Magna Mater

Magna Mater: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Idaean Mysteries

Idaean Mysteries Mysteries held in connection with the Magna Mater (Great Mother), Roman name for Rhea or Cybele, whose worship prevailed in Crete and Asia Minor, in both of which are places named Ida. The Phrygian worship degenerated in later times into profligate practices.

Magna Mater: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Rhea

Rhea (Greek) Daughter of Ouranos and Gaia, sister and consort of Kronos, mother of Zeus and others of the principal divinities. Identified by the Homeric Greeks with Cybele, the Asiatic Magna Mater; also, as the mother of Zeus, with Demeter.

An Orphic fragment reads: "When she bore Zeus she became Demeter." The six sons and daughters -- Vesta, Demeter, Hera, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades -- are symbols of the powers and elements of invisible, and the divisions of visible, nature. Rhea in one aspect is also Isis -- nature, divine and human, bearing to Kronos (time) the elements and powers that in both invisible and visible form constitute nature, only to

See them swallowed by Kronos in the end, drawn back into the inner worlds in due course by all-ingulfing time.

See also ORPHISM

(See also: Rhea, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary)

Magna Mater: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Baubo

Baubo The Matron Baubo, the enchantress "before she succeeds in reconciling the soul -- Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood.

Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle -- forgotten for a few years of infancy -- begins again" (IU 2:112).

Magna Mater: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Cybele, Kybele

Cybele Kybele (Greek) A Phrygian goddess of caves and mountains, vines and agriculture, and town life, first worshiped at Pessinus; later throughout Asia Minor and in Greece.

The equivalent in Phrygia and Crete of Rhea, the Magna Mater (great mother), wife of Kronos and mother of Zeus. Her worship was celebrated exoterically, especially in later degenerate times, by wild dances by her votaries. In one of her phases Cybele was closely connected with the moon and its extremely recondite functions.

The moon is at once a sexless potency, to be well studied because to be dreaded, and a female deity for exoteric purposes. Cybele is "the personification and type of the vital essence, whose source was located by the ancients between the Earth and the starry sky, and who was regarded as the very fons vitae of all that lives and breathes" (BCW 12:214). The breath of Cybele, equivalent in its highest substance to akasa-tattva -- "is the one chief agent, and it underlays the so-called 'miracles' and 'supernatural' phenomena in all ages, as in every clime" (BCW 12:215).

See also CORYBANTES; CURETES

Magna Mater: Spiritual - Theosophy Dictionary on Taurus

Taurus The bull; second sign of the zodiac, a constellation containing the Pleiades. In astrology a fixed earthy sign, the night house of Venus, corresponding to the throat, neck, and base of the brain. It is the bull among the four sacred animals who are the Maharajas of the four quarters, and presides over the south. Called in Sanskrit Rishabha, dedicated to Yama, the god of the Underworld, it stands in Hindu reckoning for Pranava or Aum (12 Signs of the Zodiac). Frequently it is connected with Logos, Verbum, Vach -- for it is another form or aspect of the Third Logos.

Taurus stands for both sun and moon gods, its symbol being sometimes a bull and sometimes a cow, the Third Logos mystically being considered androgyne, differentiation into the two opposites not yet having supervened. Thus Taurus was usually connected with sun gods, such as Osiris; and at others connected with moon goddesses -- Isis, Diana, Cybele, etc. -- with the moon, and with the far higher Magna Mater (great mother), source of Taurus as the Second Logos, a distinctly feminine aspect.

Its symbol represents the cow horns which are also a symbol of the moon and lunar goddesses. "Ancient mystics saw the ansated cross, in the horns of Taurus (the upper portion of the Hebrew Aleph) pushing away the Dragon, and Christians connected the sign and constellation with Christ. St. Augustine calls it 'the great City of God,' and the Egyptians called it the 'interpreter of the divine voice,' the Apis-Pacis of Hermonthis" (TG 323).

Designated by the first letter of the alphabet, Taurus is described in many ancient systems as being number one among the signs, because this ascription took place and became static at a time in past history when Taurus opened the spring, and hence was reckoned as the first. Blavatsky suggests that the constellation Taurus was in the first sign of the zodiac at the beginning of kali yuga (3102 BC.), and consequently the equinoctial point fell therein (TG 387).

Associating the Hebrew patriarchs with the signs of the zodiac, Cain presides over Taurus (IU 2:465).

Magna Mater: Encyclopedia - Syncretism

Syncretism is the attempt to reconcile disparate, even opposing, beliefs and to meld practices of various schools of thought. It is especially associated with the attempt to merge and analogize several originally discrete traditions, especially in the theology and mythology of religion, and thus assert an underlying unity. Syncretism is also common in literature, music, the representational arts and other expressions of culture. (Compare the concept of eclecticism.) There also exist syncretic politics, although in politi ...

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Magna Mater: Encyclopedia - Mother goddess

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 ...

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Magna Mater: Encyclopedia - Sibylline Books

The Sibylline Books or Sibyllae were a collection of oracular utterances, set out in Greek hexameters, purchased from a sibyl by the semi-legendary last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, and consulted at momentous crises through the history of the Republic and the Empire. The Sibylline Books should not be confused with the so-called Sibylline Oracles, twelve books of pretended prophesies, written after the fact, or Vaticinia ex eventu (compare additions to the Book of Daniel); t ...

Magna Mater: Encyclopedia II - Cybele - Cult history

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 ...

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