Dancing for Kybele

(Personal practice and theology)

I try to dance every morning for Kybele. I put on music that energizes me, put my hair up, and pretend I’m in a goth club/rave for 20 minutes or so.

I’m grateful to be alive and grateful for my body and as a devotional activity dancing reflects that.

I experience Her as She Who Holds The Chains of Incarnation. Our bodies are made of Her, She is the Earth in “Earth and Starry Heaven” though so are Ge and Rhea, and even the Earth is a Star from other planets’ perspectives.

In the Kybele cultus I observe, She is seen as the spirit of material reality. At the end of the day there is no separation from the Mother, because Her body is what our bodies are made of. While there is suggestion of positive afterlife with Her in some remaining fragments and writings, so much of Her cultus that we observe is tied to the cycles of the world, of human, animal, and plant life (especially through Her relationship with Attis). My connection to Her is deeply tied to material health and well-being and the experience of being incarnate. (Which, because of gender and body dysphoria, has been a hard topic for me much of my life.)

As the one my body is a part of, I have a duty to appreciate it for Her. She is called The Queen Whom The Drum Delights in Her Orphic hymn; I dance to the drums that are the song of the heart of the life of humanity and thank Her for this body and the chance to assemble into and incarnate in this experience.

There are many ways in which my life has been hard and there have been many times I wished I were not alive. When I’m dancing, though, and my face is red and my feet are warm and I feel the Earth tapping my feet as they tap it, and I feel the rhythm of this existence, I know gratitude. No matter what else is going on, I can feel this way. I am grateful for the privilege of my body and the health I have.

Even when I’ve been injured or sick I’ve been guided by Her to dance with my arms or hands or eyes or mind, though She loves it best when I throw all of myself into it. I also need to care take my body, and knowing my limits is part of it too.

Hail to the Mother whose bodies we wear, with whose feet we dance. We are part of a web of relationship between self and other, as we learn that our “selves” are made up of “other” it can help to free us from fear of responsibility, intimacy, death, and other things. There is no part of us that is just us, and there is No Separation from Her.