Blood on Your Own Altars

Look, now, at the reward we are supposed to get for these monstrous crimes: they promise eternal life. Hold that belief for a moment as if it were your own. Then let me ask you whether, believing it, you think eternal life worth having at the price of the conscience you would then be carrying. Come — drive your knife into the baby. He is nobody’s enemy, nobody’s defendant, everybody’s child. Or if that is somebody else’s job, then simply take your place beside a human being who is dying before he has really lived, wait for the soul so lately given to leave, catch the fresh young blood, soak your bread in it, and eat your fill. Meanwhile, as you lie at table, take note of where your mother is sitting and where your sister is. Mark the places well, so that when the dogs have brought the darkness down on you, you make no mistake — because you will be guilty of a crime unless you commit incest. Initiated and sealed into things like these, you have life that never ends. Tell me, please: is eternity worth it? And if it is not, then none of this deserves to be believed. [a]

Even supposing you had the belief, I say you would not have the will; and even supposing you had the will, I say you could not do it. Why, then, can other people do it, if you cannot? And why cannot you, if others can? I suppose we must be a different kind of creature — dog-heads, perhaps, or shadow-feet. You are a human being yourself, exactly as the Christian is. If you cannot do such a thing, you have no business believing it of anyone else, for a Christian is a human being just as you are.

But the ignorant, we are told, are taken in and imposed upon. They had no idea, it seems, that anything of the kind was charged against Christians, or they would certainly have looked into it for themselves and searched the matter out. Yet when a man wants to be initiated into sacred rites, the custom, I believe, is to go first of all to the master of them, so that he can explain what has to be got ready. In this case, then, he would no doubt say: “You will need a child, still small, who does not know what dying is and who can smile under your knife. Bread, too, to catch the running blood. Besides these, lampstands and lamps, and dogs, with scraps to draw them on until the lights go out. And above all, you must bring your mother and your sister with you.”

But what if the mother and the sister will not come? Or what if there is neither the one nor the other? What about Christians who have no Christian relatives? A man will not count as a true follower of Christ, I suppose, unless he has a brother or a son. And what if all this is waiting for them without their knowing it? At any rate they find out afterwards — and they put up with it, and pardon it. They are afraid, someone will say, of paying for it if they let the secret out. But in that case they would have every claim to protection instead; one would think they would even rather die by their own hand than go on living under the weight of such knowledge. Grant that they are afraid. Why, then, do they stay? For it is plain enough that you would have no wish to go on being what you would never have become in the first place, if you had known beforehand what it was.

To refute these charges more thoroughly, I will show that practices go on among you — some openly, some in secret — which are very likely what made you ready to believe such things about us. Children were sacrificed to Saturn in Africa quite openly, right down to the proconsulship of Tiberius, who hung the priests themselves on the sacred trees that shaded their own temple and left them there for everyone to see: so many crosses on which their crimes met the punishment justice was demanding. The soldiers of our own province can still testify to it; they carried out that very work for that proconsul. And even now the same sacred crime is committed in secret. So it is not only Christians who hold you in contempt. For all your effort, no crime is ever stamped out thoroughly and for good, and not one of your gods ever mends his ways. Saturn did not spare his own children; he was hardly likely to spare anyone else’s. And other people’s children were handed over by the parents themselves, who came gladly when the call was made and kept the little ones amused so that they would not die crying. All the same, there is a vast difference between killing a man and killing your own child. [d]

In Gaul it was people of riper years who were sacrificed to Mercury. The Tauric tales I hand over to the theaters they belong to. But in that most religious city of the devout descendants of Aeneas there is a certain Jupiter whom they wash with human blood at their games. “It is only a beast-fighter’s blood,” you say. Is it any less a man’s blood for that? Or is it cheaper blood because it comes out of a criminal’s veins? At any rate it is blood shed in murder. What a Christian Jupiter you have — and what a true son of his father’s cruelty!

As for the killing of children — since it makes no difference whether it is done for a sacred purpose or simply because a man feels like it, though, as I said, there is a great difference between killing your own child and killing anyone else — I will turn to the public at large. How many, do you think, of the crowd standing around and gaping for Christian blood, how many even of your own magistrates, so noted for their fairness to you and their severity toward us, could I charge in their own consciences with putting their own children to death? If there is any difference in the manner of the killing, it is certainly crueler to kill by drowning, or by leaving a child out to the cold and hunger and the dogs. An older person has always preferred the sword. For us, murder having been forbidden once and for all, it is not lawful even to destroy what is conceived in the womb, while the blood is still being drawn from elsewhere in the body to feed it. Preventing a birth is only a quicker way of killing a person, and it makes no difference whether you take away a life already born or destroy one that is on its way to birth. What is going to be a man is a man already; the whole fruit is there in the seed.

As to meals of blood and dishes out of a tragedy — read (I am not sure where it is told; in Herodotus, I think) how blood taken from the arms and tasted by both sides has been the bond of a treaty among certain peoples. I am not sure what it was that was tasted in Catiline’s day. They say too that among some Scythian peoples the dead are eaten by their own friends. But I am going a long way from home. Here and now, among ourselves, blood consecrated to Bellona — blood drawn from a gash in the thigh and then drunk — seals a person’s initiation into that goddess’s rites. And those who at the gladiator shows, to cure their epilepsy, gulp down with greedy thirst the blood of criminals killed in the arena while it still runs fresh from the wound, and then hurry away — whose people are they? And those who dine on the flesh of wild beasts at the place of the fighting, with such an appetite for bear and stag? That bear was drenched in the struggle with the blood of the man it tore apart; that stag rolled itself in a gladiator’s gore. The very bowels of the bears are in great demand, still loaded with human innards not yet digested. So you have men belching up flesh that has been fed on men. If that is what you eat, how do your dinners differ from the ones you accuse Christians of? And do those who fasten on human bodies with savage appetite do anything less because they devour the living? Are they less stained with human blood because they only lap up what is going to turn into blood? Plainly they dine not so much on infants as on grown men.

Blush for your habits in front of Christians, who do not have even the blood of animals at their plain and natural meals, and who keep away from things strangled and things that die of themselves for this reason only: that they may not be defiled even by the blood that has settled in the organs. To settle the matter with a single example: you tempt Christians with blood sausages, precisely because you know perfectly well that the very thing you are using to make them break their rule is a thing they hold unlawful. And how unreasonable it is to believe that people you are convinced would shudder at tasting the blood of an ox are greedy for the blood of men — unless perhaps you have tried it yourselves and found it tastier. In fact, here is a test you might use for detecting Christians, alongside the fire-pan and the incense box. They ought to be proved by their appetite for human blood as much as by their refusal to sacrifice, and equally they ought to be cleared of Christianity by refusing to taste blood, as much as by sacrificing. And there would be no shortage of human blood, with the ample supply your trials and executions of prisoners provide.

Then who are more given to incest than people who have had Jupiter himself for a teacher? Ctesias tells us that the Persians sleep with their mothers. The Macedonians are under suspicion on the same point: the first time they heard the tragedy of Oedipus, they made fun of the incest-doer’s grief and shouted, “Go on — drive at your mother!”

And even now, think what room there is for the mistakes that end in incestuous couplings, with your own indiscriminate looseness supplying the material. First of all you expose your children, for any kindhearted passer-by to pick up — a man who is a complete stranger to them. Or you give them away to be adopted by people who will do better by them as parents than you would. Sooner or later all memory of the children you handed over is bound to be lost; and once the first mistake has been made, incest goes on being passed down, the family and the crime spreading together. Then, besides that, wherever you are — at home, abroad, across the seas — your lust goes along with you, and whether it is indulged widely or on the smallest scale it can easily father children anywhere without your knowing; so that a family scattered about in the ordinary traffic of life may end up sleeping with its own kin and never suspect that there is any incest in it.

A steady and persistent chastity has protected us from anything of the sort. Keeping as we do from adultery and from every unfaithfulness after marriage, we are in no danger of incest by accident. Some of us make matters safer still and beat away the whole power of that sin by a virgin self-control — old men who in this one respect are still boys. If you would only notice that the sins I have named go on among you, that would show you they have no existence among Christians. The same pair of eyes would tell you both facts. But the two kinds of blindness tend to go together, so that people who do not see what is there think they see what is not. I will show it to be so all the way through. But now let me speak of matters that are plainer still.

“You do not worship the gods,” you say, “and you do not offer sacrifices for the emperors.” Well, we do not offer sacrifice for others for the same reason that we do not offer it for ourselves: your gods are simply not the objects of our worship. And so we are accused of sacrilege and of treason. That is the chief charge against us — in fact it is the whole sum of our offending — and it deserves to be looked into, provided that the judge is neither prejudice nor injustice, the one of which has no idea how to find the truth and the other of which rejects it out of hand. [k]

We do not worship your gods because we know there are no such beings. So this is what you ought to do: call on us to prove that they do not exist, and so prove that they have no claim on anyone’s worship. Only if your gods really were gods would there be any obligation to pay them divine honors — and Christians would even deserve punishment, if it were made plain that the beings they refuse to worship are indeed divine.

But you say, “They are gods.” We protest, and we appeal from you to your own knowledge. Let that be our judge; let that condemn us, if it can deny that all these gods of yours were once men. And if it does dare to deny it, it will be refuted out of its own books of antiquities, which gave it its information about them in the first place and which testify plainly to this day — naming the cities where they were born, the countries where they left the marks of their exploits, and the places where they are shown to have been buried.

Shall I go over them now one by one, then, so many of them and so various — new and old, barbarian, Greek, Roman, foreign; captured and adopted; private and public; male and female; country and town; naval and military? It would be useless even to hunt out all their names, so I may content myself with a summary — and not to inform you, but to bring back to your memory what you already know, since you certainly behave as though you had forgotten all about it.

None of your gods is older than Saturn; from him you trace all your deities, even the higher and better known ones. So whatever can be proved of the first will hold for those who come after. As far as books give us information, then, neither the Greek Diodorus nor Thallus, neither Cassius Severus nor Cornelius Nepos, nor any other writer on sacred antiquities, has ever ventured to say that Saturn was anything but a man. As far as the question rests on facts, I find none more trustworthy than these: that Italy itself is the country where Saturn settled after many expeditions and after enjoying Attic hospitality, welcomed warmly by Janus — or Janis, as the Salian priests will have it. The hill he lived on was called Saturnius; the town he founded is called Saturnia to this day; and finally the whole of Italy, which had borne the name Oenotria, was called Saturnia after him. He was the one who first gave you the art of writing and a stamped coinage, and that is why he presides over the public treasury.

But if Saturn was a man, he undoubtedly had a human origin; and having a human origin, he was not the offspring of heaven and earth. Since his parents were unknown, it was natural enough that he should be spoken of as the son of those elements from which all of us might seem to spring. For who does not call heaven and earth father and mother, by way of a sort of respect and honor? Or there is the habit we have of saying that people we know nothing about, or who turn up out of nowhere, have fallen from the sky. That is how it came about that Saturn, everywhere a sudden and unlooked-for guest, was everywhere given the name of the Heaven-born. Ordinary people, after all, call a man whose family is unknown a son of earth.

I say nothing of how men in those rough times used to behave, struck by the look of any stranger who happened to appear among them as though it were something divine — when even today men of education make gods out of people whom a day or two before they were acknowledging to be dead by their public mourning for them. Let these notices of Saturn, brief as they are, be enough. They will prove at the same time that Jupiter is as certainly a man as he is a man’s son, and that one after another the whole swarm is as mortal as the stock it came from.