name of Cybele, from κυβελίνη, because in the celebration of her festivals men were driven to madness.

Pagan mythology, the daughter of Caelus and Terra, and wife of Saturn. She is supposed to be the same as Ceres, Rhea, Ops, Vesta, Bona Mater, Magna Mater, Berecynthia, Dindymene, &c. According to Diodorus, she was the daughter of a Lydian prince, and as soon as she was born she was exposed on a mountain. She was preserved by sucking some of the wild beasts of the forest, and received the name of Cybele from the mountain where her life had been preserved. When she returned to her father's court, she had an intrigue with Atys, a beautiful youth whom her father mutilated, &c. All the mythologists are unanimous in mentioning the amours of Atys and Cybele. In Phrygia the festivals of Cybele were observed with the greatest solemnity. Her priests, called Corybanter, Galli, &c., were not admitted in the service of the goddess without a previous mutilation. In the celebration of the festivals, they imitated the manners of madmen, and filled the air with shrieks and howlings mixed with the confused noise of drums, tabrets, bucklers, and spears. This was in commemoration of the sorrow of Cybele for the loss of her favourite Atys. Cybele was generally represented as a robust woman far advanced in her pregnancy, to intimate the fecundity of the earth. She held keys in her hand, and her head was crowned with rising turrets, and sometimes with the leaves of an oak. She sometimes appears riding in a chariot drawn by two tame lions: Atys follows by her side, carrying a ball in his hand, and supporting himself upon a fir tree which is sacred to the goddess. Sometimes she is represented with a sceptre in her hand, with her head covered with a tower. She is also seen with many breasts, to show that the earth gives aliment to all living creatures; and she generally carries two lions under her arms. From Phrygia the worship of Cybele passed into Greece, and was solemnly established at Eleusis under the name of the Eleusinian mysteries of Cerere. The Romans, by order of the Sibylline books, brought the statue of the goddess from Pessinus into Italy; and when the ship which carried it had run on a shallow bank of the Tiber, the virtue and innocence of Claudia was vindicated in removing it with her girdle. It is supposed that the mysteries of Cybele were first known about 257 years before the Trojan war, or 1580 years before the Augustan age. The Romans were particularly superstitious in walking every year, on the 6th of the kalends of April, the shrine of this goddess in the waters of the river Almon. There prevailed many obscenities in the observation of the festivals; and the priests themselves were most eager to use indecent expressions, and to show their unbounded licentiousness by the impurity of their actions.