The Mother of the Gods 😊

~ kaye

Near the end of last week, I received a statue of Rhea-Cybele from Sacred Source. For a while, I had an online shrine to her, and given her importance as the Mother of the Gods, I’d always thought about getting an actual icon for her. Publishing The Village of Strong Branches, whose Goddesses are based on her, seemed like a fitting time to do that. The icon also came fast. Like ,,, this is the fastest the postal service has ever brought me an icon of a deity fast. It’s like USPS was a girdle proving my purity, piety, and fitness, to make a reference to Julian’s Oration to the Mother of the Gods. While that’s a bit hyperbolic, yes, I like to think that she wanted to arrive fast. 😊

A white statue of Cybele/Rhea, with a candle burning in front of it.

This morning, I lit a candle to welcome the Goddess and said a prayer (from the Orphic Hymns, the one to the Mother of the Gods). There will be other opportunities for other hymns. I played a tambourine for a few minutes. I’d picked up a candle from Calyan Wax Company in their Dignity Series a while ago; some of the profit goes to support anti-trafficking (stopping modern slavery) initiatives in the USA. There had been many opportunities to light it for other deities, and I’d had the candle lingering on a shelf for a long time, but it seemed fitting to give it to her. The Mother of the Gods is explosive and nourishing; she releases and she transforms; she dances with lions.

While prepping the photo, I found a feature that let me remove all of the background from the image, so you don’t see the remainder of what’s there. It’s a privacy decision. I’m cool with my shrine being on Zoom with people I know or on my private Instagram, and demarcating boundaries between private, small-group, and public is a wonderful mindfulness practice for thinking about sacred space and keeping it sanctified.

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Published by kaye

Aspiring poet-contemplative. I go by Kaye Boesme, and I've written a primer on polytheism called THE SOUL'S INNER STATUES (free, online/pdf/ebook) and a chapbook of religious poetry called ACTS OF SPEECH. I've been blogging for a really long time.

3 thoughts on “The Mother of the Gods 😊”

  2. Hail Rhea-Cybele!

    I once knew a guy who was deathly afraid of Cybele. His face would grow pale anytime She was mentioned. He was afraid of Her because he feared the fact that the Galli (or at least the ones that weren’t Roman citizens) had to be castrated to serve Her. He was afraid that She’d ask him to give up his balls. Me personally? I think within that is an important lesson: the Gods don’t give Their blessings for free. They’re not all fun and games. Rhea-Cybele is wild. Ecstatic. Primal. She is praised with the wildest of dances the beats of which emanate from the depths of the mountains far from the safety of our civilized beds. The place where lions roam and blood can be freely spilled. The place from which the generative force of life springs forth. This does not come for free. Some have to give up their personality fertility for the sake of all life. To go from being fertile in the personal sense to being fertile in the grandest sense. To give up being a proper and respectable man in favor of becoming a wild thing of the mountains. As a Dionysian whose own God has undergone exactly that, I can only have nothing but respect for all aspects of the Mountain Mother. She is a Goddess that represents much of what I love about being Polytheist. It is often joked that we Pagans worship sex and death. Well, here’s exactly that in the most extreme and unapologetic sense.

    Hail Rhea-Cybele!

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