...what the Maker has wrought in the fashioning of man, as we have said before, must be specially unfolded through the yearly admonitions of the lost. In testimony of the truth, by manifest reasonings and by the witness of examples, we shall prove that divination was invented and perfected through the devil, so that by this means the spirit, with thought defiled, in the hope of a fleeting happiness and with perverse discernment, might pervert wretched men entangled in perpetual calamities. There is no one to be found who doubts that the four elements are the principles of created things, that is, fire, water, air, and earth. But these elements are diverse, or contrary, in their power.
And so the nations are in error, who, while they attribute supremacy to the elements, still reckon fire as though it were the supreme god, as though the rest derived their substance from it by heat, not knowing that all the elements are joined together precisely by their own mutual contrariety, and that they themselves too have God as their Maker, who, setting each one in its own place and order, created it—a whole that we gather either by mind or by thought, or which we certainly perceive with our eyes to be composed by the divine fellowship of His Word, the proportions of bodies being held in even measure throughout the whole. The inhabitants of Egypt, receiving the benefits of waters, worship water, supplicate water, and venerate waters with a superstitious continuation of vows.
But in their rites, which they call mysteries, they add tragic deaths and the fearful contests of a dreadful calamity: incest committed with a sister and adultery, and this crime avenged by the husband's severe punishments. Isis is the sister, Osiris the brother, Typhon the husband. When he had discovered that his wife Isis had been corrupted by the incestuous lusts of her brother, he killed Osiris and tore him limb from limb, and cast the quivering members of the wretched body along all the banks of the river Nile. Isis, having repudiated Typhon, in order both to bury her brother and her spouse, took to herself as helpers her sister Nephthys and Anubis the hunter, on whom for this reason a dog's head was placed, because by the skill of a tracking dog he found the pieces of the mangled body.
Thus Isis handed over Osiris, when found, for burial. These were indeed in Egypt at once kings and tyrants: but Osiris was just, except for that which he committed with his sister; Typhon was raging, unrestrained, and proud: therefore the one is worshipped, the other shunned. This is the sum of the Isiac rite: in their inner shrines they keep the buried idol of Osiris, this they bewail with yearly mournings, they shave their heads, that they may weep over the pitiable fate of their king dishonored by the disgrace of a shaven head, they beat their breasts, they tear their arms, they reopen the scars of old wounds, so that by yearly mournings the ruin of that deadly and pitiable death may be reborn in their minds:
and when they have done these things on certain days, they then pretend to seek the remains of the mangled body, and when they have found them, they rejoice as though their mournings were lulled to rest. O wretched and perishable mortality! That you should send deadly funeral offerings to your kings year by year, neglecting the supreme God, who has composed all things by the ordering of divine craftsmanship, you both lose your hope and your life, nor are you corrected by the splendor of the light shown to you, nor do you seek the tokens of recovered liberty, nor do you recognize the hope of the salvation restored to you, nor do you, out of repentance for past crimes, ask for pardon. In vain do you suppose that this water which you worship will ever profit you: there is another water by which renewed men are reborn.
This water which you worship year by year, some other force dries up when the channels of its veins are boiled away, or else the deadly blood of your king defiles it; but that water which you despise—the kindled water—is adorned with the majesty of the venerable Spirit, so that from it, through the old scars of conscience, saving health may be poured upon believing men. But in these deaths and mournings, which are true funerals, which actually took place, of which even today the relics remain—for the tomb of Osiris is even today in Egypt and the relics of the cremated body are seen—their defenders wish to add a physical explanation, saying that Osiris is the seed of crops, Isis the earth, Typhon the heat:
and because the ripened crops are gathered by heat for the life of men, and being separated are parted from their fellowship with the earth, and again, as winter draws near, are sown, they want this to be the death of Osiris, when they store away the crops, but his finding, when the crops, conceived by the genial nurturing of the earth, again begin to be generated by yearly procreation. Grant that this is the true explanation of those rites of yours; grant that vows are paid to the deities on account of the crops: why do you add incest, why adultery, why the ruin of a pitiable punishment? Why do you display from your rites an evil example to erring men who simply desire to sin? Let the physical explanation which you allege be concealed under some other kind. But what was there to conceal, which is known to all?
Why do you bewail the crops of the earth and lament the growing seeds? For the sustenance of the human race all these things have been bestowed by the divine bounty of the supreme God: thanks are to be rendered to the supreme God for this, and the generosity of the supreme God is not to be lamented. Rather weep for the fact that you go astray, and bewail your error, ever repairing it with mournings: do not in yearly rites seek out a death that belongs to another: rather prepare consolations for your own deaths year by year. O wretched man! You rejoice that you have found I know not what, while year by year you lose your soul through these rites. You find nothing there but an image which you yourself set up, except that you must again either seek it or lament it.
Rather seek the hope of salvation, seek the beginning of light, seek what may either commend you to the supreme God or restore you to Him, and when you have found the true way of salvation, rejoice, and then with upright freedom of speech proclaim: 'We have found, we rejoice together,' when you have been freed by the indulgence of the supreme God from these calamities after your repentance. The Phrygians, who inhabit Pessinus around the banks of the river Gallus, attribute supremacy among the other elements to earth, and want it to be the mother of all.
Then, in order that they too might establish for themselves a yearly cycle of rites, with yearly mournings they consecrated the love of a rich woman and their queen, who wished tyrannically to avenge the disdain of the youth she loved; and so that they might either satisfy the enraged woman or seek a consolation for her repentance, they boasted that the one whom they had a little before buried had come back to life; and when the woman's mind burned with the impatience of excessive love, they built temples to the dead youth. Then what the enraged woman had done because of the injury of her spurned beauty, this she wished the priests ordained by her to suffer. Thus in yearly rites, along with honor to the earth, the pomp of that funeral is arranged, and while men were being persuaded that they worship the earth, they venerate the ruin of a wretched death.
Here too, most sacred emperors, in order that this error may be concealed, they want these rites also to have been composed with a physical explanation: they say the crops love the earth, and that Attis is that very thing which is born from the crops, and that the punishment he endured is this—what the reaper does with his sickle to the ripe crops: they call his death the fact that the gathered seeds are stored away, and his life again, that the scattered seeds are stored up in yearly alternations. I would wish that they now answer me as I inquire, why they have joined this simplicity of seeds and crops with a funeral, with a death, with disdain, with punishment, with love? Was there then nothing else that might be said? Was there nothing for which wretched mortality might render thanks to the supreme God for the crops?
In order to give thanks for the reborn crops, you howl; in order to rejoice, you beat your breast; nor, when you have seen the true explanation, did it ever repent you of having done this, but you act in such a way that, occupied with yearly mournings, you ever flee life and seek death. Let them tell me: what profit was there to the crops in this, that they should bewail their own offspring with yearly howlings, that they should groan over the calamities of a strewn funeral, a thing which they say was composed by a physical explanation? You mourn and lament, and you conceal your mournings under another explanation. The farmer knows when to break up the earth with the plough, knows when to commit the grain to the furrows, knows when to gather the crops ripened by the heat of the sun, knows when to thresh the parched corn:
this is the physical explanation, these are the true sacrifices, which are performed by men of sound mind with yearly labor: this simplicity does divinity require, that men in gathering the fruits should serve the ordered laws of the seasons. Why have fictions of a wretched death been sought for this order? Why is concealed by tears what ought not to have been concealed? Hence they must of necessity confess that these rites were composed not in honor of the crops, but in honor of another's death. For as to the fact that they say the earth is the mother of all the gods, those who assign the first part to this element—she is truly the mother of their gods, and we do not deny it nor refuse it, since from her they always make their gods either of stone or of wood.
The seas flow around the whole earth, and again it is bound, enclosed, by the encircling ring of the surrounding Ocean; it is covered too by the round loftiness of the sky, it is buffeted by winds, sprinkled with rains, and by the tremblings of its constant motion it confesses its own fear. Consider what awaits you who worship these things, since your gods betray their own weakness to you by daily confessions. The Assyrians and a part of the Africans wish air to hold the leadership of the elements, and they venerate it under an imagined figure: for this very same [that is, air] they consecrated under the name of Juno or of the virgin Venus—if indeed virginity ever pleased Venus. Juno, indeed—lest even here incest should be lacking—they want to have been made the wife of Jupiter from being his sister.
They have indeed made this element effeminate, moved by I know not what veneration. Is it because air is interposed between sea and sky that they attend it with the effeminate voices of priests? Tell me: is this a deity, which seeks a woman in a man, which the chorus of its priests cannot otherwise serve, unless they make their countenance effeminate, smooth their skin, and disgrace the male sex by womanish adornment? In the very temples may be seen, amid public groaning, pitiable mockeries: men suffering womanish things, and revealing this stain of an impure and shameless body with boastful display. They publish abroad their misdeeds and confess the vice of their contaminated body with the greatest blot of delight:
They adorn after a womanish manner their carefully tended hair, and, clad in delicate garments, they scarcely hold up their head on a weary neck. Then, when they have thus made themselves estranged from men, filled with the music of pipes they call upon their goddess, so that, filled with an abominable spirit, they may, as it were, foretell things to come to foolish men. What a monster is this, or what a portent? They deny that they are men and yet are not women: they wish to be believed women, but the quality of their body, such as it is, confesses something else. It must also be considered what kind of deity this is, which is so delighted by the lodging of an impure body, which clings to shameless members, which is appeased by the polluted contamination of the body. Blush, O wretches, at this very height of yours: God made you otherwise.
When your cohort comes before the tribunal of the judging God, you will bring back with you nothing that the God who made you may recognize. Cast off this error of so great a calamity, and at length forsake the pursuits of a profane mind; do not condemn, by the criminal law of the devil, the body which God made; while time still allows, come to the aid of your own calamities. The mercy of God is rich; He pardons gladly: leaving the ninety-nine sheep, He seeks the one that was lost, and when the prodigal son returns, the father both gives back his garment and prepares a feast. I do not wish the multitude of your crimes to make you despair: the supreme God, through His Son Christ our Lord, sets free those who are willing, and gladly pardons the penitent, nor does He demand much in order to pardon:
By faith alone and by repentance you can redeem whatever you have lost through the wicked persuasions of the devil. The Persians and all the Magi, who inhabit the borders of the Persian region, prefer fire and think that fire ought to be set before all the elements. These, then, divide fire into two powers, transferring its nature to both sexes and assigning the substance of fire to the likeness of both man and woman: and the woman indeed they set up with a threefold countenance, binding her with monstrous serpents. This they do for the reason that they may not in any way dissent from the devil, their author, but that their goddess, teeming with serpents, may be adorned with the spotted insignia of the devil.
But the man, whom they worship as a good driver-away, his rites they transfer to the power of fire, as his prophet has handed down to us, saying: 'Initiate of cattle-stealing, right-hand son of a good father.' Him they call Mithras, but they hand down his rites in hidden caves, so that, always sunk in the obscure squalor of darkness, they may shun the grace of bright and serene light. O dread consecration of deities! O fictions of a barbarous law, to be fled from! You believe him to be a god, of whose crimes you confess. You therefore who say that in these temples duly... by the Persian rite of the Magi—why do you alone praise these things of the Persians? If you think this worthy of the Roman name, that it should serve the rites of the Persians, the laws of the Persians... which, armed with shield, covered with breastplate [with sword and spear], is consecrated.
There is also a third part, which in the rough and secret places of the woods comprehends the fellowship of the wild beasts of the fields. The last part of this threefold division reckons the ways of lusts, which in darkness displays depraved desires and the slumbers of cupidity. Therefore they assign one part to the head, as in some way it seems to be of man... they place another in the heart, so that it may seem to hold the variety of diverse thoughts which we conceive with manifold purpose, after the manner of forests. The third part is constructed in the liver, whence are born lust and pleasure. For there the gathered fecundity of generative seeds, by natural goads, stirs up the desire of cupidity.
Consider diligently, therefore, what this division accomplishes, so that the reasoning of truth may easily assail the fabrication. The soul is divided and is separated in its very substance by a diverse kind of activity, and, its order dissolved, it begins to be what it had been. For mind is one thing, anger another, lust another. This separation, then, dissolves the soul and suffers the greatest loss from this partition, nor does the thing keep the whole appearance of itself, which, separated into three contrary parts, is divided, and, to say it more truly, becomes mortal by this very division. For what can be divided is a body: what is a body, must of necessity be mortal. Therefore if the soul is divided, it is a body:
if it is a body, the thing itself must of necessity be mortal—a notable and splendid consequence of this error. A very great benefit is conferred upon us from this consequence: by the fabrications of these trifles they wish souls to be mortal. Thus, most sacred emperors, the elements have been consecrated by lost men. But there still remain other superstitions, whose secrets must be laid open: those of Liber and Libera, all of which must be specially imparted to your sacred minds, so that in these profane religions too you may know that the deaths of men have been consecrated. Liber, then, was the son of Jupiter, namely of a Cretan king. He, having been begotten of an adulterous mother, was reared at his father's house more carefully than was fitting.
The wife of Jupiter, whose name was Juno, stirred up by the fury of a stepmother's mind, was in every way preparing ambushes for the death of the infant. The father, setting out abroad, because he knew the silent indignations of his wife, lest anything should be done by guile by the angry woman, entrusted the guardianship of his son to suitable guardians, as it seemed to him.
Then Juno, having gained an opportune time for her ambush, and the more fiercely inflamed from this fact, that the departing father had handed over to the boy both the throne of the kingdom and the scepter, first corrupted the guardians with royal rewards and gifts, then stationed her own attendants, who were called the Titans, in the inner parts of the palace, and with rattles and a skillfully made mirror so enticed the boyish mind that, the royal seats being deserted, by the desire of his boyish heart he was led to the place of the ambush. There, intercepted, he is slaughtered, and, so that no trace of the murder could be found, the throng of attendants divides among themselves his limbs cut up joint by joint.
Then, so that another crime might be added to this crime, because the cruelty of the tyrant was greatly feared, they consume the boy's limbs cooked in various ways, so as to feast on unheard-of banquets of a human corpse down to that very day. The heart, divided off, his sister kept for herself—her name was Minerva, who was herself also a partner in the crime—both that there might be a manifest token for the accusation, and that she might have wherewith to soften the onslaught of the raging father. When Jupiter returned, his daughter laid out the order of the crime.
Then the father, stirred by the deadly calamity of the disaster and by the atrocity of bitter grief, kills the Titans, tortured in a... manner, nor was there omitted in the avenging of his son any torment or punishment, but, raging through every kind of penalty, he avenged the murder of his son, such as he was—with a father's affection indeed, but with tyrannical power. Then, because the father could no longer bear the torments of his mourning soul, and because the grief arising from bereavement was soothed by no consolations, he fashioned his image of plaster in modeled work, and the heart of the boy—by which the crime had been disclosed when the sister informed on it—he places in that part of the figure where the lineaments of the breast had been formed.
After this, in place of a tomb he builds a temple, and appoints the boy's tutor as priest: his name was Silenus. The Cretans, in order to soften the savagery of the raging tyrant, establish festive days of the funeral and arrange a yearly rite with a triennial consecration, doing everything in order which the dying boy either did or suffered. They mangle a living bull with their teeth, rousing cruel banquets with yearly commemorations, and, through the secret places of the woods, wailing with discordant cries, they feign the madness of a raging soul, so that that crime might be believed to have been committed not by fraud but by madness: a chest is carried in front, in which the sister had secretly hidden the heart; with the music of pipes and the clashing of cymbals they counterfeit the rattles by which the boy had been deceived.
Thus in honor of the tyrant, by a servile populace, one was made a god who could not have a burial. There was also another Liber at Thebes, a tyrant conspicuous for the power of the magic art. He, when he had taken possession of the minds of women by certain poisons and incantations, commanded cruel deeds at his own pleasure to those whom he had driven to frenzy, so that he might have noble women, robbed of their wits, as ministers of his lusts and crimes. What crimes he committed, or how great a deed of horror he commanded—a mother against her son, or sisters against their brother—is daily handed down on the stages by the authors of tragic verse, so that the criminal cruelty of the wicked tyrant may ever be reborn in the minds of the hearers through deadly recountings.
This man Lycurgus, protected by a sober conspiracy of men, stripped of his kingdom and drove from his country: for being effeminate he could no longer withstand the agreement of the men. For that he was effeminate and a slave to the lusts of his lovers is sung in the gymnasia of the Greeks. Nor was Lycurgus content merely with his flight and exile, but, fearing lest, fleeing and received by others, he should sow in another region too the mocking seeds of his crimes, girded with the sword, he pursued the disgrace of his country with a threatening edict.
Then Liber, having cast off the fillets which he used to bind with the vine-leaf circlets of garlands, fleeing with a half-male retinue—for only the companions of his debaucheries and disgraces and lusts had followed him—wandered along all the shores of the neighboring sea with the utmost trembling of despair. There, among drunken girls and wine-soaked old men, while the pomp of his crimes still went before him—one foul in a black cloak, another terrible with a serpent displayed, another bloody of mouth as he tears apart the living limbs of a beast—by Lycurgus...
...seized, through a nearby cliff which had formed an immense precipice with its trackless rocks, he is hurled into the sea, so that his mangled body, long tossed by the waves of the sea, might recall the minds of erring peoples to the order of sanity and sobriety by a severe punishment. This end of Liber, Homer, in order to disclose his flight and trembling and to show his death, declares thus: 'smitten with an ox-goad: and Dionysus, terrified, plunged beneath the wave of the sea, and Thetis received him, trembling, into her bosom; for a strong trembling held him at the man's threatening shout.' He imitates you, Lycurgus, and follows your sober institution, nor does he stray from your salutary laws—even our consul Postumius.
For, as we find in the books of the annals, the crimes of the Bacchanalia were detected when a certain youth named Aebutius informed of them. Morals were as yet uncorrupted in the city of Rome, nor did anyone with dissolute manners seek after foreign superstitions. Then neither did the senate fail the consul, nor the laws the commonwealth, nor the consul the laws, but, when all who were handing down the criminal contrivances of this rite had been investigated, against them all, by a severe—nay, by a Roman—examination of inquiry, capital punishment was decreed by the sentence of the council, nor did the avenging swords of the consul rest so long as this evil had not been cut out by the roots. O punishment worthy of the Roman name! O praiseworthy constancy of ancient virtue!
Nor would the consul spare his own fellow-citizens, when foreign vices are corrected for the cleansing of the fatherland. There follows this contagion of the sacred rite, and imitates the order of that funeral, the death of a daughter consecrated by Ceres, a woman of Henna; for whatever the father in Crete had done concerning his son, all this Ceres established at Henna, when she had lost her daughter, through the impatience of a mother's grief. How this came about I shall touch upon in a brief account. Many sought the only daughter of Ceres — whom the Greeks call Persephone, and ours, with the word altered, call Proserpina — for the partnership of marriage.
The anxious mother judged the merits of each suitor; and while the mother's verdict still seemed uncertain to all, a rich rustic, who because of his riches bore the name of Pluto, with the rash heat of his desire — since he could not bear the delays of postponement and was burning with the fires of an unseemly love — seized the maiden, found near Percus. Now Percus is a lake within the bounds of the city of Henna, exceedingly pleasant and charming, whose loveliness arises from the variety of its flowers; for through the whole year it is crowned with blossoms that succeed one another in turn.
There you will find whatever swells of the hyacinth upon its stalk; there the foliage of the narcissus, or that which paints a golden rose above; there the white ivy creeps softly along the ground, and amid the purple violets is found the marjoram blushing sweetly red; nor do the white lilies forsake that garland: in short, a place fitted by its charm both to invite the hearts of girls and likewise to detain them. In this place, when the maiden had been found near evening by Pluto, she is seized by force and, set upon a chariot, with her garments torn and her hair disheveled, is carried off; nor did her cut nails avail anything against the rustic lover, nor did her cries and wailing help, nor the clamor of the other girls.
Then one of them, running swiftly — since no one came to help from the city — made faster by very fear, announced to the mother the seizing of the maiden. Indignant against the ravisher, the mother led an armed band; nor did the woman's coming escape Pluto, but when he turned his eyes back toward the city and saw countless columns coming with the mother, he took a deadly resolve out of desperation: he drove the four-horse chariot, by which the carriage was drawn, through the middle of the lake — which was sunk in deep abysses. There, drowned together with the maiden he loved, he furnished to the pitiable mother a deadly spectacle of her daughter's death.
The people of Henna, that they might find from some quarter a solace for the mother's grief, feigned that the king of the underworld had carried off the maiden; and that fact might follow upon the fiction, they put it about that he had emerged again with the maiden by another place near Syracuse. They duly build a temple both to the ravisher and to the maiden, with their costs carefully combined, and decree yearly vows in the temple. But by no means is the mother's grief overcome, nor are the torments of a woman's impatience healed; rather, believing truly that her daughter had been seen near Syracuse, she came by night journeys, with Triptolemus her bailiff as guide, to the shore of the city of Syracuse, in mourning garb and squalid filth. Nor was there lacking there one to deceive the credulous mother amid her calamities.
A certain Pandarus said that he had seen — I know not whom — not far from Pachynus, the ravisher boarding a ship with the maiden. The woman was persuaded, for since she longed to hear that her daughter lived in whatever fashion, she rewarded the city with boundless gifts. The Syracusans, prompted by the woman's generosity, consecrated the seizing of the maiden, and to soothe the mother's grief they adorned the procession of the wretched funeral with the honor of temples. But not even this sufficed the mother; rather, boarding a ship, she sought her daughter along foreign shores. Thus tossed by waves and tempests, she came to a place of an Attic city; there, received in hospitality, she distributed to the inhabitants the wheat hitherto unknown to them. The place took its name from her fatherland and from the woman's coming, for it was called Eleusis, because thither Ceres had come, having left Henna.
Thus, because she herself, by dispensing the grain she had brought, had handed down the discipline of gathering crops, after her death — on account of the benefit that arose from the abundance of crops — she was both buried in that place and likewise consecrated, and called by a divine name together with her daughter. For the levity of the Greeks loves to call by divine names those who have bestowed anything upon them, or who have helped them by counsel or by valor; and thus the gratitude of benefits is repaid by them in such a way that they call them gods, and believe them to be gods, who have at some time profited them. Thus Nysa does not doubt concerning Liber, nor does Sparta hesitate about new stars; sorrowful Oeta burns and consecrates Hercules, and by the empty Cretans the tomb of a Jupiter who is by now dead is still adored.