Originally a Phrygian goddess, Cybele (Greek Κυβέλη, sometimes given the etymology "she of the hair" if her name is Greek, not Phrygian, but more widely considered of Luwian origin, from Kubaba; Roman equivalent: Magna Mater or "Great Mother") was a manifestation of the Earth Mother goddess who was worshipped in Anatolia from Neolithic times. Like Gaia or her Minoan equivalent Rhea, Cybele embodies the fertile earth, a goddess of caverns and mountains, walls and fortresses, nature, wild animals (especially lions and bees) ...

Including:

• Cybele - Cult history
• Cybele - Overview: Anatolia Greece and Rome
• Cybele - Anatolian Cybele
• Cybele - Cybele and Attis
• Cybele - Aegean Cybele
• Cybele - Roman Cybele
• Cybele - Notes

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Cybele - Overview: Anatolia Greece and Rome. At Pessinos in Phrygia, an archaic version of Cybele had been venerated as Agdistis since archaic times. In 203 BC, the aniconic cult object that embodied the Great Mother at Pessinos was ceremoniously and reverently removed to Rome. Her cult had already been adopted in 5th century BC Greece, where she is often referred to euphemistically as Meter Theon Idaia ("Mother of the Gods, from Mount Ida") rather than by name. Mentions of Cybele's worship are foun ...

See also:

Cybele, Cybele - Cult history, Cybele - Overview: Anatolia Greece and Rome, Cybele - Anatolian Cybele, Cybele - Cybele and Attis, Cybele - Aegean Cybele, Cybele - Roman Cybele, Cybele - Notes

Read more here: » Cybele: Encyclopedia II - Cybele - Cult history

In Roman mythology, Magna Mater deorum Idaea ("great Idaean mother of the gods") was the name for the originally Phrygian goddess Cybele, as well as Rhea. Her cult moved from Phrygia to Greece from the 6th century to the 4th. In 205 BC, Rome adopted her cult. Fuller details are at the entry for the Roman cult of Cybele. Category: Roman goddesses ...

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Galli was the Roman name for castrated followers of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, which can be regarded as transgendered in today's terms. Cybele's Galli were similar in form to other colleges of priests in Asia Minor that ancient authors described as "eunuchs", such as the priests of Atargatis described by Apuleius and Lucian, or the galloi of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The first Galli arrived in Rome when the Senate officially adopted Cybele as a state goddess in 203 BC. Until t ...

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Attis, a life-death-rebirth deity, was both the son and the lover of Cybele, her eunuch attendant and driver of her lion-driven chariot; he was driven mad by her and castrated himself. Attis was originally a local semi-deity of Phrygia, associated with the great Phrygian trading city of Pessinos, which lay under the lee of Mount Agdistis. The mountain was personified as a daemon, whom foreigners associated with the Great Mother Cybele. The story of his origins from Agdistis, as told to the traveller Pausanias, have som ...

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The Korybantes, called the Kurbantes in Phrygia, were the crested dancers who worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing. The Kuretes were the nine dancers who venerate Rhea, the Cretan counterpart of Cybele. These male dancers in armor, kept time to a drum and the rhythmic stamping of their feet. Dance, according to Greek thought, was one of the civilizing activities, like wine-making or music. The dance in armor (the "pyrrhic dance" or pyrriche) was a male coming-of-age initiation ri ...

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In Greek mythology heavily influenced by cultures from the East, Cybele was a goddess pursued by Zeus who raped her after she disguised herself as a rock called Agdistis. The result was a hermaphrodite named Agdistis. Another version claims that Agdistis was born when Zeus dropped his semen upon the ground in his excitement over an unknown Goddess that resisted his attentions, causing a rock or a mountain to become pregnant. Or perhaps Zeus's grandmother Gaia herself became pregnant. Either way, Adgistis was the result. It was ...

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A number of religious cults have included castration as a central theme of their practice. These include: The cult of Cybele, in which devotes castrated themselves in ecstatic emulation of Attis: see Gallus. Hijra (India) Some followers of early Christianity such as Origen considered castration as an acceptable way to counter sinful desires of the flesh. Bishop Melito of Sardis (d. ca 180) was a eunuch, according to the church history of Eusebius of Caesarea, though, significantly the word "virgin" was substituted in Rufino's Latin translation of Eusebius. ...

Including:

• Castration cult - External link

Read more here: » Castration cult: Encyclopedia - Castration cult

In Greek mythology, Oenone ("wine woman") was the first wife of Paris. She was a mountain nymph (an Oread) on Mount Ida in Phrygia, a mountain associated with the Mother Goddess Cybele. Her father was Cebren, a river-god. Her very name links her to the natural but civilizing gift of wine. The Trojan prince Paris fell in love with her when he was still a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Ida. They married and Oenone gave birth to a son, Corythus. When Paris later abandoned her to return to Troy and sail across the Aegean to kidnap Helen, Quee ...

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In Greek mythology, the Dactyls (Greek for "fingers") were the archaic race of small phallic male beings associated with the Great Mother, whether as Cybele or Rhea, spirit-men like the Curetes, Cabiri and Korybantes. The Dactyls were ancient smiths and healing magicians. In some myths, they are in Hephaestus' employ, and they taught metalworking, mathematics, and the alphabet to humans. When Rhea, the mother of the gods, knew her time of delivery was come, she went to the sacred cave on Mount Ida. As she squatted in labor she ...

Including:

• Dactyl mythology - Reference

Read more here: » Dactyl mythology: Encyclopedia - Dactyl mythology

A mother goddess is a goddess portrayed as the Earth Mother who serves as a general fertility deity, the bountiful embodiment of the earth. From the elegant snake-offering goddess figures of Knossos to the rock-cut images of Cybele, to Dione ("the Goddess") who was invoked at Dodona, along with Zeus, until late Classical times, it is sometimes too facile to class all archaic female goddesses as manifestations of the mother goddess. Archaeologists tend to avoid such theories in interpreting sites and material remains and sometim ...

Including:

• Mother goddess - Matriarchy and goddess history
• Mother goddess - Sumerian Mesopotamian and Greek goddesses
• Mother goddess - Celtic goddesses
• Mother goddess - Norse goddesses
• Mother goddess - Olympian goddesses
• Mother goddess - Hinduism
• Mother goddess - Shaktism
• Mother goddess - Mother goddess worship in Catholicism
• Mother goddess - Neopaganism

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87 Sylvia (sil'-vee-a) is one of the largest main belt asteroids. It orbits beyond most of the main belt asteroids, so it is classed as one of the Cybeles (see Minor planet groups). Sylvia is remarkable for being the first known asteroid to possess more than one moon. 87 Sylvia - Discovery and naming. Sylvia was discovered by N. R. Pogson on May 16, 1866 from Madras (Chennai), India. Paul Herget, in his The Names of the Minor Planets (1955), attributes the name as honouring the first wife of a ...

Including:

• 87 Sylvia - Discovery and naming
• 87 Sylvia - Physical characteristics
• 87 Sylvia - Moons

Read more here: » 87 Sylvia: Encyclopedia - 87 Sylvia

Sabazios is the nomadic horseman sky and father god of the Phrygians. In Indo-European languages, such as Phrygian, the '-zios' element in his name goes back to Dyeus, the common precursor of 'deus' (god) and Zeus. Though the Greeks associated Phrygian Sabazios with Zeus, representations of him, even into Roman times, show him always on horseback, as a nomadic horseman god, wielding his characteristic staff of power. Sabazios - Thracian/Phrygian Sabazios. It seems likely that the migrating Phr ...

Including:

• Sabazios - Thracian/Phrygian Sabazios
• Sabazios - The god on horseback
• Sabazios - Transformation to Sabazius
• Sabazios - The Jewish connection

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In Greek mythology, Amalthea (Greek Αμαλθεια, "tender") is the most often mentioned among foster-mothers of Zeus. She is sometimes represented as the goat which suckled the infant-god in a cave in Mount Aigaion ("Goat Mountain") in Crete, sometimes as a goat-tending nymph of uncertain parentage (daughter of Oceanus, Haemonius, Olen, or Melisseus), who brought him up on the milk of a goat. In order that Cronus should not hear the wailing of the infant, Amalthea gathered about the cave the Kuretes or the Korybantes to dance and shout and cla ...

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Binah, (meaning "Understanding"; בינה), in the Kabbalah of Judaism, is the second intellectual Sephirah on the tree of life. It sits on the level below Keter (in the formulations that include that Sephirah), across from Chockmah and directly above Gevurah. It is usually given four paths: to Keter, Chockmah, Gevurah, and Tiphereth (some Kabbalists place a path from Binah to Chesed as well.) In an anthropomorphic visualization, it may be alternatively related to the "left eye", "left hemisphere" of "the brain" or the "heart." Binah is often defined as the ability to understand one thing from with ...

Including:

• Binah Kabbalah - Non-Jewish associations
• Binah Kabbalah - External link

Read more here: » Binah Kabbalah: Encyclopedia - Binah Kabbalah

In Greek mythology, Dardanus ("burner up") was a son of Zeus and Electra, daughter of Atlas, and founder of the city of Dardania on Mount Ida in the Troad. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.61–62) states that Dardanus' original home was in Arcadia where Dardanus and his elder brother Iasus (elsewhere more commonly called Iasion) reigned as kings following Atlas. Dardanus married Chryse daughter of Pallas by whom he fathered two sons: Idaeus and Deimas. When a great flood occurred, the survivors, who were living on mountain ...

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The anonymous Homeric Hymns celebrating individual gods are a collection of ancient Greek hymns, "Homeric" in the sense that they employ the same dactylic hexameter as the Iliad and Odyssey and are couched in the same dialect. They were attributed to Homer himself in Antiquity—from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides (iii.104)—and the label has stuck. The oldest of them were written in the 7th century BCE, the days of Hesiod; somewhat later than the date ordinarily ascribed to the first transcri ...

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A mortal woman in Greek mythology, Niobe (Νιόβη), daughter of Tantalus and either Euryanassa, Eurythemista, Clytia, Dione, or Laodice, and the wife of Amphion, boasted of her superiority to Leto because she had fourteen children (Niobids), seven male and seven female, while Leto had only two. Apollo killed her sons as they practiced athletics, with the last begging for his life (Apollo would have spared his life, but had already released the arrow), and Artemis killed her daughters. Apollo and Artemis used poisoned arrows to kill ...

Including:

• Niobe - Other uses

Read more here: » Niobe: Encyclopedia - Niobe

Bendis was a Thracian goddess of the hunt whom the Greeks identified with Artemis, and hence with the other two aspects of the former Minoan Triple Goddess, Hecate and Persephone. She was a huntress, like Artemis, but was accompanied by dancing satyrs and maenads on a 5th Century red-figure stemless cup (at Verona). More than Olympian Artemis, Bendis remained a night-goddess, which linked her with Hecate . Her cult was introduced into Attica by immigrant Thracian residents, and became so popular that in Plato's time (ca. 430 BC ...

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