The earliest material evidence of the cult of the great mother-goddess of Anatolia dates from the first half of the first millennium B.C., while her worship – which in its later, Hellenized, form spread across the entire Mediterranean basin – did not completely die out before the end of the fifth century A.D. Cybele was not only the goddess of fertility and motherhood but also a deity of mountains and uncontrolled nature as well as the protector of cities. The comparatively well-documented rites associated with her in ancient Rome (which were inevitably affected by the ideological premises and political aims underpinning the official state cult) must have differed significantly from the earlier cultic practices in Phrygia. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to critically re-examine the problematic premises of earlier scholarship that unwarrantedly tended to trace some of Cybele’s characteristic features, which are only attested by Hellenistic and Roman sources, back to the original Anatolian deity. By drawing upon the especially relevant passages from ancient authors and selectively adducing the pertinent iconographic evidence (including the complex imagery of the so-called Parabiago Plate), the present study pays particular attention to some of the potentially most controversial aspects of Cybele’s cult (e.g. Attis, Galli, ritual castration, and orgiastic rites), which have also in the more recent past occasionally led to unsubstantiated speculations about the true nature of the Phrygian Mother Goddess.
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