Blood on the Altars

We have spoken about the gods themselves, the ones who are worshiped. Now we must say a few words about their sacrifices and their mysteries. Among the people of Cyprus, Teucer sacrificed a human victim to Jupiter and handed that sacrifice down to later generations; it was done away with only lately, by Hadrian, while he was emperor. Among the Tauri, a fierce and inhuman people, there was a law ordering that strangers be sacrificed to Diana, and the sacrifice was kept up for many ages. The Gauls used to appease Esus and Teutates with human blood. And the Latins were not free of this cruelty either, since Jupiter Latialis is worshiped with an offering of human blood even now. What good do the men who offer such sacrifices ask of the gods? Or what can gods like these give to men, when it is the punishment of men that wins them over? With barbarians this is not so surprising: their religion matches their character. But our own countrymen, who have always claimed for themselves the credit of gentleness and civilization — are they not found more inhuman than the barbarians by these sacrilegious rites? Men who have been polished by a liberal education and then turn aside from that refinement ought to be counted the more godless of the two; more godless, at any rate, than men who are ignorant and untaught and slide into evil practices because they do not know the good ones. [a]

And it is plain that this business of killing human victims is old, since Saturn was honored in Latium with a sacrifice of the same kind — not that a man was killed at the altar, but that he was thrown from the Milvian bridge into the Tiber. Varro reports that this was done on the authority of an oracle, and the last line of the oracle runs like this:

Because that appeared ambiguous, both a torch and a man are regularly thrown to him. But they say that sacrifices of this kind were stopped by Hercules when he came back from Spain, though the custom went on: instead of real men, figures made of rushes were thrown in. Ovid tells us so in the Fasti:

It is the Vestal virgins who make these offerings, as the same poet says:

As for the infants sacrificed to this same Saturn, on account of his hatred for Jupiter, I cannot find language for it. To think that men were so barbarous, so savage, that they gave the name of sacrifice to the killing of their own children — a filthy deed, one the human race ought to hold in horror. With no regard at all for a parent’s love they destroyed tender and innocent lives, at the age when children are dearest to their parents, and they outdid in brutality the savagery of every wild animal; for savage as the beasts are, they still love their young. Incurable madness! What more could those gods do to them if they were furious than they do now when they are pleased — when they stain their own worshipers with the murder of their kin, take their children from them, and strip them of every human feeling? What can be sacred to such men? Or what will they do in unhallowed places, when they commit the greatest crimes among the very altars of the gods? Pescennius Festus relates, in the books of his History in Satire, that the Carthaginians used to sacrifice human victims to Saturn. When they had been beaten by Agathocles, the king of the Sicilians, they supposed the god was angry with them; and so, to offer a more thorough atonement, they sacrificed two hundred sons of their nobility:

What good, then, did those men expect from that sacrifice, when they put to death a larger part of their own city than Agathocles had killed when he won?

Judging by sacrifices of this kind, the public rites must be counted signs of a madness just as great. Some are in honor of the mother of the gods, and in them men mutilate themselves. Others are in honor of Virtus, whom they also call Bellona, and in them the priests make their offerings not with another victim’s blood but with their own: they cut their shoulders, thrust out a drawn sword in each hand, and run, out of their minds, raving. So Quintilian says excellently in his Fanatic: “If a god compels this, he does it in anger.” Are even these things sacred? Is it not better to live like cattle than to worship gods so godless, so unholy, so bloody? But we will discuss at the proper place where these errors and these disgraceful deeds came from. In the meantime let us look at other rites as well, ones with no guilt in them, so that we do not seem to be picking out the worst parts because we want something to find fault with.

In Egypt there are rites in honor of Isis, for losing her little son, or else for finding him. First her priests, their bodies shaved smooth, beat their breasts and mourn, just as the goddess herself did when the child was lost. Afterwards the boy is brought out as though he had been found, and the mourning is turned into joy. That is why Lucan says, “And Osiris, never sought for enough.” For they are always losing him and always finding him. So in the rites there is an acting out of something that really happened; and it declares plainly enough, if we have any sense at all, that she was a mortal woman, and would have been left almost desolate if she had not found one person. The poet himself did not miss this. He has the young Pompey say, on hearing of his father’s death:

This Osiris is the same one the people call Serapis. For it is the custom that the names of dead men who are made gods should be changed, so that nobody — I suppose this is the reason — will imagine that they were men. Romulus after his death became Quirinus; Leda became Nemesis, and Circe Marica; Ino, when she had leapt into the sea, was called Leucothea, and among us Mother Matuta; and her son Melicertes was called Palaemon and Portunus. The rites of Eleusinian Ceres are not unlike these. As in the ones just mentioned the boy Osiris is looked for with his mother’s wailing, so in these Proserpine is carried off to an incestuous marriage with her uncle; and because Ceres is said to have searched for her through Sicily with torches lit at the top of Etna, her rites are performed with the throwing of torches.

At Lampsacus the victim offered to Priapus is a donkey, and the reason this animal is sacrificed is set out in the Fasti. When all the gods had come together at the festival of the Great Mother, and, full of feasting, were passing the night in play, they say that Vesta lay down on the ground to rest and fell asleep; that Priapus formed a design against her honor while she slept; but that she was woken by the ill-timed braying of the donkey Silenus used to ride, and the plotter’s plan came to nothing. That, they say, is why the people of Lampsacus used to sacrifice a donkey to Priapus, as if in revenge, while among the Romans the same animal was crowned with loaves at the Vestalia, in honor of her chastity being saved. What is uglier, what more disgraceful, than that Vesta should owe the saving of her purity to a donkey? But the poet invented the story. Was the other account any truer, the one told by the men who wrote the Phaenomena, when they speak about the two stars in Cancer that the Greeks call the Donkeys? That they were donkeys who carried father Liber across a river he could not cross; that he rewarded one of them with the power of speaking in a human voice; that a contest then arose between that donkey and Priapus; and that Priapus, beaten in the contest, was enraged and killed the winner. This is far more absurd still. But poets have a license to say whatever they like. I do not meddle with a mystery as foul as this, and I will not strip Priapus of his covering, in case something laughable is brought to light. It is true that the poets invented these fictions — but they must have been invented in order to hide some worse depravity. Let us ask what it is. In fact it is obvious. A bull is sacrificed to the Moon because he has horns as she does; and, as the poet says of another sacrifice, “Persia appeases Hyperion ringed with rays with a horse, so that no slow victim is offered to the swift god”; so in this case no more fitting victim could be found than the one that resembled the god it was offered to.

At Lindus, which is a town of Rhodes, there are rites in honor of Hercules, and the way they are kept differs widely from every other rite. They are not carried out with words of good omen, as the Greeks call it, but with abuse and cursing; and they count it a violation of the rites if at any point in the ceremony a good word escapes anyone, even by accident. This is the reason given for the practice — if there can be any reason in things utterly senseless. When Hercules had come to the place and was suffering from hunger, he saw a plowman at work and began asking him to sell one of his oxen. The plowman answered that this was impossible, because his whole hope of working the land depended on those two bullocks. Hercules, with his usual violence, killed them both, since he could not get one. And the poor man, when he saw his oxen slaughtered, avenged the injury with abuse — which gave that man of elegance and refinement great pleasure. While he was preparing a feast for his companions and devouring another man’s oxen, he took the bitter reproaches thrown at him with ridicule and loud laughter. But when it was decided that divine honors should be paid to Hercules, in admiration of his excellence, the citizens set up an altar to him, and he named it, from what had happened, the Yoke of Oxen. At that altar two yoked oxen were sacrificed, like the ones he had taken from the plowman. And he appointed that same man to be his priest, and ordered him always to use the same abuse when he offered the sacrifice, because, he said, he had never feasted more pleasantly. Now these are not sacred rites but sacrilege, in which the very thing is prescribed which, done anywhere else, is punished with the greatest severity.

And what do the rites of the Cretan Jupiter himself show, except the way he was taken from his father, or the way he was brought up? There is a goat belonging to the nymph Amalthea, which suckled the infant; and Germanicus Caesar speaks of this goat in his poem translated from Aratus:

Musaeus relates that Jupiter, when he was fighting against the Titans, used the hide of this goat as a shield, and that this is why the poets call him shield-bearer. So whatever was done in hiding the boy is also acted out in the rites. And the mystery of his mother contains the same story, which Ovid sets out in the Fasti:

Sallust rejected this account altogether, as something the poets had invented, and wanted to give a clever explanation of the reasons why the Curetes are said to have nourished Jupiter. His point was this: because they were the first to understand the worship of the deity, antiquity — which exaggerates everything — made them famous as the nurses of Jupiter. How badly this learned man was mistaken, the matter itself declares at once. For if Jupiter holds the first place both among the gods and in religious rites, and no gods were worshiped by men before him, because the ones who are worshiped had not yet been born, then it appears that the Curetes were on the contrary the first who did not understand the worship of the deity — since all the error came in through them, and the memory of the true God was taken away. They ought therefore to have understood, from the mysteries and ceremonies themselves, that they were offering prayers to dead men. I do not, then, require anyone to believe the fictions of the poets. If someone thinks the poets are lying, let him look at the writings of the pontiffs themselves, and weigh whatever literature there is that has to do with sacred rites. He will perhaps find more than we bring forward, and from it he may understand that everything held to be sacred is empty, hollow, and made up. But anyone who has found wisdom and laid his error aside will certainly laugh at the follies of men who are all but out of their minds: I mean the men who dance with indecent gestures, or run naked, oiled and crowned with garlands, either wearing a mask or smeared with mud. And what shall I say about shields now rotten with age? When they carry them, they think they are carrying the gods themselves on their shoulders. Furius Bibaculus is reckoned among the leading examples of piety, because although he was praetor he still carried the sacred shield, with the lictors walking before him, even though his office as praetor exempted him from that duty. So he was not Furius but plainly furious, thinking that he did his praetorship credit by that service. And so Lucretius exclaims, and deservedly, since these things are done by men who are neither unskilled nor ignorant:

Who that has any sense would not laugh at these mockeries, when he sees men doing in earnest, as though they had lost their reason, the very things that would make anyone who did them in fun look far too full of sport and folly?