The Gods Were Men

I have gone through the opinions of almost all the philosophers. Their more shining claim to fame is that they pointed to one God, though under many names — so that a person might well think either that Christians are philosophers now, or that the philosophers were already Christians then. But if the world is governed by providence and directed by the will of one God, then the old ways of untrained people ought not to sweep us along into the mistake of agreeing with the crowd, however charmed and delighted those ways are with their own fables; not when they are refuted by the opinions of their own philosophers, who have the authority of reason and of age alike behind them. [a]

For our ancestors believed lies so easily that they rashly took other monstrous things for marvels as well: a Scylla of many parts, a Chimera of many shapes, a Hydra rising again out of wounds that only did it good, and Centaurs — horses tangled together with their riders. Whatever rumor was free to invent, they were perfectly willing to listen to. Why should I bring up those old wives’ tales about people changed from men into birds and beasts, and from men into trees and flowers? If such things had ever happened, they would happen again; and because they cannot happen now, they never happened at all.

It was the same with the gods. Our ancestors believed carelessly, credulously, with untrained simplicity. They gave their kings religious honor; they wanted to go on looking at them after death in some outward form; they were anxious to preserve their memory in statues — and so things taken up merely as consolation became sacred. And in those days, before the world was opened up by trade and before the nations confused one another’s rites and customs, each nation honored its own founder, or a famous leader, or a chaste queen braver than her sex, or the discoverer of some skill or craft, as a citizen worth remembering. In this way the dead man was given his reward, and those who came after were given an example.

Read the writings of the Stoics, or the writings of wise men, and you will admit these things along with me. Euhemerus says that men were counted gods for some merit of their virtue or for some gift they gave, and he lists their birthdays, their home countries and their burial places; province by province he points these things out — the Dictaean Jupiter, the Delphic Apollo, the Pharian Isis, the Eleusinian Ceres. Prodicus speaks of men taken up among the gods because, while people were still wandering, they were useful to them by discovering new kinds of food. Persaeus argues his way to the same conclusion, and adds that the crops that were discovered and the men who discovered them were called by the same names — which is how the comic poet’s line runs, that Venus goes cold without Bacchus and Ceres. Alexander the Great, the famous Macedonian, wrote in a remarkable letter to his mother that a priest, in fear of his power, had betrayed to him the secret that the gods had been men. In that letter he makes Vulcan the first of them all, and after him the family of Jupiter. [d]

And look at the swallow and the cymbal of Isis, and at the tomb of your Serapis, or Osiris, standing empty while his limbs are scattered about. Then consider the rites themselves and their very mysteries: you will find grim deaths, disasters and funerals, and the grief and wailing of wretched gods. Isis mourns and laments and searches for her lost son, with her Cynocephalus and her shaven priests; and her miserable devotees beat their breasts and act out the grief of that most unhappy mother. Then, by and by, when the little boy is found, Isis is glad, the priests celebrate, Cynocephalus who found him takes the credit — and year after year they never stop either losing what they find or finding what they lose. Is it not absurd either to mourn for what you worship, or to worship what you mourn for? And these used to be Egyptian rites; now they are Roman ones.

Ceres, with her torches lit and a serpent coiled about her, anxious and troubled, tracks the footprints of Proserpina, who was carried off, wandering and violated. These are the Eleusinian mysteries. And what are the rites of Jupiter? A she-goat is his nurse; as an infant he is snatched away from his greedy father so that he will not be swallowed; and a clanging din is beaten out of the cymbals of the Corybantes so that the father will not hear the baby crying. Cybele of Dindymus — I am ashamed to tell it — could not entice her adulterous lover into her bed, unhappily as he pleased her, because she herself, being the mother of many gods, was ugly and old; so she mutilated him, no doubt so that she might make a god out of a eunuch. Because of that story the Galli worship her too by punishing their own bodies with the same mutilation. These things are certainly not rites; they are tortures.

And the very shapes and appearances of the gods — do they not show how contemptible and disgraceful your gods are? Vulcan is a god who limps and is crippled. Apollo is still smooth-faced after all these ages. Aesculapius has a full beard, though he is the son of the forever-young Apollo. Neptune has sea-green eyes, Minerva grey-blue ones, Juno the eyes of an ox. Mercury has wings on his feet, Pan hooves, Saturn irons. Janus wears two faces, as though he might walk with his looks turned backward. Diana is sometimes a huntress with her robe hitched up high; as the Ephesian she has many breasts hanging full; and blown up as Trivia she is a horror with three heads and a crowd of hands.

And what is your Jupiter himself? In one statue he is set up beardless, in another bearded. Called Ammon he has horns; called Capitolinus he wields the thunderbolts; called Latiaris he is sprinkled with gore; called Feretrius he is not approached. Not to go through the whole crowd of Jupiters any further, Jupiter has as many monstrous shapes as he has names. Erigone was hanged from a noose, so that as a virgin she might glow among the stars. The Castors die by turns so that they may live. Aesculapius is struck with a thunderbolt in order to rise into a god. Hercules is burned up by the fires of Oeta in order to put off being human.

These fables and errors we learn from parents who know no better, and — what is more serious still — we work them up in our own studies and lessons, above all in the verses of the poets, who have done all they could to damage the truth by their authority. That is why Plato was right to expel from the state he had founded in his argument the famous Homer, whom he had praised and crowned. For it was Homer above all who, in the Trojan war, mixed your gods into the affairs and the doings of men, even while he made a joke of them. He matched them against one another in combat. He wounded Venus. He bound Mars, wounded him, and drove him off. He tells how Jupiter was set free by Briareus so that the rest of the gods could not tie him fast; how he wept showers of blood over his son Sarpedon, because he could not snatch him away from death; and how, drawn on by the girdle of Venus, he slept with his wife Juno more eagerly than he was in the habit of sleeping with his mistresses. [q]

Elsewhere Hercules shovels out dung, and Apollo is herding cattle for Admetus. Neptune builds walls for Laomedon, and the unlucky builder never received the wages for his work. Then Jupiter’s thunderbolt is hammered out on the anvil along with the arms of Aeneas — though there were sky and thunderbolts and lightning long before Jupiter was born in Crete; and the flames of the real thunderbolt were something the Cyclopes could never copy and Jupiter himself could not help fearing. Why should I speak of the adultery of Mars and Venus, caught in the act, or of the violence Jupiter did to Ganymede — an act consecrated, as you say, in heaven? All of it has been put forward with one aim: that a certain authority might be won for the vices of men. By fictions like these, and by lies of a still more attractive kind, the minds of boys are corrupted. The same fables cling to them as they grow up into the strength of full manhood, and the poor wretches grow old in the same beliefs — though the truth is plain, if only they will look for it.

For all the writers of old, Greek and Roman alike, have set down that Saturn, the beginner of this whole race and crowd, was a man. Nepos knows it, and Cassius in his history; Thallus and Diodorus say the same. This Saturn, then, driven out of Crete by fear of his raging son, had come to Italy. Janus took him in, and — being something of a Greek, and polished — he taught those untrained country people a great many things: how to stamp letters, for instance, how to strike coins, how to make tools. And so he chose that his hiding place should be called Latium, because he had lain safely hidden there; and he gave a city his own name, Saturnia, and Janus gave one the name Janiculum, so that each of them left his name behind for later generations to remember.

So it was certainly a man who fled, certainly a man who hid, the father of a man and sprung from a man. He was declared the son of Earth, or of Heaven, only because among the Italians nobody knew his parents — just as to this day we say that people who turn up unexpectedly were sent from heaven, and that people of no family and no name are sons of the soil. His son Jupiter reigned in Crete after his father was driven out. There he died; there he had sons. To this day the cave of Jupiter is visited, and his tomb is pointed out, and he is convicted of being human by those very rites of his.

There is no need to go through them one by one and unroll the whole line of that family, since mortality is proved in its first parents and must have run down into all the rest by the very law of their succession — unless perhaps you imagine that they became gods after they died. That is how Romulus became a god, by the perjury of Proculus; how Juba is a god, by the goodwill of the Mauritanians; and how other kings are divine, men consecrated not because anyone believes in their divinity, but in honor of the power they wielded. What is more, the title is fastened on men who do not want to bear it. They would rather go on being human. They are afraid of being made gods; they are old men already, and they still do not want it. [y]

So no gods are made out of dead people, since a god cannot die; and none out of people who are born, since everything that is born dies. What is divine is what has neither a rising nor a setting. For if they were born, why are none born today? Unless perhaps Jupiter has grown old, and childbearing has failed in Juno, and Minerva has gone grey before she ever bore any. Or has that whole business of begetting stopped for the reason that nobody agrees to fables of this kind any longer? Besides, if gods could be brought into being, they could not perish; and we would have more gods than there are men altogether, so that by now the sky could not hold them, nor the air take them in, nor the earth carry them. From this it is plain that they were men — the ones we read of as having been born, and know to have died.

Who then doubts that the common people pray to the consecrated images of these men and worship them in public? The belief and the mind of an untrained man is taken in by the perfection of the art, blinded by the glitter of gold, dimmed by the shine of silver and the whiteness of ivory. But if a man would set before his mind the tools and the machinery that go into forming each image, he would blush at having feared a lump of matter that a craftsman handled as he pleased in order to make a god. For a god of wood — some piece of a woodpile, perhaps, or of an unlucky log — is strung up, cut, chopped, planed. A god of bronze or of silver, often out of a filthy vessel, as the Egyptian king did it, is melted down, beaten with hammers, forged on anvils. A god of stone is cut and carved and polished by some worthless man — and feels no more of the injury done to it at its birth than it feels afterward the worship that flows from your reverence. Unless, of course, the stone or the wood or the silver is not a god yet.

So when does the god begin to exist? Look: it is melted, it is worked, it is carved — it is not a god yet. Look: it is soldered, it is built together, it is set up — and even now it is not a god. Look: it is decorated, it is consecrated, it is prayed to — and now at last it is a god, once a man has chosen it to be one and has dedicated it for the purpose.

How much more truly do dumb animals judge your gods, and by nature at that? Mice, swallows and kites know that the gods have no feeling: they gnaw them, they trample them, they perch on them; and unless you drive them off, they build their nests in your god’s very mouth. Spiders weave their webs across his face and hang their threads from his head. You wipe them, wash them, scrape them; you guard and fear the very things you make. And not one of you thinks that he ought to know God before he worships him. They would rather obey their ancestors without a thought; they would rather add themselves to somebody else’s error than trust their own judgment — knowing nothing at all about the thing they fear. So greed has been made holy in gold and silver; so the shapes of empty statues have been given their standing; so Roman superstition was born. [ac]

And if you think again about the rites of these gods, how much of it is laughable, and how much of it pitiful! Naked men run about in the raw cold of winter. Some walk in felt caps and carry old shields around, or beat drums, or lead their gods begging through the streets. Some shrines you are allowed to approach once a year; some you are forbidden to visit at all. There is one place where a man may not go, and there are others kept holy from women; and at some ceremonies it is a sin needing atonement for a slave even to be present. Some sacred places are garlanded by a woman who has had one husband, others by a woman who has had many — and the one who can count up the most adulteries is the one sought after with the most religious eagerness.

And the man who pours out his own blood as a drink offering and prays by way of his own wounds — would he not be better off with no religion at all than with religion like this? And the man whose genitals are cut off, how deeply he wrongs God by trying to win him over in this way! If God wanted eunuchs, he could bring them into the world as eunuchs; he would not have to make them so afterward. Who cannot see that people of unsound mind, weak and degraded in their understanding, are playing the fool in these things — and that the sheer number of those in error gives each of them cover from the rest? Here the defense of the general madness is the multitude of the madmen.