Abstract
This thesis will address four main research questions. Chapter one will address how the nature of the ancient evidence and the history of modern scholarship on the Mother’s cult create problems for understanding her teletai and orgia in Classical Greece, arguing that four major factors (the relative dearth of evidence from the Classical Period in comparison to later periods, the influence of Bachofen’s hypothesis of primitive matriarchy, Orientalism, and cisnormative assumptions about gender) have led much previous scholarship on this topic astray.
Chapter two will discuss what the evidence from the Archaic and early Classical Periods up to around 440 BCE reveals about the early history of the rites, arguing that, although evidence from this period is limited, it does suggest that the Mother may have been honored through rites involving raucous music, ecstatic dancing, and purported divine possession by the sixth century BCE and that she was certainly honored through such rites by the early-to-mid fifth century BCE at the latest.
Chapter three will address what sources from the later Classical Period that are sympathetic or at least not overtly hostile to the rites reveal about how sympathetic Greeks during this time may have viewed them and what aspects of them they may have found appealing. It will argue that the rites’ alleged capacity for psychological and physiological healing, their reputation for being a transformative spiritual experience, and their purported exoticness are significant factors in positive Greek representations of them and that additional factors, such as the fact that they centered around a powerful female goddess and the potential for women in particular to attain positions of status and authority within the cult, may have made them especially appealing to Greek women.
Finally, chapter four will address how hostile and polemical sources from the later Classical Period discuss the Mother’s rites in the context of broader Greek ideas about gender and ethnicity and use them to advance their own rhetorical purposes. This chapter will argue that authors hostile to the cult associate individuals and groups whom they perceive or seek to portray as undesirable with the rites in order to link them with inappropriate (from their perspective) gender or sexual behavior and/or foreignness. It will also observe a trend of apparent growing hostility to the rites in the extant sources over the course of the later Classical Period.
Key words:Classical Greece; Greek religion; Greek literature; Kybele; Phrygia; ancient mystery cults; ritual practices; ancient Greek gender; ancient ethnicity