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Cybele — Description

Today's essay is going to be an exploration of two related yet distinct questions: how old can a god be, and, more importantly, how could you tell? What is a god? What even is religion at its most irreducible definition? I'm Heathen so I'm obviously of a polytheist persuasion, but that's operating under a rather egotistical expression of self-loathing which insists that I specifically am in fact the butt of a cosmic joke. Religion, to me, is a very private spirituality, it's what happens when I talk to myself, so clearly a church and a religion are optionally separable concepts. You don't have to attend to believe in the divine, and I'd argue you don't need to believe in the divine to be religious either. Basic superstitions like knocking on wood or holidays long since adopted into secular hands are still “religious” in a way, an implied order to the universe and your own tick on the clock, even one you don't inherently have to believe is actually there to still operate the motions in your bones. Is religion ritual? Is it observance? Philosophy? Is it consistency even? One can say “I hope I come back as a butterfly” and “I'll see you in Hell” in the same conversation, and you probably wouldn't even blink at the paradox. We live in a sort of cultural nebula, where “religion” is a spectrum of a thing which is emergent yet frustratingly independent from the sum of its parts.
Alright so where did we get religion? Evolutionarily, we surely presume that humans with religion emerged from nature without yes? That assumes though that humans are the only religious species out of 8 million animals, and are we? Are anyone else, unaskable, religious too? As early as 1964, Jane Goodall observed our closest cousins 7 million years removed, the chimpanzees, behaving… what I can only describe as “predictably erratically”. Male chimpanzees will literally start hollerin’ up a storm when it cracks thunder, they grab branches and display dominance behaviors at the forces of nature as if it's a negotiation it thinks it can enact, presumably because at some point it sprinkled, some stupid boy tried to scream it away, and the cloud passed. Congratulations, you just invented superstition, because without any other information to go off of, literally born in the wild, it rained, you scared it, it went away. Behavioral association established. Now even if it doesn't work, it's still what ya do whenever it rains, just in case it does work again, ya know? It like Og, him passtime throw rock at bigger rock, realize smack make bigger rock give birth to smaller sharp rocks. Hit rock, shape rock. Me think Og is onto something.
What about a little closer to home though? Were all humans religious? What did Lucy think when she looked up into the sky with diamonds 3.2 million years ago? There's a lug of jasper we call the Makapansgat Pebble, named after the location in South Africa where it was found in 1925. Though, I will argue pedantically that a stone that fills the palm of your hand is not a pebble, that is a rock. Not all of my beef can be rational and scientific, a girl has her pet peeves. It's a cute little cobble though, and that's the point. It's been weathered by the elements in such a way as it kinda resembles a dopey hominin face, something which must've been relatable to one of the local australopithecines for all the distance they carried it. Though the stone bears no marks of intentional human alteration, the nearest possible source of jasper from the cave it was found in is some five clicks away. As someone who has walked three miles through an Indiana summer, you gotta be committed to hold onto your favorite rock all the way back to your favorite hard place. Why? It looks like a face sure, but really think of the implications of that fundamental understanding you share with an Australopithecus if that's indeed what happened here. Did the face remind the carrier of themselves? All the other great apes have been observed utilizing their own reflection, so we know the carrier must've had a sense of self, it's possible. Or did it remind them of someone they knew? Someone they lost to a memory they literally held onto, perhaps? Animals most certainly grieve, I'd even argue that's a fundamental emergent property of sentience. In 2018, an orca dubbed Tahlequah was seen carrying the dead body of her calf for seventeen days, weighed down but unable to let go, same as you reading may well have felt once. Or perhaps the rock owned its own face in the mind of its carrier, who conceptualized it into a person never once born, another human, another mind, another agent that could be. We certainly had the imagination for it, this is the generation which produced the oldest human inventions in the archaeological record, those flakes hammered off of cores at Lomekwi 3 in Kenya some 3.3 million years ago. There's a world of difference between using an unaltered rock to smash something and making a stone tool out of existing material, afterall. One must first be able to imagine something which does not yet exist in order to create it from existing materials, to will the imagined into being. Curiously, the giant rock cores these pre-Homo peoples were making their tools out of at Lomekwi had also carried from elsewhere. Not as far mind you, you wouldn't have to leave your apartment complex to fetch these stones, but that's not an insignificant distance to haul around the weight of road salt, especially when there's no fences invented yet to keep leopards out while you're doing it. But here's the question: is that religion? Is a god, at its core, just ritual flavored with pareidolia?
I don't have a sturdy answer to that question, and I'm excited to see your guys’ thoughts in the comments, but we're probably doomed to speculation until we have something more concrete in our hands. The Makapansgat Pebble was made by the tumble of nature, not human tools. There was no “art” to it, only recognition, so the next logical step is to seek out the oldest artifact made in man's own image by man's own hands. The distance we have to go to get there though is head-spinning, because “art” by its nature is both incredibly difficult to define and to preserve. There's a mussel shell, Pseudodon DUB1006-fL, found on the island of Java which was scratched up by a stone tool in the hands of our ancestors species, Homo erectus some 500,000 years ago, which is usually cited as the first intentionally created art for art's sake because of its seemingly purposeless repeating zigzag pattern. As a mineral worker myself though, I'm skeptical. It's not a particularly even zigzag, and I've made similar marks just taking my dental scalpel to a big carbuncle of sandstone, sometimes out of boredom or to test my knife's dullness against the matrix. I don't think it's out of the question that erectus had art, Neanderthals created art after all, look only at the weird little helicopter dude they drew in La Pasiega Cave 64,000 years ago, or the circle of stalagmites they assembled in Bruniquel Cave 176,000 years ago. Phylogenetic bracketing would imply that our common ancestor, erectus, must've therefore had art to pass down to both of us. Our oldest cave paintings don't appear until 51,200 years ago, and those are already as far afield as Karampuang Cave on the island of Sulawesi. Art is clearly something we already had in our possession and brought with us out of Africa to the ends of the Earth, indeed we see much more obvious examples of intentional aesthetic alteration at Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated some 73,000 years old, roughly contemporaneous with the migration out of the Rift Valley into the rest of the world. The problem though is that paint washes and shells flake. Even masterpieces we consider quintessential to shared human consciousness cling onto life in the present day. We only have 20% of Leonardo's original Last Supper, the rest is restoration work desperately trying to save a painting that was doomed from the start because of incompatible materials. Art, by its nature, is fragile, fleeting, and abstract, just like the human thoughts which inspire it, and we will probably, sadly, never know what the “first” artwork was, or if we'd even recognize it if we saw it.
We don't start to get a clear picture (pun intended) of a consistent human artistic industry until after we were the only ones left. The last pureblood Neanderthal went to the flower beds roughly 40,000 years ago, their descendants hybridized into oblivion with the wave of anatomically modern humans who had entered Europe by at least 54,000 years ago. This date is yielded from teeth found in France's Grotte Mandrin rock shelter, itself a rich location of shared Sapiens and Neanderthal occupation, and its discovery helped push away the theory that we showed up one day and just slaughtered all the Neanderthals to make room for our own homes. Sometimes you just fall in love with someone so deeply that your soul and theirs become indistinguishable and inseparable, your children no longer the offspring of two worlds, but of one people. There are nonviolent means of going extinct, if you only have the heart to go look for them.
We used to refer to these early human explorers as “Cro-Magnon”, after the type site in France, but this term comes with some rather 19th century historical baggage, and there's nothing physically distinguishable enough between these skeletons and yours to warrant giving them any other title than just “human”. Their technology though is called the “Aurignacian” industry, defined by the first true “blades” (razor thin stone flakes which are selected to be at least twice as long as they are wide, as opposed to just bashing an edged shard off of a bigger rock and calling it a day), and an explosion of artistic innovation. These are the folks who painted a pride of cave lions on the walls of Chauvet Cave 35,000 years ago (m… maybe but as a non-expert I choose to not get involved in that nerd fight), and their affinity for this beast is found further abroad in the Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel. Carved from the tusk of a mammoth over the course of some 300 hours worth of whittling, it's the world's oldest surviving image of a thing which does not exist outside of human imagination, in this case a man (or woman, there's not exactly enough… anatomical clarity to make that call) with the head of a cave lion. What is the Lion-Man beyond those two components? Oh fuck idk your guess is as good as mine, the written word wasn't even conceived of for another thirty thousand years, we'll probably never know what the artist's intention was. It's been thrown around, in my opinion a bit too confidently, that it represents some kind of Ice Age shaman donning a cloak of lion skin to embody the spirit of the animal or something romantic like that. It may also be a lost, nameless god, the sort of mythical hybrid which wouldn't be homesick among the pantheon of Ancient Egypt. If I may put forth an untestable speculation of my own with a dash of inspiration from my Heathenry, there's a cryptid in Danish folklore called a “Valravn”. When a raven eats the heart of a fallen warrior, it absorbs his animating thought and mutates into a horrid half-man half-crow thing which haunts the living. It doesn't absorb the consciousness or identity of the soul it consumes, only the humanlike capacity to create its own, the original man digested and his mind stripped for spare parts to build a new one. Aurignacian peoples, at least so far as the archaeological record can tell us, didn't usually bury their dead. Perhaps this was intentional like a Zoroastrian sky burial, a sacred honor to be eaten by scavengers and assume a new life through them, or perhaps it was cold and necessary for peoples at the whim of in an environment which does not forgive staying in one place long enough to give the dead rites. Perhaps like the Valravn, a Lion-Man is what becomes of a human heart when it's consumed by a beast which now wears human skin, a haunting demon which embodies the brutality of predation and frostbite, the thing you get eaten by and incorporated into when you wander too far into the blizzard. Or it was a sex toy, anything's a sex toy if you're brave enough.
Bout 20 miles east down the Danube there's another cave from the same time period whose name is only slightly more pronounceable, Hohle Fels. There's actually a less widely known Lion-Man sculpture from this site, which does curiously imply an industry, as in this was a culturally common character that multiple people would've recognized, but whatever lore he's hiding he's only an inch long compared to Hohlenstein-Stadel's entire foot, and half of him is comically missing. The real crown jewel in this cache though is what finally gets us into our subject matter today, an artifact recovered from the cave in 2008 which has since been dubbed the “Venus of Hohle Fels”. Also carved from mammoth ivory, it's the oldest undisputed depiction of a human being in the entire record, though like all of us, she is not without her peculiar imperfections. The first thing you'll notice when you inevitably google what the blue fuck Ava is on about today is that she comes endowed with enormous, voluptuous bahongabongas, and the second thing you'll notice is that she's missing her head. Where a head should be is instead a little hoop-ring through which one could presumably thread a string and wear the Venus as a pendant. Why? No one knows, but the absence of an identifiable face is bizarrely going to become a running theme.
A lot like internet memes, the original post is much older than the traction it would eventually garner. The Aurignacians would come and go, superseded by a genetically distinct population of specialized mammoth hunters who were better equipped to tough out the Last Glacial Maximum as discussed last week. In Europe, we refer to these peoples as the Gravettian Culture, and they deserve a deeper dive of their own some day but for now the important development was the boom in popularity of even more “Venus Figurines”, as they are collectively known. The most famous and characteristic of these sequels to Hohle Fels is the Venus of Willendorf, carved from limestone and tinged with red ochre pigment about 30,000 years ago in what is today Austria. She's not dissimilar to the Venus of Hohle Fels: a large, well-endowed woman with no clothes and no face. She does have a head, but it's completely veiled by what could be pleated hair but more likely is meant to represent the shell caps worn by skeletons in Gravettian graves, such as those at Sungir, Arene Candide, and the most central crossroads in all of Gravettian culture, the mammoth-bone village of Dolní Věstonice.
Dolní Věstonice is remarkable in many ways but most relevant to today is that these were the first people, so far as we've found, to create ceramics. We've been throwing things into fire for as long as we've had the stuff, and eventually someone noticed that chucking the clay of the Earth in there hardens it into whatever shape you had molded into before. Or it just fucking explodes like a hot firecracker. We find plenty of thermal-shocked chunks of animal statues littered around this cache, and that's equally entertaining when you have literally nothing better to do out there in the ice age. Among the oldest of these fired figurines though is yet another Venus, sculpted 31,000 years before our time, following roughly the same trends as its predecessors, though this one at least has eye slits. It also has four holes sticked through the top of its head so that she could be accessorized with the quills of feathers or the stems of flowers, which I think is adorable.
So okay that's three of many other examples of superficially congruent images found scattered throughout the Danube Valley over the course of, at minimum, four thousand years. Admittedly that's a lot of time to swallow that these are all representations of the same “character” but it's not outrageous. That's only a smidgen longer than the distance from one end of Ancient Egypt from the other, and though not as consistent as people are often led to believe, Horus has been there from when Narmer got eaten by a hippopotamus all the way to the birth of Christ. Characters, even if significantly altered in the course, can last that long, but trying to coax an identity out of that assumption here is as futile as it will ever be. Are these things goddesses or are they children's toys? The Venus of Dolní Věstonice has a child's fingerprint in the fired clay, afterall. Are they fertility idols or assistants for arousal? There's a rock shelter in France called Abri de Laussel which was inhabited by Gravettians 25,000 years ago, and… boy was it.. There's ceramic… toys… absolutely strewn around the place, for either preference mind you good for them. This was clearly Makeout Point, and the limestone walls were etched with panels of this same large, faceless woman presenting what seems to be the horn of a bovid of sorts. One of the panels has her getting it on, while the most famous one has thirteen notches carved in the horn. I keep seeing it suggested that this represents the thirteen menstrual cycles of a year, and like… sure? Like why not I guess? But does that help? What even is the symbolism there? Is this bitch… drinking menstruation out of a shot glass? I mean I can't deny that's metal as fuck but have some class you filthy cretins, godsdamn.
Are the Venuses a single imagined person, or are they several real ones drawn from life? We know the Gravettians did sculpt art of each other. There's a mammoth ivory carving of a head found at Dolní Věstonice, bout the size of a pencil sharpener, its hair done up in a stylish bun and a dinged up left eye. There's a woman buried at Dolní Věstonice, 30s or 40s when she died but now going on 26,000, curled on her side, clutching fox bones, overcrossed with two mammoth scapulae, and her head drenched in red ochre (a ferrous clay pigment used in Paleolithic cave paintings). This woman, DV3 as we can only call her now, has a malformation of the skull caused by blunt trauma she received in the eye as a kid. This discovery makes that ivory head the oldest confirmable artwork of a real individual human being who lived and died on the planet you're standing on right now. Though, this piece obviously bucks any classically Venus trends, such as having a face, being a face, at that.
The Venuses certainly have a demographic quality if nothing else. Richard J. Johnson et al. published a survey in the journal Obesity in 2020 which examined waist to shoulder ratios on Venuses found across Europe, and it turns out the farther north you go, the closer to the glacier line these peoples lived, the more obese they portrayed their figurines. Not the pattern you may expect to correlate with a time of starvation and lands of few resources. I can confirm from personal experience that growing biological baby bottles is quite calorie-demanding. That actually speaks to the point of these trinkets though and the image people wanted to project. I was chatting about this research with my lab partner Kevin, and the example he brought up were robins who grow larger and plumper in colder climates because fat is both a phenomenal insulator and stores more nutrients you can fall back on when winter becomes unreasonable. Thus there's a survival pressure to select big buxom beauties as the pinnacles of prowess and power. I can't help but wonder if these Gravettians saw some kind of symbolic connection between these women and the mammoths they relied on to obtain a massive amount of sustenance at once for the tribe. Like, a hunter is not always going to be able to trophy a mammoth skull around to prove how good he is in the field, but if the tribe has a matriarch in tow who gets her fill of an entire elephant on the regular, that's a much more portable badge of achievement that your people are doing well. I can't prove that with the evidence available to us, but it's food for thought.
Whatever the Venus Figurines are, they outlived the Last Glacial Maximum. The ice began to retreat 20,000 years ago, opening new lands and the hope of warmer pastures to the genetic descendants of the Gravettian peoples. This population got down and dirty with their neighbors, the Solutreans, printing out a cluster of materially similar folks collectively referred to as the “Magdalenian Culture” who would supersede them both. These are the talented artists who painted the ceilings bursting with bulls at the Caves of Lascaux and Altamira, so beautifully human that the story goes one Pablo Picasso was awestruck and the words “We have invented nothing” dropped from his mouth. Unfortunately this quote seems to be entirely apocryphal, which sucks because it's a beautiful quote and I've definitely repeated it to other people. The Magdalenians inherited the manufacture of Venus Figurines, just now a lot more abstract and even more frustrating unanswerables. Take the so-called “Double Venus” of Grimaldi Caves, which depicts the torso and head of a well-endowed woman like… spot welded to the back of some… creature-thing that looks like a phallic bootleg of a Big Bird Pez-dispenser. I don't know, no one knows. Not only is this Venus faceless like its companion pieces (they're carved from soapstone so it lends this nice smooth, almost Slenderman-y sort of uncanny valley effect to them), its face was actively scritched out by the artist. That's really starting to creep me out, so may I direct you instead to the Venuses depicted at Gönnersdorf from the span of 15,000 to 11,000 years ago. Some are carved sticks, others are scribbles, and one of them is gay! There's a doodle of two chicks making out in this cave, it's awesome and hot!
It's also… weird right? These can't be the same OC that was bahongabongaed out in Hohle Fells 24,000 years earlier. I know for most people the distant past kinda just Flinstones together in our minds, but you have to remember that the distance between 33,000 BCE to 9,000 BCE, though both squarely prehistoric, is the same distance between you at home stuffing your face with a grilled raccoon and 24,000 BCE. Would you think it fair if someone in the year 26,026 claimed that your lewd DeviantArt commission is the same woman, goddess, whatever, as was thought of in the mind of someone living during the Last Glacial Maximum? Is that reasonable? Just because you all thousands of years apart from each other came up with the vague throughline of body positivity? I personally don't think it would be, especially as someone with a linguistics background. Words, like genes, mutate, decay, and override themselves into oblivion, that's how Latin splinters into French, Spanish, Romanian, etc, and that's only been in the past two thousand years. Even Modern English, a structurally Germanic language, is packaged half full with words derived from a Romance tongue, and it's mutually unintelligible even to its closest cousin Frisian. While I can't deny the consistency is freaking me out, I don't want my unverifiable personal gnosis to count towards what our data actually has the capacity to tell us. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme, be cautious of the difference when trying to reconstruct a spirituality or write a historical fantasy series, like everyone's favorite internet mom is.
I say all this because the next subject we're gonna cover is often mentioned in the same breath as the Venus Figurines, but try my damnedest though I did, I couldn't find any evidence of cultural continuity between the Venus Figurines and the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük. The Gravettians, Solutreans, Magdalenians, all of them and their Venus Figurines were confined to Europe before vanishing at the start of the Holocene. I couldn't find any evidence of a back migration or any… I guess “missing link?” between that tradition and the artifacts made in Neolithic Anatolia some 8000 years ago. I'm not saying there's no connection, a lot can happen in three thousand years, but I cannot prove to you that the resemblance is anything but coincidence and convergence. That said, the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is what she says on the tin: a little paperweight of a queen fired on her clay throne, large as the world and flanked with two large felines as her arm rests (a motif we refer to in archaeology as a “Potnia Theron”, the “Mistress of Animals”). The artifact had been found in the ruins of this long abandoned farming community with its head broken off. If you Google Image this statue, that head is a modern replacement. Even I have to confess that's objectively spooky and it's crawling up my spine. There was a head at some point though, for the record, other such figurines are found with their heads still on, and those heads do in fact come with faces. That makes it worse though, there's one that's just going to town on her corpulent nipples and her face is that of a woman who's enjoying making you watch more than she is the activity itself.
While she may not be a final holdout of a precursor tradition, the Seated Woman of Çatalhöyük is more likely to be the herald of a new one. Bear with me because we're about to make an abrupt entrance into written history, Pausanias's history specifically. Pausanias was a 2nd-century Lydian-Greek geographer who documented his travels in the archaeologically useful Description of Greece, which also takes detours across the pond in Ionia, the culturally Greek coastline of Anatolia. Pausanias records that there's a giant carving, 26 feet tall, of the Magnesian “Meter Theon” (the “Mother of the Gods”) hewn right into the face of Mount Sipylos, said by the locals to oldest representations of their national goddess, Cybele, and he's describing a real monument which is still standing today, called the Manisa Relief. Pausanias attributes its construction to the mythical king Broteus, son of Tantalus and great-uncle of Agamemnon, so assuming there's a nugget of truth in any of these people's existences, that would put the statue’s construction at 1300 BCE ish, which surprisingly isn't that far off from what archaeology can tell us. The carving has long since weathered beyond the point of plausible recognizability, it may actually be a man with a beard, though the face is… again… destroyed. Hmm. There still remain though Luwian inscriptions scribbled around the niche, two names, “Kuwalanamuwa the Prince” and “Zuwani the Palace Official”, both historical figures from the court of the Hittite King Šuppiluliama I, who reigned until his death in 1322 BCE.
Scholastically though, labeling the Manisa Relief as an image of the goddess Cybele is tentative (tantalizing, if you will). There's nothing on or around the image itself to suggest that was the original artist's intention. The name “Cybele” (in its original Phrygian form “Kubileya”) doesn't appear spelled out in the archaeological record until the 6th century BCE, with the erection of a sanctuary called “Aslankaya” in modern Turkish, the “Lion's Rock”. It's typical of Phrygian monuments, an open-air site with one big fake big door that kinda makes it look like the healing shrines from Shadow of the Colossus. You can find similar devotional architecture in the Midas Monument in modern Yazılı, dedicated both to the king himself shortly after his death in the 7th century BCE (yes King Midas was a real historical person, we'll get to that) and a niche in the doorway inscribed with the word “Matar”, Mother, the usual epithet for Cybele. Both the Midas Monument and Aslankaya have a space for a statue of the goddess in their niches, Aslankaya so named because she was flanked by two lions, but the statues have not survived into modern times. I suspect this iconography is where her name comes from in the first place. It's a wonky word and is usually glossed as derivative of the name of Mount Sipylos, whom she embodies, or from a more general Phrygian phrase meaning “of the mountain”. “Cybele Mater” therefore makes her literally the “Mountain Mama”, while the ancient grammarian Hesynchius associates her with caves and chambers. She's the goddess you carve out of a mountain, a miniature of the thing you're standing on in the doorway of a cliffside temple.
Now there's an even earlier Anatolian goddess named “Kubaba” imported from Hittite days, first attested as the national deity of the city of Carchemish by the 18th century BCE. Though a lot of scholars have tried over the decades to link her to Cybele, and there may well be a connection, we just don't have the data to prove it. Almost nothing is known of Kubaba outside of her hometown, and even then there's no real mythology preserved that'd tip us off that she is one and the same with Cybele. Kubaba is more described as a queen than a mother, an administrator of royal affairs and possibly the underworld, and her iconography is completely different, distinguishable from any other generic goddess only by a pomegranate in one hand and a mirror in the other. Similarly, on the Sumerian King List there's a “Kubaba” notable as being the only female ruler attested in the document. She was, according to the even later Weidner Chronicle, a cantankerous tavern-keeper who was given kingship over Kish by the god Marduk after sheltering a troop of fishermen whose catch was intended for the temple but confiscated by the authorities of King Puzur-Nirah. Though similar and often brought up in discussions of Cybele, her name has no connection to the Anatolian Kubaba, instead derived from a combination of the Sumerian words “Kug” meaning “radiance” and “Baba”, a goddess of midwifery. Indeed that “Kug” element disqualifies her as a real queen altogether, unattested in the language of the time period she would've reigned, and thus she was probably propaganda conceived of in the minds of Sumerian kings who wanted to disqualify the mismanagement of former rulers. That being said, what we can know about the Phrygian Cybele is itself sparse on indigenous resources, so as we finally dip our toes into some actual fucking mythology, just know that this is going to be coming from the mouths of Greeks and Romans writing about the religion of foreigners whom they considered to be barbaric, cowardly, and the most horrifically inconceivable of them all to a tiny Roman mind, effeminate, gasp. It's not ideal as a primary source, but literally nothing about this research so far has been anyway.
Pausanias claims that Cybele, under her proper true name “Agdistis”, is the consequence of a wet dream Zeus had, because apparently Zeus can't keep it in his pants even in his fucking sleep. This is an example of interpretation graeca, however, so the Phrygian sky-god he's probably referencing here would've been Sabazios in the original context. Sabazios is an obscure god in and of himself, Thracian in origin, but the Romans in their writings identified him with Jupiter, Bacchus (Greek Dionysis), and… Steve, curiously. The Romans seem to have misheard their Jewish citizens when they called their God “Tzevaot” as the more familiar “Sabazios”, which is why they often synchrotised Steve with Bacchus in their administration over Judea. The more ya know🌈🌟
Anyway, this drip seeds the soil of the Earth below, and from this impregnation a new divinity Gigers out of the hillside. This hermaphrodite child is named Agdistis after the stone “Agdus” which birthed it, according to Arnobius's extended version of the tale. He explains that the reason why the gods were afraid of Agdistis is because that rock was apparently a fuckin party animal to its very genes. The way Arnobius words it is “there is a rock of unheard-of wildness in every respect” lmao, and claims Agdus is one of the rocks Deukalion reseeded the population of the Earth with after the Greek flood myth was done and over with. Here “Zeus” had, of course, attempted to assault Agdus because he thought she was hot, but Adgus fought him off, go girl! This is when the sky falls asleep and, gross… seeds her anyway, at which point Agdistis chestbursters out of her. Agastis had both baby makers and Arnobius hilariously takes this to mean Agdistis has twice the libido, and it's an angry libido to boot. Agdistis just tears up the countryside, think the volcano chick from Moana. “He violently plundered and laid waste; he scattered destruction wherever the ferocity of his disposition had led him; he regarded not gods nor men, nor did he think anything more powerful than himself; he contemned earth, heaven, and the stars”. The gods decided this just simply could not continue, and they assign the task of removing the source of Agdistis's power to a god Arnobius calls “Liber”, basically the same guy as Dionysus so again this is probably Sabazios. Agdistis's favorite lake is drugged with wine, the mad bastard passes out, and then the other mad bastard sneaks up and ties… what's described as a hunting snare shaped like a horse halter to Agdistis's male member. When Agdistis wakes up, and stands up, there's a swift cinch, and the next thing you know there's blood everywhere and she's got new pronouns.
This red tidal wave then washes the missing bits elsewhere, and a pomegranate tree grows where it lands. Eventually there comes along a little princess named Nana, daughter of the Sangarius River, who plucks a fruit from this tree, nuzzles it close to her bosom, and then it… like… morph sucks into her chest I guess? Next thing she knows she's with child and her father is not happy. Thinking she was knocked up by some street rat and that somehow that's her fault, Sangarius locks Nana away in a room where she and her baby will… starve to death. She is nursed in her prison by the “mother of the gods”, however, nourished with fresh fruits until the baby is born. Sangarius, blatant asshole, orders his evil henchmen to strip the child from its mother and leave him exposed to the wilderness. A passing nobody named Phorbas rescues the boy and raises him under the name “Attis”, after the goats (Phrygian “attagi”) who suckled him. Attis, to his continued suffering, grows up the prettiest kid in school, and no one finds his body more appealing than Agdistis. Arnobius describes her as… sticking her hands down places hands should not go the kid's entire childhood, grooming him until he gets drunk in the woods and confesses his “love” for Agdistis. Narfi's bowels, this has not been a fun essay.
This is where Midas enters the story so I wanna circle back to him for a breather. The version of the Midas story you probably know best is actually not from Greek mythology at all but from Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1852 work A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. The gold touch thing goes back to Ovid and his Metamorphoses, but the daughter tragedy (her name is “Marigold”, fuck you Hawthorne) was completely invented in the 19th century. King Midas though was a real king of Phrygia, a constant pain in the ass for his contemporary, the Assyrian King Sargon II. According to Aristotle, Midas was married to Hermodike II, a woman credited with inventing coinage. Interestingly, this does line up with archaeology. The world's first struck gold coins first appeared in Lydia around the 7th century BCE, which… is a little on the nose, isn't it, History? It's not his gold touch that starved him to death like in the myth though, quite the opposite. Gordion, his capital city, was sacked by the Cimmerians in 696 BCE, and Midas committed suicide by downing a jug of bull's blood. Further still, the Midas Monument at Yazılı is inscribed with a dedication to Midas from a man named “Ates”, the Phrygian form of the name Attis. Hmm.
Midas in the mythological setting is the son of Gordias, of Gordian Knot fame, and of the goddess Cybele. In the Arnobius version, Midas is the king of Pessinus, and seeing the sorry state Attis has grown up in offers his human daughter as a wife and a human bed to sleep with her in. Attis, good lad, decides to ditch Agdistis for this offer, and Midas seals the gates shut to keep out any “intrusions”. Agdistis though is under the impression that Attis can only live happily among human people if he remains unmarried, and in response to the silly monkeys’ attempt to keep her out with a wooden door instead rises from the Earth itself, taking the entire city with her as the crown atop the head of her new God of War boss form. The whole city goes mad and panics, Attis himself driven to cut his junk off as an appeasement to the goddess. “Take these, Agdistis, for which you have stirred up so great and terribly perilous commotions”. He dies from the blood loss underneath a pine tree, which drives Agdistis into a screaming fit of grief. She merges Attis's meat with the pine tree, presumably for easier luggage, drags him before Sabazios, and demands her toy be returned to life. The sky father, bravely, refuses, only going so far as to preserve Attis's body from decaying, and so from Attis's blood Agdistis sprouts an almond-tree as his mournful gravestone. Ovid's version of the myth in his poem Fasti is a little different, he has Attis swearing he'll be loyal to Cybele forever, and that if he's lying, then may the love he cheats on be his last. Brave or stupid little man then goes right ahead and cheats on Cybele with a Naiad named Sagaritis, who is immediately murdered by Cybele in her own tree, and unable to cope with the death he caused, Attis cuts his junk off in atonement to his brutal goddess. Good. Heavens.
Alright what the hell is going on here? To answer that question, we need to take one more detour. One of the largest and most prosperous cities in all of ancient Anatolia was Ephesus, home to what remains of the one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis. The sanctuary had been sacred to the indigenous inhabitants for at least a few centuries prior to the construction of Croesus's version in the 6th century BCE. This is the building that was burnt down by Herostratus in 356 BCE just so he'd be remembered for literally anything whatsoever in the history books. What goddess may have been tended to before the Greeks showed up and rebranded her as a form of Artemis is unknowable, but the fact that they adorned their extremely well-endowed Artemis with a crown made out of an entire city's walls would suggest a connection to Cybele as she appears in the Agdistis myth. According to Strabo, the Temple of Artemis was tended to by a troop of virgin priestesses and, notably, a class of eunuchs whom he calls “Megabyzoi”. We therefore have a precedent for self-castration as a form of devotion throughout the ancient Anatolian world, and it'll give us an insight into Attis's role in the minds of the Cybele cult.
The Romans brought the Magna Mater into their city in 204 BCE, when during their wars with Carthage the Sibylline oracle prophesied their doom at the hands of Hannibal, unless of course the goddess was literally imported all the way from Phrygia. Negotiating the arrangement with the allied Anatolian Kingdom of Pergamum, the black meteorite which was worshipped as Cybele's idol in Pessinus was gifted to Rome and used as the head for a statue of the goddess on Palatine Hill. Given how well the Battle of Zama went for Rome just two years later, it's safe to say they made the right call. With this introduction though came a lot of societal confusion and culture shock. Cybele's priestly attendants were known as “Galli” to the Romans, after the stream Gallus in Phrygia whose waters are said to drive perfectly healthy young men insane enough to cut ties with their maleness, which I for one see as a perfectly reasonable course of action, but hypermasculine Roman society couldn't wrap their heads around the notion that being on testosterone is a form of biological torture for some folks. I mean here they are accusing something in the water of turning people, and I can only assume frogs, gay.
The Roman poet Catullus, writing in the first century BCE, tries to wrap his head around the logic in a Gallus's inner struggle in his 63rd poem, trying to sympathize with the mindset, though his conclusion still isn't particularly flattering to modern sensitivities. Here Attis is portrayed as an outsider to Phrygia who sails to this part of the world of his own volition so that he may approach the goddess and pledge himself to her rites. He enters the deepest, darkest grove of Cybele's woods, and takes a sharp flint to his groin, first blood at last for the woman she is (Catullus switches her pronouns immediately after her castration). Attis then takes up her tambourine and stirs up a din to please the goddess, leading a chorus of like-minded girls who chose the path of femininity. Together they climb the summit of Mount Ida and pass the fuck out, because they just cut an entire organ off their bodies in a world before modern medicine and then climbed a fucking mountain. Catullus's Attis awakes the next morning with… a lot to process, as a lot of us do when we go through a big transition that there's no going back on. Though Catullus puts words of regret in Attis's mouth and has Cybele basically sicking her lions on her new pet to keep it from running away, there's a nuance he hastily buries to Attis's self-reflection. Attis looks back on all she had as a man, she was an athlete, a star wrestler whom people came from miles around to reward her brutality with all the material goods and personal freedoms which this society freely bestows on men. She's traded all of that for a nunnery in the woods, beating drums to appease an angry and possessive mountain, and though Catullus doesn't think that a worthy trade, Attis compares her flight from the life and home she knew, from all her fame and family, to a slave escaping her master. Is a place really home when you can't live as yourself? When the only image you present to the world is a lie, when a person who isn't you is piloting your body and the people around you are holding the keys to your cage hostage, is that really where you belong? That's a sentiment, I think, a lot of people here in 2026 understand all too well. I certainly do.
Roman society formed a tentative compromise between themselves and these women. Galli were by no means equals, but neither were the women they identified with. They were expected to wear feminine clothing, train their voices, perform the same societal roles as passable women, and well frankly that's literally all we want anyway. Removing their testicles also got that delicious delicious estrogen flowing without any testosterone to interfere with the natural feminization of their bodies that followed, indeed many Galli took up professions as wet nurses. It's not a comfortable life, in fact it's one where you're constantly looking over your shoulder, but it beats rotting away in the alternative by leagues and miles. Unfortunately, when there's one side of a population who decides they just cannot coexist with the other, harassment and discrimination follows suit, boiling over a fire of strawman propaganda until the already persecuted are actively hunted. Emperor Theodosius I, in his quest to Christianize his nation, ordered the Temple of Cybele shut down and destroyed in 394 CE, with no record left to us of what became of the goddess's priestesses. The few Christian authors who mention spotting them begging in the streets, however, do not paint a very “Love thy neighbor” kind of image. It's a sad, tragically human end to an already difficult story which has taken us from the dawn of symbolic thought in primates to issues which we're still plagued by today, and it's one I think Jesus himself would be disappointed in.
Matthew 19:10, after hearing my man JC say the only reason you should ever get divorced is if your partner cheats on you and thus completely betrays the death-pact sanctity of a wedding vow, his disciples rub their necks like yeesh that's strict, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry”, as if cheating on your wife is something men are just expected to do. Jesus however points out that there's plenty of people who can live perfectly happy lives without marriage if that is what one must resort to. He cites the example of his castrated neighbors, commonplace and benign, “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can”.
I agree, mind your own business people, if you say you're gonna do good by each other then mean what you say. If the people in your life can't rely on you, how can you rely on them? Did I expect to finish an essay on ice age art with Jesus being nonchalant on the existence of trans women, as one should be? No, but I'm happy I got to be the one who wrote it. Be nice to your neighbors, and take a buddy with you when next you step into those dark hauntwoods, for the Earth herself listens when you are otherwise alone.
Design notes, I have a nasty and unhealthy habit of diving into the abyss to explore the caves and not coming back up for air. My conceptualization of Cybele was very much birthed in that dark place I go when anxiety steals my breath. When I finally resurface I come back with this persistent conspiracy that the Earth wants me dead specifically. Note that we have not interpreted Cybele as an earth goddess, I mean literally she is the Earth itself, the sentient consciousness of the physical thing you're standing on, the clay you were molded from in a warm little pond, a cruel and ancient force of nature who gets a sick kick out of making mortal creatures kill each other just to live one nanosecond longer. As an environmental scientist, I actually quite dislike the stereotypical trope of nature as this untouched druidic paradise where everything kumbayas with the birds and the bees compared to all the corrupted filth of man. Don't get me wrong, man is filthy and corrupt and nature is beautiful, but I personally think that beauty is a haunted, lovecraftian one. Cybele is the unglamorous part in a nature documentary where a cute little bunny rabbit is abruptly eviscerated by a hawk and its babies are just left with not a goddamn chance of survival without her. The hawk has helpless children it has to feed too, afterall.
Her continents are made of the ever-mulching bones of every single living thing which has ever died, and her true form rises from her oceans of entropic chaos. Her lions are the blizzards and sandstorms that eat your closest kin when you're not supervising them close enough. She wears a mammoth skull headdress carved from end to tip with a pride of cave lions stampeding forth onto whoever she is looking down upon, for the taboo of looking into her eyes is a forbidden mystery even the Sonder Witch is not willing to press. Imagine if the entire elephant graveyard from the Lion King just one day woke up as one colossal bone golem and you've got Cybele. And no, technically speaking those may not be tits but rather, of all things, beehives. The motif is derived from the Artemises of Ephesus, and those are carved with lil bees leading to their dangling nests. That being said, I cannot bring myself to argue that the ancient artists didn't 100% know what they were doing, I mean look, come on, of course they did. Clearly it was the right choice anyway if their design is still being riffed on by some peasant barbarian girl with a box of Crayolas some 2500 years later.