New Art of Kybele

I am in the middle of rethinking what I want to do with that Goddess deck of mine. I mean, not to worry, I still plan to publish, finish the book, &c; but lately I've been looking at the thing as a whole, trying to bring it into some kind of balance. To that end I've decided to swap a few cards out, mostly the monotheistic sorts, to make room for some other Goddesses. First one so far: I'm switching the Black Virgin out, and replacing her with Kybele. Here She is:

My version of the Black Virgin had strong elements of Kybele anyway, but I think I'd rather have the real thing. I did most of this last week sometime, then put it down, not sure if I liked it; but tonight I went back in and finished it, tweaking the colors and putting in those darker outliney sort of shadows. It's amazing to me how those little shadows always make the thing look dramatically better. It's exponential, I swear.

So, this Kybele (I'm using the Greek spelling rather than the Roman 'Cybele') is sort of a combination of the Roman imagery, which usually shows Her enthroned with a lion, and the very very very ancient and startlingly similar image of the Neolithic Goddess from Çatal Höyük (from, seriously, 6000-5500 BCE), thus:

(Image from Wikipedia, by one Roweromaniak)

I do like Her (and I like Her more the longer it goes), but I'm not sure if She's quite rattle rattle BOOM!! enough. It's a little weird; Kybele has a reputation for wildness, but all the statues of Her (the Roman ones, anyway) are very staid and proper looking, with the stately pose, the throne, and the mural crown. So it's a little tricky.

Still, I think I do like Her.

And, oh yes, a pine cone for Attis.

Goddess of the Week

And for the third time we get the Black Virgin.

My first thought upon seeing Her was that, gee, maybe I should get around to painting an image of Cybele one of these days. (It surprises me the major Goddesses I have not drawn; there are some interesting loopholes in my work, like, say, Demeter. All right then, I'll officially take that as a hint.)

And along those lines I'm inclined to interpret this card, for this week anyway, as Cybele Herself, and not just as an unusual form of the Virgin Mary Who is linked to the worship of the old Goddesses such as Cybele and Isis. After all, this card is about roots, and the old under the mask of the new: what would happen if this time we focused on the old, those roots?

Now, Cybele is an ancient Anatolian Goddess, Anatolia being the name for (roughly) modern Turkey; Her worship was adopted in Greece, and later Rome. She was known for orgiastic worship, with wild dances and drumming and cymbal-playing; but Her worship was looked upon a little askance, at least by the Romans (who could be pretty uptight about some things, like, oh I don't know, fun). Probably this was because, in addition to the raucous partying aspect, some of Her priests practiced self-castration, in imitation of the story of Attys, the beloved of the Goddess.

Attys was a beautiful boy, the son of a river-nymph, conceived when She ate an almond (i.e. parthenogenetically, a virgin birth); Cybele fell in love with Him, and made Him promise to be faithful to Her. Her swore He would; but in time He fell in love with a hamadryad named Sagaritis. When Cybele found out She cut the nymph's tree down, thus killing Sagaritis; and Attys went mad on a mountaintop, castrating Himself. He died under a pine tree, and the blood from His wound sprang up as violets.

A three-day festival was celebrated to Him in the Spring, in which a pine tree was decorated with violets (echoes of the Maypole, though I don't know that they are necessarily connected); and for two days the participants mourned and searched for Attys with wild rites. On the third day, however, He was found; and the mourning and sadness turned to joy at His rebirth.

Attys, then, falls into the category of the (vegetation) God Who dies and is reborn, like Dionysos, Adonis, or even Inanna's Dumuzi; and Cybele, as the Great Nature Mother, is properly His lover (or mother).

That, of course, is the Classical version of Her story. But we are interested in roots today: so what of Cybele's actual Anatolian origins?

Well, first of all, the Attys story is something that was attached to Cybele at rather a late date and is not known before the 6th century BCE. Cybele Herself is a particularly complex Goddess, and would appear to have a variety of strands making Her up; one of them may trace back to the deified Sumerian Queen Kubaba, Who was eventually adopted into the Hittite pantheon through the Hurrians, where She was identified with Hannahhannah (She, Who, in the story of Telipinu sent the bee to wake Him); She may also be related to the Hurrian Mother-Goddess Hebat. She may even, though this is pretty speculative, be related to the Goddess depicted in the famous statue from Çatalhöyük, a neolithic city in southern Anatolia, dating from the eight to sixth millennia BCE. This small statue shows a large, nearly nude woman perhaps giving birth, seated on a throne flanked by lionesses; though there is quite a large gap in time, it does recall later depictions of Cybele, Who was shown in much the same way, enthroned with a lion to either side.

Old roots, then. Old Mountain Mother Cybele, old as the hills, old as the mountains; old as the first cities, whose walls She wears as crown. She is wildness and civilization both; or, She is the wildness within us that does not go away despite civilization.

And I recall, that while I was away last week on my vacation at an event of the large festival type, that one night I stood behind the drummers drumming loud and wild and watched the dancers, while I added my zils, my little finger cymbals, to the drumming. I have, myself, been celebrating Cybele.

So, then, what does She have to say?

Old Mountain Mother am I. Yes. I am old, old old, old as the first stirrings of humans, old as the first bands of hunters following the wild animals, old as the green and dangerous mountains themselves.

And I am still here.

Remember your wildness; it will connect you with something vital, something not to be ignored, something that must be remembered to life live best; the drum is the heartbeat, after all, the very center of who you are.

Fireworks and drumming and dancing, all open your heart, all BAM! explode it out, open it up, loudly, joyously, raucously. It must needs be done. Especially now, when the world is inhabited by the timid, those who have forgotten what it is like to live.

Strip off your civilization! Dance far into the night! Collapse exhausted at dawn, then do it again the next night! Mourn, mourn the old you, then celebrate the new that is born through my grace; I will be here to birth you.

Always.

Well then! What do you think?

Goddess of the Week

Well, though I'm not a Christian it is Easter Sunday. So it makes sense that this week's 'Goddess' is the Black Virgin, a somewhat mysterious form of the Christian Virgin Mary depicted with dark or black skin. Though there can be various reasons why Her skin is dark (depending on the individual Madonna), more than a few are linked with ancient Goddess worship.

Now, I was operating under a fairly loose definition of 'Goddess' when I did these cards originally, which is why folk like Joan of Arc and the occasional Buddhist Bodhisattva have been included; but this one, particularly, has more claim to being a Goddess than most.

Black Madonnas are a mostly medieval European phenomenon, with between 450-500 of them in existence, a good part of which are in France, though there are famous examples in Belgium, Spain and Poland. Now, there are various reasons given for the dark color of Her skin, some of which are quite mundane: for example pigments changing over time, or soot from candles darkening the colors (though oddly enough in a lot of cases this seems to only affect the paint of the hands and face, not the clothing. Hmmmmm.) Still, it's quite clear that a number of them were painted dark on purpose.

It's also clear that quite a few of the sites with Black Madonnas were at one time sacred to some form of the Goddess, mostly Isis, Cybele, or Artemis. This isn't particularly mysterious--when the Roman Empire officially dedicated itself to Christianity, the Church's policy with the more stubborn holdovers of Paganism was to adapt them over to Christian purposes. So in the same way that elements of the Saturnalia, the great Pagan Roman winter festival, were adopted into Christmas, so churches were built on old Pagan holy sites. And if they had been dedicated to a Goddess, well it just made sense to dedicate the Church to the Christian version of the Mother, Mary.

And so then, because these Madonnas are connected with the old Earth Goddesses, the color of their skin is that of the rich, black, earth.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is perhaps the most famous Black Madonna. She is originally Spanish; but in Mexico one Juan Diego had a vision of Her in 1531, and so since then She has become a symbol of Mexico. She has been linked, incidentally, with the Aztec Earth-Goddess Tonantzin or their Great Mother Coatlicue.

I should probably offer a little bit of explanation on the art of this card. When I painted it I had in mind the Goddess Cybele, also known as the Magna Mater or Great Mother. Cybele was native to Phyrgia in central Anatolia; but the Romans adopted Her. Quite formally, actually: in response to a crisis in 204 BCE (there was always a crisis in Rome), the Senate consulted the Sybilline books, and came to the conclusion that Cybele's worship should be brought to Rome. Which they did, by bringing Her icon from Phyrgia. This icon was in the form of a conical (or needle-like) uncarved Black Stone, and was a meteorite; which I suppose makes it a conical aniconic icon.

Anyway, so that is why I only painted Her face black, to represent Cybele's Stone. The blonde hair, blue eyes and doll-like features are meant to evoke the European shell put over the ancient Eastern Goddess.

This card represents ancient secrets in plain sight, then, or the layers of the past showing through in the present; and despite the rewritten history the origins of things are easily discerned. So this week, be on the lookout for old patterns underneath current circumstances; it may not be apparent on first glance, and may require a little digging, but you may well find that what you thought was something new is actually a manifestation of an old issue or old way of doing things. Or, it may be less about old habits you're falling into and more about ancient themes of the sacred popping up in unusual or modern-looking places. I think, mostly, it is advice for the week to be aware and look closely at what is just beneath the surface, to see the patterns, habits, connections, or old ways of worship there.

What does She have to say?

I am Earthshaking Cybele, rattle your bones, bang on my drums! Rattle rattle BOOM! Dance the ecstasy, run up the mountain; you are all wild still in your bones, under your veneer of civilization. I cannot be stopped; I cannot be forgotten; I will always be here and I will always be powerful, whatever veil you throw over me. I am the Old Mountain Mother of the Mural Crown; I walk with lionesses at my side.

Rattle rattle BOOM! Let the kettledrums thunder! Every drumbeat is mine. Every drumming heart is mine. This is as it is. From the beginning to the end, it is mine.

I am the Great Mother. I always have been, and always will be. I am always here. And you are always my children, all of you. If you have need, ask. Even as a pretty Madonna, what do I do but bridge Earth and Heaven? For I am the Black Stone that fell from the Sky.

Well. She is very strong, and that was not what I was expecting. Two letters in to typing that I found I had hit the CAPS LOCK key; I turned it off but She is LOUD! I think, then, I will add to my advice above and say that reclaiming our wildness is also part of the message. Get your heart beating: go dancing, running, be loud! I am reminded of the boom of a firework, how it is so loud it almost stops the heart; but at the same time it opens the heart WIDE.

Wait a minute. I just remembered! One of Cybele's Roman festivals was the Megalensia, held from April 4th through the 10th, marking both the arrival of Her Stone to Rome and the founding of Her temple on the Palatine. There was also a (probably earlier in origin) festival of Cybele in March, the Hilaria, held from the 15th to the 28th; and some of the rites of the Hilaria are strikingly similar to those of guess what, the Christian Easter.

Well then!