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Kabeiroi Cabari In the archaic myths that underlie Greek mythology the Kabeiroi were servants of the Mother Goddess of Anatolia. Their name connected them with Mount Kabeiros in the region of Berekyntia, where the Phrygian Goddess held sway, but long before anyone could remember, they had come to the island of Samothrace, their sacred island in the North Aegean Sea. There they preserved their pre-Hellenic mysteries, of which the Greeks understood very little, in their Pelasgian language that pre-dated the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages into Anatolia and the Aegean basin, some time, modern linguists agree, in the 2nd millennium BCE. Non-Greek graffiti have been found at Samothrace into Hellenistic times. Diodorus Siculus said of the Kabeiroi that they wre Idaioi dactyloi— "Idaian dactyls" in the sense of Phrygian Mount Ida, sacred to the goddess— but that was hearsay, as was the suggestion that the mysteries associated with Orpheus had their origins among the Kabeiroi. Outsiders might easily confuse the Kabeiroi with the Korybantes, the Kuretes, the Telchines of Rhodes, and among the Minyans of Lemnos, the Hephaistoi— the "Hephaestus-men" who knew the mysteries of the forge and the secret arts of metal-working— all initiated men's groups, whose origins lay in the most distant past. On Lemnos, the sanctuary of the Kabeiroi is identifiable by traces of inscriptions and seems to have survived the Greek conquest by Miltiades in the 6th century, and the program of Hellenization that ensued. The geographer Strabo reported that in Lemnos, the mother (there was no father) of the Kabeiroi was Kabeiro herself, a daughter of Proteus, one of the "old men of the sea," a goddess whom the Greeks might have called Rhea. Aeschylus wrote a play called the Kabeiroi and the fragments that survive have them as a chorus greeting the Argonauts at Lemnos. There seems to be a raucous burlesque character to the mysteries of the Kabeiroi: wine-vessels are the only characteristic finds, and an inscription at Lemnos indicates parapaizonti, the one who "jests along the way" (Burkert 1985). At Greek Thebes there are more varied finds, which include many little bronze votive bulls and which carry on into Roman times, when the traveller Pausanias, always alert to the history of cult, learned that it was Demeter Kabeiriia who instigated the initiation cult there in the name of Prometheus and his son Aitnaios. Walter Burkert (1985) says, "This points to guilds of smiths analogous to the Lemnian Hephaistos." The votive dedications at Thebes are to a Kabiros in the singular, and childish toys like votive spinning tops for Pais suggest a manhood initiation. Copious wine was drunk, out of characteristic cups that were ritually smashed. Fat, primitive dwarves with prominent genitalia were painted on the cups, like the followers of Silenus. In Classical Greek culture the mysteries of the Kabeiroi at Samothrace remained popular, though little was entrusted to writing beyond a few names and bare genealogical connections. Seamen among the Greeks might invoke the Kabeiroi as "great gods" in times of danger and stress. The archaic sanctuary of Samothrace was rebuilt in Greek fashion; by classical times the Samothrace mysteries of the Kabeiroi were known at Athens. Herodotus had been initiated. But at the entry to the sanctuary, which has been thoroughly excavated, the Roman antiquary Varro learned, there had been twin pillars of brass, phallic like herms, and in the sanctuary it was understood that the child of the Goddess, Kadmilos, was in some mystic sense also her consort. See also "Cabari." References *Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, (1985)
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