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Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary
Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Molleur, Joseph
Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary. By Philippe Borgeaud. Translated by Lysa Hochroth. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xix + 186 pp. $49.95 (cloth).
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This book is the English translation of La Mère des dieux: De Cybele à la Vierge Marie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996). It contains two prefaces (the one to the original French edition, and a second written specially for the English edition), in which Borgeaud stridently attacks the theories and scholarship of those who have been responsible for devising and perpetuating "two scholarly myths that are as tenacious as they are ill-founded." The first of these myths "is that of the matriarchal stage and of its corollary, the cult of the Great Goddess," while the second "portrays the Virgin Mary as the heiress of the ancient great goddesses." Together, these myths "[serve] as an argument for the fantasy of a feminine monotheism" (pp. xv-xvi). Borgeaud insists that his own scholarly excavation of the mother of the gods "aims at avoiding [such] monotonous repetitions of a prefabricated credo addressed to a synthetic image" by relying instead on "lived experience in the field" (p. xiii), "on history and specificity" (p. xviii).
Borgeaud traces the "itinerary" of the mother of the gods-a goddess sometimes known as Cybele, sometimes called by other names, but usually not named at all-from her origins in Phrygia (central Asia Minor) at the end of the seventh century B.C.E. (chap. 1); to her establishment in the Athenian Agora (via a "Lydian filter" [p. xiii]) at the end of the fifth century B.C.E., where she was viewed as a "native Greek" goddess of justice/mother earth figure while also being associated with the "foreign" Phrygian mother goddess (chap. 2); to her very official summons to Rome at the end of the third century B.C.E., when the idol of the mother of the gods was brought from Pessinos in Phrygia to Rome, via Pergamon (chaps. 4 and 5). In Rome, "her introduction included references to her Anatolian origin, her status as an already Hellenized goddess, and her being identified as an ancestral Roman goddess" (p. 57). Borgeaud also pays considerable attention to the character of Attis (the mother's lover-son who later metamorphosed into a dying-and-rising god) and the connection between the figure of Attis and the mother's devoted band of self-castrated priests (chaps. 3 and 6).
In the latter chapters Borgeaud explores several parallels between early Christianity and the cult of the mother of the gods, which he designates "mutual interferences" to indicate that the borrowing, or influence, did not flow exclusively in one direction (pp. 98, 129). For example, attributes of the Virgin Mary derive "not [only] from biblical traditions, but . . . from those of the ancient Mother of the gods" as well (p. 130). Indeed, Borgeaud concludes the book by noting how, in the process of Constantinople's Christianization, "the Meter theon, the Mother of the gods . . . lost her ancient attributes and assumed the loving, protective stance of the Meter Theou, the Mother of God, her close neighbor. But she did not forget her origins" (p. 131). One wonders: How does such a final word square with the author's deriding of the "second modern myth" at the outset of the book?
Mother of the Gods is a carefully researched and, for the most part, persuasively argued book that will be of interest to academic libraries and scholars in the field. However, its usefulness is somewhat diminished due to two surprising omissions: it lacks a bibliography, and it lacks maps. The notion of the "itinerary" of the mother of the gods is central to the book, and, in order to follow that itinerary as clearly as possible, readers need frequently to consult maps of the ancient world-maps that the book itself does not provide.
JOSEPH MOLLEUR
Cornell College
Mount Vernon, Iowa
Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Fall 2005
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