Praeparatio Evangelica 2 part 2/3

He therefore instructed her to take the seed that had fallen from him, and mixing it with oil and the blood dripping from the arrowhead, to anoint the tunic of Heracles with it. And having done this, Deianira kept the potion by her.

Again, Heracles, having taken captive the daughter of Phylas and lain with her, begot a son Antiochus; and again, having taken captive Astyaneira, the daughter of King Armenius, and having lain with her, he begot a son Ctesippus.

Thespius the Athenian, son of Erechtheus, having begotten fifty daughters by various women, and being eager for them to obtain children by Heracles, invited Heracles to a certain sacrifice, and having splendidly feasted him, sent each of his daughters to him in turn. And he in a single night deflowered them all, and became the father of those called the Thespiades.

And having taken Iole also captive, and being about to perform a sacrifice, he sent to his wife Deianira and asked for the cloak and tunic which he was accustomed to use for sacrifices. And she, having anointed the tunic with the love-charm given by the Centaur, sent it to him.

And Heracles, having put on the tunic, fell into the greatest calamity. For since the arrowhead had received the venom from the Hydra, and because of this the tunic, through its heat, ravaged the flesh of his body, he, being in great agony, killed the servant who had brought it to him, and he himself, in accordance with an oracle, gave himself over to fire, and thus ended his life. Such, then, are the events concerning Heracles.

Concerning Asclepius, they say that he was the son of Apollo and Coronis, and that he pursued the science of medicine, and advanced so far in reputation that he unexpectedly healed many who had been given up as incurable; so that Zeus, being provoked, struck him with a thunderbolt and destroyed him. And Apollo, being provoked at the killing of his son, slew the Cyclopes who had fashioned the thunderbolt for Zeus. And Zeus, being provoked at their death, commanded Apollo to serve as a slave with Admetus, and thus exacted this penalty from him for his crimes.

These things, then, Diodorus has set forth in the fourth book of his Library. And the same author says that the Greeks took over the rest of their theology as well from other nations, writing the following in the third book of his history.

The Atlantians, then, say that Uranus was the first to rule as king among them, and that he had children by several women, forty-five in number, of whom eighteen, they say, were by a woman named Titaea, who, having been chaste and the cause of many blessings, was deified after her death, being renamed Earth.

And Uranus had daughters, Basileia and Rhea, who was also called Pandora. Basileia, having raised her brothers and shown them a mother's benevolence, was called 'mother.'

And later, after the death of Uranus, having cohabited with her brother Hyperion, she bore two children, whom she named Helios and Selene.

And the brothers, fearing Rhea, slaughtered Hyperion, and drowned Helios in the river Eridanus; and Selene, having learned of this, threw herself from the roof; and their mother, becoming frenzied, wandered through the land, her hair loosened, possessed by the god through the beating of drums and cymbals, and she herself altogether vanished.

And the crowds, marveling at this turn of events, transferred Helios and Selene to the stars in the sky, and reckoned their mother to be a goddess, and set up altars to her, and honored her with rites of drums and cymbals.

The Phrygians say that Maeon, who ruled as king of Phrygia, had a daughter Cybele, who was the first to invent the pan-pipe, and was called the Mountain Mother. And Marsyas the Phrygian, being on friendly terms with her, was the first to devise the flute, and he remained to the end of his life without experience of sexual love.

And Cybele, having come together in intimacy with Attis, became pregnant. When this became known, her father killed Attis and her nurses; and Cybele, becoming frenzied, rushed out into the countryside, and there continued wailing and beating the drum.

And Marsyas kept company with her, who, having entered into a musical contest with Apollo and having been defeated, was flayed alive by Apollo.

And Apollo, having fallen in love with Cybele, wandered with her as far as the land of the Hyperboreans, and commanded that Attis' body be buried and that Cybele be honored as a goddess. For this reason, even to this day, the Phrygians do this, lamenting the death of the youth, and having set up altars, honor Attis and Cybele with sacrifices.

And later, at Pessinus in Phrygia, they built a costly temple, and instituted the most magnificent honors and sacrifices.

After the death of Hyperion, the sons of Uranus divided the kingdom among themselves, of whom the most distinguished were Atlas and Cronus. Of these, Atlas received the regions along the Ocean, and became an outstanding astrologer; and he had seven daughters, called the Atlantides. These, having united with the noblest gods, became the founders of the greater part of the human race, bearing by their virtue gods and heroes, of whom the eldest, Maia, having united with Zeus, bore Hermes.

And Cronus, being distinguished for greed and licentiousness, married his sister Rhea, by whom he begot Zeus. And there was also another Zeus, the brother of Uranus, who ruled as king of Crete, and who fell far short in fame of the later one.

The former, then, ruled over the whole world, while the latter ruled Crete and begot ten sons, called the Curetes. And they say that his tomb is shown in Crete even now.

And Cronus held dominion over Sicily, Libya, and Italy. And Zeus, being his son, pursued a life opposite to that of his father. And some say that he succeeded to the kingdom because his father willingly yielded it to him, while others say that he was chosen by the people because of their hatred toward his father.

And when Cronus made war upon him together with the Titans, Zeus prevailed in battle, and traversed the whole inhabited world. And he excelled in bodily strength and in his other virtues, and made every effort to punish the impious and to do good to the virtuous; on account of which, after his passing from among men, he was named Zeus, because he was thought to have become for men the cause of living well.

These, then, are the main points of the theology held among the Atlantians. And they say that the Greeks also make use of these same things.

These things Diodorus records in the third book of his Histories. And the same author, in the sixth book, drawing from the writing of Euhemerus of Messene, confirms the same theology, speaking here word for word as follows.

Concerning the gods, then, the ancients have handed down two conceptions to later generations. For some, they say, are eternal and imperishable, such as the sun and moon and the other heavenly bodies, and besides these the winds and the others that have obtained a nature similar to these; for each of these has an eternal origin and continuance. But others, they say, were earthly gods, who, on account of their benefactions to mankind, obtained immortal honor and glory, such as Heracles, Dionysus, Aristaeus, and the others like them.

Concerning the earthly gods, many and varied accounts have been handed down among the historians and the mythographers. And among the historians, Euhemerus, who composed the Sacred Record, has recorded them in his own particular way; while among the mythologists, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, and other such writers have fabricated more monstrous myths about the gods. We shall attempt to run briefly through what has been recorded by both, aiming at due proportion.

Euhemerus, then, having become a friend of King Cassander, and being compelled by him to perform certain royal services requiring a great journey abroad, says that he was carried off toward the south into the ocean; and having sailed out from Arabia the Blessed, he made his voyage through the ocean for several days, and came upon islands in the open sea. One of these was called Panchaea, in which he beheld the inhabitants, the Panchaeans, excelling in piety, and honoring the gods magnificently with sacrifices and notable offerings of silver and gold.

And this island, he says, is sacred to the gods, and contains many other things admired both for their antiquity and for the artistic skill of their construction, concerning which we have set forth the particulars in the books before this one.

And on it, upon a certain exceedingly lofty hill, there is a temple of Zeus Triphylius, established by Zeus himself at the time when he was king of the whole inhabited world, while still living among men. In this temple there is a golden stele, on which are inscribed, in Panchaean letters, a summary account of the deeds of Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus.

After this, he says that Uranus was the first to become king, a man of fairness and beneficence, and knowledgeable in the motion of the stars; and that he was the first to honor the heavenly gods with sacrifices, on account of which he was also called Uranus.

And he had sons by his wife Hestia, Titan and Cronus, and daughters, Rhea and Demeter. And Cronus became king after Uranus, and, having married Rhea, begot Zeus, Hera, and Poseidon.

And Zeus, having succeeded to the kingdom of Cronus, married Hera, Demeter, and Themis; by whom he had children — the Curetes by the first, Persephone by the second, and Athena by the third.

And he came to Babylon and was entertained as a guest by Belus, and after this, coming to the island of Panchaea, situated by the ocean, he set up an altar to Uranus, his own ancestor; and from there, going through Syria, he came to Casius, who was then ruler of that region, from whom Mount Casius takes its name. And coming to Cilicia, he defeated in war Cilix, the local ruler. And having gone through very many other nations, he was honored by all of them, and was proclaimed a god.

Having gone through these things and the like concerning the gods, as though concerning mortal men, he adds, saying: 'And concerning Euhemerus, who composed the Sacred Record, we shall be content with what has been said; but as for what is told mythologically among the Greeks concerning the gods, following Hesiod and Homer and Orpheus, we shall attempt to run briefly through it.' Then next he appends the mythologies of the poets.

But let so much, as sufficient for us, be cut off from the theology of the Greeks; to which it is fitting to append the rites performed in the innermost shrines and the secret mysteries of these same gods, and to consider whether they present some evidence befitting a truly divine theology, or whether they proceed from somewhere below, from a long and demonic delusion, being worthy of laughter, or rather still more of shame, or rather even of pity for those who are still blind.

These things the admirable Clement plainly discloses in his Exhortation to the Greeks — a man who had experienced all these things at first hand, yet soon turned away from the error, having been redeemed from these evils by the saving word and through the teaching of the Gospel. Hear, then, also a few brief words of his on these matters.

Do not, then, meddle curiously with godless shrines, nor with the mouths of chasms filled with monstrous portents, nor with the Thesprotian cauldron, nor the Cirrhaean tripod, nor the Dodonaean bronze; but leave behind, withered along with its aged myths, the ancient oak honored amid the desert sands, and the oracle housed there in that very oak.

For the fountain of Castalia has fallen silent, and likewise another fountain at Colophon, and the other divining waters have died in the same way. And indeed, though late, these empty vanities have nevertheless been exposed as having run dry along with their own myths.

Recount to us also the rest of the divination — or rather, of the madness — the useless oracles: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, that of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, of Amphilochus.

And if you wish, deconsecrate along with them also the observers of portents and of birds and the interpreters of dreams; and bring and set up together, beside the Pythian oracle, the diviners by flour and by barley-grain, and the ventriloquist-diviners still honored among the many; yes, and let the shrines of the Egyptians and Tyrrhenians, and their necromancies, be given over to darkness — these truly mad devices, the sophistries of faithless men, and the gambling-dens of unmixed error.

Fellow-traffickers in this sorcery are the goats trained for divination, and the ravens taught by men to give oracles to men.

But what if I should recount to you the mysteries? I will not, indeed, dance them out in mockery, as they say Alcibiades did; but I will thoroughly strip bare, according to the word of truth, the sorcery hidden within them, and I will parade before the spectators of the truth, as though upon the stage of life, those very beings you call your gods, whose rites are these mystic initiations.

The Bacchants celebrate frenzied orgies for the raving Dionysus, keeping the sacred month with the eating of raw flesh, and they perform the distribution of pieces of flesh from these slaughters, crowned with serpents, crying out in ecstasy 'Evoe!' — that very 'Eve,' through whom error followed, and after whom death followed close behind; and the sign of the Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent.

Indeed, according to the precise Hebrew pronunciation, the name 'Eve,' with its aspiration, is interpreted as 'the female serpent.' And Deo and Kore have already become a mystic drama, and Eleusis, with torches, celebrates their wandering, their rape, and their grief.

And it seems to me that one ought to derive the etymology of the words 'orgia' and 'mysteria' — the former from the wrath (orgē) of Deo which arose against Zeus, the latter from the pollution (mysos) that occurred concerning Dionysus. And if they should also be derived from a certain Attic Myus, whom Apollodorus says perished while hunting, I have no objection to your mysteries having been glorified with a funerary [cry and] honor.

But it is also possible for you to understand the mysteries otherwise, as little myths formed by the interchange of letters. For such myths, if any others do, hunt out the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most foolish of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks.

May he, then, perish — whoever it was that began this deceit toward mankind, whether it was Dardanus, who instituted the myths of the gods as mysteries, or Eëtion, who established the orgies and rites of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned it from Odrysus, and then handed on to his subjects a cunningly crafted deceit.

For never could Cinyras, the Cyprian islander, persuade me — he who dared to transfer the lustful orgies of Aphrodite from night into day, being ambitious to deify a fellow-citizen harlot.

Others say that Melampus, son of Amythaon, brought from Egypt to Greece the festivals of Deo, a grief celebrated in song. These men I, for my part, would call the originators of evils, the fathers of godless myths and of ruinous superstition, who have planted these mysteries in human life as a seed of wickedness and corruption.

Now, then — for indeed it is time — I will expose your very orgies as full of deceit and monstrous imposture. And if you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these myths of yours that are held in such honor. I will proclaim openly the things that are hidden, not being ashamed to speak of what you are not ashamed to worship.

The foam-born, Cyprus-born, and Cinyras-beloved one — I mean Aphrodite, 'the lover of the genitals' — because she appeared from the genitals, from those very lustful members of Uranus that were cut off, which after the severing forced their way through the wave: thus Aphrodite becomes, worthy of you, the fruit of shameless members. And in the rites of this pleasure of the sea, as a token of that generative act, a lump of salt is given, and a phallus is bestowed on those being initiated into the art of adultery; and those being initiated bring in a coin to her, as lovers pay a courtesan.

And the mysteries of Deo — and Zeus's amorous embraces with his mother Demeter, and her wrath — I no longer know what to call her henceforth, mother or wife, this Deo, on whose account she is said to have been called Brimo; and the supplications of Zeus, and a drink of gall, and the plucking out of hearts, and unspeakable deeds.

These things the Phrygians perform in the rites of Attis, Cybele, and the Corybantes. And it has been much repeated that Zeus, having torn off the testicles of a ram, brought and threw them into the very bosom of Deo, paying a false penalty for his violent union with her, as if he had thereby castrated himself.

The tokens of this initiation, set forth in full — I know that they will move to laughter, even you who are unwilling to laugh, because of the exposures. 'I have eaten from the drum, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have carried the sacred vessel, I have crept into the bridal chamber.' Are not these tokens an outrage? Are not these mysteries a mockery?

But what if I should add also the rest? Demeter conceives; the maiden is reared; and this same Zeus who begot her again unites with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after her mother Deo, having forgotten his former pollution; and he unites with her having become a serpent, as was proven.

For the token of the Sabazian mysteries, for those being initiated, is 'the god through the bosom'; and this is a serpent drawn through the bosom of those undergoing the rite, a proof of Zeus's intemperance. And Pherephatta also conceives a bull-shaped child.

Indeed, a certain idolatrous poet says: 'A bull is the offspring of a serpent, and a serpent the father of a bull; on the mountain lies hidden the herdsman's goad' — calling, I suppose, the herdsman's 'goad' the narthex-wand, which the Bacchants brandish about, calling it a 'staff.'

Do you wish that I should also relate to you Pherephatta's flower-gathering, and the basket, and her rape by Aidoneus, and the chasm of the earth, and the swine of Eubouleus that were swallowed up together with the two goddesses — for which reason, at the Thesmophoria, casting pigs into the pits, they later cast them out again?

This mythology the women celebrate variously in the cities — the Thesmophoria, the Skirophoria, the Arrhetophoria — dramatizing in many ways the rape of Pherephatta. For the mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman: while he was still a child, with the Curetes dancing about him in armed motion, the Titans stealthily crept in by guile, and having deceived him with childish toys, these same Titans tore him limb from limb while he was still a mere infant, as Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the rite, says: 'the cone, and the whirling top, and the limb-bending playthings, and the fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides.'

And it is not without use for us to set forth, for the sake of condemnation, the useless tokens of this rite: knucklebone, ball, spinning-top, apples, whirling wheel, mirror, and fleece.

Now Athena, having secretly taken away the heart of Dionysus, was named Pallas from the throbbing of the heart. And the Titans, who had also torn him limb from limb, set a certain cauldron upon a tripod, and having thrown in the limbs of Dionysus, boiled them first, and then, having pierced them with spits, held them over the fire of Hephaestus.

And Zeus, appearing later — if indeed he was a god, he perhaps partook of the savory smoke of the roasting flesh, which honor your gods, by their own admission, are allotted — punishes the Titans with his thunderbolt, and entrusts the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo, to be buried. And he, not disobeying Zeus, carries the torn-apart corpse to Parnassus and lays it to rest there.

And if you wish to behold also the orgies of the Corybantes: these two, having killed their third brother, covered the head of the corpse with a purple cloth, and having crowned it, the two of them buried it, carrying it upon a bronze shield to the foothills of Olympus.

And these mysteries are, to sum it up in a word, murders and burials; and the priests of these rites, whom those concerned call 'Anaktotelestai,' add further monstrous embellishment to the calamity, forbidding that celery with its root be placed upon the table; for they suppose that celery sprang up from the blood that flowed from the Corybantic murder. Just so, indeed, also the women celebrating the Thesmophoria carefully avoid eating the seeds of the pomegranate; for they think that pomegranates grew from the drops of Dionysus's blood that fell to the ground.

Calling the Corybantes also 'Cabiri,' they proclaim a Cabiric rite. For these same two brother-murderers, having taken up the chest in which the private member of Dionysus lay stored, carried it down into Tyrrhenia — glorious merchants of such freight! — and there the two of them, being fugitives, spent their time, handing over to the Tyrrhenians, as a most precious teaching of piety, the worship of the private parts and the chest. For this reason, not unreasonably, some wish Dionysus to be called Attis, since he has been deprived of his private parts.

And what wonder is it if the Tyrrhenian barbarians are initiated by such shameful sufferings, when even among the Athenians and the rest of Greece — I am ashamed even to say it — the mythology concerning Deo is utterly full of shame?

For Deo, wandering in search of her daughter Kore, grows weary in the region of Eleusis — this is a place in Attica — and sits down upon a well, grieving. This is even now forbidden to those being initiated, lest those already initiated should seem to imitate the mourning goddess.

At that time the earth-born inhabitants dwelt in Eleusis; their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and also Eumolpus and Eubouleus. Triptolemus was a herdsman, Eumolpus a shepherd, and Eubouleus a swineherd; from these the clans of the Eumolpidae and of the Kerykes — this very hierophantic clan — flourished at Athens.

And indeed — for I will not refrain from saying it — Baubo, having received Deo as a guest, offers her the kykeon. But Deo refuses to take it and will not drink — for she was in mourning — and Baubo, greatly pained at this, as though she had been slighted, uncovers her private parts and displays them to the goddess. And Deo is delighted at the sight, and at last, though with difficulty, receives the drink, pleased by the spectacle.

These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians; these also Orpheus records in writing. And I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, that you may have the mystagogue himself as witness to this shamelessness: 'So saying, she drew up her robes and showed all that unseemly shape of her body; and the boy Iacchus was there, and laughing he tossed his hand beneath Baubo's bosom. Then when the goddess smiled, she smiled within her heart, and received the shimmering vessel in which the kykeon lay.'

And the password of the Eleusinian mysteries is this: 'I fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took [something] from the chest; having done with it, I put it back into the basket, and from the basket into the chest.' Fine indeed are these spectacles, and worthy of a goddess!

Worthy indeed of night are these rites, and of fire, and of the great-hearted — or rather vain-minded — people of the Erechtheids, and moreover of the other Greeks besides, for whom, after death, there await things they do not even hope for.

To whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? To night-wanderers, magi, bacchants, maenads, initiates — to these he threatens the things after death, to these he prophesies the fire. For the things accounted mysteries among men are initiated without true consecration.

Custom, then, and empty supposition, and the mysteries of the serpent, are a kind of deceit religiously practiced, urging with spurious piety initiations that are truly no initiations at all, and rites devoid of true ecstatic consecration.

And what sort of things are the mystic chests? — For their sacred things must be laid bare, and their unspeakable secrets must be spoken out. Are they not sesame cakes, and pyramid-cakes, and balls of wool, and cakes with many navels, and lumps of salt, and a serpent, the sacred emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? And are there not pomegranates too, and besides these, [cakes shaped like] hearts, and fennel-stalks and ivy, and moreover flat-cakes and poppies? These are their sacred things.

And besides these, the unspeakable symbols of Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, a woman's comb — which is, in euphemistic and mystical language, the female organ. Oh, the manifest shamelessness! Long ago, among temperate men, night, kept in silence, was a veil for pleasure; but now, for those being initiated, the sacred night of licentiousness is openly proclaimed, and the fire, held aloft in torches, exposes their passions.

Put out, O hierophant, the fire! Be ashamed, torch-bearer, of your torches! The light exposes your Iacchus. Allow the night to conceal the mysteries; let the rites be honored by darkness. The fire does not dissemble; it is commanded to expose and to punish.

These are the mysteries of the atheists. And rightly do I call these men atheists, who, being ignorant of him who truly is God, worship instead — as though truly divine — a child torn apart by the Titans, and a grieving little woman, and unspeakable [bodily] parts which are, in very truth, out of shame worshiped shamelessly; being gripped by a twofold godlessness: the first, whereby they are ignorant of God, not recognizing him who truly is God; the second, whereby, through this very error, they suppose things that do not exist to exist, and call these — things that are not truly [divine], or rather do not exist at all, having obtained only the name — gods. So much, then, for this author.

Rightly, then, do we confess that we ourselves have been set free from all these things, having been ransomed, as from some dread and most grievous disease, from that long and inveterate error — first, by the grace and benefaction of God the Almighty; second, by the ineffable power of the evangelic teaching of our Savior; and third, by sound reasoning, having judged it unholy and impious to honor with God's own reverend title men who were mortal and long since lying among the dead, men who have not even left behind the memory of temperate conduct, but have bequeathed to their successors examples of the utmost licentiousness and intemperance, of cruelty and derangement of mind.

For how is it not the most foolish thing of all, that lovers of temperance should yield the first place to the shameful and licentious, and that the sensible and prudent should render the reverend honor to those who have lost their wits, and that the devotees of justice and humanity should yield it to men steeped, through excess of cruelty and inhumanity, in the pollutions of child-murder and parricide?

And what excess of impiety did it not surpass, to cast down the solemn and all-holy title of God upon the unspeakable parts of men and women, and upon irrational, beastly nature, and to speak of such shameful and inhuman things concerning the divine as, even among evildoers among men, if they were convicted, would fall under the law's inexorable penalties?

And what need is there to dwell longer on it, in proclaiming as good news, to barbarian and Greek alike, freedom from the evils just mentioned, and bringing to light the reasonableness of the apostasy from the falsely-named gods — seeing that already the greater part even of those who were most given to superstition, as though roused from a deep stupor, and having opened the eye of the soul from the ancient mist, have perceived the utter folly of their ancestral error, and, taking their stand upon reason, have chosen the other way, having withdrawn from the old one?

Of these, some went straight to the point and utterly spurned the whole mythology of their ancestors, laughing broadly at it; others, avoiding the reputation of atheism, neither stood by their former views nor departed from them altogether, but, purposing to flatter and to serve their own reputation, declared that the stories told about their much-vaunted gods were true myths fashioned by poets, concealing within them natural [scientific] theories.

Of these — even though they present, in the fullest sense, no proof of truth whatever — nevertheless the exposition [of their views] would be necessary for us, for the examination of what is esteemed even among these men, so that our withdrawal from these things too might be shown to have come about for us in no other way than through the reasonableness set forth by the evangelic teaching of our Savior. Come, then, let us take up the account of these things also from the beginning, and examine it.