This entry closely parallels a scholion on Aristophanes, Birds 877 ("Lady Cybele, ostrich, mother of Cleocritus"). Symmachus and Didymus are cited there as sources of some of the phrases used.
The orgiastic rituals of Cybele (see kappa 2594; cf. gamma 23, kappa 2588) and her son Attis, centered around a decorated pine-tree (and thus the probable source of modern 'Christmas trees'), originated with the Phrygians, or perhaps the people they subjugated in west-central Anatolia, and were imported to Rome during the Punic Wars (and widely extended in the Roman Empire by the Emperor Claudius, a devotee). Mother Cybele was more often known in Rome as Magna Deum Mater (Great Mother of the Gods) and hence today as 'The Great Mother'. Catullus' Attis (poem 63) describes with a certain horror the practice of castration at these rituals, designed to bring the future priests of the goddess closer to her sex. Castrated priests of Cybele were called Galloi (gamma 23) and were a paradigm throughout the ancient world for 'effeminate' men (in its literal sense, 'transformed into feminine'). In iconography she is constantly portrayed with her team of lions. Her rites are often approximated to those of Sabazius (also Phrygian) or Dionysus.
[1] On Cleocritus see also kappa 1721, kappa 2587. For the description of such a man as birdlike we might compare Proust's description of Jupien at the beginning of Sodom and Gomorrah (Cities of the Plain) I. Hesychius glosses the word strouqo/s 'lecher'.
[2] This bird was originally a sparrow. We cannot be quite certain how or why it was applied to the ostrich when that bird was discovered by the Greeks, but it certainly has that sense in Aristophanes and here.
[3] On this term and its cognates see under kappa 1634.