Exhortation to the Greeks 2.22

These rites, then, are worthy of night and fire, and of the “great-hearted,” or rather empty-headed, people of the Erechtheids, and of the other Greeks too, “for whom there wait, when they die, things they do not expect.” Against whom does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? “Night-roamers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaean women, initiates”: these he threatens with what comes after death, to these he prophesies the fire; “for the mysteries that are customary among men are celebrated in an unholy way.” The mysteries, then, are mere custom and empty opinion, and a deceit of the serpent that is worshiped, when people turn with a counterfeit piety to initiations that are really no initiations and rites that are no rites. And what are the mystic chests like? For I must strip bare their holy things and speak out what is not to be spoken. Are they not sesame cakes, pyramids, balls of wool, cakes with many knobs, lumps of salt, and a serpent, the sacred emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, pomegranates, fig branches, fennel stalks, ivy, and also round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things. And further, the secret emblems of Themis, the Earth: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, and a woman's comb, which is, to put it euphemistically and in the language of the mysteries, a woman's private part. What open shamelessness! Once night was a silent veil for the pleasures of the self-controlled; now for the initiates night is a much-talked-of trial of incontinence, and the fire, carried in torches, exposes their passions. Put out the fire, hierophant; torchbearer, have some respect for the torches; the light exposes your Iacchus. Let night hide the mysteries; let the orgies be honored in darkness. The fire does not play a part; it is ordered to convict and to punish.