Sabazios, the nomadic horseman and the sky/father god of Phrygia, is an ancient Thracian being*, whose precise nature is much debated in academia, with many scholars claiming with certainty an understanding of his place in the Thracian mythos.
The confusion around Sabazios is not surprising, given the relatively unexamined nature of Thracian culture and religion in general.
Sabazios, whose various syncretisms will be addressed and explored elsewhere, is a god whose name most likely draws from related terms meaning freedom, and fluidity.
He is described at one point in modern scholarship as "the most changeable of gods", and again, "as the god of no mythology".
Sabazios is referred to as the "Unstoried One", for indeed, the documented stories pertaining to him directly are few and far between...
His cult spread from Thrace in the north of Greece to Attica and to Athens in the fifth century BCE. In Indo-European language, the element ' - zios' is precursor of Dyeus-Deus (god) and Zeus. The Greeks, by inherit of the Thrace around century V b.C., associated the phrygid Sabazios with Zeus and Dionysos.
An important symbol of his cult was a snake, which is a chthonian symbol as well as one of revival. Another symbol of Sabazius was a crown (with two small snakes raising their heads) worn by the god himself and by some of the members initiated into his cult.
*Thracians have been denigrated to the ranks (and rancor) of savage drunken barbarian neighbors to the North of the "civilized" Hellenic world. As Dr. Aleksandr Fol, late founder of the Institute of Thracology in Sofia, Bulgaria, points out in numerous academic publications, Thracians have yet to be definitively studied as anything but an "alien culture" through a Greco-Roman perspective.
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