The Mysteries Laid Bare

So stop prying into godless shrines, and into the mouths of chasms stuffed with freak-show wonders, and the Thesprotian cauldron, and the Cirrhaean tripod, and the bronze of Dodona. That ancient oak, honored in the middle of empty sand, and the oracle beside it that has withered away along with its tree — leave them to the fables they have grown old among. Castalia’s spring has fallen silent, and the other spring at Colophon, and in the same way the rest of the prophetic waters are dead. Late, but at last, they were shown up as empty of their own conceit, drained away together with the tales they carried. [a]

Go on and list for us the other kind of prophecy — madness, rather — and its useless oracles: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymean, the oracle of Amphiaraus, of Apollo, of Amphilochus. And if you like, strip the sign-readers and the bird-watchers and the interpreters of dreams of their holiness along with them. Fetch the flour-diviners and the barley-diviners and set them beside the Pythian priestess, along with the ventriloquists many people still hold in honor. And let the secret shrines of the Egyptians and the Etruscan calling-up of the dead be handed over to darkness. These are truly the madhouses of faithless men, their shops of clever nonsense, their gambling dens of undiluted error. Goats trained for divination are partners in this sorcery, and crows taught by men to deliver oracles to men.

And what if I go through the mysteries for you? I will not dance them out, the way they say Alcibiades did. I will strip bare, by the word of truth, the sorcery hidden inside them — and those so-called gods of yours, the ones whose secret rites these are, I will wheel out onto the stage of life for an audience of the truth.

The Bacchants hold their revels for the maddened Dionysus. They keep their holy frenzy by eating raw flesh; crowned with snakes, they carry through the parceling out of the butchered meat, howling “Euhan!” — that Eua through whom error came in behind. The token of the Bacchic rites is a consecrated snake. In fact, in the exact speech of the Hebrews, the name Hevia, said with the rough breathing, means “the female serpent.”

Demeter and Kore have already become a mystic drama, and Eleusis carries torches for their wandering, the seizure, and the grief.

It seems to me that the words “orgies” and “mysteries” ought to be traced back to their roots — the first from the wrath (orgē) Demeter felt against Zeus, the second from the pollution (mysos) that happened in the case of Dionysus. Or, if you prefer, from some Myus of Attica, who Apollodorus says was killed while hunting. I do not grudge it: your mysteries have been made glorious by the honor paid at a grave. You may also read the word another way, as mythēria, hunting-tales, by swapping the letters around; for if anything hunts men down, tales like these do — they hunt the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most senseless of the Phrygians, and the superstitious among the Greeks.

So let the man perish who first set this fraud loose among human beings — whether it was Dardanus, who introduced the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who established the rites and initiations of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who learned the trick from Odrysus and then passed the skilled fraud on to his subjects. As for Cinyras the Cypriot islander, he will never talk me round. He dared to bring the lewd rites of Aphrodite out of the night into the daylight, in his eagerness to make a goddess out of a prostitute from his own city. Others say it was Melampus the son of Amythaon who brought Demeter’s festivals over from Egypt into Greece — grief set to a hymn.

These are the men I would name as the first authors of evil, the fathers of godless myths and of deadly superstition, who planted in human life the seed of vice and ruin: the mysteries.

And now — it is time — I will expose these rites of yours as full of fraud and freak show. If you have been initiated, you will only laugh harder at these honored stories of yours. I will announce openly what has been kept hidden. I am not ashamed to say what you are not ashamed to worship.

Take first the “foam-born” and “Cyprus-born,” the darling of Cinyras — I mean Aphrodite, “lover of the members, because out of the members she appeared”: those members cut off from Uranus, those lustful things that did violence to the wave after the cutting. What a fitting fruit of lewd parts she is. In the rites of this sea-born pleasure, a lump of salt and a phallus are handed to those being initiated into the adulterer’s art, as proof of how she was born. And the initiates bring her a coin, the way lovers bring one to a prostitute.

The mysteries of Demeter are these: Zeus’s sexual coupling with his mother Demeter, and Demeter’s rage — after this I no longer know what to call her, mother or wife, which is the reason, they say, that she is called Brimo — and the pleadings of Zeus, and the drink of gall, and the tearing out of hearts, and acts not to be described. The Phrygians perform the same things for Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes. And the story they have worn out is that Zeus tore the testicles off a ram, carried them in, and threw them into Demeter’s lap, paying a counterfeit penalty for his violent coupling by pretending he had cut off his own.

The passwords of this initiation, set out here at leisure, will start you laughing, I know — even though you are in no mood to laugh, with the exposure going on: “I ate out of the drum. I drank out of the cymbal. I carried the kernos. I slipped in under the bridal canopy.” Are these tokens not an outrage? Are the mysteries not a joke?

And what if I add what is left? Demeter conceives; Kore is brought up; and then the one who fathered her — this same Zeus — has intercourse with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after having had the mother, Demeter, forgetting the earlier pollution. Zeus is both the father of the girl and her ruin. He coupled with her after turning himself into a snake, and was shown up for what he was. That, at any rate, is why the token of the Sabazian mysteries for initiates is “the god through the lap”: the snake, drawn through the clothing of those being initiated — proof of how little self-control Zeus had.

Pherephatta conceives too, a child in the shape of a bull. Sure enough, as some idol-making poet says:

meaning, I think, by “the herdsman’s goad,” the fennel rod the Bacchants wreathe.

Do you want me to go through Pherephatta’s flower-gathering as well, and the basket, and the seizure by Aidoneus, and the gaping open of the earth, and the pigs of Eubouleus that were swallowed up along with the two goddesses — which is why, at the Thesmophoria, they throw pigs down into the pits? The women celebrate this piece of storytelling in different ways from city to city: the Thesmophoria, the Skirophoria, the Arrhetophoria, staging the seizure of Pherephatta as tragedy in every possible shape.

The mysteries of Dionysus are altogether inhuman. He was still a child, and the Curetes were dancing round him in armor, when the Titans slipped in by a trick, distracted him with children’s toys, and — Titans that they were — tore him limb from limb while he was still an infant. As Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the Initiation, says:

And it will not be useless to set out the useless tokens of this rite, so that they get the condemnation they deserve: knucklebone, ball, spinning top, apples, bull-roarer, mirror, tuft of wool.

Now Athena, who had stolen away the heart of Dionysus, was called Pallas from the palpitating (pallein) of that heart. And the Titans, the ones who had torn him apart, set a cauldron on a tripod, threw the limbs of Dionysus into it, and boiled them down first; then they ran them onto spits and “held them over Hephaestus.” Zeus turned up later — if he was a god, presumably because he had caught a share of the savor of the roasting meat, the perquisite your gods agree is allotted to them — and mauled the Titans with his thunderbolt, and handed the limbs of Dionysus over to his son Apollo to be buried. And Apollo, since he did not disobey Zeus, carried the torn corpse to Parnassus and laid it down there.

And if you want to look further, into the rites of the Corybantes: those two killed their third brother, covered the dead man’s head with a purple cloak, wreathed it, and buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield down to the foothills of Olympus. That, in a word, is what the mysteries are — murders and burials. And the priests of these rites, whom the people whose business it is to name such things call Anaktotelestai, add one more marvel to the disaster: they forbid celery with its roots on to be set on the table, because they believe celery grew up out of the blood that ran from the Corybant. It is exactly like the women who keep the Thesmophoria, who take care not to eat pomegranate seeds that have fallen on the ground, thinking pomegranates sprang from the drops of Dionysus’s blood.

They call the Corybantes “Cabiri” as well, and announce the rite as the Cabiric mystery. For those two brother-killers took up the chest in which Dionysus’s genitals had been laid and carried it down into Etruria — merchants with a glorious cargo. And there they stayed as exiles, setting out the highly valued teaching of piety, a set of genitals and a chest, for the Etruscans to worship. Which is why some people are not unreasonable in wanting Dionysus called Attis: he had been stripped of his genitals.

And why be surprised that the Etruscans, who were foreigners, are initiated into shameful sufferings like these, when at Athens and in the rest of Greece — I am ashamed even to say it — the story about Demeter is full of disgrace?

Demeter, wandering in search of her daughter Kore near Eleusis, which is a place in Attica, wore herself out and sat down on a well, grieving. To this day that is forbidden to initiates, so that those who have been through the rite will not look as if they were imitating the mourning woman. The earth-born people were living at Eleusis at that time. Their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and besides them Eumolpus and Eubouleus. Triptolemus was a cowherd, Eumolpus a shepherd, Eubouleus a swineherd; from them came the line of the Eumolpidae and of the Heralds — that hierophant family that flourished at Athens.

Well then — I will not hold back from saying it — Baubo received Demeter as her guest and held out a cup of kykeon to her. Demeter refused it and would not drink, since she was in mourning. Baubo was badly stung, thinking she had been slighted, and so she pulled up her clothes and showed the goddess her genitals. And Demeter was delighted at the sight, and at last, with difficulty, took the drink — pleased, I say it again, at the show. These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians. Orpheus writes them down too. I will set Orpheus’s own lines in front of you, so that you have the mystery-guide himself as your witness to this shamelessness:

And this is the password of the Eleusinian mysteries: “I fasted. I drank the kykeon. I took from the chest; having done the work, I put it back into the basket, and out of the basket into the chest.”

Fine sights, and worthy of a goddess. Yes: rites like these deserve the night and the fire, and the “great-hearted” — empty-headed, rather — people of Erechtheus, and the rest of the Greeks besides, for whom “there awaits, when they have died, what they do not expect.” And who is it that Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesies against? “Night-roamers, magi, Bacchants, Lenaean revelers, initiates.” To them he threatens what comes after death; for them he prophesies the fire. “For what men count as mysteries, they are initiated into unholily.”

So the mysteries are custom and empty opinion, and a fraud of the serpent given religious observance, since with a bastard piety men are courting initiations that do not initiate and rites that are no rites at all.

And what are the mystic chests like? I have to strip their holy things bare and tell out what is unspeakable. Are they not sesame cakes, and pyramid cakes, and round cakes, and wafers studded all over with bosses, and lumps of salt, and a snake, the emblem of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, pomegranates and fig branches and fennel rods and ivy, and round cakes as well, and poppies? These are their holy things. And on top of that, the secret tokens of Earth-Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, a woman’s comb — which is, to say it decently and in mystic language, a woman’s private part.

What plain shamelessness. Long ago, for people with any self-control, night was a covering for pleasure, and kept silent. Now, for initiates, night is a trial run at losing control, and it does the talking; and the fire, carried in torches, exposes what they do. Put the fire out, hierophant. Torchbearer, have some respect for your torches. The light convicts your Iacchus. Let the night hide the mysteries; let the rites be honored with darkness. Fire does not play a part: it is under orders to expose and to punish.

These are the mysteries of the godless. And I am right to call them godless. They have no knowledge of the God who really is, and they worship a little boy being torn apart by Titans, and a wretched woman in mourning, and parts of the body that truly cannot be named for shame — and they worship them shamelessly. They are held fast in a double godlessness. The first is that they do not know God, since they do not recognize the God who really is. The second is this error: they take what does not exist for something that does, and they call gods the things that do not really exist — or rather, do not exist at all, and have got hold of nothing but the name. That is exactly why the apostle convicts us, saying, “And you were strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope, and godless in the world.”

Many good things to the king of the Scythians, whoever he was — Anacharsis. One of his own countrymen was copying the rite of the Mother of the gods as it is practiced among the people of Cyzicus: beating a drum, clashing a cymbal, with a begging priest’s gear hung around his neck. The king shot him down with an arrow, on the ground that the man had turned unmanly among the Greeks and was teaching the rest of the Scythians the woman’s disease.

And on that account — for it must not be covered up at all — I find myself amazed at how Euhemerus of Acragas and Nicanor of Cyprus, and Diagoras and Hippo, the two Melians, and that Cyrenean besides, whose name was Theodorus, and a good many others, all of them men who lived self-controlled lives and who saw the error about these gods more sharply than the rest of the world, came to be called atheists. Even if they never grasped the truth itself, they at least suspected the error — and that suspicion is no small seed; it grows into a live coal of good sense on the way to truth. One of them warns the Egyptians, “If you believe them to be gods, do not wail over them and do not beat your breasts; and if you mourn them, then stop treating them as gods.” Another one took a Heracles made of wood — he happened to be cooking something at home, as one does — and said, “Come on then, Heracles. Now is your moment to do this thirteenth labor for us, as you did the twelve for Eurystheus, and get Diagoras’s dinner ready.” And with that he put him on the fire like a log.

Godlessness and superstition, then, are the two extremes of ignorance, and we must work hard to stay clear of both. Do you not see Moses, the hierophant of truth, laying it down that no man crushed or cut may enter the assembly, and neither may the son of a prostitute? By the first two he hints at the godless character, robbed of the divine power that brings life; by the third and last he hints at the man who signs himself over to many falsely named gods in place of the one God who is — just as the son of a prostitute signs himself over to many fathers, in ignorance of his true one.

There was once an inborn, ancient fellowship between human beings and heaven. Ignorance darkened it, but now and then it leaps out of the darkness and blazes up — as in the line someone wrote:

And in these:

and whatever else the poets’ children sing.

But wrong ideas, bent away from the straight road, truly ruinous, turned man — heaven’s own plant — away from the heavenly way of living and stretched him out on the ground, talking him into clinging to earthen figures. Some were deceived at once by the sight of the sky. Trusting nothing but their eyes, they watched the stars moving, and were amazed, and made gods of them, naming the stars theoi from thein, “to run.” They worshipped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians do. Others picked the cultivated fruits that grow out of the ground and called the grain Demeter, as the Athenians do, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans do. Others watched what vice pays out, and made gods of the payments, worshipping disasters as well; and from that source the poets of the stage invented the Erinyes and the Eumenides, and the Blood-avengers, and the gods of suppliants, and the Avenging Spirits.

Some of the philosophers, coming after the poets, make idols out of the shapes of the passions inside you — Fear, Love, Joy, Hope — just as old Epimenides set up altars at Athens to Outrage and Shamelessness. Others start from events themselves, which are turned into gods for men and given bodies: a Justice, a Clotho, a Lachesis, an Atropos, a Destiny, and Auxo and Thallo, the Attic goddesses. There is a sixth way of introducing error and manufacturing gods, the way that counts up the twelve gods; Hesiod sings their birth in his own Theogony, and everything Homer says about the gods belongs here. One is left, since there are seven in all: the way that starts from the good God does for human beings. Not understanding that it is God who does them good, they invented saviors — the Dioscuri, and Heracles the warder-off of evil, and Asclepius the doctor.

These are the slippery, damaging departures from the truth. They drag man down out of heaven and tip him into the pit. I want to show you the gods themselves close up, what sort of thing they are and whether they are anything at all, so that you may finally stop wandering and run back to heaven. “For we too were once children of wrath, like the rest; but God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, when we were already dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” For the Word is living, and the one buried with Christ is lifted up with God. Those who are still unbelieving are called children of wrath, fed on wrath. But we are no longer wrath’s nurslings; we have been torn away from the error and are rushing toward the truth. So we who were once sons of lawlessness have now, through the Word’s love for us, become sons of God.

Your own poet, Empedocles of Acragas, slips in with a word for you too:

Most of what is told about the gods among you is made-up story. What is taken to have actually happened is on record about shameful men who lived without restraint:

This is what the Sibyl urges on us, prophet and poet at once. And the truth urges it too, stripping this crowd of gods of their startling, terrifying masks, and convicting the beliefs about them by way of the names they share.

Take this for a start. There are people who write down three Zeuses: the son of Aether in Arcadia, and two more, both sons of Kronos, one of them in Crete and the other, again, in Arcadia. There are others who set out five Athenas: the Athenian, daughter of Hephaestus; the Egyptian, daughter of Nilus; a third, the daughter of Kronos and the inventor of war; a fourth, the daughter of Zeus, whom the Messenians have named Coryphasia after her mother; and above them all the daughter of Pallas and of Titanis the daughter of Oceanus, who impiously sacrificed her father and then dressed herself in her father’s skin as if it were a fleece.

Aristotle, for his part, makes the first Apollo the son of Hephaestus and Athena — which means Athena is no virgin any longer — the second the Cretan, the son of Kyrbas, the third the son of Zeus, and the fourth the Arcadian, the son of Silenus, whom the Arcadians call Nomius. After these he lists the Libyan, the son of Ammon; and Didymus the grammarian adds a sixth to them, the son of Magnes. And how many Apollos are there now? Countless — mortal, perishable men, called by the same name as the ones already mentioned. And what if I listed for you the many Asclepiuses, or the Hermeses that get counted up, or the Hephaestuses out of the stories? Would I not look like a bore, flooding your ears with all these names?

But it is their native countries and their trades and their lives — and their graves above all — that convict them of having been men. Ares, for instance, honored by the poets as highly as could be:

this shifty and unbending fellow was a Spartan, according to Epicharmus; Sophocles knows him for a Thracian; others say he was an Arcadian. And Homer says he was tied up for thirteen months:

Good luck to the Carians, who sacrifice dogs to him. And may the Scythians never stop offering up asses, as Apollodorus and Callimachus tell us:

and the same poet elsewhere:

Hephaestus, whom Zeus threw out of Olympus “from the divine threshold,” fell on Lemnos and worked as a smith, crippled in both feet: “and his thin legs bustled beneath him.”

So you have a doctor among the gods, and not only a smith. And the doctor was greedy for money; Asclepius was his name. I will set your own poet in front of you, Pindar the Boeotian:

And Euripides:

So Asclepius lies thunderstruck within the borders of Cynosuris. Philochorus says that Poseidon was honored as a doctor on Tenos, and that Sicily lies on top of Kronos, and that he is buried there. Patrocles of Thurii and the younger Sophocles tell the story of the two Dioscuri in some tragedies of theirs. These Dioscuri were a pair of perishable men — if Homer is a good enough guarantee of what was said:

Let the man who wrote the Cyprian poems come forward as well:

That is a poet’s lie. Homer is more trustworthy than he is, since he spoke about both of the Dioscuri; and besides, Homer showed Heracles up as a phantom, calling him “the man Heracles, who knew great deeds.” So Homer himself knows Heracles as a mortal man. Hieronymus the philosopher goes further and describes how his body was put together: short, with bristling hair, powerfully built. Dicaearchus says he was spare, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, greyish-eyed, with straight hair. This Heracles, then, lived fifty-two years and came to his end, buried in the fire on Oeta.

As for the Muses, whom Alcman traces back to Zeus and Mnemosyne, and whom the rest of the poets and writers make gods of and worship — whole cities by now set museums aside as holy ground for them — Megaclo the daughter of Macar bought them: they were Mysian slave girls. Macar was king of the Lesbians and was always quarreling with his wife, and Megaclo was angry for her mother’s sake. Of course she was. So she buys these Mysian slave girls, as many of them as there are, and calls them Moisai, in the Aeolian dialect. She had them taught to sing the deeds of old and to play the lyre in tune. And by playing constantly and singing beautifully over him, they charmed Macar and put a stop to his temper. That is why Megaclo, in thanks for what they had done for her mother, set them up in bronze and gave orders that they be honored in every temple. So much for the Muses. The account is in Myrsilus of Lesbos.

Now then, listen to the love affairs of the gods you have, and the unbelievable tales of their lack of self-control — their wounds and their chains and their fits of laughter and their fights, their spells of slavery too, and their drinking parties, and their couplings and tears and sufferings and lewd pleasures.

Call Poseidon up for me, and the chorus of girls he ruined: Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and ten thousand more. Even with that many, your Poseidon’s passions were cramped for room.

Call Apollo up for me too. This is Phoebus, a pure prophet and a good counselor. But Sterope will not say so, and neither will Aethousa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle. Daphne alone escaped both the prophet and the ruin.

And last of all let Zeus himself come forward, the “father of men and gods,” as you have it. He spilled over so far into sex that he desired every woman there was and satisfied his desire on every one of them. At any rate, he stuffed himself with women no less than the Thmuis goat does with she-goats. And your poems, Homer, amaze me:

You make Zeus solemn, Homer, and you fasten an honored nod on him. But show him nothing more than a woman’s sash, sir, and Zeus is exposed and his hair is disgraced.

Look how far into shamelessness that Zeus of yours drove, spending all those nights of pleasure with Alcmene. Not even nine nights were long for a man with no self-control — a whole lifetime, on the contrary, was short for his appetite — and all so that he could sow for us the god who wards off evil.

Heracles, son of Zeus, truly Zeus’s son, was born out of that long night: the man who worked through the twelve labors with much hardship over a long stretch of time, and ruined the fifty daughters of Thestius in a single night, becoming at once the adulterer and the bridegroom of that many virgins. So the poets are not unreasonable in calling him “cruel” and “a doer of wicked deeds.” It would take a long time to go through his adulteries of every kind and his ruining of boys. Your gods did not keep away even from boys: one was in love with Hylas, another with Hyacinthus, another with Pelops, another with Chrysippus, another with Ganymede. Let your wives worship gods like these; let them pray that their own husbands turn out like them — that self-controlled — so that they can be like the gods by imitating the same things. Let your boys be trained to revere gods like these, so that when they grow into men they will have taken the gods as a plain picture of whoring.

But perhaps it is only the male gods who dart after sex.

says Homer — the goddesses being ashamed, out of a sense of dignity, to look at Aphrodite caught in adultery. Yet the goddesses run wild with even more feeling, bound fast in adultery: Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, a Nereid with Aeacus and Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion, Pherephatta with Adonis. And Aphrodite, disgraced with Ares, moved on to Cinyras, and married Anchises, and set a trap for Phaethon, and loved Adonis. She competed with the ox-eyed goddess; and the goddesses stripped for the sake of an apple and stood there naked in front of the shepherd, to see which of them he would judge beautiful.

Come, let us make a quick tour of the games as well, and do away with these grave-side festivals: the Isthmian and the Nemean and the Pythian, and on top of them the Olympian.

At Pytho the Pythian serpent is given worship, and the snake’s festival is announced under the name Pythia. At the Isthmus the sea spat out a pitiful piece of refuse, and the Isthmian games mourn Melicertes. At Nemea another little boy, Archemorus, was buried, and the child’s funeral is called the Nemean games. Pisa is a grave, men of Greece — the grave of a Phrygian charioteer — and Phidias’s Zeus takes over for himself the drink-offerings poured out for Pelops, which are the Olympic games. So the games, it seems, were mysteries, contests fought over dead men, and so were the oracles; and both of them went public. Only the mysteries at Agra and at Halimus in Attica stayed inside Athens.

But the contests and the phalluses got up for Dionysus are by now a scandal for the whole world; they have spread through life and fed on it badly. Dionysus was set on going down to Hades and did not know the road. A man named Prosymnus promises to tell him, and not for nothing. The fee was not a decent one, though it was decent to Dionysus: what he asked for as his fee was a sexual favor. The god was willing enough when the request was made, and promised to give it to him if he came back, confirming the promise with an oath. He learned the road and set off; then he came back again, and could not find Prosymnus, who had died. To discharge the obligation to his lover, Dionysus hurries to the tomb, itching to be used. So he cuts a fig branch, whatever came to hand, shapes it into the likeness of a man’s member, and sits down on the branch, keeping his promise to the dead man. As a mystic reminder of that experience, phalluses are set up for Dionysus city by city. “For if it were not Dionysus for whom they hold the procession and sing the hymn to the shameful parts, it would be the most shameless thing done,” says Heraclitus; “but Hades and Dionysus are the same, the one they rave for and keep the Lenaea for.” And it is not so much for the body’s drunkenness, in my opinion, as for the disgraceful ritual of their lewdness.

Naturally, then, gods of yours like these are slaves — they have become slaves of their passions. But even before the men called Helots among the Spartans, Apollo went under the yoke of slavery to Admetus at Pherae, and Heracles to Omphale at Sardis; Poseidon was a hired hand for Laomedon, and so was Apollo, like a useless household servant, since he could not even get his freedom out of his previous master. That is when the two of them built the walls of Ilium for the Phrygian.

And Homer is not ashamed to have Athena light the way for Odysseus, saying that she had “a golden lamp” in her hands. And we read of Aphrodite carrying a chair, like some loose little serving girl, and setting it down for Helen right in front of the adulterer, to lead her into bed with him.

Panyasis, on top of these, records a great many other gods who served men, writing something like this:

And so on.

It follows naturally that these amorous, passion-ridden gods of yours are brought on stage with human feelings in every respect. “For theirs too was mortal flesh.” Homer proves it, when he brings Aphrodite on very precisely, screaming sharp and loud over her wound, and when he describes Ares himself, the most warlike of them, gashed in the flank by Diomedes. Polemo says Athena was wounded by Ornytus. Homer says Aidoneus too was shot by Heracles, and Panyasis records that Helios was. This same Panyasis records that Hera, the goddess of marriage, was wounded by the same Heracles “in sandy Pylos.” And Sosibius says Heracles was wounded in the hand by the sons of Hippocoon.

And if there are wounds, there is blood. The ichor of the poets is more repulsive than blood, since ichor is understood to be blood gone rotten. So treatments and food have to be brought in for them, since they need them. That is why there are tables and drinking bouts and laughter and intercourse. They would not go in for any of it — not sex, not making children, not even sleeping — if they were deathless and needed nothing and never grew old.

Zeus himself shared a mortal table among the Ethiopians, and an inhuman, lawless one when he was entertained by Lycaon the Arcadian: he stuffed himself with human flesh, and did not mean to. The god did not know that Lycaon the Arcadian, his host, had cut his own son’s throat — Nyctimus was the boy’s name — and served him up as a dish for Zeus.

A fine Zeus this is: the prophet, the protector of guests, the answerer of suppliants, the gentle one, the giver of every omen, the one you turn to in need — or rather the unjust one, the lawless, the outlaw, the unholy, the inhuman, the violent, the ruiner, the adulterer, the lover.

But that was then, when he was that sort of thing, when he was a man. By now it seems to me that your stories have grown old on you. Zeus is not a snake any longer, nor a swan, nor an eagle, nor a man in love. The god does not fly, does not chase boys, does not kiss, does not force anyone — and yet even now there are plenty of beautiful women, better-looking than Leda, in fuller bloom than Semele, and boys of better appearance and better manners than the Phrygian cowherd. Where is that eagle now? Where is the swan? Where is Zeus himself? He has grown old along with his feathers — since he is surely not repenting of his love affairs, and is not being trained into self-control.

The story is stripped bare in front of you. Leda died; the swan died; the eagle died. Go looking for your Zeus. Do not go prying into heaven; pry into the earth. The Cretan will tell you about him — the man in whose country Zeus is actually buried. Callimachus, in his hymns:

For Zeus is dead — do not take it hard — just as Leda is dead, and the swan, and the eagle, and the man in love, and the snake.

By now even the superstitious themselves are plainly beginning to understand, however unwillingly, the error about the gods:

and a little later they will be found to be oaks and rocks after all.

Staphylus records that a certain Agamemnon is honored as a Zeus in Sparta. Phanocles, in his Loves, or Beautiful Boys, records that Agamemnon king of the Greeks set up a temple of Aphrodite Argynnis for Argynnus, the boy he loved. The Arcadians turn in prayer to an Artemis called the Hanged, as Callimachus says in his Causes; and another Artemis, Condylitis, is honored at Methymna. There is a shrine of yet another Artemis in Laconia, Artemis of the Gout, as Sosibius says. Polemo knows of a statue of Apollo Gaping, and of another Apollo honored in Elis, Apollo the Glutton. Out there the Eleans sacrifice to Zeus Averter of Flies; the Romans sacrifice to Heracles Averter of Flies, and to Fever, and to Fear, whom they also enroll among Heracles’ company. I say nothing of the Argives and the Spartans: the Argives give religious honor to Aphrodite the Grave-robber, and the Spartans revere Artemis the Cougher, since coughing is what they call chelyttein.

Do you suppose that the things I am setting before you have been smuggled in from somewhere? You do not seem even to recognize your own writers, whom I am calling as witnesses against your unbelief — poor wretches, who have filled your whole unlivable life with godless mockery.

Is there not a bald Zeus in Argos, and another Zeus, the Avenger, honored in Cyprus? Do the Argives not sacrifice to Aphrodite Peribaso, and the Athenians to Aphrodite the Courtesan, and the Syracusans to Aphrodite Kallipygos, whom the poet Nicander somewhere called “fine-buttocked”? I say nothing at all about Dionysus Choiropsalas. The people of Sicyon bow down to him, having appointed Dionysus over women’s private parts and revering as the overseer of shame the founder of outrage.

Such are the gods they have, and such are they themselves — playing among gods, or rather playing games with themselves and outraging themselves. And how much better are the Egyptians, who honor irrational animals village by village and city by city, than the Greeks who bow down to gods like these? The animals may be beasts, but at least they are not adulterous and not lecherous, and they hunt after no pleasure against nature. As for what sort of things these gods are, what more needs to be said, when they have been exposed enough already?

Still, the Egyptians I have just mentioned are scattered in their religion. The people of Syene worship the sea bream; those who live on Elephantine worship the maeotis, which is another fish; the people of Oxyrhynchus, likewise, worship a fish named after their own district. The people of Heracleopolis worship the ichneumon, those of Sais and Thebes a sheep, the people of Lycopolis a wolf, those of Cynopolis a dog, the Memphites Apis, the Mendesians a goat.

And you, who are better than the Egyptians in every way — I hesitate to say worse — you who never stop laughing at the Egyptians day after day: what are you like yourselves when it comes to irrational animals? Some of you, the Thessalians, have honored storks out of long habit, and the Thebans honor weasels, because of the birth of Heracles. And again, what about the Thessalians? They are reported to worship ants, since they have learned that Zeus took the likeness of an ant in order to have intercourse with Eurymedusa the daughter of Cletor, and fathered Myrmidon. Polemo records that the people who live around the Troad worship the local mice, which they call sminthoi, because the mice gnawed through their enemies’ bowstrings; and it is from those mice that they gave Apollo the title Sminthian. Heraclides, in his Foundings of Temples, says that in Acarnania, where the promontory of Actium is and the temple of Actian Apollo, they sacrifice an ox to the flies. And I will not forget the Samians: the Samians revere the sheep, as Euphorion says. Nor will I forget the Syrians who live in Phoenicia, some of whom revere doves and others fish, as extravagantly as the Eleans revere Zeus.

Very well. Since the ones you give religious honor to are not gods, it seems to me I ought to look next at whether they are really spirits, ranked in this second order, as you put it. Because if they are spirits, they are greedy and foul.

You can find local spirits out in the open, city by city, harvesting honors: Menedemus among the Cythnians, Callistagoras among the Tenians, Anius among the Delians, Astrabacus among the Spartans. At Phalerum a hero at the stern of a ship is honored; and the Pythian priestess arranged for the people of Plataea to sacrifice to Androcrates and Democrates and Cyclaeus and Leuco when the war with the Medes was at its height. Anyone who can look about him even a little can spot a great many other spirits:

Who are these guardians, man of Boeotia? Do not grudge us the answer. Or is it obvious that they are the ones we have mentioned, along with the more honored ones — the great spirits: Apollo, Artemis, Leto, Demeter, Kore, Pluto, Heracles, and Zeus himself?

But they are not guarding us from running away, man of Ascra. From sinning, perhaps — they who, of course, have never tried their own hand at sin! Here the proverb fits: “The father who took no correction corrects his son.”

And if these really are guardians, it is not out of any warm feeling toward us. They are set on your destruction, and they press in on your life the way flatterers do, baited by the smoke. The spirits themselves confess their greed somewhere, when they say:

What other voice would the gods of the Egyptians send out, if they were given a voice — cats and weasels — but the Homeric and poetic one, the voice that loves the smell of fat and good cooking? So these are the spirits you have, and the gods, and any half-gods, if there are any so called — the way a mule is called a half-ass. You certainly have no shortage of words for putting together your compounds of impiety.