https://ionamiller2020.weebly.com/kybele-attis.html
Kybele Speaks
We have to let Kybele speak and amplify herself and listen. We seek the emotional and feeling factor associated with the archetypal image. To study plants, we study the soil from which they grow.
All archetypes are contaminated with one another in the unconscious. The motifs of myths grow from a human basis. We have to circumambulate the story to grasp its essence as personal and cosmic religion -- through mystic identification.
If we start with the Paleo-European Great Mother, we can pile up comparative material forever until all symbols are included, for she is 'the mother of all'. We can't erase inconvenient parts of history; that is denial. But it is not mere speculation either. 'Going down into the depths' of thought-patterns and emotional experience and re-emerging remains the great Mystery.
You danced with the Mother, shrieked with the Mother, bled with the Mother, and the Mother helped you heal.
How can we make her Presence, participation mystique, and animism felt in our lives today, in contemporary society? The sacred meal is her oldest ritual, despite all later modifications.
James Hillman said, "When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed."
We need to set the scene. The Midas legend and Gordion are a major part of Kybele's legends. The gods arrived with an ancient disaster of immense proportions. Naturally, we cannot collapse the timeline down over centuries, but we are looking for pulse-points [wars, famine, cliate change, disasters] that might have increased the fervor for devotees of Kybele, especially in earth disasters.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phry/hd_phry.htm
The date of the ancient Mediterranean Eruption is hidden in dead trees specifically, 1560 BCE, in the wood of a royal Phrygian tomb. A more remote eruption later may also have affected weather. The anomaly of 1159 b.c. coincides with the global effects of the eruption of Hekla III in Iceland.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/1996/07/cornell-researchers-precisely-date-wood-ancient-tomb-turkey
Nature reports that "logs used to build the inner chamber of the Midas Mound Tumulus, a massive tomb named for King Midas of the Phrygians and located at the Gordion archaeological site, were cut in 718 B.C. "That is not plus-or-minus anything; it is a date 'to the year,'" said Cornell doctoral student Maryanne Newton, one of the Nature article's coauthors."
The Bronze Age Minoan eruption was one of the most massive eruptions on earth in the past 10,000 years. Anatolia shared the catastrophe of the Thera eruption, which turned the sky black with ash. Cooler and wetter weather threatened their crops. Surely, amid the death and destruction they called on their great goddess.
Artifacts from her cult center verify this: "When the volcano erupted, the island of Thera—and environs thousands of miles in every direction—was wracked with pyroclastic flows and tsunamis, as clouds of ash blotted out the sky and blanketed much of the Mediterranean region with the stuff. That included the local Minoan town of Akrotiri and, farther away, woods that would be used to construct the royal “Midas Mound” tumulus, or tomb, near the ancient Phrygian site of Gordion, in Turkey." Isaac Schultz April, 2020
She signifies a profound transformation and an enriched understanding of darkness, staying within the darkness, within its dark illumination. Our ancestors sit with us in the dark. The Divine Earth Road follows an underground stream into the Underworld, a geocentric mythical topology. It coalesced with the source of all that comes into being.
Jung mused, “If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night."
Clement of Alexandria quoted the initiatory formula as a password: "From the tambourine I have eaten; from the cymbal I have drunk; I have become the kernos (sacred dish; terra-cotta vessel for offerings); the room (cave bridal chamber; shrine; initiation chamber) I have entered." (Protrept Exortation to the Greeks 2.15: trans. Vermaseren, in Eliade)
Shadow is the substance of the soul, that inner darkness that draws us down, away from life in inexorable relationship with the Underworld. Then, as now, a veritable patchwork of ideas, philosophies, and superstitions syncretized into many unique permutations within the minds of each individual.
Our personal mythology arises when we are engulfed by an unconscious content. Such numinous experience is the kernel of our story. Our own psychological events keep the motifs alive which reveal basic archetypal structure and the somatic framework.
Rilke spoke of our wild calling in Requiem for a Friend: "And only then, when I have learned enough, I will go to watch the animals, and let something of their composure slowly glide into my limbs; will see my own existence deep in their eyes, which hold me for awhile and let me go, serenely, without judgment."