The Great Mother Of The Gods

Worshiped throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, the "Mother of the Gods" was known by a variety of names. Among peoples of Asia Minor, where her cult first began, she often shared the names of local mountains. The Greeks commonly called her Cybele, the name given to her by the Phrygians of Asia Minor, and identified her with their own mother goddesses Rhea, Gaia, and Demeter. The Romans adopted her worship at the end of the Second Punic War and called her Mater Magna, Great Mother. Her cult became one of the three most important mystery cults in the Roman Empire, along with those of Mithras and Isis. And as Christianity took hold in the Roman world, ritual elements of her cult were incorporated into the burgeoning cult of the Virgin Mary. In Mother of the Gods, Philippe Borgeaud traces the journey of this divine figure through Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome between the sixth century B.C. and the fourth century A.D. He examines how the Mother of the Gods was integrated into specific cultures, what she represented to those who worshiped her, and how she was used as a symbol in art, myth, and even politics. The Mother of the Gods was often seen as a dualistic figure: ancestral and foreign, aristocratic and disreputable, nurturing and dangerous. Borgeaud's challenging and nuanced portrait opens new windows on the ancient world's sophisticated religious beliefs and shifting cultural identities.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.

With roots as an Anatolian mother goddess and symbol of fertility, Cybele came to be known as Magna Mater, Great Mother of the Gods. Conscripted by many civilizations of the Mediterranean, she became the mother goddess of much of the classical world.

This is the first thorough account of the nature and the spread of the cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, and the first to present her worship soberly as a religion rather than sensationally as an orgiastic celebration of self-castrated priest-attendants.

Excerpt from The Great Mother of Gods: A Thesis Vesta9 was the highest flight his imagination took, While the host of other deities - and they were as numerous as the acts and duties of the worshiper's life - remained en tirely abstract and formless. The acquisition of the Sibyl line Books, then, occurred at a time when Rome had prac tically no acquaintance with the religions of the East; and the event may be regarded as the first pronounced step in the process which finally resulted in the denationalization of the old-roman religion and the enthronement of a turba deorum whose worship was not in harmony with the genius of the early Romans, and which came to be in harmony with the genius of the later Romans only by reason of the change which that genius gradually underwent. The in troduction of the Books is to be regarded primarily as a manifestation in the development of a new religious sys tem; as a cause it is to be regarded only in so far as It fa cilitated that development in a peculiar manner. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.