Gods Made Out of Men

Because of all this the Stoics form a different idea of the gods; and since they cannot see where the truth lies, they try to fit the gods into the workings of nature. Cicero followed them, and this is the account he gave of the gods and their worship: “Do you see how an argument drawn from real and useful discoveries about the natural world was carried across into gods that are false and made up? That is what bred mistaken beliefs, and confused errors, and superstitions fit for old women. We know the gods’ shapes, their ages, their clothes and their ornaments; we know their families, their marriages, all their relationships — the whole of it brought down to the level of human weakness.” What could be said more plainly, or more truly? The leading man of Roman philosophy, who also held its most honored priesthood, refutes the false and invented gods and testifies that their worship consists of little more than old women’s superstitions. He complains that men are tangled up in mistaken beliefs and confused errors. His whole third book on the nature of the gods pulls down and destroys the whole of religion. So what more is expected of us? Can we outdo Cicero in eloquence? Not at all. What he lacked was confidence, because he did not know the truth — as he admits himself in the same work. He says he can more easily state what is not true than what is; that is, he knows the accepted system is false, but he does not know the truth. It is plain, then, that the ones taken for gods were men, and that their memory was consecrated after their death. That is also why each of them is given a particular age and a fixed likeness: their images were shaped in the dress and at the age at which death caught them. [a]

Let us look, if you like, at the hardships these unlucky gods went through. Isis lost her son. Ceres lost her daughter. Latona was driven out and chased across the earth, and barely found a small island where she could give birth. The mother of the gods fell in love with a beautiful young man, and then, when she caught him with a prostitute, she cut him; and that is why her rites are performed to this day by the Galli as her priests. Juno hunted down her rivals with a fury, because she could not conceive a child by her own brother. Varro writes that the island of Samos used to be called Parthenia, because Juno grew up there and was married there to Jupiter. And so there is a very famous and very old temple of hers on Samos, with an image dressed as a bride, and her yearly rites are celebrated as a wedding. If, then, she grew up; if she was first a girl and afterward a woman — anyone who does not understand that she was a human being admits that he himself is an animal. Why should I even speak of the lewdness of Venus, who served the lusts of everyone, gods and men alike? From her disgraceful affair with Mars she bore Harmonia; from Mercury, Hermaphroditus, who was born of both sexes; from Jupiter, Cupid; from Anchises, Aeneas; from Butes, Eryx. By Adonis she could bring forth no child at all, because he was gored by a boar and killed while he was still a boy. She was also the first to set up the trade of the courtesan, as the sacred history records, and she taught the women of Cyprus to make money by prostitution. Her reason for ordering it was this: that she alone should not look unchaste, a woman chasing men, among all the rest. Has she too any claim on religious worship — a goddess with more adulteries on record than childbirths?

But not even the virgins people celebrate were able to keep their chastity untouched. Where are we to suppose Erichthonius came from? From the earth, as the poets would have it? The thing itself cries out otherwise. When Vulcan had made weapons for the gods, Jupiter gave him his choice of any reward he liked, and swore, as he was accustomed to swear, by the lake of the underworld, that he would refuse him nothing he asked. Then the lame smith demanded Minerva in marriage. Great and excellent Jupiter, bound by so heavy an oath, could not refuse; but he advised Minerva to resist and defend her chastity. Then, in that struggle, they say Vulcan spilled his seed on the ground, and Erichthonius was born from it, and that his name came from eris and chthon, that is, from the struggle and the ground. Why, then, did she, a virgin, hand that boy over, shut up with a serpent and sealed, to the three virgin daughters of Cecrops? An obvious case of unchastity, I think, and one that cannot be glossed over. Another of them nearly lost the young man she loved, torn to pieces by his own maddened horses, and she called in Aesculapius, the finest of physicians, to treat him. And when he had been healed:

What is the meaning of care so careful and so anxious? Why the hidden home? Why the banishment — so far off, and to a woman, and into solitude? Why, next, the change of name? And last of all, why so settled a hatred of horses? What do all these things imply, except the awareness of disgrace, and a love not at all becoming to a virgin? There was clearly a reason why she took on so much trouble for a young man so loyal — one who had refused to give in to his stepmother’s love.

Here too we must answer those who not only admit that gods have been made out of men, but even boast of it as something to their credit — whether for courage, like Hercules, or for gifts given, like Ceres and Liber, or for the arts they discovered, like Aesculapius or Minerva. I will show from particular cases how foolish all this is, and how unworthy to be the reason men stain themselves with guilt that cannot be washed off and make themselves enemies of God, despising him while they take up offerings to the dead. They say it is virtue that raises a man to heaven — not the virtue philosophers argue about, which consists in the goods of the soul, but the kind tied to the body, which is called bravery. And since Hercules had it above everyone, they believe he earned immortality by it. Who is so stupidly senseless as to judge bodily strength a divine good, or even a human one, when it has been given in greater measure to cattle, is often ruined by a single illness, and is worn down by old age itself until it fails altogether? So Hercules, when he saw that his muscles were disfigured by open sores, wanted neither to be healed nor to grow old, in case he should ever look less strong or less handsome than he had once been. They supposed that he climbed into heaven from the pyre on which he burned himself alive; and the very qualities they so foolishly admired they put into statues and images and consecrated, so that they might stand forever as monuments to the folly of people who had believed that gods owed their origin to the killing of animals. But this, perhaps, is the fault of the Greeks, who always made the greatest matters out of the most trifling ones. What about our own countrymen? Are they any wiser? They think nothing of bravery in an athlete, because it does no harm; but in a king, where it causes disasters on a huge scale, they admire it so much that they imagine brave and warlike generals are admitted to the council of the gods, and that there is no other road to immortality than to lead armies, lay waste other people’s land, destroy cities, tear down towns, and put free peoples to death or into slavery. The more men they have knocked down, robbed, and slaughtered, the more noble and distinguished they think themselves; and caught by the show of empty glory, they give their crimes the name of virtue. I would rather they made themselves gods out of the killing of wild animals than approve an immortality so stained with blood. [j]

If a man has killed one single man, he is treated as polluted and wicked, and they do not think it right for him to be let into this earthly house of the gods. But the man who has butchered countless thousands, flooded the plains with blood, and fouled the rivers, is admitted not only to the temple but even to heaven. In Ennius, Africanus speaks like this: “If anyone at all is allowed to climb to the regions of the gods above, for me alone the great gate of heaven stands open.” Because, of course, he had wiped out and destroyed a great part of the human race. What deep darkness you were in, Africanus — or rather you, poet — to imagine that the way up to heaven lies open to men through massacre and bloodshed! And Cicero went along with the delusion: “It is true, Africanus; the same gate stood open for Hercules.” As though he himself had been the doorkeeper of heaven at the time it happened.

I honestly cannot decide whether to think it a matter for grief or for laughter, when I see serious, learned men — wise, at least in their own eyes — tossed about in such wretched waves of error. If this is the virtue that makes us immortal, I for my part would rather die than be the cause of death to as many people as possible. If immortality can be had in no other way than by bloodshed, what will happen if everyone agrees to live in harmony? And that could certainly come about, if men would throw away their destructive and godless madness and live in innocence and justice. Will no one, then, be worthy of heaven? Will virtue die out, because men are not to be allowed to rage against their fellow men? But the people who count the overthrow of cities and nations the greatest glory will not put up with public quiet. They will plunder and rage, and by inflicting outrageous injuries they will break up the bond that holds human society together, so that they may have an enemy to destroy — with worse wickedness than the wickedness they used in attacking him.

Now let us move on to what is left. It was the giving of benefits that got Ceres and Liber the name of gods. I am able to prove from the sacred writings that grain and wine were used by men before the children of Coelus and Saturn. But let us suppose these two did bring them in. Can it seem a greater thing to have gathered grain, crushed it, and taught men to make bread — or to have pressed grapes picked from the vine and made wine — than to have produced grain itself and the vine itself and brought them out of the earth? God may indeed have left these things to be drawn out by human ingenuity; even so, everything must belong to him, who gave man both the wisdom to discover and the very things that could be discovered. The arts too are said to have won immortality for their inventors: medicine for Aesculapius, the smith’s craft for Vulcan. Then let us worship the men who taught the fuller’s trade and the shoemaker’s as well. But why is no honor paid to the man who discovered the potter’s art? Is it that those rich men look down on Samian dishes? There are other arts besides, whose inventors greatly improved human life. Why have no temples been assigned to them either? But of course it was Minerva who discovered them all, and that is why workmen say their prayers to her. That, then, was the dirt out of which Minerva climbed to heaven. Is there really any reason why anyone should leave the worship of him who laid the warp of the earth with its living creatures and of the heaven with its stars, and worship instead the goddess who taught men to set up the woof? And what rank does the man hold who taught how wounds in the body are healed? Can he be more excellent than the one who formed the body itself, and the power of sensation, and life? And did he, after all, devise the herbs themselves and bring them to light, and the other things the healing art is made of?

But someone will say that this supreme Being, who made all things, and those others who conferred particular benefits on men, are each entitled to their own worship. To begin with, it has never once happened that a worshipper of these was also a worshipper of God. It cannot possibly happen. For if the honor paid to him is shared out with others, he stops being worshipped altogether, since his religion requires us to hold that he is the one and only God. The great poet cries out that all those who refined human life by inventing the arts are down among the dead, and that even the man who discovered that medicine and that art was himself hurled down by a lightning bolt to the waters of the Styx — so that we may understand how great the power of the Almighty Father is, who can put out even gods with his lightning. But clever men perhaps reasoned it out to themselves like this: since God cannot be struck by lightning, plainly the thing never happened. On the contrary — because it did happen, plainly the man in question was a man and not a god. The poets’ falsehood does not lie in the deed, but in the name. They were afraid of trouble if they admitted the truth against what everybody believed. But if this much is agreed among themselves, that gods were made out of men, then why do they not believe the poets when those same poets describe the gods’ exiles and wounds, their deaths, their wars, their adulteries? From all of which it may be understood that they could not possibly have become gods, since they were not even good men, and while they were alive they did the things that bring on everlasting death. [q]