that a part should not have perished, and that a mortal body, set apart from the law of putrefaction, should endure right up until now? We could long since have pressed you to prove this thing, were it not of equal folly both to say such things and to demand proofs of matters of this kind. 'But this history is false and contains in itself no part of the truth.' — It is indeed of no concern to us — we for whose sake you contend that the gods have been driven out from the lands — whether it be consistent and propped up by the firmness of faith, or on the contrary lyingly and composed by the fiction of some falsehood.
For it is enough for us — whose purpose today is to show that these divinities which you promise, if they exist anywhere among the nations and grow hot with the boilings of wrath, receive the causes of their furious offences no more from us than from you; and that this tale exists among things, has been set down by you in commentaries, is daily read through by those who wish, and is handed on in order for the instruction of the time to come by those who come after. — And if it is in any case true, we see no reason underlying it why the gods of heaven should be said to be angry with us, since we have neither betrayed their so great turpitudes, nor put them into any writings, nor sent them forth into public testimony by the celebrations of sacred rites.
But if, as you remember, it is false and interpolated with deceitful lies, no man can doubt that you are the cause of the offence, you who either allowed certain persons to write such things, or suffered what was written to endure in the memory of the ages. And yet how can you accuse this writing of falsehood, when the very sacred rites — which you keep performing through the course of the years — are witnesses, and it is both believed by you to be true and judged to be of proven trustworthiness? For what does that pine mean, which you always, on fixed days, carry into the sanctuary of the mother of the god? Is it not the likeness of that tree, beneath which the frenzied and unhappy youth laid violent hands on himself, and which the mother of the gods consecrated as a solace for her wound?
What of the tufts of wool, with which you bind and wind about the trunk of the tree? Is it not a repetition of those wools with which Ia covered the failing youth, and thought she could impart some warmth to his freezing limbs? What of the little branches of the tree, decked and wreathed with violet-coloured garlands? Do they not indicate that the mother adorned the pine with its first flowers, the mark and testimony of a pitiable fortune? What of the priests of Cybele beating their palms against their breasts with dishevelled hair? Do they not recall to memory those laments with which the turret-crowned mother, together with Agdestis, followed the boy with tearful wailing? What of the bread abstained from as nourishment, to which practice you have given the name 'the fast'?
Is it not an imitation of that time when the divinity, by the violence of her grief, abstained from the corn of Ceres? Or, if the things we say are not so, do you explain, do you tell us: those emasculated and effeminate ones, whom we see taking part with you in the rites of this divinity — what business, what solicitude, what care have they there, and why do they, after the manner of mourners, beat their arms together with their breasts, and imitate the fortune of those set in a lamentable lot? What of the garlands, what of the violets, what of the wrappings, the coverings of soft wool? Why, finally, the pine itself, a little before a most useless log nodding among the thickets, is soon, as though some present and most august divinity, set up in the seats of the mother of the gods?
For either this is the reason which we find in your writings and commentaries, and it is manifest that you are not performing divine ceremonies but renewing the image of sad deeds; or, if there is some other reason, which the obscurity of the mystery has denied us, that too must needs share in the infamy of some turpitude. For who is there who would believe that there is anything of honour in that matter which base Galli initiate, effeminate worn-out wretches perform?
The greatness of the subject and the very duty of this defence indeed demands that we should similarly pursue the other kinds of turpitudes — whether those which the histories of antiquity report, or those which those holy mysteries contain, to which initiations a name is given and which are handed down not to all in common, but by the reticence of a few. But the innumerable rites of the sacred things, and the deformity attached to each in bodily fashion, forbid us to go through them all: nay rather, to speak more truly, from certain of them we ourselves turn aside by design and reason, lest, while we strive to unfold them all, we should be polluted by the contaminations of the very exposition. Let us then pass over Fenta Fatua, who is called the Good Goddess, whom — beaten with myrtle rods because
without her husband's knowledge she had drunk up a jar full of unmixed wine, was beaten with myrtle rods, as Sextus Clodius relates in his sixth book on the gods, in Greek; and he shows that a sign is displayed — that, when the women perform a divine rite to her, a covered wine-jar is set up, and it is not permitted to bring in myrtle sprigs, as Butas writes in his 'Causal Explanations.' But let us also, with equal manner and dissembling, pass over the gods called Conserentes, whom, together with the rest, Flaccus writes were turned into the likeness of a human penis and buried themselves in the ashes which had been formed beneath a little pot for the entrails; and when Tanaquil, skilled in the disciplines of Etruria, moved it aside, the gods rose up and hardened with divine sinews. Then she commanded the captive of Corniculum to understand and recognise what the thing meant for her;
and Ocrisia, a most prudent woman, inserted the gods into her genitals, and unfolded certain movements: then the holy divinities, boiling up, spat forth the force of Lucilius, and King Servius the Roman was born. Let us also pass by the monstrous Bacchanalia, to which the Greek name is Omophagia, in which, with feigned frenzy and with soundness of mind set aside, you wreathe yourselves about with serpents, and — so as to prove yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god — with bloody mouths you tear apart the entrails of bleating she-goats. And moreover let us pass by those hidden initiations of the Cyprian Venus, whose founder is said to have been King Cinyras, in which those who take part bring in fixed offerings as to a harlot, and carry off phalli, as gifts of the propitious divinity's signs.
Let the Corybantic rites also be given over to oblivion, in which that holy mystery is handed down: a brother slaughtered by his brothers; from the blood of the slain one, parsley born; that herb forbidden to be set on tables, lest an inexpiable offence should be incurred from the Manes of the dead. But we forbear also to proclaim those other Bacchanalia, in which a secret and unspeakable thing is disclosed and insinuated to the initiated: how Liber, occupied with childish playthings, was drawn away by the Titans, how he was cut limb from limb by them and cast into little pots to be cooked; how Jupiter, allured by the sweetness of the smell, flew unbidden to the meal, and — having learned the grave matter — overwhelmed the marauders with his thunderbolt and hurled them down into the lowest seats of Tartarus.
As testimony of this matter and as a proof of his fortune, the Thracian handed down in his poems the knuckle-bones, the mirror, the tops, the whirling little wheels, the smooth balls, and the golden apples taken from the virgin Hesperides. It was our plan to pass over and sail past those mysteries also by which Phrygia is initiated, and that whole nation, had not the name of Jove, interposed among them, forbidden us to pass over his injuries and disgraces briefly — not that it is sweet to us to ride over mysteries so foul, but that it may become clear to you yourselves, again and again, how much injury you heap upon those whose guardians, avengers, and worshippers you profess yourselves to be.
'Once upon a time,' they say, 'Diespiter, when he was inflamed with base lusts and forbidden desires toward Ceres his own mother — for she is handed down by the inhabitants of that region as the mother of Jove — yet did not dare to seek by most open force what he had conceived in wanton craving, contrived ingenious snares by which he might diminish in her chastity the mother who feared no such thing: he became a bull out of a god, and, hiding under the appearance of a beast the mind and audacity of an ambusher, he was let loose, raging, with sudden force upon the unwary and unsuspecting woman; he carried out his incestuous business, and — his deceit betrayed by lust, being understood and recognised — he flew away.'
'The mother blazes up with furies and indignation, foams, pants, boils over; and, unable to contain the roar and tempest of her wrath, from her continual suffering she thenceforth took the name of being called Brimo; nor is anything else at heart for her than to pursue her son's audacity with such punishments as she is able.' 'Jupiter is in a flurry, broken with fear, nor does he find with what remedies to soothe the spirits of the violated one. He pours out prayers and supplicates: the ears of the grieving one are stopped up. The whole order of the gods is called in as intercessors: no one's authority is great enough to be heeded. At last the son, seeking ways of satisfaction, contrives such a remedy: he selects a noble ram with quite large testicles, cuts these off himself, and strips them of the covering of the woolly little sac.'
'Approaching his mother, mourning and submissive, and as though he had by his own verdict condemned himself, he throws himself into her lap and casts these things down before her. At the sight of the manly pledge she takes on a milder spirit, and is recalled to care for the offspring conceived: after the tenth month she gives birth to a daughter of splendid body, whom the succeeding age of mortals named now Libera, now Proserpina.'
'When the ram-like Jupiter beheld that she was quite vigorous, blooming, and full of richer sap, forgetting what evils and crime and how great a rashness he had a little before undertaken, he returned to his former acts; and because it seemed abominable enough that a father should be joined in wifely union hand-to-hand with his daughter, he passed into the terrible form of a serpent, bound the frightened virgin with huge coils, and under a savage guise sported and fawned upon her with the softest embraces. It comes about that she too is filled with the seed of most mighty Jove, but not on the same condition as her mother: for she gave back a daughter fashioned with her own lineaments, but from the maiden's childbirth there was poured forth, in the shape of a bull, the monuments of Jove's guile.' — Someone will require an authority for the matter:
then we shall cite that man of Tarentum and the well-known senarius which antiquity chants, saying: 'The bull begot a dragon, and the dragon a bull.' Finally, the very sacred rites and the ritual of that initiation itself, to which the name Sabadia belongs, can be a testimony to the truth: in which a golden serpent is let down into the bosom of the consecrated, and drawn out again from their lower and hindmost parts. I do not think it necessary here to go through the members one by one at great length in words, and to show how great swarms of turpitudes and of shameful deeds lie in those base parts. For who is there among mortals, bearing even a slight sense of humanity, who does not himself clearly see what all these things are —
how criminal, how foul, and what great disgraces they carry from the very sacred mysteries and from the indecent origins of the sacred rites? 'Jupiter,' he says, 'blazed up toward Ceres.' — What so great thing, I ask, has this Jupiter — whoever he is — deserved of you, that there is no kind of reproach, no infamy, no adultery, which you do not heap upon his head as though upon some cheap and muddy character? 'Leda betrayed the law of matrimony': — Jupiter is said to be the author of the fault. 'Danae could not guard her virginity': — the theft is narrated to be Jove's. 'Europa hastened to the name of a woman': — the same Jove is boasted to be the stormer of chastity.
'Alcmena, Electra, Latona, Laodamia, a thousand other maidens and a thousand mothers, and along with them the boy Catamitus, were despoiled of the honour of their modesty': — everywhere it is the same tale of Jupiter, nor is there any kind of turpitude in which you do not sow his name among associated lusts, so that he seems altogether pitiable, born for no other cause than to be the seat of crimes, the material of curses, a certain exposed place into which all foulnesses drain themselves off with the sewage-floods of bilge-water. Yet if you were to say that he had had commerce with women who were strangers, the thing would indeed be impious, but the injury of the curse would be tolerable.
Did he even neigh with the appetites of a maddened heart after his mother, even after his daughter, and could neither the sanctity nor the reverence of a parent, nor even the horror of offspring begotten from himself, lead him away from the image of so foul a thought? I should therefore like to see that father of the gods, Jupiter, the eternal power over things and men, honoured with the horns of an ox, wagging his shaggy ears, his gait drawn together into hooves, chewing the cud of pale grasses, and — in his hinder part — smeared with soft dung on his tail, hocks, and ankles, and befouled with the flux of his entrails.
I should like, I say — for it must be said more often — to see him twisting the stars, and he who with his crash terrifies and lays low the pale nations, pursuing herds of wethers, inspecting the testicles of rams, seizing these with that censorial and divine hand with which he is wont to brandish the flashing fires and to rage with thunderbolts; then next probing the hidden parts with a fervent castrating-knife, and, the witnesses removed, tearing away the little membranes wrapped about the offspring; and offering them, still fervent, to the mother as though certain fillets for the eliciting of pity — brought forth pale, wounded, feigning the torments of grief, and, to establish credit for the deed, defiled with ram's blood, and, for the lie of a wound, covered over with woollen bands and little linen cloths.
Is this to be heard and read through beneath this vault of the world? And are those who handle these things to wish themselves to be thought pious, holy, and guardians of religions? Is there any sacrilege greater than this, or can any mind be found so endowed with irreligious opinions as one that believes, or accepts, or in the innermost mysteries of the sacred rites betrays such things? That Jupiter, whoever he is — if he perceived that he existed, or if he were affected by any sense of injury — would it not be a worthy occasion on which, angered and roused, he should draw the earth from beneath our steps, extinguish the lights of the sun and moon, nay rather confound all things into the appearance of that ancient unity? 'But these rites,' he says, 'do not belong to our commonwealth.'
— And who says that, or who rejoins it? A Roman, a Gaul, a Spaniard, an African, a German, or a Sicilian? And how does it help your cause, if these things are not yours, when those who perform them are of your parties? Or what does it matter whether you approve of them or not, when the things that are properly your own are found to be either of like foulness or of a greater kind of turpitude? For do you wish us to consider those mysteries also, and those divine ones, which are named Thesmophoria by the Greeks, by which — from the Attic people — those holy sleepless vigils were consecrated, and the grave all-night celebrations?
Do you wish us, I say, to see what origins they have, or what causes, so that we may prove that Athens herself, mighty in the arts and studies of humane culture, speaks things as insulting toward the gods as others keep repeating — and that reproaches no less than the rest are cast upon them by you, published under the appearance of religion? 'At a certain time,' they say, 'when Proserpina — not yet a woman, but still a maiden — was gathering purple flowers in the little meadows of Sicily, and while the eagerness of the gathering was calling her here and there at random through the flowery harvest, the king of the Manes, springing forth through a cavern of profound depth, carries off the ravished maiden with him and hides himself again in the recesses of the earth.'
'And since Ceres was ignorant that this had happened, nor could she suspect where in the world her daughter might be, she set her mind to search out the lost one over the whole globe: she takes up twin torches laden with the weight of Aetnaean flames, by which, lighting her way before her, she goes on to seek her through all the regions of the earth.' 'In the wandering of this search she is also carried into the Eleusinian borders. This is the name of a district established in the region of Attica. There dwelt at that time in these parts earth-born men, whose names were these: Baubo, Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Eubuleus, Dysaules:'
Triptolemus the yoker of oxen, Dysaules the keeper of she-goats, Eubuleus of swine, Eumolpus of the woolly flock — from whom flows the race of the Eumolpidae, and from whom is drawn that famous name among the Cecropians, and those who afterward flourished as heralds-of-the-caduceus, hierophants, and criers. So then that Baubo, whom we said had been a dweller in the Eleusinian district, receives Ceres — wearied with manifold ills — as a guest, fawns upon her with gentle obsequiousness, begs that she may take care to refresh her body, and offers to her thirsting ardour a draught of cinnus, which Greece calls the cyceon: the mourning goddess turns away from and rejects the offices of humanity, nor does her fortune permit her to be mindful of the common care of health.
She, on the other hand, begs and exhorts her, as is the custom in such cases, not to take up a disdain for her kindness; but Ceres holds out most stubbornly and keeps up the obstinacy of an untamed rigidity. And when this happened again and again, and her unconquerable resolve could not be worn down by any compliances, Baubo changed her arts, and her whom she could not entice by earnest means she resolved to cheer with laughable marvels: that part of the body through which the female sex is wont both to bring forth offspring and to gain the name of mother, she frees from its longer neglect, makes it take on a cleaner aspect and be smoothed into the semblance of a boy not yet hardened and bristly.
She returns to the sorrowing goddess, and amid those commonplaces by which it is usual to break and soften grief, she uncovers her own self and, with her private parts laid bare, displays all those places of shame. And the goddess fixes her eyes upon the pubes and is nourished by the strange kind of comfort: then, made more relaxed through laughter, she takes up and drinks down the potion she had scorned, and what Baubo's modesty could not for a long time draw forth, the obscenity of a shameful deed extorted. If perchance any man suspects that we are dishonestly slandering, let him take up the books of the Thracian bard (Orpheus), which he records to be of divine antiquity, and he will find that we neither cleverly invent anything nor seek out and manufacture holy rites in order to make the gods a laughing-stock.
For we shall set forth in your midst the very verses which the son of Calliope (Orpheus) uttered with Greek mouth and, by singing them down the ages, published to human law: 'Thus having spoken, she at once drew up her garment from below and set before her eyes the things shaped at the groin; and Baubo, shaking them with hollowed hand — for they had a boyish look — patted and fondled them affectionately. Then the goddess, fixing the orbs of her august light, being a little softened, laid aside the sorrows of her mind: then she takes the cup in her hand and, with laughter following, gladly drains the whole liquid of the cyceon.' — What say you, O cunning sons of Erechtheus, what say you, citizens of Minerva?
My mind longs to know with what eloquence you will defend such perilous matters, or what arts you possess by which to give safety to persons so riddled with wounds and charges. This is no false indictment, nor are you assailed by a calumnious accusation. The tokens and origins of your Eleusinian rites bring forth base things, and so do the inscriptions of ancient letters, and finally the very passwords which, when questioned, you answer at the receiving of the sacred things: 'I have fasted and drunk the cyceon'; 'I have taken from the chest and put into the basket'; 'I have received again, and transferred into the little chest.'
So then, as those holy and secret mysteries reveal, are your gods carried off and do they carry off others, do they join in marriages sought by stealthy frauds, is the honor of virginity torn from the resisting and unwilling, are impending injuries unforeseen, is it unknown what befell the ravished, do they seek the lost like men, and beneath the brightest sun traverse the vastness of the world with lamps and torches? They are afflicted, they fall sick, they put on the squalor of mourners and the marks of miseries; and, that they may be able to turn their mind to nourishment and to taking food, no reason, no season, no grave speech or serious kindliness is employed, but the shameful obscenity of bodies is displayed...
...that obscenity, and those parts are thrust forward which common modesty, which the law of natural shame bids to hide, which among chaste ears it is a sin to name without pardon and without prefacing due honors. What spectacle, I ask, what was there in the shameful and reverend parts of Baubo, that could turn a goddess of the female sex, formed with a like member, into admiration and laughter — that, set before the divine light and gaze, could both give forgetfulness of miseries and lead her over into a merrier disposition by sudden mirth? O what things, O how great things could we, mocking and jeering, bring forth, were we not restrained by the religion of a nation and its lettered authority!
For a long while now, I confess, I hesitate, look about, and hang back — 'doubling the Tellenian tangles,' as the saying goes — while shame holds me from bringing forth those Alimuntian mysteries, in which, in honor of Father Liber, Greece erects the phallus and all its territories flower with images of male members. What this is, is perhaps obscure, and it is investigated by what reasoning it comes about. — Whoever is ignorant of this, learn, and, having marveled at such great matters, keep them ever in pure senses with scrupulous observance. 'When Liber, the Nysian and son of Semele,' they say, 'was still among men, he sought to know the underworld and to inquire what was being done beneath the seats of Tartarus:'
and this desire of his was hindered by certain difficulties, because through ignorance of the road he did not know by what way to go and proceed. A certain Prosumnus arises, a disgraceful lover of the god and quite prone to nefarious lusts, who promises he will point out the door of Dis and the approaches to Acheron, if the god would gratify him and allow conjugal pleasures to be plucked from himself. The god, easy-going, swears he will be at his power and pleasure — but only once he had first returned from the lower world, his vow and expedition accomplished. Prosumnus courteously sets forth the way, and at the very threshold of the underworld prostitutes himself.
Meanwhile, while Liber surveys the Styx, Cerberus, the Furies, and all other things with curious inquiry, the guide of the way falls from the number of the living and is buried in the human manner. Euius (Bacchus) emerges from the lower world and recognizes his dead guide; and, in order to fulfill the faith of the pact and to release himself from the obligation of the oath he had sworn, he proceeds to the place of burial and, cutting off a very strong branch from a fig tree, he shapes, planes, and smooths it and fashions it into the likeness of a human penis; he fixes it over the mound of the tomb and, bared on his hinder part, draws near, sets it beneath, and settles down upon it. Then, assuming the wantonness of one lusting, he twists his buttocks this way and that and contrives to suffer from the wood what he had long ago promised in reality.
And lest anyone perchance suppose that such impious things have been fabricated by us, we do not require him to believe Heraclitus as witness, nor do we wish him to take from the reading of the man himself what he thought about such mysteries: let him question all Greece as to what these phalli mean, which the ancient custom erects and venerates through the fields and the towns, and he will find the causes to be those we state — or if it should be a matter of shame to explain the truth plainly, what will it profit to obscure, what to cover up the cause and origin of the rite, when the very accusation lies in the substance of the religion itself? What say you, O peoples, what say you, O nations occupied with and given over to the venerations of temples?
Is it to rites like these that you compel us by flames, exiles, slaughters, and every other kind of punishment, and by the fear of cruelty? Are these the gods you bring in upon us, insinuate, inflict — gods whose like you would not wish either yourselves to be, or any other person joined to you by degree of blood and right of kinship? Can you disclose to your beardless boys, still in their bordered togas, the bargains that Liber struck with his lovers? Can you drive your daughters-in-law — nay, those wedded to you in marriage — to the shamelessness of Baubo and to the 'chaste' pleasures of Ceres? Do you wish your young men to know, hear, and learn what sort Jupiter himself proved to be toward one mother and then another?
Do you wish grown maidens and fathers still in their prime to learn by what art this same one played upon his own daughter? Do you wish full-blooded brothers, sprung from the same seeds, to be told in turn that he did not disdain the couch and couplings of his sister? Must one not, then, forthwith flee far from gods of this kind, and, lest the obscenity of so impure a religion creep into the mind, close off all hearing entirely? For what mortal is there, trained in morals so chaste, whom the precedents of the gods would not incite to frenzies of this kind? Or who could restrain his own desires from kinsfolk and reverend persons, when among the gods above he sees nothing sacred preserved amid the confusion of lusts?
For once it has been established that the first and perfect nature (the gods) could not curb its own desire within just bounds, why should not man pour himself out into promiscuous appetites — man, both cast headlong by inborn frailty and encouraged by the tutelage of holy divinity? For a long while now, I confess, as I ponder within my mind such monstrous deeds of this kind, I have been wont to marvel that you dare to call anyone among these an atheist, irreligious, sacrilegious — anyone, that is, who either altogether deny or doubt that the gods exist, or who maintain that they were men, enrolled in the number of the gods on account of some power and merit:
whereas, if the truth were reached and an examination held, it would be fitting that none should be named by such appellations more than you, who, under the guise of worship, heap upon them more curses and charges than if you had openly done so and imbibed them with avowed cursings. He who doubts that the gods exist, or who altogether denies it — although the boldness of following monstrous opinions may seem blameworthy — yet, without persecuting any person, merely withholds his belief from obscure matters; and he who asserts that they were of earthly race, although he strips them of the sublimity of the heavenly ones, yet heaps upon them incidental praises, since he affirms that they were raised to the merit of divinity by their benefactions and by admiration of their virtues.