Matar Kubileya, the Rock Facades and Attis

Phrygian religion is dominated by one figure. Matar, mother, appears in the earliest Phrygian inscriptions with an epithet understood as of the mountain, and she is carved into rock facades across the Phrygian highlands: a standing female figure in a doorway cut into a cliff, framed by geometric patterning, facing open country rather than a settlement. Lynn Roller's study argues that this Anatolian mother is a goddess of the wild and of the boundary between the settled and the unsettled, and that the fertility reading imposed on her later distorts what the Phrygian evidence shows.

The Greeks received her as Meter or Cybele and gave her ecstatic rites, drums, cymbals and eunuch priests. Whether the self castration of those priests is Phrygian or a Greek elaboration of Phrygian material is disputed, since it appears in Greek and Roman sources and not in Phrygian ones.

Attis, the youth who is the goddess's companion and who dies and is mourned, appears late in the record and is not securely Phrygian in origin. Maarten Vermaseren's study collects the material for both figures. Their combined worship became a state cult at Rome, where the black stone of the goddess was brought from Pessinus in 204 BCE during the war with Hannibal.