From Cybele to Muhammad: A Tale of the Black Stone of Mecca

The next presentation in University College Cork’s Study of Religions Research Seminar Series takes place on Wednesday 20 November 2024 from 6-7pm [GMT] on MS Teams with Davide Suleyman Amore on:

In a passage from his Ab Urbe Condita, Titus Livius tells of the arrival in Ostia of the ship carrying the Black Stone, simulacrum of the goddess Cybele, the Magna Mater Deorum. The stone came from the Phrygian sanctuary of Pessinus on the orders of the Senate of Rome, which had requested it based on a response taken from the Sibylline Books, for help against Hannibal, who had invaded and terrified Italy. It was the year 204 BC: the stone arrived in Rome, together with a small following of Phrygian priests and faithful, to live there permanently. The small stone the boulder was placed in the hands of the Roman noble Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, who boarded the ship; he took her ashore and handed her over to the highest-ranking women who, passing her from hand to hand, loaded her onto a carriage and transported her to Rome.
One stone led to another. In thinking about that stone that was so sacred and famous and then disappeared into thin air without leaving a trace another stone came to mind, black too the Mecca stone was also claimed to be an aerolite. And two identical aerolites are not the most common thing under the sky. It is also difficult to believe that an important religious symbol such as the stone of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, the support of a widespread cult that pushed the most ardent followers to mutilate their genital organs as evidence of their devotion, had necessarily ended up missing, overwhelmed by the defeat of paganism like many other images of ancient divinities. The stone was easily transportable (as we can see in Livy’s story), it had believers willing to do anything so it could have survived. We know that at the time of Emperor Claudius (41-54 AD) the cult of the Great Mother was taken away from the Phrygians, who scandalized the sensibilities of the city with their barbaric and bloody rites, and was Romanised. This noteworthy fact could be the basis for hypothesizing that the Gauls (Galloi, Galli), who had certainly continued the service of the goddess, could have been angry at these decisions and had reacted by fleeing from Rome after having appropriated the sacred stone, which they had to consider as theirs. Thus, was born, in brief, this paper which aims to trace a path of logical continuity between the Black Stone, historically proven symbol of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, present in Rome starting from the year 204 BC. and then disappeared and forgotten, and the Black Stone, of very uncertain origin, present today in the Muslim Kaʿbah in Mecca.

Davide S. Amore is a teacher of literature and history in lower secondary schools, a historian of religions and a medievalist philologist. After graduating from the University of Salerno, under the supervision of prof. Giovanni Casadio, with a thesis on the Sabean community of Harran, some excerpts of which have been published in important magazines in the sector, obtained a first MA in Historical Methodology and a second one in Religious Studies. Since 2019 he has been a member of SISR (Italian Society of History of Religions). He is the author, in addition to several articles in scientific and popular magazines and in the Italian press, of some chapters of Simone Barcelli’s publication, L’enigma delle origini della razza umana. Miti e Leggende: le cronache di un misterioso passato (Verona: Edizioni Cerchio della Luna, 2011), of a four-handed essay with Dr. Anna Maria Turi entitled L’amore che danza. Storia di Rumi, poeta e maestro sufi (Tavagnacco, UD: Edizioni Segno, 2023), and edited the translation of Abdassamad Clarke’s work, Follow the Money. A Muslim Guide to the Murky World of Finance (Imperia: Edizioni Al Hikma, 2018). Furthermore, a joint study with Dr. Diego Marin on the esoteric-religious roots of the medieval banking system is forthcoming.

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Dr Jenny Butler
Lecturer, Study of Religions Department
Principal Investigator, Environmental Research Institute (ERI)
External Graduate Faculty Member of the University of Maine