CYBELE, or Rhea Cybele, in Greek mythology, was the mother of Zeus and the order of deities of which he was the head. As such she was styled “mother of gods” stáw μητηp), and her temple called Metroön. But though thus made to fit into the general system of deities, her worship was originally peculiar to Crete and Phrygia in Asia Minor, in both which places it was accompanied by wild orgiastic dances and music on the model of the rites which her first priests and attendants, the Curetes, Corybantes, and Dactyls had held in her honour. It was in Crete that the infant Zeus was secluded and brought up in the guardianship of the Curetes, and there also he was said to have been buried. But the belief in the death of Zeus in this case may have arisen from the tendency of her worship to dwell on the opposites of birth and death as seen in the Phrygian story of Atys, which again, like that of Adonis, seems to illustrate the change in nature from the bloom of spring to the decay of winter. (See Atys). In Phrygia she was on the one hand the goddess of mountains, caves, and haunts of wild animals. Her name Cybele was the Phrygian word for caves. Her proper name there was Agdistis, and she was thought of as attended by lions and panthers. On the other hand she was a goddess of vine-growing, agriculture, and town-life, wearing a mural crown, and connected in early legends with Midas, Gordias, and Marsyas, who belong also to the cycle of Bacchus, whose nurse she is sometimes called. Marsyas perfected the flute which she had invented. Midas and Gordias owed their great wealth to her. The centre of her worship in Phrygia, and the most sacred place to her anywhere, was Pessinus, where in a cave in Mount Dindymon was an image of her in the form, as was said, of a meteoric stone, ...