Around the Magna Mater, the meal is not a guest menu but a sacred cycle. First, the libatio: milk, honey, and non-alcoholic wine are poured to the goddess, for the Mother abhors spilled blood. Then come the liba and popana, small baked cakes offered on the altar and shared. Finally, the epulum, the collective banquet of the Megalesia (games in April at Rome), where brotherhoods exchange simple dishes. The priests (Galli) observe their taboos: no pork, no certain fish, no undiluted wine on fast days. So there is no starter-main-dessert, but an ascent from the divine to the human: one gives first to the goddess, then eats what she has deigned to leave.

The sacred pine — under which Attis, the beloved of the goddess, died — marks the whole Cybeline table: crunchy pine nuts, resin perfuming the wine, needles burnt as incense. Honey, for its part, replaces blood in the Mother's libations, who loves only the sweetness of the earth's fruits. Pine and honey: death and fertility in the same bite.