Cybele

The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) defines Cybele as a goddess of nature and fertility in Asia Minor and Greece, whose worship was marked by ecstatic and frenzied states[1]. Beekes associates the goddess with the Phrygian Matar Kubileya or Kubeleya (Kubileya/Kubeleya Mother), perhaps meaning Mountain Mother, Lydian Kuvava, and Greek Κυβέλη (Kybelē), Κυβήβη (Kybēbē), or Κύβελις (Kybelis). He thinks that the name originated in Carchemish as Kubaba around the 12th century BC and that her names refer to the mountain (Beekes 2010b). Diodorus Siculus (1st century BC) and Strabo (64 or 63 BC – circa 24 AD) also believed that Cybele comes from the Phrygian Mount Cybelon or Cybela. References to a mountain origin of the name are also found in Virgil's, Aeneid[2] and Ovid's, Fasti[3]. In other words, the mountain was named first for unknown reasons, and the deity took its name. Stephanus of Byzantium (6th century AD) and others identified her as the 'mother of the gods' Rhea[4]. Also very popular among Romans, Cybele (Fig. 1) became known as the Great Mother (Magna Mater) or the great Idaean mother of the gods (Magna Mater deorum Idaea), equivalent to the Greek title Mother of the Gods from Mount Ida (Meter Theon Idaia). Some historians believe that Virgin Mary was simply employed to replace retiring Cybele with the same job description in the Christian world (Bordereau 1996).

Figure 1. Cybele enthroned, with lion, cornucopia, and mural crown. Roman marble, c. 50 AD. Getty Museum, Getty Villa 57.AA.19.  Artwork by Marshall Astor. Creative Commons license.

Rome officially adopted the cult of Cybele during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). Dire prodigies, including a meteor shower, a failed harvest, and famine, seemed to warn of Rome's imminent defeat. The Roman Senate and its religious advisers consulted the Sibylline oracle and decided that Carthage might be defeated if Rome imported the Magna Mater (Great Mother) from the 'ancient Phrygian city of' Pessinus (Greek Πισσινούς; Pissinous). As this cult object belonged to the Kingdom of Pergamum, a Roman ally, the Romans sent ambassadors to seek the king's consent. On the way, they consulted with the Greek oracle at Delphi, who confirmed the need to bring Cybele to Rome (Beard 1994; Boatwright, Gargola, and Talbert 2004). The goddess arrived from Pessinus to Rome as a black stone; meteoric, volcanic, or simply smoked?  Later, the stone was used to make the face of the goddess' statue (Summers 1996). Eventually, the famine ended, and Hannibal was defeated.

To apply classical notions of morphology, we may split Kybelē as Kyb-elē. The first part, kyb, is probably no other than the root of κύβος (kybos; cube), anything of cubic shape, especially a cubical die. The oracles may well have meant that only chance (dies) would save Rome; so, go to Pessinus (tar-makers) and get some dies (or black dyes) to try your chances, or to ally with the Phrygians (smoky bakers; see section The land of Phrygia) and 'paint it black' [5].

The second part, elē, is found as an independent word, ἕλη ('elē), which is glossed with several coherent etymologies and meanings. It is synonymous to ἀλέα (alea; compare English aleatory, French aléatoire), Ionian ἀλέη (aleē) or ἄλη (alē; compare English ale), avoiding, escape, from the verb ἀλέομαι (aleomai; aorist ἀλευάμην; aleyamēn; from root ἀλεϝ-; aley-, alev-, alef-; /alev/; compare English alley, French alé), to avoid, shun; from ἀλεάζω (aleazō), to heat up, be warm; or to hide, hide oneself, conceal oneself, occult, keep covered, or to gather together, collect, muster, amount, form a party, rally, take in the aggregate, sum; or from εἵλη ('eilē), warmth, laughter, chaff, lighthearted joking, banter, teasing, making fun of, mock, ridicule, etc. But, 'elē also derives from the verb αἱρέω ('aireō), to take with the hand, grasp, seize, take away, get into one's power, overpower, catch, entrap, overtake, win over, win, gain, grasp with the mind, understand.

Obviously, the Oracle's deliberation had many possible interpretations, as is always the case in languages. Some were diametrically opposite, ranging from paint it black, through hm… try your chances, to stand up and fight, or fortify your city. But were an Oracle's words oral, a product of instantaneous divine inspiration recorded as uttered, or the result of long hour work of a knowledgeable writer pretending to be the oracle? I am still not convinced that utterances and writing can originate outside a human brain. Neither am I convinced that such semantic synthesis of concepts into one name, Cybele, can be done phonetically, i.e., without reading and writing. Therefore, I am not convinced that Cybele was invented before writing.

The Kyb-elē morphology of Cybele (Greek Κυβέλη; Kybelē) makes of the goddess's name a dice-win, dice-gain. This way, Cybele means chance, luck, easy win, gain without toil. The variants of the ending morpheme represent declinations, semantic nuancing, and evolution in time of the various related Greek verbs. For example, the Phrygian form Kubeleya contains the stem ἀλεϝ- (aley-), to avoid, escape (toil), whereas Kybelē contains -'elē, gain. The mountain of Cybele, Mount Cybelon (or Cybela), probably meant a mountain of luck, a certain amount of chance; it was not literally a geological formation or an object of religious worship. Another consequence of this morphology is that the stems kyb and elē, as well as their cognates, Kybelē, Cybele, cube, aleatory, etc., belong to the same language, call it Greek, Proto-Greek, Pre-Greek, Lydian, Phrygian, Proto-Indo-European, or Afroasiatic. Curiously enough, the cubical building called Kaaba, or Ka'bah (literally meaning cube), in Mecca, is the center of Islamic worship and is concealed with a black cloth. If I were to compare Cybele with modern beliefs, I would opt for Kaaba rather than Virgin Mary.

The Kaaba in Makkah, 1907. Note its monumental black stone aspect. Artwork by Masjid al-Haram 1, Marked as public domain.

Rukn al-Yamani (the Yemeni Corner) is the corner of the Kaaba facing slightly southwest from the center of the Kaaba. Artwork by Fars Media Corporation. Creative commons license.

Muhammad fixed a black stone into the Kaaba. Miniature from 1307 AD, one of the oldest depictions of the Kaaba. Artwork by Taha b. Wasiq b. Hussain. Creative commons license.

Wailing Wall, Jerusalem, by Gustav Bauernfeind (19th century).  Marked as public domain. The Western Wall's holiness in Judaism is a result of its proximity to the Temple Mount. The Foundation Stone, the most sacred site in the Jewish faith, lies behind it.

The Black Stone is seen through a portal in the Kaaba. Artwork by Amerrycan Muslim. Creative Commons license. 

There were numerous Kaaba­-like structures in the territories of the Achaemenid Empire, which predate the foundation of Islam. One of them stands opposite Darius II's mausoleum at Marvdasht, Iran. The inscription on Mecca's Kaaba translates 'verily, the first House founded for men was surely that at Bekkah (another name of Mecca), for a blessing and a guidance to the worlds' (Imoti 1979). The 'cornerstone' of the Kaaba building is a black stone embedded in the south-eastern corner. The other Kaaba buildings also allegedly had counterparts of the Black Stone. There was a Red Stone in the Kaaba of the South Arabian city of Ghaiman; and the White Stone in the Kaaba of al-Abalat (near modern-day Tabala).

Grunebaum points out that divinity was often associated with the fetishism of stones, mountains, unique rock formations, or trees of abnormal growth (Grunebaum 1970). Armstrong further says that the Kaaba was thought to be at the center of the world, with the Gate of Heaven directly above it. The Kaaba marked the location where the sacred (hidden, unseen, concealed) world intersected with the profane (προφανής; prophanēs; foreseen, seen clearly or plainly, conspicuous, obvious). The embedded Black Stone symbolized this intersection as a meteorite that had fallen from the sky to link heaven and earth (Armstrong 2002). Suppose the black stone is a volcanic rock (lava) as it appeared to Swiss traveler, geographer, and orientalist Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (Burckhardt 1829). In that case, we can well understand why it is thought to represent the center of the world (Earth) with the Gate of Heaven (volcano crater) directly above it. Whatever the Black Stone is or represents, it attracts the world's Muslims to gather around it, as did Cybele (another black stone) to Romans. Stone is a 'great matter' for building cities and city walls that protect them. Cities attract people to gather into or around them.

To better grasp the meanings of Cybele (Kyb-elē), we can gather the sememes behind the constituent stems and capitalize on the power of morphological analysis. The prevailing view has been and still is, as outlined by Beekes (Beekes 2010a). There was a mountain, somewhere in Phrygia, a toponym already of unknown origin. The mountain was called Cybelon, Cybela, Kubeleya (in 'Phrygian') or Kybeleia (Greek Κυβέλεια) for some unknown arbitrary reason. Our ancestors, presumably impressed by the volume of the mountain, thought that this must be the dwelling of a spirit (god). They named the spirit Cybele based on the mountain's name and went around to carve rocks and inscribe the spirit's name in her honor. This scenario does not explain why Cybele was celebrated in antiquity with festivities including drinking, dancing, and frenzy behavior and is, perhaps, still celebrated as a black stone embedded in the walls of a square building in Mecca. It neither explains why Cybele wears a mural crown representing city walls or towers (Fig. 3). Why was she the protector of cities? Why did she carry the Latin epithet Magna Mater ('Great Mother'; or, rather, great matter/material)? Why was she represented as a stone or any other symbols associated with her cult?

Figure 3. Cybele wearing a crown with a city wall on a tetradrachm from Smyrna. Artwork by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Creative Commons license.

A more structured hypothesis was formulated by Bulgarian archaeologist Maya Vassileva (Vassileva 2001). The Great Goddess was only called mater or matar in Old-Phrygian inscriptions frequently found on rocks. Kubileya or Kubeleya was only an epiclesis. The deity had no theonym in Phrygia but was only referred to as mater with various epithets in Old-Phrygian texts suggesting her anonymous nature. For example, mater Kubeleya is attested twice, geographically quite apart (Brixhe and Lejeune 1984). Vassileva suggests that the epithet Kubeleya may have produced the Greek theonym Kybele, but Kubeleya rather corresponds to the Greek epithet oreia, meaning 'of the mountain'. She proposes that the epithet did not derive from the name of a particular mountain but from the word for mountain – the deity's privileged dwelling. Thus, mater Kubeleya or mater oreia would mean 'the mater of the mountain'. Following Old Phrygian and Greek literary and archaeological evidence, Vassileva concludes that Cybele (Kybelē) is any mountain that bears a cave, either natural or artificial.

My prediction is that only mountains with artificial caves qualify as Cybele's dwellings. An artificial cave is a quarry. If we were to write quarry using the Greek alphabet, we would probably write κύαρ (kyar; quar), meaning a hole or a swelling; better, a hole and a swelling, like the eye of a needle, or the orifice of the ear. The examples from the Greek literature are objects that contain both notions, hollowness, and swelling. Digging a hole (Y; V; U) on the ground causes the ground's surface to swell (A; Λ; be filled) at an adjacent site because of the accumulation of the dug soil at the orifice of the hole. Opening an eye to a needle (QU) causes the metal outline to swell (ky-AR[6]). Digging a quarry produces a hole on the ground (KY-ar) and a pile of quarried stones (ky-AR). To use the quarried stones, one must s-quare them, removing (privative S) the swellings from their surface. An s-quarred stone becomes square (cubical; kyb-os). Hence, mater Kyb-elē becomes the matter taken away ('aireō > elē) as a cube (kybos); i.e., the cubical extracted (squared) matter, the trimmed stone. The trimmed stone protects cities because it simply affords to build protective walls (a citadel) around them. No metaphysical connotation is needed.

The Latin term civilis may be considered as a corrupted transliteration of Kybelē. Civilis is an alternative adjectival derivative of civis, townsman. It pertains to public life, civic order, befitting a citizen, hence by extension popular, affable, courteous. The Latin-born civilization relates to city as its Greek analogue πολιτισμός (politismos; administration of public affairs, later, civilization) relates to πόλις (polis; community or body of citizens, later, state, republic, citadel, city). This connection to Kybelē allows parallelism between civilization[7] and 'Stone Age', at the semantic level, or Cubism, at the morphological level. Civilization originally meant living in common within a delimited urban area instead of the nomadic or rural modes. City walls (citadels) afford life and administration in common for a society, like house walls afford life and administration in common for a family.

Through civilis, Kybelē could have given the English city (from Ky-) and the French ville (-belē). The English terms town and borough, of Germanic origin, also contain the notions of delimitation, fortification, and joint administration. Unlike villages, which were somewhat random agglomerations of houses, Germanic towns, boroughs, and Latin cities had citadels (later, towers, palaces, or cathedrals) for delimitation, protection, and administration. Of course, today, all these nuances have been forgotten. The perpetual question of the difference between village, town, and city, is today answered by urban population size, without standard definitions. Thus, we have the City of London and the London town, a vast agglomeration of villages but which has a palace and a cathedral (citadels) that once governed the entire empire. With today's evolving hierarchical (vertical) administrative organization of societies and population dynamics, it will be hard to redefine cities, towns, and villages stably and discretely.

Claims

Cybele = great matter, mountain matter, trimmed stone, quarried stone, civilization, urbanism, fortification

Cognates

Cybele: Qibla, cube, ville, village, civilization, alley, rally, Sibyl, Sibylla

References

Armstrong, Karen. 2002. Islam: A Short History. New York, NY: Modern Library.

Beard, Dame Winifred Mary. 1994. "The Roman and the Foreign: The Cult of the 'Great Mother' in Imperial Rome." In Shamanism, History, and the State, edited by Nicholas Thomas and Caroline Humphrey, 164–190. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan.

Beekes, Robert S P. 2010a. "Κυβέλη." In Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 794. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series. Leiden: Brill.

———. 2010b. "Μένος." In Etymological Dictionary of Greek, edited by Lucien van Beek, 930–31. Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series. Leiden: Brill.

Boatwright, Mary T, Daniel J Gargola, and Richard JA Talbert. 2004. The Romans: From Village to Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA.

Borgeaud, Philippe. 1996. La Mère des dieux. De Cybèle à la Vierge Marie. Paris: Seuil.

Brixhe, Claude, and Michel Lejeune. 1984. Corpus des inscriptions paléo-phrygiennes. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations.

Burckhardt, Johann Ludwig. 1829. Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of Those Territories in Hedjaz Which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred. London: Henry Colburn.

Grunebaum, Gustave Edmund von. 1970. Classical Islam: A History 600 AD to 1258 AD. Edited by Gustave Edmund von Grunebaum. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Imoti, Eiichi. 1979. "The Ka'ba-i Zardušt." Orient Journal of the Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan 15: 65–69.

Summers, Kirk. 1996. “Lucretius’ Roman Cybele.” In Cybele, Attis and Related Cults, edited by Eugene N Lane, 337–365. Religions in the Graeco-Roman World. Leiden: Brill.

Vassileva, Maya. 2001. "Further Considerations on the Cult of Kybele." Anatolian Studies 51: 51–63.

 

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[1] Cybele in the AHD; accessed 13 April 2021.

[2] Virgil, Aeneid III. lll; XI. 768.

[3] Ovid's, Fasti 4.249, 363.

[4] Cybele in LSJ; accessed 13 April 2021.

[5] Greek and English expressions meaning there is no hope, begin to mourn. Black has always been the colour of mourning in Greece, and as far as I know. In French, deuil means both mourning and black.

[6] Compare French ras, crop, cut right against an orifice or a surface, razed hair, flat and plain, filled to the brim without protruding, a level spoonful of sugar. The clusters RA (flat) and AR (swelling, protruding) are antonyms by inversion.

[7] Through *Kybelēzation and *Cybelization (/ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/); note the phonetic lengthening of the third I of civilization, corresponding to the Greek H (ē) of Kybelē., compared to the previous two.