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The Phrygian Mother Goddess came to the ancient Greek world from Anatolia and became a forceful presence there. As her preminence increased, she was Hellenized in name, appearance, and background, and became conflated with other deities such as Rhea and Artemis. Yet she always retained her status as an outsider: she was the Anatolian Mother. From the East Ancient Greek cities, including Miletos and Smyrna (today's Izmir in Turkey, where our company is situated) her worship spread to further west, to Sicily, Italy, and southern France.
The prominence of the cult of the Magna Mater in Rome is unquestioned. The impact of the cult of the Mother Goddess in Rome was real, vivid, and public from the beginning. This cult was actively sought and openly encouraged by many segments of Roman society. The Magna Mater came to Rome with great fanfare and public ceremony. After her dramatic arrival, the goddess seems to have settled down in her home on the Palatine and become a regular part of Roman religious life.
The Mother Goddess did not fade away after the second century C.E. Quite the contrary; the cult of the Mother spread throughout the length and breadth of the world touched by ancient Mediterranean civilization, from Britain to Afghanistan. Nor did the goddess fade away from the Mediterranean heartland, for we find the Roman Magna Mater playing a vivid role in the political and religious life of the Empire in late antiquity.
Her appeal went beyond any narrow political or ethnic definition and spoke to the human needs of many peoples of the ancient Mediterranean world. The varying reactions to the Mother Goddess among different Mediterranean groups, the peoples of ancient Anatolia help illuminate many of the significant changes in Mediterranean society and also mark the constancies that shaped the lives of many of the people who lived there. The cult of the Mother Goddess enables us to hear the voiced of humble people as well as great, and rural communities as well as major urban centers.
We chose the name of the Mother Goddess, Kybele, as the name of our company, as she represented fertility, nature, power and protection, being a very strong figure for more than 25,000 years on the land where we live today, that is, Anatolia.
