In accordance with the matrilineal social structure of the People of the Plain, Cybele has inherited the farmhold of Thessalia, and has turned her land into a place wherein its laborers can find purpose in something greater than themselves. Known as Cybele the Compassionate, this respected elder of the Clutch of the Sun Stones has made Thessalia a refuge from the injustices of the world.
She and her husband, Attis, are the parents of two sons, Educas, the Ponderer and Tinkerer, and Corybas, the Caretaker of the Sacred Grove. The two elders also have a daughter, Ilithyia, God-Queen of the Sacred Grove, whom they have not set eyes upon in many years. However, Cybele is happy to spend time with her two granddaughters, the children of Ilithyia, Parthenia and Gamelia.
In the novel, Sweet Muse of Madness, Cybele’s greatest challenge is to preserve the Way of the Goddess in the face of the Heavenly Patriarch deity from the East.
MYTHOLOGICAL CONTEXT
Cybele was a pre-historic nature goddess originating in ancient Phrygia (modern Turkey). Her worship gradually moved west to Greece and then to Italy. More specifically, Cybele was associated with caverns, which may symbolize the female threshold through which all life emerges from the deep womb of the earth and through which all life returns. Thus did the vagina make all women the sacred personification of the Goddess. Cybele’s mythological male consort was Attis.
Festivals celebrating Cybele were noted for their wild abandon, as raw and unbounded as the early earth itself. Supposedly, during these festivals, the frenzied celebrants sometimes mutilated themselves. In historic Greece, these celebrants were called the Corybantes, in reference to the mythological Corybas, who was one of the children of Cybele.