on the island and elsewhere in cave sanctuaries throughout ancient Thrace, accessed the ecstatic visionary revel that summoned an apparition of the netherworld goddess." (Ruck)
https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/mushroom-monuments-thrace-and-ancient-sacred-rites-005267
