Taking time to read

[ezekielsdaughter]

I’m reading “Mother of the Gods  From Cybele to the Virgin Mary”.  Very academic and often over my head.  But occasionally I run into these chapters like Chapter 4 which describes the Romans adopting a foreign god because of fear of falling rocks in their region.  So they formally go to Pessinos, pick up a holy stone (which the author says was a meteorite) and bring it back with ceremony to Rome.  They have to find a chaste young man to accompany it, and it is turned over to the matrons of Rome.  Later, it’s incorporated into its own home in the statue of a woman/mother.  It’s a foreign goddess, but I guess that it solved the problem of falling rocks for them.  I say that it remained foreign because the worship of this particular goddess involved men castrating themselves--which the Romans abhorred.  How did the Romans make peace with such a practice?  It sounds like it was socially walled off; no Romans worshipped this goddess.  They imported the worshippers.  Mercenary worshippers!

This chapter also has a quote from a Roman:
“Let no one imagine, however, that I am not sensible that some of the Greek myths are useful to mankind, part of them explaining, as they do, the works of Nature by allegories, other being designed as a consolation for human misfortunes, some freeing the mind of its agitations and terrors…”

I never saw the Romans as being that clear minded about their religion.  That probably explains why it was so easy for them to make a late Emperor a god.  It was only politics.