Phrygian Religion

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.

Phrygian myth paired the Mountain Mother with a young consort, Attis, whose death and, in some versions of the story, restoration became the center of an ecstatic mystery cult that spread with her worship into the Greek and Roman world. The cult's priesthood, the Galli, marked their devotion by castrating themselves, a practice ancient writers connected directly to the myth of Attis's own self mutilation, and lived afterward as a recognized third category outside the ordinary categories of Roman manhood, dressed and adorned in ways contemporaries read as feminine. Roman civic religion never fully domesticated what it had imported. Roman citizens were for a long time forbidden to serve as Galli or to castrate themselves in the goddess's honor, even as the state cult of the Magna Mater she had become held an official festival, the Megalensia, each April on the Palatine. The tension between an officially sponsored cult and a priesthood whose central rite Roman law tried to keep at arm's length is itself part of what ancient sources found remarkable about the religion the Phrygians had exported. No Phrygian scripture survives to give the myth in the tradition's own words; it is known through rock cut facades, inscriptions and the retellings of later Greek and Roman writers.