The Catskills Phygianum of the Maetreum of Cybele

formally Gallae Central House


Picture of Central House in the 1930's
Central House in the 1930's




Since it's purchase in early 2002 by four women Central House has been through a lot of changes.  At first the vision was a housing cooperative welcoming of transsexual women and non transsexual women.  During that phase many came and went and much was learned.  In June of 2002 Gallae Central House Inc. was formally incorporated as a New York non profit corporation to manage the house for the original partnership that purchased it.  Because one of the original four women was not a Cybeline, this was done on a secular basis.  We would have legally been entitled to pursue a tax exempt status as a charitable organization since our stated goal, mission and efforts were all aiding transsexual women in early transition.but we decided not to do so at that time.

  In late 2003 with the transfer of ownership interest from the sole non member of the Cybeline faith to a woman who was an active Cybeline priestess the focus was shifted towards a religious convent under the direction of the Maetreum of Cybele with some emergency housing help for those women in need.  Many took advantage of that phase and gradually the focus was shifted more and more as the house became the Phrygianum or convent home of the priestesses of Cybele.  In October of 2003 we formally published the first part of our organizational model that was based on our historical research and which we had already put into practice.  In June of 2004 we took another quantum leap forward (or backward in the reclaiming sense) with our publication of the Rule of the Women of Cybele.  With the cooperation of the head of a Benedictine order of nuns,  our research lead us to the discovery that the Rule of the Benedictine Women was a survival of the earlier Montanist Rule that was a direct gnostic Christian adaptation of the original Rule of the Women of Cybele.  This remarkable document was a spiritual guide to living together as a  feminine religious convent community and predated the Rule of St. Benedict for men by approximately 600 years!  Our Cybeline Rule used the results of years of research with the base model that had survived as Rule of the Benedictine nuns to restore a historically appropriate "Rule" for our own religious faith and became structure of living at the Catskill Phygianum, a Cybeline Convent as had existed for thousands of years until the Catholics murdered in their sleep the last remaining Cybeline priestesses in Rome at the beginning of fifth century CE.  That it was with the cooperation of Bendectine Catholic nuns we restored our own Rule seemed strangely appropriate given the history.

In 2005 the decision was made to formally incorporate the Cybeline faith,  the four then current owners signed over their interest in the property to the newly incorporated Maetreum of Cybele as the official home of the religion and the centre of the world wide Cybeline revival.  Emergency housing help was still part of the mission but only one of the original owners still lived on the property.   At this time, although we would have legally been entitled to do so years before, we applied for tax exempt status for our Cybeline Convent home.  It was granted in March of 2006.

 Late in 2006 one of those emergency cases along with a rebel priestess attempted a wholesale coup of the entire organization and using extremely abusive behaviour eventual forced the last original owner and the head of the faith to move off the site for her own safety and health.  In the process the tax exempt status of the property was challenged by the town and then denied outright.  

Recent Freedom of Information requests uncovered an openly religious bigoted, gynophobic and transphobic misrepresentations of the facts by the Town Attorney for Catskill who just recently, in flagrant disregard of New York and Federal law once again denied our legitimate mandated property tax exempt status.  In doing so he deliberately misrepresented facts out of time sequence to make his case, apparently spent untold hours personally researching my own background and writings, openly insulted and questioned my own credentials as a scholar of religious history and demanded proof of my prior ordination (which was supplied and then ignored).  He also reproduced, without permission, copyrighted material I had authored including even the notice of copyright indicating he was aware he was breaking copyright law in the process.  He first misrepresented himself as a tax examiner to ask my permission to verify the number of buildings on the property and showed up with a Code enforcement officer and safety inspector and WITHOUT PERMISSION,  (I had carefully granted permission only to walk the grounds) bullied his way into the house and then passed judgment on what was and wasn't religious icons and representations although he apparently lacks any background as a religious scholar to do so especially in the case of a non Judeao-Christian tradition.  In the process he essentially violated the civil rights of freedom of religious practice to every Cybeline on the planet and violated the Constitutional right of equal treatment under the law of all religious practices.  These are serious legal breaches of ethics.  Copyright violations, religious freedom violations, Constitutional violations.  His deliberate misrepresentation of my written works out of time sequence in order to further his own bigoted ends of denial of our rights is icing on the cake.  He attempted to use our charitable acts (included under law as legitimate parts of recognized religous practice) as justification we were in violation of religous use of the property!  He went a step further and claimed that our intention, as a faith devoted to the Divine Feminine principles,  of allowing the use of the property by groups dedicated to women's rights and spirituality also a violation of our religous nature!  Under this fiction alone every single religious group that has more than one AA meeting, boy scout or girl scout troup meeting or any meeting that includes non members of that faith is NOT entitled to tax exempt status.  We DEMAND that if our own tax exempt status is not restored for both 2007 and 2008 that every single other religous exempt group within the jurisdiction of Catskill that fails this measure by allowing other groups to use their property have their exempt status also removed.

 I just received notice that demands access to our RELIGIOUS CONVENT HOME for an illegal "fire inspection" under the fiction that our home is a "place of public assembly" which can only be interpreted as further legal harassment by the Town of Catskill at his direction.  The Town of Catskill is well aware that our public religious ceremonies take place in our open air Temple/Grove  and the the Phrygianum itself is a Convent and religious retreat, spiritual centre and place of healing, not a place of "public assembly" under any definition of Federal and New York law, lacking far short of the 100 person capacity mentioned in the Town of Catskill's own definitions and not by any even far fetched interpetation of the legal meaning a "place of public assembly"  as such.  Our home is organized under almost identical principles as a Benedictine Convent.  We use the term "convent" as the Town of Catskill is well aware since they researched two separate listing and copied those listings by two different Pagan organizations calling us a convent and have it on their own record..  When they denied renewal of our tax exempt status in 2007, the written opinion by the Town Attorney acknowledged they had the burden of proof we failed to meet the standards and yet when I appealled the decision, they openly refused to provide me with that proof or a copy of the legal "opinion" (opinionated would be more accurate) so I could refute those allegations which I could have done so on the spot given the open and deliberate mistatements and misrepresentations they contained.

In the summer of 2002 a local bigot addressed a Catskill town meeting held in Palenville demanding our being run out of town as a minority religion making a number of ridiculous and slanderous accusations.   He demanded harassment of us by the Zoning inspector at the time which was pointedly not denounced by the Town.  The summer of 2003 several local bigots threatened openly and publicly to burn us out who then physically attacked us on our own property in the middle of the night.  The summer of 2004 a gang of teenagers repeatedly vandalized our property and one night attempted to break in, breaking a window on our front door in the process.  Later that fall this same group young terrorists then also openly and publicly threatened to burn us out on Halloween.  Catskill itself has a history of having openly harassed a lesbian couple's Pagan Bookstore in the late 1990's out of business, Palenville has seen in the recent past ugly racial bigotry and attempts to run out of the hamlet a gay couple who operated a Bed and Breakfast as an openly gay affirming one around the same time.  We have already stood up to bigoted terrorist thugs, we will not fail to do so when the next group hides their bigotry under the banner of the law falsely.

NOTICE TO THE TOWN OF CATSKILL: We will NOT be driven out or stand for unequal and openly bigoted treatment or harassment under the law.  Catskill and Palenville are BOUND by the Constitution of the United States and it's laws and we will stand on those rights.

As we enter the year 2008 we look towards a future of being a centre not only of the Cybeline faith, but one available for women of all faiths as well as a place of safety and healing from the ravages of the patriarchy on the collective souls of the women of the world.  It has been a long struggle but the vision has remained and now is being reborn.

Blessings,
Rev. Mother Battakes, Cathryn Platine






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