Cybele

Cybele sighs for the disdainful shepherd, while you do not blush;

Why is the male of the Idaean goddess amputated, if no youth, too disdainful, was castrated by her in the grief of frustrated lust?

We have sometimes seen Attis castrated, that god of Pessinus;

Cybele sighs for the disdainful shepherd, while you do not blush;

We are driven to the beasts — the very beasts, surely, that you attach to Liber and Cybele and the Heavenly Goddess.

sovereign ostrich Cybele, mother of Cleocritus!

to Bacchus, the finch and Cybele, the ostrich and mother of the gods and mankind.

I poured forth sacred strains from my golden throat in honor of the god Pan, tiotiotiotinx, from the top of the thickly leaved ash, and my voice mingles with the mighty choirs who extol Cybele on the mountain tops, totototototototototinx.

The same rites the Phrygians celebrate for Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes.

May he perish, then, who began this deception among men — whether it was Dardanus, who introduced the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who founded the orgies and rites of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who, having learned them from the Odrysian, then passed on the artful deception to his subjects.

He shot down with arrows his own subject, who, imitating among the Scythians the rite of the Mother of the gods practised among the Cyzicenes, beat a drum and clashed a cymbal and had hanging from his neck the trappings of a begging priest of the Mother — judging him to have become unmanly among the Greeks, and a teacher to the rest of the Scythians of the womanish disease.

These were Gods of Nations or Tribes, Gods born of primitive observation of Nature and primitive reverence for her, Gods sprung from wide-spreading emotional movements, like Dionysus and Cybele.

Be well assured, my dear friend, Crito, that this is what I seem to hear, as the frenzied dervishes of Cybele seem to hear the flutes, and this sound of these words re-echoes within me and prevents my hearing any other words.