Kyvele: Ritualized Ecstasy
Ritualized Ecstasy
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Kybele's image is of unutterable sanctity, both in horror and in reverence. Ritualized processing of intoxicants, ecstasy, and local populations thrived. Sacrifice occurred in the groves, and orgies in the caverns that echoed and roared with frenzy. They enticed their dead god back up the axis mundi like a serpent from the underworld, the heart of the Goddess‘ rites.
In these groves, trees were hewn into images of the Divine Bridegroom, a nameless god, whose phallus was called out from the earth for ritual consumption. On the forest floor, Amanita muscaria itself appears as a blazing red fire glowing beneath the pine.
Historically, the cult first emerged from the sacred caverns and groves at Gordium, the legendary city of King Midas (738-696 BCE). More likely, her hidden cult was introduced there. There must have been a strong unconscious emotional interest and appeal for other centers of worship popped up like mushrooms -- 23 highland monuments.
Her first lavish temple was built in the early Phrygian period, around the eighth century BCE. The meteoric idol of the Mother really came from there. Her secret identity is a continuation of primitive, animistic thought.
They must have been thunderstruck by such firefall. They knew what it was and where it came from -- not in scientific terms, but in terms of their collective mythic lives.
More recently Antonin Artaud used the motif metaphorically. "And there is a luminous point where all reality is rediscovered, only changed, transformed, by -- what? -- a nucleus of the magic use of things. And I believe in mental meteorites, in personal cosmogonies."
Kybele was linked to Dionysus. Attis, Adonis, Bachus, Bromius, Tammuz, Pan, Sabazius, Serapis, Zalmoxius, Zeus, and Orpheus himself - are replicas of their grand primordial archetype Dionis. The variations which appear among them resulted from the transplantation of the god from one region to another. The migrating Phrygians brought the Dionis/Sabazius cult with them when they settled in Anatolia in the early first millennium BCE.
The pinecone that tipped his Thyrsus linked him to Kybela (lat. Cybele), another Brygo/Phrygian primordial deity. This phallic scepter tipped with a pinecone (symbolizing pineal gland/third eye) was also his emblem; the potent panther was his totem-animal, The god's origins trace to Macedonia, (Pelagonia and Paionia in Upper Macedonia, the Phrygian's ancestral homeland).
The story of Attis also originated here. A eunuch priest, Atys traveled from Pessinus to Sardis, the Lydian capital at the foot of mount Tmolos, where 'the ancient goddess, Kubaba, from Mesopotamia and the Phrygian goddess first appear to have merged.' (Gough, 2014)
Kybele is virtual, chaotic, and autochthonous. The Roman orator, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BCE), said the Anatolian goddess was revered, ‘by all the kings who have ever held rule in Europe and in Asia.’ She eventually refracted into competing narratives, many of which contain residue of past paradigms lost in the mists of deep time.
The essence of all phenomena is a vibrant rhythm, the intimate nature of phenomena is directly perceptible by polyrhythmic human consciousness. For this reason, imitating is knowing. The echo is the paradigm of imitation and initiation. Her ordeal was a psychedelic metaphysical journey.
Rituals of music, dance, and drugs were a way of seeking direct contact with the deity. Drugs were synonymous with the divine influence of a deity. Whether or not some of these magical traditions and divination rites preserve relics, or hallucinations, of Paleo- and Neolithic heritage is not entirely a matter of conjecture.
The oldest female goddesses were associated with the serpentine powers of the dynamic life force, the natural cycle of life. Her names, shape and powers changed from the Anatolian Earth Mother over time and cross cultural interactions.
"Ritual dismemberment and consumption of a sacrificial victim recently hung upon a sacred tree is, a central process of actions in the rites of the Phrygian mother at large and has much relevance to the study of other mystery initiations." (Attrell)
"Internally, this manifested itself as an ordeal and a spiritual ascent for the sacrificial 'king'; essentially, his duty was to sacrifice himself to the goddess,
mimicking the mushroom itself. He was dressed as the god and suspended himself in the sun‘s rays in order to dry ‘before he was taken down and ritually murdered and eaten by the maenads, as had been done with the mushroom.
The poet Robert Graves was the first to suggest that the maenad‘s savage custom of tearing off their victims‘heads was an allegorical reference to tearing off Amanita muscaria‘s cap (since the stalk was not eaten)." ..."the 'revel‘ which ensued during these rites was no beatific feast; rather, it is a scene of desperation attended by cries of lamentation and wailing."
"The divinely inspired lamentation of women is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the religions of the dying and rising gods. In cults of the Divine Bridegroom, lamentation existed hand in hand with the ecstatic behavior arising at the sacred marriage." (Attrell)
The unconscious psyche, intuition, and associative thinking is the instinctual human essence. Psyche periodically goes into periods of descent or depression and even mania, often in a very dramatic way. She symbolically links a supernatural world of the dead to the world of the living in a realistically human shape with multiple states of being. Both the Greek and Roman cults were hybrid practices, a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult practices.
Her tympanon (frame drum, tambourine) is the celestial sphere. She was sometimes worshiped as the pole star representing the gate of heaven or axis of the Earth, an umbilical connecting the galactic center to the world-navel, tethers the center of the Earth to the center of the Sky, a bridge linking both forms of reality in a cosmic synthesis. (Guénon 2001, Behun)
When these elements are drawn together, they reciprocally inform one another, deepening our understanding of the performative and spatial dimensions of our experience of the divine and opening the possibility of a direct relationship unbound by dogma. Direct experience is symbolically intimate.
Gaston Bachelard posed the question: ‘How could a legend be kept alive and perpetuated if each generation had not “intimate reasons” for believing in it?’ The symbolist meaning of a phenomenon helps to explain these ‘intimate reasons.’ It links the instrumental with the spiritual, the human with the cosmic, the acasual with the causal, disorder with order, and the transcendent.
The androgynous goddess, the masculine/feminine energy of the world body, means the soul or psyche has no gender. It involves masculine and feminine aesthetics.
"In liminal situations around the world, neophytes are often
treated or symbolically represented as being neither male nor female. Alternatively, they may be allotted the characteristics of both genders, irrespective of their biological sex. In the given initiation rite, they are symbolically sexless or androgynous, as what Victor Turner calls ―a kind of human prima material–as undifferentiated raw material." (Attrell)
Modern ideas of motherhood and sentimental mores can only lead us astray. Kybele is a Dark Mother from the depths of pre-history. She appears in our dreams as a wild animal. as uncontrolled, unacknowledged aspects of ourselves.
The Phrygian deity was the prototype mother goddess of the Mediterranean -- the archetypal imaginal landscape, wild unknown country. Her ritual settings were caves, rock-cut monuments or sanctuaries, springs, flowing water, and virgin forests. She remained a living ode to instinct, beauty, and dignity.
Kybele priests used to demonstrate their psychic abilities using magical stones. The most well-known magic stone was the Kybele Blackstone of Pessinus. Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, a historian, wrote that such conic black stones were found in various regions of Anatolia. A black meteorite was worshiped as her sky body.
Her themes and rites included bees and bulls, sacred marriage, a mother-goddess wedded to her son, and the dying god. Her indigenous Anatolian form was shaped by currents from ancient Mesopotamia and the seductive jangling of cymbals.
Ishtar and Astarte (Sumerian, Hittite, Neo-Hittite) in the east converged with European influences (Balkans, Thrace, Macedonia, Crete) from the west. Frenzies of devotion echoed Tammuz and Adonis. Kybele became linked to the cults of Rhea and Dionysos. Their ecstatic rituals intermingled. The Anatolian mysteries suffered under Persian rule.
The later Greek (Cybele) and Roman (Magna Mater) versions differed in characteristics, myths, and images as other cults co-mingled. The bow and arrow of Artemis and Diana are not her early attributes. Her wide diffusion, an act of inclusion, was also an act of engulfment.
She was considered an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Her priest-son shifted from Midas and Dionysos to Attis. In her fluid iconography, when the son-lover was a flute, the wife and mother Kybele was represented by the tympanon. Her mythic stories largely took form in the Hellenistic era.
The mythic goddess is ambivalent, formidable, and relentless. She exuded power and demanded respect. Her surreal violence, and the unbridled bisexual hyper-erotic libido of the severed hermaphrodite cannot be denied but it was ritualized, eventually into a Roman prophetess, the Sibyl.
We search for behavioral processes that are proto-religious but have the potential to relate to supernatural forces or a point of contact with human psychic abilities. Her followers crossed sexual boundaries during ecstatic rites.
Shared imagination is its core, leading to communal trance celebration and orgiastic sharing of imaginal bodies. The ritual atmosphere is ecstasy, deity possession, and mania. Borderline experiences suggest a possible expanded future through body-centered imagination. Mushroom mycelia are digestive organs that secrete digestive enzymes.
Hidden in the walls of our own labyrinthine digestive tracts, gut-brain bidirectional signalling exists between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. The microbial gut actually talks to the brain, releasing hormones into the bloodstream and signaling the vagus nerve. They perfectly fit the definition of reward neurons that drive motivation and increase pleasure.
Belly brain generates spontaneous visceral inner images, which in a state of altered consciousness support the healing process. We reunite with the potential world, the eternal primeval world. What is spaceless and timeless corresponds to the eternal essence of the unified world and the world soul. Complex thought emerged around the middle Paleolithic.
