What is "cybele"

n. 1 (context Greek god English) A mother goddess of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor. 2 (context astronomy English) Short for (w: 65 Cybele), a main belt asteroid.

Cybele (; Phrygian: Matar Kubileya/Kubeleya "Kubeleyan Mother", perhaps "Mountain Mother"; Lydian Kuvava; Kybele, Kybebe, Kybelis) is an Anatolian mother goddess; she has a possible precursor in the earliest neolithic at Çatalhöyük, where the statue of a pregnant, seated goddess was found in a granary. She is Phrygia's only known goddess, and was probably its state deity. Her Phrygian cult was adopted and adapted by Greek colonists of Asia Minor and spread to mainland Greece and its more distant western colonies around the 6th century BCE.

In Greece, Cybele met with a mixed reception. She was partially assimilated to aspects of the Earth-goddess Gaia, her Minoan equivalent Rhea, and the Harvest-Mother goddess Demeter. 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 transgender or eunuch mendicant priesthood. Many of her Greek cults included rites to a divine Phrygian castrate shepherd-consort Attis, who was probably a Greek invention. In Greece, Cybele is associated with mountains, town and city walls, fertile nature, and wild animals, especially lions.

In Rome, Cybele was known as Magna Mater ("Great Mother"). The Roman State adopted and developed a particular form of her cult after the Sibylline oracle recommended her conscription as a key religious component in Rome's second war against Carthage. Roman mythographers reinvented her as a Trojan goddess, and thus an ancestral goddess of the Roman people by way of the Trojan prince Aeneas. With Rome's eventual hegemony over the Mediterranean world, Romanised forms of Cybele's cults spread throughout the Roman Empire. The meaning and morality of her cults and priesthoods were topics of debate and dispute in Greek and Roman literature, and remain so in modern scholarship.

Cybele is an ancient goddess of fertility. Cybele may also refer to

• Cybele (actress), the stage name of Greek actress Cybele Andrianou
• Cybele (comics), Marvel Comics character
• Cybele (trilobite), a genus of trilobite
• Cybele asteroid, a group of asteroids in the main belt
• Cybèle Varela, Brazilian artist
• 65 Cybele, an asteroid
• Plaza de Cibeles, a famous square and fountain in Madrid, Spain, named for the goddess
• Sundays and Cybèle, a 1962 French film

Cybele is a trilobite in the order Phacopida, that existed during the middle Ordovician in what is now Sweden. It was described by Loven in 1846, and the type species is Cybele bellatula, which was originally described dubiously under the genus Calymene by Dalman in 1827. The type locality was in Östergötland.

Cybele is an outdoor bronze sculpture by French artist Auguste Rodin, installed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden, in the U.S. state of Texas.