Founding myths and the vitality of traditions to be preserved

The intellectual obsession with the prehistoric Great Mother is no mere erudite exercise. Reconstructing the traces of this primordial divinity, universal archetype and inexhaustible source of ancient cults, means questioning, from the foundations, the entire edifice of the West. The fresh re-edition of Alessandro Giuli's volume dedicated to the goddess Cybele transforms a question from mere speculation into a problem that can no longer be avoided. This is perhaps the reason for the choice, fifteen years after the first publication, of the publishing house "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, a refined point of reference in antiquistics. Because included in the revisitation of the original text is an invitation, not too subtly, to European culture to come to terms with its own religious stratification: are we facing a traumatic break with the past or an underground, persistent continuity that still shapes our relationship with the sacred?

Cybele was the Phrygian deity that the Romans imported onto the Palatine in 204 BC, during the convulsions of the Second Punic War. Giuli, a journalist trained in Italian right-wing cultural circles and now Minister of Culture, evocatively places in the title a verse by d'Annunzio - 'Magna Madre came' - taken from the lauda 'A Roma' of 1900. Not an innocent choice as if to immediately mark the ground, half antiquarian erudition half visionary celebration. At the opening of the book, the Introibo - the celebrant's letter to the altar, as in the Tridentine liturgy - is both a theoretical manifesto and a declaration of faith: Giuli offers his labours to the gods of the domestic hearth and to the Great Mother, according to the Latin formula of ancient dedications. Then he gets into the matter. The rituals of the metroaco cult in Rome - the Canna intrat, the Arbor intrat, the Sanguem, the Hilaria, the Lavatio Matris Deum, the Ludi Megalesiaci - are described with a wealth of sources, drawing as much from the classics as from the literature of the early 20th century, that generation of scholars systematically ignored - the author laments - by contemporary academic historiography.

A common thread is the bold thesis, belonging to a 'myth-historical' narrative, according to which the original seat of the Magna Mater is not Phrygia, but primordial Italia, Saturnia Tellus: Cybele would not be imported from Pessinunte, but would return to the Palatine Hill, like a soul going back to its beginning. Rome would therefore be the point of departure and, at the same time, of arrival of a cosmic cycle, symbolised by the Aion and the Phoenix. The conflict with Carthage - in the reading proposed by Giuli - would not be an episode of military history but the recurring manifestation of a cosmological archetype: Rome-One against Carthage-Diad, male against earth-bound female, solar order against matriarchal chaos. An archetype that, writes Giuli, 'has reappeared countless times on the Mediterranean scene' and that in the present would see at work 'dark forces that would like to distort it definitively'.

It is precisely in this passage that the book trespasses from historiographic territory into something more urgent and contemporary. Giuli does not name names or indicate precise targets, but the tone is that of an intellectual organic to a worldview that feels tradition is under threat: on the one hand cultural presentism, on the other the relativism that dissolves identity and roots. The reference to the 'way of heroes' as opposed to the 'available alcove of Dido' sounds like an invitation to a choice of field that goes beyond the history of religions. In this sense, Giuli's book should also be read as a document of a cultural sensibility - that of the Italian traditionalist right, heir to Julius Evola and Augusto Del Noce, René Guénon and Georges Dumézil - that finds its symbolic orientation point in the myth of Rome.

In the introductory pages of this volume, Giovanni Casadio, a long-time historian of religions, foregrounds the narrative layer of the entire ritual and mythical story of the deity and his acolyte Attis. Without 'making a show of eloquence', but with the aim 'of offering a collection of notions', in any case drawn from the sources. In the background, there remains an open question that the book does not care to evade: in an era in which the sacred has evaporated into the mists of digital consumerism and the great collective narratives are shattered into individual claimant identities, what does it mean to invoke the 'return' of a goddess? Giuli seems to believe that Cybele returns anyway, with the fatal punctuality of a distant past, above fashions and interlocutors. Whether one follows him in this faith or not, the book remains a trace, against which one may perhaps lash out in dissent: of the vitality of the Italian tradition and of that profound need for founding myths that no modernity can truly extinguish.