The Mountain Mother Who Became Cybele

The central figure of Phrygian religion was a goddess the Phrygians called Matar Kubileya, the Mountain Mother, mistress of a wild landscape attended by lions and worshipped in open air sanctuaries carved directly into the rock of the Phrygian highlands around Gordion, the kingdom's capital under the kings later Greek tradition remembered as Midas. Her cult did not stay confined to Anatolia. By the sixth century BCE Greek cities had received her under the name Cybele, and the Greeks read her as a form of their own earth goddess Rhea, mother of the Olympian gods. Rome went further still. In 204 BCE, during the darkest years of the war against Hannibal, the Roman senate formally imported her cult from Asia Minor on the advice of a prophecy in the Sibylline Books, installing her on the Palatine as the Magna Mater, the Great Mother, with a black meteoric stone said to be her own image standing in for the goddess much as a Phrygian rock sanctuary once had. Few Anatolian cults traveled as far, or were as formally and publicly adopted by a state that Phrygia had never ruled. Pessinus, set on the slopes of Mount Dindymus, served as her classical era cult center, distinct from Gordion where her worship first took root, and it was from a sanctuary in this region that Rome's senate obtained the sacred stone it carried west in 204 BCE. Ancient writers continued to call her the Phrygian goddess for centuries afterward, a label that outlasted her formal adoption into both the Greek and the Roman pantheon.