The enthusiastic transports and the somber fanaticism of the Phrygian worship contrasted violently with the calm dignity and respectable reserve of the official religion, and excited the minds of the people to a dangerous degree. The emasculated Galli were the objects of contempt and disgust and what in their own eyes was a meritorious act was made a crime punishable by law, at least under the empire.[[8]] The authorities hesitated between the respect due to the powerful goddess that had delivered Rome from the Carthaginians and the reverence for the mos maiorum. They solved the difficulty by completely isolating the new religion in order to prevent its contagion. All citizens were forbidden to join the priesthood of the foreign goddess or to participate in her sacred orgies. The barbarous rites according to which the Great Mother was to be worshiped were performed by Phrygian priests and priestesses. The holidays celebrated in her honor by the entire nation, the Megalensia, contained no Oriental feature and were organized in conformity with Roman traditions.
A characteristic anecdote told by Diodorus[[9]] shows what the public feeling was towards this Asiatic worship at the end of the republic. In Pompey's time a high priest from Pessinus came to Rome, presented himself at the forum in his sacerdotal garb, a golden diadem and a long embroidered robe—and pretending that the statue of his goddess had been profaned demanded public expiation. But a tribune forbade him to wear the royal crown, and the populace rose against him in a mob and compelled him to seek refuge in his house. Although apologies were made later, this story shows how little the people of that period felt
the veneration that attached to Cybele and her clergy after a century had passed.
Kept closely under control, the Phrygian worship led an obscure existence until the establishment of the empire. That closed the first period of its history at Rome. It attracted attention only on certain holidays, when its priests marched the streets in procession, dressed in motley costumes, loaded with heavy jewelry, and beating tambourines. On those days the senate granted them the right to go from house to house to collect funds for their temples. The remainder of the year they confined themselves to the sacred enclosure of the Palatine, celebrating foreign ceremonies in a foreign language. They aroused so little notice during this period that almost nothing is known of their practices or of their creed. It has even been maintained that Attis was not worshiped together with his companion, the Great Mother, during the times of the republic, but this is undoubtedly wrong, because the two persons of this divine couple must have been as inseparable in the ritual as they were in the myths.[[10]]
But the Phrygian religion kept alive in spite of police surveillance, in spite of precautions and prejudices; a breach had been made in the cracked wall of the old Roman principles, through which the entire Orient finally gained ingress.
Directly after the fall of the republic a second divinity from Asia Minor, closely related to the Great Mother, became established in the capital. During the wars against Mithridates the Roman soldiers learned to revere Mâ, the great goddess of the two Comanas, who was worshiped by a whole people of hierodules in the ravines of the Taurus and along the banks of the
Iris. Like Cybele she was an ancient Anatolian divinity and personified fertile nature. Her worship, however, had not felt the influence of Thrace, but rather that of the Semites and the Persians,[[11]] like the entire religion of Cappadocia. It is certain that she was identical with the Anâhita of the Mazdeans, who was of much the same nature.
The rites of her cult were even more sanguinary and savage than those of Pessinus, and she had assumed or preserved a warlike character that gave her a resemblance to the Italian Bellona. The dictator Sulla, to whom this invincible goddess of combats had appeared in a dream, was prompted by his superstition to introduce her worship into Rome. The terrible ceremonies connected with it produced a deep impression. Clad in black robes, her "fanatics," as they were called, would turn round and round to the sound of drums and trumpets, with their long, loose hair streaming, and when vertigo seized them and a state of anesthesia was attained, they would strike their arms and bodies great blows with swords and axes. The view of the running blood excited them, and they besprinkled the statue of the goddess and her votaries with it, or even drank it. Finally a prophetic delirium would overcome them, and they foretold the future.
This ferocious worship aroused curiosity at first, but it never gained great consideration. It appears that the Cappadocian Bellona joined the number of divinities that were subordinated to the Magna Mater and, as the texts put it, became her follower (pedisequa).[[12]] The brief popularity enjoyed by this exotic Mâ at the beginning of our era shows, nevertheless, the growing
influence of the Orient, and of the religions of Asia Minor in particular.