Against the Nations 5.18–5.36

The greatness of the subject and the duty of the defense itself indeed demand that we likewise pursue the other kinds of disgrace, both those which the histories of antiquity publish and those which the holy mysteries contain, called initiations, which you hand down not to all in common but to the silence of a few. But the countless rites of the sacred things and the deformity attached to each ... prevent us from going through them all; indeed, to express it more truly, we ourselves turn aside from some by design and reason, lest, while we strive to explain everything, we be polluted by the defilements of the exposition itself. Let us pass over, then, Fenta Fatua, who is called the Good Goddess, whom Sextus Clodius, in the sixth book of his Greek work on the gods, shows was beaten with myrtle rods because she drank a jar full of wine without her husband's knowledge; and that a sign of this is shown, that when women perform a sacred rite to her, an amphora of wine is set up covered, and it is not lawful to bring in myrtle branches, as Butas writes in his Causes. But let us also be silent, with like restraint and discretion, about the Conserentes gods, of whom Flaccus writes, among other things, that they, turned into the likeness of a human member, covered themselves with the ash that had been made under a little pot of entrails; and that when Tanaquil, skilled in the lore of Etruria, moved it, the gods rose up and grew hard with divine sinews. Then she ordered a captive woman from Corniculum to understand and recognize what the matter meant: that Ocrisia, a most prudent woman, took the gods into her body and made the proper movements; then the holy deities, boiling over, discharged their force ..., and King Servius was born a Roman.

We will also pass over the monstrous Bacchanalia, whose Greek name is Omophagia, in which, with feigned frenzy and with soundness of mind set aside, you wrap yourselves with snakes, and, to show that you are full of the god's divinity and majesty, you tear apart with bloody mouths the flesh of bleating goats. We will also pass over those hidden initiations of Cyprian Venus, whose founder is said to have been King Cinyras, in which those admitted bring certain fees as to a harlot and take back phalluses given as signs of the gracious deity. Let the Corybantic rites also be given to oblivion, in which this holy mystery is taught: a brother killed by his brothers; parsley sprung from the blood of the slain; that herb forbidden to be set on tables, lest inexpiable offense be incurred from the dead man's Manes. And we refrain from proclaiming those other Bacchanalia, in which a secret and unspeakable thing is disclosed and instilled into the initiates: how Liber, occupied with childish playthings, was torn apart by the Titans; how he was cut limb from limb by them and thrown into little pots to be cooked; how Jupiter, enticed by the sweetness of the smell, flew to the meal uninvited, and, discovering the grave deed, overwhelmed the robbers with his thunderbolt and hurled them into the lowest seats of Tartarus. The Thracian poet has published in his songs testimony and evidence of this event: knucklebones, a mirror, tops, rolling wheels and smooth balls, and golden apples taken from the Hesperides for the maidens.

It was our plan to pass over and sail past also those mysteries into which Phrygia and the whole people of Ilium are initiated, were it not that the name of Jupiter placed in them forbids us to pass over his wrongs and disgraces briefly; not that it is pleasant for us to ride roughshod over such foul mysteries, but so that it may be made plain to you yourselves again and again what injury you heap on those whose guardians, defenders, and worshipers you profess to be. Once, they say, when Diespiter burned with wicked lusts and forbidden desires for Ceres, his mother (for this goddess is held by the inhabitants of that region to be Jupiter's mother), and yet did not dare to seek by open force what he had conceived in wanton craving, he devised ingenious traps by which to rob of her chastity his mother, who feared nothing of the kind. From a god he becomes a bull, and, hiding the mind and boldness of a seducer under the appearance of a beast, he rushes with sudden violence, raging, upon her, unsuspecting and unaware; he does his incestuous deed, and, the fraud betrayed by his lust, recognized and known, he flies away. The mother burns with frenzy and indignation, foams, pants, boils over, and, not able to contain her roaring and the storm of her anger, from her continuous passion she took thereafter the name Brimo. Nor has she anything else at heart than to pursue her son's audacity with what punishments she can.

Jupiter is in distress, broken by fear, and does not find by what remedies he may soothe the mind of the violated one. He pours out prayers and supplicates: the ears of the grieving one are closed. The whole order of the gods is sent as envoys: no one's authority is great enough to be heard. At last the son, seeking ways of making amends, devises this remedy: he picks out a fine ram with very large testicles, cuts them off himself, and strips them of the woolly covering of the scrotum. Approaching his mother, grieving and humble, as though he had condemned himself by his own sentence, he throws them into her lap. Seeing the manhood of the pledge, she takes on a gentler mind and is brought back to care for the offspring she had conceived. After the tenth month she bears a daughter of splendid body, whom the following age of mortals called now Libera and now Proserpina. When Jupiter the wether saw her very strong, blooming, and full of sap, forgetting what evils and crime he had lately undertaken and how much rashness, he returns to his former deeds; and since it seemed wicked enough for a father to be joined with his daughter in close conjugal union, he changes into the terrible form of a serpent, binds the terrified maiden in huge coils, and under the disguise of a beast plays and fawns on her with the softest embraces. It happens that she too is filled with the seed of mighty Jupiter, but not on the same terms as her mother: for the mother produced a daughter drawn with her own features, but from the maiden's childbirth there was poured forth, in the form of a bull, a monument of Jupiter's seduction. Someone will want an authority for the matter: then we will cite that well-known Tarentine iambic line which antiquity sings, saying: 'The bull begot the serpent, and the serpent the bull.' Finally, the rites themselves and the ritual of initiation, called the Sebadia, can be witness to the truth: in them a golden snake is let down into the bosom of the initiates and taken out again from the lower and lowest parts.

I do not think it necessary here also to go through each member with much talk and show how great springs of disgrace and shameful deeds are in the separate parts. For who among mortals, bearing even a slight sense of humanity, does not himself see clearly what all these things are, how wicked, how foul, and what great disgraces the gods bear from the very rites of the mysteries and from the unseemly origins of the rites? 'Jupiter,' he says, 'burned for Ceres.' What, I ask, has this Jupiter, whoever he is, deserved so much from you, that there is no kind of disgrace, no infamy, no adultery which you do not heap on his head as on some vile and dirty character? Leda betrayed the right of marriage: Jupiter is said to be the author of the fault. Danae could not keep her virginity: it is told as Jupiter's theft. Europa hastened to the name of woman: the same one is boasted to be the conqueror of her chastity. Alcmena, Electra, Latona, Laodamia, a thousand other virgins and a thousand mothers, and with them the boy Catamitus, were stripped of the honor of their modesty: everywhere the story of Jupiter is the same, and there is no kind of disgrace with which you do not join his name in shared lusts; so that he seems, pitiable one, to have been born for no other reason at all than to be the companion of crimes, the material of slanders, a kind of exposed place into which all the filth from the sewers of the bilges might drain. Yet if you said that he had dealings with strange women, the thing would indeed be impious, but the injury of the slander would be tolerable. Did he neigh after his mother too, after his daughter too, with the cravings of a savage heart, and could neither the holiness nor reverence of his mother, nor even the horror of a pledge sprung from himself, draw him away from the image of so foul a thought?

I should like, then, to see that father of the gods, Jupiter, the eternal power over things and men, adorned with cattle's horns, shaking hairy ears, his steps contracted into hooves, chewing the cud of green grass, and at the back, his tail, hocks, and ankles smeared with soft dung and covered with the flow of his intestines. I should like, I say, to see (for it must be said more often) him who turns the stars and terrifies and lays low the pale nations with his crash, chasing flocks of wethers, inspecting rams' testicles, seizing them with that censorial and divine hand with which he is accustomed to brandish flashing fires and rage with thunderbolts; then searching out hidden parts, and, with witnesses removed, tearing off the membranes surrounding the progeny, and offering them to his mother, still boiling with anger, as some kind of fillets for eliciting pity: gaping, pale, wounded, feigning the torments of pain, and, to make the deed believed, stained with ram's blood and covered with woolen bandages and linen cloths for the lie of a wound. Is this to be heard and read under this axis of the world? And do those who handle these things want to be thought pious, holy, and guardians of religion? Is there any sacrilege greater than this, or can any mind be found endowed with opinions so irreligious as one which believes, accepts, or publishes such things in the inmost mysteries of the rites? That Jupiter, whoever he is, if he felt that he existed or were affected by any sense of injury, would it not be a fitting matter for him, angry and roused, to take the earth from under our feet, put out the lights of the sun and moon, and indeed throw all things together into the appearance of the ancient unity?

'But these rites,' he says, 'do not belong to our state.' Who says this, or who replies? A Roman, a Gaul, a Spaniard, an African, a German, or a Sicilian? And what does it help the case if these are not yours, when those who perform them are of your party? Or what does it matter whether you approve of them or not, when those that are properly yours are found to be of similar foulness or of a greater kind of disgrace? For do you want us to consider those divine mysteries which the Greeks call the Thesmophoria, for which those holy night-long vigils and solemn all-night festivals were consecrated by the Attic people? Do you want us, I say, to see what origins and causes they have, so that we may prove that Athens itself too, powerful in the arts and studies of humane culture, speaks as insultingly against the gods as others do, and that no lesser disgraces are published by them under the appearance of religion than those which you throw at others? Once, they say, when Proserpina, not yet a woman and still a maiden, was gathering purple flowers in the little meadows of Sicily, and when the desire of gathering drew her here and there through the flowery harvest, the king of the Manes, leaping up through a cave of great depth, carried off the maiden with him and hid himself again in the depths of the earth. When Ceres did not know this had happened and could not guess where in the world her daughter was, she set her mind on seeking the lost one through the whole world: she takes twin torches kindled with the flames of Etna, and, lighting her way with them, goes to search in all the regions of the earth.

In the wandering of this search she comes also to the borders of Eleusis: that is the name of a district located in the region of Attica. At that time five earth-born people lived in these parts, whose names were these: Baubo, Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Eubuleus, Dysaules: Triptolemus the yoker of oxen, Dysaules the keeper of goats, Eubuleus of pigs, Eumolpus of the woolly flock, from whom the race of the Eumolpidae flowed and that famous name among the Cecropians is derived, and those who later flourished as heralds, hierophants, and criers. So that Baubo, whom we said was an inhabitant of the district of Eleusis, receives Ceres, worn out by manifold evils, with hospitality, and flatters her with gentle attentions. She asks her to take care to refresh her body, and offers to her burning thirst a drink of barley groats, which Greece calls kykeon. The grieving goddess turns away and rejects the kind services, and her misfortune does not allow her to remember her health. Baubo, on the other hand, courteously asks and urges her, as is the custom in such cases, not to scorn her kindness: Ceres persists most obstinately and keeps the stubbornness of untamed rigidity. When this happened often and her unconquerable resolve could not be worn down by any attentions, Baubo changes her tactics, and resolves to cheer with wonders of mockery one whom she could not entice by serious means. That part of the body by which the female sex both brings forth offspring and usually gains the name of mother, she frees from longer neglect, makes it take a smoother appearance, and smooths it into the likeness of a boy's face, not yet hard and bristly. She returns to the sad goddess, and, among those ordinary things with which it is customary to break and temper grief, she uncovers herself and shows all those parts of shame, her groin exposed. The goddess fixes her eyes on it and feeds on the appearance of an unheard-of consolation; then, made more cheerful by laughter, she takes and drinks the drink she had spurned, and what the modesty of Baubo could not long obtain, the obscenity of a shameless act extorted.

If anyone perhaps suspects that we are wickedly slandering, let him take the books of the Thracian prophet, which you say are of divine antiquity, and he will find that we neither cunningly invent anything nor seek and contrive to make the holiness of the gods laughable. For we will set before you the very verses which the son of Calliope uttered in the Greek language and, by singing, made public for human use through the ages: 'So saying, she drew up her robe from the bottom and showed to her eyes the parts formed in her groin; ... which Baubo, shaking with hollow hand (for the face was like a boy's), claps and handles in friendly fashion. Then the goddess, fixing the orbs of her august eyes, softened a little, lays aside the sadness of her mind; then she takes the cup in her hand, and, with laughter following, gladly drinks all the liquor of the kykeon.' What do you say, you shrewd sons of Erechtheus, you citizens of Minerva? My mind longs to know with what eloquence you will defend such dangerous business, or what arts you have to give safety to persons or matters and cases so pierced through. This is not a false indictment, nor are you attacked by a slanderous denunciation. The shameful origins of your Eleusinian rites are known: the inscriptions of ancient literature publish them, and finally the very tokens which you answer when asked at the reception of the rites: 'I have fasted and drunk the kykeon; I have taken from the chest and put in the basket; I have received again and transferred to the little chest.'

So then, as those holy and secret mysteries declare, do your gods carry off and get carried off, contract marriages sought by stealthy frauds; is the ornament of virginity snatched from those who resist and are unwilling; are impending injuries not known; is it unknown what has happened to those carried off; do they search for what is lost like human beings, and wander through the vastness of the world with lamps and torches under the brightest sun? Are they affected, do they grow sick, do they take on the squalor of mourners and the marks of misery; and, so that they may turn their minds to nourishment and the taking of food, is no reason, no time, no serious speech or earnest kindness applied, but a shameless obscenity of the body shown, and those parts thrown before them which common modesty bids us hide, which the law of natural shame bids us conceal, which it is unlawful to name among chaste ears without asking pardon and without prefacing apologies? What spectacle, I ask, what was there in Baubo's private and shameful parts, that turned to wonder and laughter a goddess of the female sex, formed with a like member, and that, thrown before her eyes and divine gaze, both gave her forgetfulness of her miseries and brought her into a happier state by sudden merriment? O what things, how many, could we set forth in mockery and jest, if the religion of our people and the authority of our writings did not forbid us!

I confess that I have long been hesitating, looking about, and shuffling, doubling the Tellenian tricks, as the saying is, while shame keeps me from bringing forward those Alimuntian mysteries in which Greece sets up phalluses in honor of Father Liber, and all the territories flourish with images of male members. What this is is perhaps obscure, and one asks for what reason it is done. Whoever of you does not know it, learn it, and, admiring such great things, guard it always in pure minds with fearful observance. When Liber, the Nysian and son of Semele, was still among men, they say, he desired to know the underworld and to inquire what went on under the seats of Tartarus; but this desire of his was hindered by some difficulties, because through ignorance of the route he did not know by what way to go and proceed. A certain Prosymnus appears, a shameful lover of the god and quite prone to wicked lusts, who promises to show him the door of Dis and the approaches to Acheron, if the god would comply with him and allow wifely pleasures to be taken from him. The god, easygoing, swears that he will be in his power and at his will, but only when he had returned from the underworld, having gained his wish and completed his expedition. Prosymnus courteously explains the way and sets him at the very threshold of the underworld. Meanwhile, while Liber surveys Styx, Cerberus, the Furies, and all the other things with curious inquiry, the guide departs from the number of the living and is buried in the human manner. Euius emerges from the underworld and learns that his guide is dead: and so that he might fulfill the terms of the pact and free himself from the religious obligation of his oath, he goes to the place of burial, cuts a very strong branch from a fig tree, hews, planes, and smooths it, and fashions it into the likeness of a human member; he fixes it on the mound of the tomb, and, stripped behind, approaches, lowers himself, and sits upon it. Then, taking on the wantonness of one in heat, he twists his buttocks this way and that, and pretends to suffer from the wood what he had long ago promised in reality.

And so that no one may think such impious things have been invented by us, we do not ask him to believe Heraclitus as a witness, nor do we want him to learn from his own reading what he thought about such mysteries: let him ask the whole of Greece what these phalluses mean which ancient custom sets up and venerates through the countryside and towns; he will find that the causes are those we state. Or if they are ashamed to explain the truth simply, what will it help to obscure and cover the cause and origin of the rite, when the very accusation lies in the religious act itself? What do you say, you Gentiles, you nations occupied and devoted to the veneration of temples? Is it to these rites that you drive us by flames, exiles, slaughter, and other kinds of punishment, and by fear of cruelty? Are these the gods you bring upon us, press upon us, force upon us, whom you would neither wish to be like yourselves, nor wish anyone joined to you by degree of blood and right of kinship to be like? Can you tell your beardless boys still in the purple-bordered toga what pacts Liber made with his lovers? Can you urge your daughters-in-law, indeed your own wives joined to you in marriage, to the modesty of Baubo and the chaste pleasures of Ceres? Do you want your young men to know, hear, and learn what sort of man Jupiter himself proved toward one mother and another? Do you want grown maidens and fathers still vigorous to learn by what art the same god sported with his daughter? Do you want sisters already passionate, and brothers from the same seed, to hear again that the same god did not spurn the bed of his sister? Must one not then flee far at once from such gods, and must all hearing be closed so that the obscenity of so impure a religion may not creep into the mind? For who among mortals is trained in such chaste character that the examples of the gods would not provoke him to such frenzies? Or who could restrain his desires from kin and persons to be revered, when he sees that among the gods above nothing holy is kept in the confusion of lusts? For when it is established that the first and perfect nature could not rein in its desire within just limits, why should man not pour himself into promiscuous cravings, thrown headlong by inborn frailty and helped by the teaching of the holy divinity?

I confess that I have long been accustomed, as I reflect in my mind on the monstrosities of such things, to wonder that you dare to call anyone an atheist, irreligious, or sacrilegious, among those who either deny or doubt that there are gods at all, or who maintain that they were human beings and were brought into the number of the gods because of some power and merit; when, if a true examination were made and held, no one would more fittingly be called by such names than you, who under the appearance of worship heap on them more slanders and charges than if you had done it openly, steeped in avowed abuse. He who doubts that there are gods, or denies altogether that they exist, though he may seem to follow monstrous opinions with boldness, still, without attacking any person, does not lend belief to obscure matters; and he who asserts that they were of earthly race, though he deprives them of the loftiness of heavenly beings, still heaps extra praises on them, since he maintains that they were raised to the merit of divinity by their benefits and the admiration of their virtues.

But you, who maintain that you are the defenders and champions of their immortality, have you passed over any one of them, left any unwounded by your slanders? Or is there any kind of disgrace, condemned by common judgment, that you have feared to bring upon them, or have been slowed down by at least the authority of their name? Who declared that the gods loved perishable and mortal bodies? Was it not you? That they committed those sweetest thefts in other men's marriage beds? Was it not you? That sons joined in ill-omened intercourse with their mothers, and fathers in turn with their own daughters? Was it not you? That handsome little boys and grown youths with the most beautiful features were sought after incestuously? Was it not you? Who said that they were castrated, debauched, shape-shifters, thieves, held in bonds and chains, finally attacked with thunderbolts, wounded, that they died and even received earthly burials? Was it not you? Since, then, so many and such great charges have been composed by you to insult the gods, do you dare to object that the minds of the deities are offended because of our name, when it has long been clear that you are guilty of such great anger and the authors of divine indignation?

'But you are wrong,' he says, 'and you slip, and you show by your very attack on these things that you are quite unskilled, uneducated, and boorish. For all these histories, which seem to you shameful and to tend to the dishonor of the divine, contain holy mysteries in themselves, wonderful and deep reasons, not such as anyone could easily discern by liveliness of wit. For what is written and placed on the surface of the words is not what is signified and meant; all those things are understood in allegorical senses and hidden meanings put underneath. So he who says that Jupiter lay with his mother does not mean incestuous or shameful embraces of Venus, but names Jupiter for rain and Ceres for the earth. And he who again declares that he practiced wantonness with his daughter says nothing of foul pleasures, but puts Jupiter for the name of rain and the daughter for the seed. So too he who says that Proserpina was carried off by Father Dis does not say, as you think, that the maiden was carried off for most shameful desires, but, because we hide seeds in the clods, means that the goddess went under the earth and made a pact with Orcus for fruitful increase. In the same way in the other histories too one thing is said and another understood, and under the common simplicity of speech lies a secret meaning and the wrapped-up depth of a mystery.'

All these are, as appears, subtleties and sharp points, with which it is customary to prop up bad cases in the courts; or rather, to speak more truly, the colors of sophistical disputes, by which not the truth but always an image, appearance, and shadow of truth is sought. For since it is shameful, unbecoming, and unseemly to accept the straightforward readings, the course has been taken of substituting one thing for another and forcing the interpretation of disgrace into an appearance of decency. But what is it to us whether other senses and other meanings lie beneath your writings? For it is enough for us, who maintain that the gods are treated wickedly and impiously by you, to accept what is written and what is heard, and not to care what is in the hidden part, since the insult to the deities is held not in the obscure intention of the meanings but in the signification of the prominent words. And yet, so that we may not seem unwilling to examine what sort of thing this is that is said, we ask you first, if you are willing to lend us patience: from where have you learned or been informed that these things were either written in an allegorical manner or must in the end be understood in that way? Did the writers call you into their counsel? Or were you hiding in their breasts at the time when they substituted some things for others, with the inner truth covered? Then, if they, for some reason and from religious fear, wanted to wrap those mysteries in dark obscurity, how bold of you to want to understand what they did not want understood, to know and lay open to the knowledge of all what they hid, in vain, with words that do not signify the truth!

But even if we agree with you that in all these fables hinds are spoken of instead of Iphigenias, how is it clear to you, when you want to explain or disclose these allegories, that you interpret and understand the same things that were felt by the historians themselves in their silent thoughts, and set out not by their proper words but by other meanings? You say that the union of Jupiter and Ceres means rain falling into the bosom of the earth: another may devise something else, more cleverly, and guess it with the likeness of truth; a third may devise something else, a fourth something else; and as the qualities of the imaginers' minds carry them, so each thing can be explained by infinite interpretations. For since all this so-called allegory is taken from hidden matters and has no certain limit in which the meaning of what is said is fixed and unmoved, each is free to draw the reading to whatever he wishes and to affirm that the meaning lies where his own suspicion and plausible conjecture has led him. Since this is so, how can you take certain things from doubtful ones, and attach a single meaning to a saying which you see drawn off in countless ways by the variety of expositions?

Finally, if you think it suitable, we ask you this also with a repeated question: do you think that all these fables, that is, each of them in its entirety, were written in a double-edged, two-tongued, shape-shifting way, or that some parts of them say nothing ambiguous and others are manifold and veiled with the overlay of an allegorical covering? For if the whole fabric and series of the exposition, from beginning to end, is enclosed in allegorical coverings, explain and show us what we ought to substitute for the individual things each fable speaks of, and bring forth and call into other things and meanings. For as you want us to understand Jupiter as rain, Ceres, for example, as the earth, and Libera and Father Dis as the sinking of seed and ..., so you must tell us what we ought to understand by the bull, what by the indignation and anger of Ceres, what the word Brimo means, what the supplication of anxious Jupiter, what the heavenly ones sent as envoys and not heard, what the castrated ram, what the offspring of the castrated ram, what the satisfaction made by these, what the things done again with more obscene lust with the daughter? Likewise in the other fable, what are the grove of Henna and the flowers, what the fire taken from Etna and the torches kindled with it, what the wandering through the world with these, what the Attic region, what the Eleusinian district, what Baubo's hut and rustic hospitality, what the drink of kykeon signifies, what the refusal of the drink, what the shaving and uncovering of the private parts, what the shameful sweetness of the spectacle and the forgetfulness of bereavement obtained by such remedies? If you show what ought to be substituted for all these by a change of things, we shall grant you assent to such an assertion; but if you can neither substitute one thing for each nor call the connection of the facts into another sense, why do you load with allegorical obscurities what is written simply and published for common understanding?

Unless perhaps you will say that these allegories are not in the whole body of the history, but that some parts are written in the common way and others veiled with a double and two-sided covering. That is a clever subtlety, but plain to any dullard. For since it is most difficult for you to transpose, invert, and divert everything that is written, you choose some things that suit your wish and strive to maintain from them that spurious and adulterated readings are laid over an inner truth. But even if we grant you that the matter is as you say, how do you know, or from where do you learn, which part of the history is written in simple meanings and which is covered by discordant and foreign significations? For it may happen that what you think is so is otherwise, and that what you believe is otherwise was put forth in other and contrary conceptions. For when it is said that in the body of one subject part is written allegorically and the other in undoubted and straightforward speech, and there is no sign in the matter by which the difference between the ambiguous and the simply spoken can be shown, what is simple may as well be thought to have been said ambiguously as what is written ambiguously may be believed to be free of coverings. In what way this is done or can be believed possible, we confess we cannot understand at all. For let us examine what is said in this way.