Exhortation to the Greeks 2.13

And it seems to me that the orgies and the mysteries should be explained by their derivation: the “orgies” (ὄργια) from the wrath (ὀργή) of Demeter against Zeus, and the “mysteries” (μυστήρια) from the pollution (μύσος) that took place in connection with Dionysus. And if they come from a certain Myous of Attica, who, Apollodorus says, was killed while hunting, I do not grudge you that: your mysteries have been glorified with the honors of a funeral. You may also understand them in another way, as “myth-hunts” (μυθήρια), since the letters correspond; for such myths, if anything does, hunt down the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most senseless of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks. Perish, then, whoever began this deceit among human beings: whether Dardanus, who introduced the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who founded the orgies and rites of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned the artful deceit from the Odrysian and then passed it on to his subjects. Nor would Cinyras, the Cypriot islander, ever persuade me, who dared to bring the lewd orgies of Aphrodite out of the night into the daylight, in his ambition to make a goddess of a harlot of his own city. Others say that Melampus son of Amythaon brought the festivals of Demeter, a grief celebrated in song, from Egypt to Greece. These I would call the authors of evil, the fathers of godless myths and of deadly superstition, who planted the mysteries in human life as a seed of wickedness and corruption.