Cybele (also Kybele) is the Phrygian mother goddess adopted into Greek religion as Magna Mater, the Great Mother, and into Roman religion through the formal importation of her cult in 204 BCE. In the classical tradition, she is the daughter of Uranus and Gaea — that is, of heaven and earth — and her worship involved ecstatic rites, self-castrating priests (the Galli), and a chariot drawn by lions. The lions that draw her chariot are, in the Ovidian tradition, the transformed bodies of Atalanta and Hippomenes.

Cybele appears on the frontispiece of the Atalanta Fugiens, where the concluding scene of the Ovidian narrative is depicted. After Hippomenes wins the footrace with Venus's golden apples and the couple consummates their love in Cybele's temple, the goddess punishes their sacrilege by transforming them into wild animals — a lion and a lioness. The frontispiece shows this sequence spatially: the couple embraces at the entrance to Cybele's temple before emerging behind it in their leonine forms.

De Jong reads Cybele's role in the frontispiece as crucial to the work's overall allegorical architecture (De Jong, pp. 314-316). The union of Hippomenes and Atalanta in the temple — that is, the conjunction of Sulphur and Mercury — is not the final stage of the Work. Cybele's punishment-as-transformation represents the further processing that the united substance must undergo. The fruit of heaven and earth (Cybele being daughter of both) permits the union of opposites only after a prolonged process. The couple's transformation into lions parallels the winged and wingless lions of Emblem XVI, which De Jong identifies as the volatile and fixed aspects of the philosophical substance in a more advanced stage of the Work.

Forshaw provides additional context, noting that Cybele's chariot, traditionally pulled by lions, creates a visual link between the frontispiece narrative and the recurrent lion symbolism throughout the fifty emblems. The transformation from human lovers to yoked beasts suggests that the coniunctio of Mercury and Sulphur, once achieved, does not produce freedom but rather a new form of productive servitude — the united substance becomes an instrument of a higher power (Cybele/Magna Mater/Nature).

Maier identifies Cybele with Rhea, the Titaness and mother of the Olympian gods, extending her genealogical range. As daughter of heaven and earth and mother of the gods, she occupies the pivotal position between the cosmic and the material. Her temple, where the sacred violation occurs, is the alchemical vessel where Mercury and Sulphur join — and her wrath is the transformative fire that changes the nature of the combined substance.

For a lay reader, Cybele is the figure who governs what happens after the crucial union has been achieved. In Maier's symbolic world, bringing the volatile and fixed principles together is not enough — the united substance must be further transformed, and that transformation appears as punishment in the mythological narrative. The lions pulling Cybele's chariot are Atalanta and Hippomenes in their perfected form: no longer fleeing or pursuing, but harnessed together in powerful, directed labor.

Meanings Across Registers

De Jong shows that alchemical terms operate simultaneously across material, medical, spiritual, and cosmological dimensions.

Alchemical

The Phrygian Magna Mater whose lion-drawn chariot and tympanum-rites figure the maternal-vegetative power that gestates the Stone within the sealed vessel.

Medical

The patroness of fertility-medicine whose ecstatic cult preserved an ancient pharmacology of mineral and herbal remedies tied to the great mother's seasonal rites.

Spiritual

The terrible Mother whose galli-priests' self-castration figures the radical sacrifice of generative power that the spiritual work demands; the dark counterpart to Sophia.

Cosmological

Earth as enthroned goddess: the personified terrestrial sphere from which all metals are mined as her milk, attended by the lions of solar fixity and the keys of celestial influx.