So the Meter in the earlier Derveni Papyrus reference appears to be equivalent to both the enigmatic 'Mother' deity and to the less shadowy goddess Demeter. Received her name Γῆ Μήτηρ because she was a fusion of both The Derveni Papyrus makes the some claim, stating that Demeter (Melanippides says that Demeter and the Mother of the gods are one). States explicitly that the two goddesses were regarded as identical. The imagery of Meter, and the fifth-century B.C. Pindar addresses Demeter as the goddess with resounding cymbals, using

Ge and Meter and Rhea and Hera are the same thing. In her 1999 book In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (University of California Press), Lynn Emrich Roller notes (p. Gaia, Rhea, Demeter, Persephone and Hera, which occurs in Ancient Greek religion, which is expressed in some of its mythology, and which may or may not be a result of the identification of these goddesses, being either important maternal or chthonic figures, with the Great Phrygian Mother, whom the Greeks would call Kybele, but also simply 'the Mother of the Gods.' This notwithstanding, there is a lot of conflation and syncretism of the most prominent goddesses, i.e. Likely based on such evidence, evidently takes it for granted that the hymn is in honour of this divinity, listing it as one of the 'Hymns to the Meter Theon ' at the end of its 'Rhea-Kybele Myths' webpage series. The musical and wilderness aspects, together with the lions, of this hymn are signature attributes of Rhea-Kybele, eventually finding their sharpest focus in Nonnus' Dionysiaca (see also Orphic Hymn 14, & cf. Going by the commonest references in Ancient Greek literature and the closest associations in Ancient Greek religion, the best candidate for this particular hymn's addressee would appear to be Rhea, but specifically as filtered through her identification with the ambiguous Phrygian deity Kybele (or a perhaps pre-Hellenic goddess who would become identified as Kybele a couple of centuries after the Homeric Hymns' composition).

Homeric hymn 5