Cybele goddess biography of martin luther king iii

She is Phrygia 's only known goddess, and likely, its national deity. In Greece , Cybele met with a mixed reception. She became partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia , of her possibly Minoan equivalent Rhea , and of the harvest—mother goddess Demeter.

What is cybele, the goddess of

Some city-states, notably Athens , evoked her as a protector, but her most celebrated Greek rites and processions show her as an essentially foreign, exotic mystery-goddess who arrives in a lion-drawn chariot to the accompaniment of wild music, wine, and a disorderly, ecstatic following. Uniquely in Greek religion, she had a eunuch mendicant priesthood.

In Greece, Cybele became associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions. The Roman state adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle in BC recommended her conscription as a key religious ally in Rome's second war against Carthage to BC. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas.

As Rome eventually established hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanized forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout Rome's empire. Greek and Roman writers debated and disputed the meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods, which remain controversial subjects in modern scholarship. No contemporary text or myth survives to attest the original character and nature of Cybele's Phrygian cult.