The Refutation of All Heresies

The Druids and Hesiod

The Druids and Pythagoras

The Celtic Druids also pursued the Pythagorean philosophy to its very heights, after Zalmoxis, a Thracian by birth and a servant of Pythagoras, became the founder of this training among them. For after the death of Pythagoras, Zalmoxis traveled there and became the founder of this philosophy among them.

The Celts regard these men as prophets and seers, because they foretell certain events for them from calculations and numbers by the Pythagorean art. We will not keep silent about the methods of that art either, since some have presumed to build heresies out of them as well. The Druids also resort to magical rites.

Hesiod and the Muses

But Hesiod the poet says that he too heard about nature in this way from the Muses, and that the Muses are the daughters of Zeus. For when Zeus, in the excess of his desire, had lain with Mnemosyne for nine nights and days together without a break, Mnemosyne conceived in one womb those nine Muses, becoming pregnant with one on each night. Then, summoning the nine Muses from Pieria — that is, from Olympus — he begged to be taught:

How first the gods and the earth came to be,

and the rivers, and the boundless deep, and the surge of the sea,

and the glittering stars, and the wide heaven above;

how they took the crown and shared out the glory,

and how at first they held Olympus of the many valleys.

Tell me these things, Muses, he says,

from the beginning, and which of them first came to be.

Chaos, no doubt, came first of all; but next

wide-stretching Earth, the ever-secure seat of all

the immortals who hold the peaks of white Olympus;

and windy Tartarus in a recess of the wide earth;

and Love, most beautiful of the immortal gods,

who drives care away from all gods and all men

and overpowers the mind and the prudent counsel in their breasts.

But from Chaos came Erebus and gloomy Night;

and from Night in turn both Air and Day were born;

but Earth, the first, bore one equal to herself,

starry Heaven, to veil her round on every side,

to be forever a secure seat for the blessed gods.

And she brought forth the towering hills, the pleasant haunts

of the nymphs who live throughout the wooded heights.

She also bore the barren Sea with its raging swell,

apart from sweet Love; but next,

lying with Heaven, she bore Ocean with his deep eddies,

and Coeus, and Crius, and Hyperion, and Iapetus,

and Theia, and Rhea, and Themis, and Mnemosyne,

and gold-crowned Phoebe, and lovely Tethys.

But after these was born, last of all, crafty Cronus,

fiercest of her sons; and he hated his vigorous father;

and she bore the Cyclopes in turn, whose hearts were savage.

Hesiod goes on to list all the rest of the giants descended from Cronus, and somewhere afterward says that Zeus was born of Rhea. All of these men, then, made the statements above in their teaching about both the nature and the origin of the universe. But every one of them fell short of what is divine, and busied himself with the substance of the things that exist. They were astonished at the sheer size of creation, and supposed that these things themselves were the divine, each thinker preferring for himself a different part of the world; but they failed to recognize the God who made these things.

So I consider that we have now given a sufficient account of the opinions of those among the Greeks who have attempted to construct systems of philosophy. It is from these that the heretics have taken their cue, trying to establish the doctrines that will be set out shortly. It seems best, however, first to explain the mystery rites, and whatever imaginary teachings some have laboriously constructed about the stars or about magnitudes, and to lay those out; for the heretics take their cue from these as well, and so are thought by most people to be uttering marvels. After that we will expose the feeble opinions these men advance.