Exhortation 1

CLEMENT THE STROMATIST: EXHORTATION TO THE GREEKS. Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both singers, and both belong to legend (and this song is still sung even now in the chorus of the Greeks); by the art of music the one lured a fish, and the other walled in Thebes.

And yet another, a Thracian sage (this too is a Greek legend), tamed the wild beasts by his bare song, and even transplanted trees, the oaks, by his music.

I could tell you yet another legend and singer akin to these: Eunomus the Locrian and the Pythian cicada.

A Greek festival was being held at Pytho over a dead serpent, while Eunomus sang the dirge for the reptile.

Whether the song was a hymn or a lament for the snake, I cannot say.

There was a contest, and Eunomus was playing the cithara in the heat of the day, at the hour when the cicadas were singing under the leaves up in the mountains, warmed by the sun.

They were singing, you see, not to the dead serpent, the Pythian one, but to the all-wise God an autonomous song, better than the laws of Eunomus.

A cicada flies onto the lyre's frame;

it began to chirp on the instrument as though on a branch;

and the singer, attuning himself to the cicada's song, supplied the missing string.

So it is not by Eunomus's song that the cicada is drawn, as the legend would have it—the legend that set up Eunomus in bronze at Pytho with his very cithara, together with the Locrian's fellow contestant;

the cicada flies of its own accord, and sings of its own accord.

But the Greeks thought it had become a contestant in music.

How then have you come to believe empty legends, supposing that living creatures are charmed by music? But Truth's bright countenance alone, it seems, appears to you to be counterfeit, and has fallen under the eyes of unbelief.

And so Cithaeron and Helicon and the mountains of the Odrysians and the Thracians' shrines of initiation—the mysteries of error—have been deified and hymned.

As for me, even if these are but legends, I am indignant at so many calamities dramatized in tragedy;

but for you the very records of evils have become dramas, and the actors of those dramas a spectacle for your delight.

But come, let us shut up the dramas and the poets who play the Lenaean reveler—now utterly drunk—crowning them somewhere with ivy as they rave wildly in Bacchic rite, together with the satyrs themselves and the maddened troop, along with the rest of the chorus of demons, let us confine them in aged Helicon and Cithaeron; and let us bring down from above, out of the heavens, Truth together with most radiant Wisdom, to the holy mountain of God and the holy prophetic chorus.

And let her, shining out as a light most far-seen, illumine on every side those who are wallowing in darkness, and deliver mankind from error, stretching out her supreme right hand—understanding—unto salvation;

and let those who look up and lift their heads forsake Helicon and Cithaeron, and dwell in Zion;

for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem—the heavenly Word, the true champion crowned in the theater of the whole world.

And this my Eunomus sings, not the air of Terpander nor of Cepion, nor indeed the Phrygian or Lydian or Dorian mode, but the eternal melody of the new harmony, that which bears the name of God, the new song, the Levitical—soothing of grief, free of wrath, bringing forgetfulness of all evils;

a sweet and true medicine of persuasion is blended into the song.

Being possessed by demons unto destruction, celebrating outrages, deifying griefs, they were the first to lead men by the hand to the idols—yes, indeed, to stones and wood, that is, to images and shadow-paintings—and to build up the awkwardness of their custom, having yoked under utter slavery, by songs and incantations, that truly noble freedom of those who dwell as citizens under heaven.

But not such is my singer, nor has he come to dissolve before long the bitter slavery of the tyrannizing demons; rather, transferring us to the gentle and benevolent yoke of true godliness, he calls us back again to heaven, us who had been cast down to earth.

He alone, of all who ever were, tamed the most intractable beasts—men: the flighty ones as birds, the deceivers as reptiles, the hot-tempered as lions, the pleasure-lovers as swine, the rapacious as wolves.

And the senseless are stones and wood;

indeed, a man baptized in ignorance is more insensible than stones.

Let the prophetic voice come forward as a witness for us, in concord with truth, pitying those worn down in ignorance and folly;

for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.

He, taking pity on the great ignorance and hardness of heart of those petrified against the truth, raised up out of those stones—out of the nations who had put their faith in stones—a seed of godliness sensible of virtue.

Again, then, He has somewhere called venomous and treacherous hypocrites who set ambushes for righteousness a brood of vipers;

but even of these snakes, if any willingly repent and follow the Word, he becomes a man of God.

And He allegorically calls others wolves clothed in sheep's fleeces, hinting at the rapacious in human form.

And all these most savage beasts, then, and such stones, the heavenly song itself transformed into gentle men.

For we too were once—yes, we too were once—foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to pleasures and manifold lusts, passing our lives in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another, as the apostolic writing says;

but when the kindness and benevolence of God our Savior appeared, not by works done in righteousness which we ourselves had done, but according to His mercy He saved us.

Behold how great the strength of the new song!

It has made men out of stones, and men out of beasts.

And those otherwise dead, who had no share in the life that truly is, became merely listeners of the song, and came back to life.

This same Word, too, set the whole universe in tuneful order, and strained the discord of the elements into the array of harmony, that thus the entire cosmos might become for Him a harmony.

And He let the sea loose at liberty, yet hindered it from treading upon the land; and the land, in turn, that drifts He made firm, and fixed it as a boundary of the sea;

yea, indeed, He softened the onrush of fire with air, as though blending Dorian harmony with Lydian;

and He tamed the harsh coldness of the air by interweaving fire with it, thus blending tunefully these lowest notes of the universe.

And so this pure song, the support of the universe and the harmony of all things, stretched from the center to the extremes and from the heights to the center, brought this whole into accord—not according to Thracian music, like that of Jubal, but according to the ancestral will of God, which David emulated.

But He who is of David and before him, the Word of God, disdaining lyre and cithara, those lifeless instruments, and having attuned by the Holy Spirit this cosmos and indeed also the little cosmos, man—both his soul and his body—makes music to God through the many-voiced instrument, and sings in accompaniment to the instrument, namely man.

"...so that you may breathe in," He says, "and may contain the Lord."

Yes indeed, David the king, the cithara-player, whom we mentioned a little before, was exhorting toward the truth and turning men away from idols; far indeed was he from hymning the demons, who were driven away by the true music that came from him—the music by which, when Saul was demon-possessed, that man healed him merely by singing.

A beautiful living instrument the Lord wrought in man, after His own image;

and assuredly He Himself too is the all-harmonious instrument of God, tuneful and holy, the supramundane Wisdom, the heavenly Word.

What, then, does this instrument, the Word of God, the Lord, and the new song will? To open the eyes of the blind and to unstop the ears of the deaf, and to lead by the hand those lame of foot or wandering into righteousness, to reveal God to senseless men, to make an end of corruption, to conquer death, to reconcile disobedient sons to the Father.

Benevolent is the instrument of God!

The Lord has mercy, instructs, exhorts, admonishes, saves, guards, and as the reward of our learning promises us out of His abundance the kingdom of heaven, enjoying of us this one thing only—that we are saved.

For evil feeds upon the destruction of men, but truth, like the bee that injures none of the things that are, rejoices over the salvation of men alone.

You have, then, the promise; you have the benevolence.

And do not so suppose my saving song to be new in the sense that a vessel or a house is new;

for it was before the morning star, and in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Error is old, but truth appears new.

Whether, then, mythical she-goats teach that the Phrygians are ancient, or again the poets who record the Arcadians as pre-lunar, or yet again the Egyptians who dream that this land was the first to bring forth both gods and men—

but not one even of these was before this cosmos; rather, before the foundation of the cosmos were we, who for the necessity of our coming to be in it were begotten beforehand to God—we, the rational creatures of the Word of God, on whose account we lay claim to antiquity, because in the beginning was the Word. But that the Word was from above, the divine beginning of all things, He both was and is;

but that now there has received a name—the name long since consecrated, worthy of power—the Christ: He has been named by me "a new song."

The Word, therefore, the Christ, is the cause both of our being of old (for He was in God) and of our well-being (for now He has appeared to men)—this very Word, who alone is both, God and man, the cause to us of all good things;

from whom, being thoroughly taught how to live well, we are sent forward unto eternal life.

For according to that divinely inspired apostle of the Lord, the saving grace of God has appeared to all men, instructing us, that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in the present age, awaiting the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ. This is the new song, the appearing that now has shone forth among us of the Word who was in the beginning and pre-existed;

the pre-existent Savior has appeared of late; He who is in Him who Is has appeared, because the Word was with God, the teacher has appeared; the Word by whom all things were created has appeared;

and having in the beginning, together with our fashioning, granted life as Creator, He taught us, when He appeared as teacher, how to live well, that afterward, as God, He might bestow life everlasting.

And He did not now for the first time take pity on us in our error, but from above, from the beginning; yet now, when we were already perishing, He appeared and saved us through and through.

For the wicked, creeping beast, working its sorcery, still even now enslaves and torments men—as it seems to me, punishing them barbarously, men who are said to be bound together with dead bodies, until they rot away together with them;

and having bound them fast to images and certain such idols by the wretched bond of superstition, this very thing that is spoken of, he buried them, alive, with himself, until they too perish together.

For which reason (since the deceiver is one—he who of old brought down Eve, and now already the rest of mankind as well, into death), one likewise is He who is our succor and helper, the Lord, foretelling from the beginning prophetically, and now already calling us plainly unto salvation.

Let us flee, then, persuaded by the apostolic charge, the ruler of the authority of the air, of the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience, and let us run to the Savior, the Lord, who both now and ever exhorted us unto salvation—through wonders and signs in Egypt, in the wilderness both through the bush and through the cloud that followed by His benevolent grace as a handmaid for the Hebrews.

By this fear, indeed, He exhorted the hard-hearted;

but already through all-wise Moses and truth-loving Isaiah and the whole prophetic chorus, He turns more rationally toward the Word those who possess ears.

And there is a place where He reproaches, and another where He even threatens;

and some of mankind He even bewails;

and to others He sings, just as a good physician of ailing bodies treats some with poultices, smooths down others, douches others, divides others even with the knife, cauterizes still others, and there is a case where he even amputates, if by any means it be possible for the man to be made whole, even at the cost of a part or a limb.

Many-voiced indeed is the Savior, and of many turns, for the salvation of men;

by threatening He admonishes, by reproaching He turns them about, by lamenting He shows mercy, by playing music He comforts; through the bush He speaks (those men needed signs and wonders), and by the fire He terrifies men, kindling the flame out of the pillar, a token at once of grace and of fear:

if you obey, the light; if you disobey, the fire.

And since flesh is more honorable than pillar and bush, the prophets after those things speak forth—the Lord Himself speaking in Isaiah, He Himself in Elijah, He Himself in the mouth of the prophets;

but you—if you do not believe the prophets, and take both the men and the fire to be legend—the Lord Himself shall speak to you, He who, being in the form of God, counted it not a thing to be grasped to be equal with God;

but He emptied Himself, the compassionate God, longing to save man;

and now the Word Himself plainly speaks to you, shaming your unbelief—yes, I say, the Word of God, who became man, that you too might learn from a man how, after all, a man may become God.

Is it not, then, absurd, my friends, that God should always be exhorting us to virtue, while we shrink back from the benefit and put off our salvation? For does not John also call us to salvation, and become wholly a voice of exhortation? Let us, then, inquire of him:

"Who are you, and from where, among men?" Elijah, he will not say; the Christ, he will deny being;

but he will confess himself to be a voice crying in the wilderness.

Who, then, is John? To take it figuratively, let it be permitted to say: the exhorting voice of the Word, crying in the wilderness.

What do you cry, O voice? Tell us also. "Make straight the ways of the Lord."

John is a forerunner, and the voice is the forerunner of the Word—a voice of exhortation, preparing beforehand unto salvation, a voice exhorting unto the inheritance of heaven;

through which the barren and desolate woman is no longer childless.

This childbearing was foretold to me by an angel's voice;

that voice too was a forerunner of the Lord, bringing good news to a barren woman, as John did to the wilderness.

Through this voice of the Word, therefore, the barren woman is blessed with fair children, and the wilderness bears fruit;

the two forerunning voices of the Lord—of the angel and of John—signify to me the salvation laid up in store, so that, this Word having appeared, we may carry off the fruit of fair offspring, life everlasting.

At any rate, the Scripture, bringing both voices into one, makes the whole matter clear:

"Let her break forth into a cry, she who does not travail, for more are the children of the desolate than of her who has a husband." To us an angel brought good news, John exhorted us to discern the husbandman, to seek the husband.

For one and the same is this man—the husband of the barren woman, the husbandman of the wilderness—who filled with divine power both the barren woman and the wilderness.

For since the children of the noble woman were many, while the Hebrew woman, of old prolific, was childless through disobedience, the barren woman receives the husband and the wilderness the husbandman;

then the one becomes mother of fruits, the other of believers, but both are mothers through the Word;

while for the unbelievers, even still now, there remain both the barren woman and the wilderness.

John, the herald of the Word, in some such way exhorted men to become ready for the coming of God the Christ; and this was what the silence of Zacharias hinted at, awaiting the fruit that is forerunner of the Christ, that the light of truth, the Word, might loose the mystical silence of the prophetic riddles, becoming the gospel.

But you, if you long to see God as He truly is, partake of purifications befitting God—not of laurel leaves and certain fillets adorned with wool and purple, but, having bound on righteousness and put round about you the leaves of self-control, seek diligently after Christ;

"for I am the door," He says somewhere;

which it is necessary for those who wish to understand God to learn thoroughly, that He may throw open for us all at once the gates of the heavens;

for the gates of the Word are rational, opened by the key of faith;

"no one has known God except the Son, and he to whom the Son may reveal Him." And I well know that He who opens the door, which was hitherto shut, afterward reveals the things within, and shows what it was not even possible to know before, except for those who have journeyed through Christ, through whom alone God is beheld.

Do not, then, busy yourselves with godless sanctuaries, nor with the mouths of pits full of marvel-mongering, nor with the Thesprotian cauldron, nor the Cirrhaean tripod, nor the Dodonaean bronze;

and leave the aged oak honored amid desert sands, and the oracle there, withered along with the very oak itself, to legends grown old.

Silent, at any rate, is the spring of Castalia, and the other spring at Colophon, and likewise the other prophetic streams have died; and indeed, though late, yet at last empty of their vanity they have been refuted, flowing away together with their own legends.

Recount to us also, of the rest of the divination—or rather the lunacy—the useless oracular shrines: the Clarian, the Pythian, the Didymaean, that of Amphiaraus, the Apollo, that of Amphilochus; and, if you wish, summon also the prodigy-watchers and the bird-augurs and the interpreters of dreams along with them; and set up together beside the Pythian, bringing the flour-diviners and the barley-diviners, and those who are still honored among the many, the belly-prophets;

yes indeed, let the sanctuaries of the Egyptians and the necromancies of the Etruscans be handed over to darkness.

These are truly the sophistries of faithless men and the gaming-houses of unmixed error;

fellow-travelers of this sorcery are the she-goats trained for divination, and the ravens taught by men to give oracles to men.

But what if I should recount to you the mysteries? I will not dance them out, as they say Alcibiades did, but I will lay bare full well, in accordance with the word of truth, the sorcery concealed in them, and these very gods of yours, whose rites are mystic, I will wheel round, as upon the stage of life, before the spectators of truth.

The Bacchae celebrate the raving Dionysus with the eating of raw flesh, conducting the sacred frenzy, and they perform the distribution of the flesh of the slaughtered, crowned with serpents, shrieking out "Euan!"—that Eua through whom error came in our train;

and the token of the Bacchic rites is a consecrated serpent.

Indeed, by the rough breathing the word is interpreted "hua," the female serpent.

Deo and Kore (Demeter and Persephone) have already become a mystic drama, and Eleusis with its torches celebrates their wandering, their rape, and their grief.

And it seems to me that one ought to derive the etymology of the orgia (rites) and the mysteria (mysteries): the former from the wrath (orge) of Deo which arose against Zeus, the latter from the pollution (mysos) that befell concerning Dionysus;

but even if from a certain Attic Myus, whom Apollodorus says perished in a hunt, there is no grudge:

your mysteries have been glorified by honor paid at a tomb.

It is possible for you also, in another way, to understand the "mysteries" as "myth-stories" (mythēria), by the corresponding interchange of the letters;

for they hunt—if any others do—then assuredly these myths of this kind also hunt the most barbarous of the Thracians, the most senseless of the Phrygians, the superstitious among the Greeks.

May he perish, then, who first began this deception among men—whether Dardanus, who instituted the mysteries of the Mother of the gods, or Eetion, who established the rites and initiations of the Samothracians, or that Phrygian Midas, who, having learned from Odrysus, then handed on to his subjects the artful deception.

For the Cypriot islander Cinyras could never persuade me—he who dared to hand over from night into day the lustful rites concerning Aphrodite, ambitious to deify a harlot of his own city.

Others say that Melampus the son of Amythaon brought over from Egypt to Hellas the festivals of Deo, the grief that is hymned.

These men I, for my part, would call the originators of evil, fathers of godless myths and of deadly superstition, who planted in human life the mysteries as a seed of vice and corruption.

But now—for indeed it is time—I will expose your very rites, full of deception and marvel-mongering.

And if you have been initiated, you will laugh all the more at these myths of yours that are honored.

I speak openly of things hidden, not being ashamed to tell what you are not ashamed to worship.

The foam-born and Cyprus-born goddess, dear to Cinyras (I mean Aphrodite, the genital-loving one, because she sprang from the genitals—those genitals of Uranus that were cut off, the lustful ones, which after the severance were tossed by the wave)—how worthy a fruit of lewd members Aphrodite proves to be: in the rites of this sea-born pleasure, a lump of salt and a phallus, as a token of her birth, is handed to those being initiated into the art of adultery;

and those being initiated bring her coin, as lovers do to a courtesan.

The mysteries of Deo, and the amorous embraces of Zeus with his mother Demeter, and the wrath (I do not know what else to call her henceforth, mother or wife) of Deo—on whose account she is said to have been called Brimo—and supplications to Zeus, and the draught of gall, and the tearings-out of hearts, and unspeakable obscenities:

these same things the Phrygians perform to Attis and Cybele and the Corybantes.

And they have spread the tale that Zeus, having torn off the testicles of a ram, brought them and cast them into the bosom of Deo, paying a false penalty for his violent embrace, as though he had castrated himself.

The symbols of this initiation, set out from my abundance of evidence, I know will move you to laughter—though, because of the refutations, you are in no mood to laugh:

"I crept in under the bridal chamber." Are these symbols not an outrage? Are these mysteries not a mockery? And what if I should add the rest as well? Demeter conceives, Kore is reared up, and then this same Zeus who begot her unites again with Pherephatta, his own daughter, after the mother Deo, forgetful of his former pollution—Zeus, the father and the corrupter of the maiden—and he unites with her having become a serpent, he who was thus exposed.

At any rate, the token for the initiates of the Sabazian mysteries is "the god through the bosom";

and this is a serpent, drawn through the bosom of those being initiated—a proof of the incontinence of Zeus.

Pherephatta too conceives a bull-shaped child;

indeed, some idol-mongering poet says:

"a herdsman, the goad"—calling, I think, the herdsman's goad the fennel-stalk, which the Bacchae wreathe round.

Do you wish me to recount to you also the flower-gatherings of Pherephatta, and the basket, and the rape by Aïdoneus (Hades), and the cleft of the earth, and the swine of Eubuleus that were swallowed up together with the goddesses—for which reason, in the festival of the Thesmophoria, they cast piglets into the chasms?

For the mysteries of Dionysus are utterly inhuman;

while he was still a child, the Curetes dancing round him in armed motion, and the Titans craftily stealing in, having deceived him with childish toys—these Titans tore him to pieces while he was yet an infant, as Orpheus the Thracian, the poet of the Rite, says:

"a cone and a bull-roarer and limb-bending playthings, and fair golden apples from the clear-voiced Hesperides."

And the worthless symbols of this rite of yours it is not worthless to set forth for your condemnation:

a knucklebone, a ball, a top, apples, a bull-roarer, a mirror, a tuft of wool.

Athena, then, having made off with the heart of Dionysus, was named Pallas from the "palpitating" (pallein) of the heart;

but the Titans, who also tore him apart, setting a certain cauldron upon a tripod and casting in the limbs of Dionysus, first boiled them;

"then, having pierced them through, they held them over Hephaestus's fire." But Zeus, appearing later (if he was a god, perhaps because he partook of the savor of the roasting flesh, whose prerogative your gods confess to have obtained), assails the Titans with a thunderbolt, and entrusts the limbs of Dionysus to his son Apollo to bury.

And he—for he did not disobey Zeus—carrying the mangled corpse, deposits it on Parnassus.

And if you wish to behold also the rites of the Corybantes: these, having slain their third brother, covered the head of the corpse with a purple cloth, and, having crowned it, buried it, carrying it on a bronze shield up under the foothills of Olympus (and these are the mysteries, to put it briefly—murders and burials).

And the priests of these rites, whom those whose business it is to name them call Anactotelests, add a fresh marvel to the calamity, forbidding that whole-rooted parsley be set upon the table;

for they suppose, you see, that the parsley sprang up from the blood that flowed from the Corybant.

Just as, indeed, the women who celebrate the Thesmophoria take care to eat the seeds of the pomegranate;

for they believe that the pomegranates have sprouted up from the drops of the blood of Dionysus that fell to the ground.

And, calling the Corybantes Cabiri, they proclaim a Cabiric initiation;

for these two fratricides, having taken up the chest in which the genitals of Dionysus lay, brought it down to Tyrrhenia, traders in a famous cargo;

and there they tarried, being fugitives, setting before the Tyrrhenians, as the highly honored teaching of piety, the worship of genitals and a chest.

For which reason, not unfittingly, some wish Dionysus to be called Attis, as being deprived of his genitals.

And what wonder is it if the barbarous Tyrrhenians are initiated in such shameful sufferings, when among the Athenians and the rest of Hellas—I am ashamed even to say it—the mythology concerning Deo is full of shame? For Deo, wandering in search of her daughter Kore around Eleusis (this is a place in Attica), grows weary and sits down at a well in her grief.

This is forbidden to the initiates even now, lest those who have been initiated should seem to imitate [the grieving goddess].

Now at that time the earth-born inhabited Eleusis;

their names were Baubo and Dysaules and Triptolemus, and further Eumolpus and Eubuleus;

from whom flourished in Athens the family of the Eumolpids and that of the Heralds (Kerykes), namely this hierophantic line.

And so (for I will not refrain from speaking it) Baubo, having received Deo as a guest, offers her a draught of barley-drink (kykeon);

and when she refused to take it and was unwilling to drink (for she was in mourning), Baubo, becoming exceedingly aggrieved, as though slighted, pulls up her garments and displays her private parts to the goddess;

and Deo is delighted at the sight, and at last barely accepts the drink, being pleased at the spectacle.

These are the secret mysteries of the Athenians.

These very things, indeed, Orpheus also records.

And I will set before you the very verses of Orpheus, that you may have the mystagogue himself as witness of this shamelessness:

"So saying, she drew up her robes, and displayed all the unseemly fashion of her body;

and the child Iacchus was there, and laughing he tossed her about with his hand beneath the bosom of Baubo;

and the goddess then, when she smiled, smiled in her heart, and received the gleaming vessel in which the kykeon lay."

And here is the watchword of the Eleusinian mysteries:

"I fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took from the chest; having handled it, I put it away into the basket, and from the basket into the chest." Fine spectacles indeed, and fitting for a goddess!

Worthy indeed of night are these rites, and of fire, and of the great-hearted—or rather vain-minded—people of the Erechtheids, and besides them of the rest of the Greeks, for whom there awaits, when they have died, things they do not even expect. To whom, then, does Heraclitus of Ephesus prophesy? To the night-wanderers, the magi, the Bacchants, the maenads, the initiates—to these he threatens the things after death, to these he prophesies the fire;

for the things customarily reckoned mysteries among men are celebrated unholily. Custom, then, and empty supposition, and the deceit of the serpent—these are the mysteries that are worshipped, men turning with bastard piety to initiations that are truly uninitiated and to rites that are unhallowed.

(continued) ...turning with bastard piety to these unhallowed rites.

And of what sort, too, are the mystic chests!

For I must strip bare their holy things and tell out their unspeakable contents.

Are these not sesame-cakes and pyramid-cakes and lumps of wool and many-navelled cakes, and grains of salt, and a serpent, the token of Dionysus Bassareus? And besides these, are there not pomegranates and fig-branches and fennel-stalks and ivy, and besides also round cakes and poppies? These are their holy things.

And in addition, the secret symbols of Themis: marjoram, a lamp, a sword, a woman's comb—which is, to put it euphemistically and mystically, a woman's private part.

O the open shamelessness!

Of old, for men of sober mind, night that was kept silent was the veil of pleasure;

but now, for those being initiated, night that is talked about is the test of incontinence, and the fire, borne as a torch, convicts the passions.

Quench the fire, O hierophant;

be ashamed, O torchbearer, of the torches;

the light convicts your Iacchus;

permit night to hide the mysteries;

let the rites be honored with darkness;

the fire does not play a part: it is commanded to convict and to chastise.

These are the mysteries of the godless;

and I rightly call these men godless, who have been ignorant of the God who truly is, but, ashamed as the deed truly is, shamelessly revere a little child torn apart by Titans, and a wailing woman, and members unspeakable—being entangled in a twofold godlessness: the first, by which they are ignorant of God, not recognizing the God who truly is; and the other, this second, in their error, reckoning as existing those that do not exist, and naming as gods these that do not truly exist—or rather do not exist at all, but have merely obtained a name.

For this reason, indeed, the apostle reproves us, saying: "And you were strangers to the covenants of the promise, having no hope, and atheists in the world."

Many good things befall the king of the Scythians, whoever he was [Anacharsis],

...who shot down with his arrows one of his own countrymen who had taken up among the Scythians the celebration of the Mother of the gods, deeming him a teacher of a womanish disease to the rest of the Scythians.

For which reason, then (for it is by no means to be concealed), it occurs to me to marvel in what manner men have nicknamed "atheists" Euhemerus of Acragas, and Nicanor of Cyprus, and Diagoras, and Hippo the two Melians, and besides these that famous Cyrenaean (Theodorus is his name) and certain others in numbers—men who had lived soberly and had perceived more sharply than the rest of mankind the error concerning these gods—even though they had not understood the truth itself, yet had suspected the error; which is no small living spark of a seed of wisdom that springs up toward truth;

of whom one charges the Egyptians: "If you regard them as gods, do not lament them nor beat your breasts;

but if you mourn them, no longer count these to be gods." And another, taking up a Heracles wrought of wood (he happened to be boiling something at home, as was natural),

"Come now, O Heracles," he said;

"now is the time for you—just as you served Eurystheus—so now also to do us this service, this thirteenth labor, and to prepare the meal for Diagoras"; and then he put it into the fire as firewood.

Atheism, then, and superstition are extremes of ignorance, outside of which one must strive to remain.

Do you not see Moses, the hierophant of truth, commanding that the eunuch and the castrated should not enter the assembly, and besides, the one born of a harlot? He hints, through the former, at the godless way of life, deprived of the divine and generative power; and through the last, the third, at the man who inscribes to himself many falsely-named gods in place of the one true God—just as the son of the harlot inscribes to himself many fathers, in ignorance of his true father.

There was a certain innate, ancient fellowship of men with heaven, darkened indeed by ignorance, yet now and then bursting suddenly out of the darkness and shining forth; such, indeed, as that which was said by someone: "Do you see this boundless ether on high, holding the earth round about in its moist embraces?" And: "O thou support of the earth and having thy seat upon the earth, whoever thou art, hard to discern by sight"—and all the other such things that the sons of poets sing.

But notions that are erroneous and led astray from the straight way—truly destructive—turned man, the heavenly plant, away from the heavenly mode of life and stretched him out upon the earth, having persuaded him to attach himself to earthly fashioned things.

For some, at once deceived concerning the spectacle of heaven, and trusting in sight alone, gazing upon the motions of the stars, both marveled and deified them, naming the stars "gods" (theoi) from their "running" (thein), and worshipped the sun, as the Indians do, and the moon, as the Phrygians;

while others, plucking the cultivated fruits of the things that grow from the earth, named the grain Deo, as the Athenians do, and the vine Dionysus, as the Thebans.

Others, observing the requitals of evil, deify the retributions, worshipping even calamities.

Hence the poets about the stage have fabricated the Erinyes and the Eumenides and the Palamnaei and the Prostropaei, and further the Alastores.

And now certain even of the philosophers themselves, after the poets, fashion into idols the types of the passions among you—Fear and Eros and Joy and Hope—just as, indeed, Epimenides of old set up at Athens altars of Insolence and Shamelessness;

while others, setting out from the very deeds, are deified by men and are fashioned in bodily form—a certain Justice (Dike), and Clotho and Lachesis and Atropos, and Destiny (Heimarmene), and Auxo and Thallo, the Attic ones.

There is a sixth introductory mode of deception, conferring gods, according to which they reckon the twelve gods;

of whom Hesiod sings his own theogony, and all that Homer expounds in his theology.

And last remains (for these modes are seven in all) the one that sets out from the divine beneficence bestowed upon men.

They fashioned certain saviors—the Dioscuri, and Heracles the averter of evil, and Asclepius the healer.

These, then, are the slippery and injurious deviations from the truth, dragging man down from heaven and overturning him into the pit.

But I wish to show you the gods themselves, close at hand, of what sort they are, and whether they are anything at all, so that at last you may cease from error, and may run back again to heaven.

For we too were once, somehow, children of wrath, even as the rest;

but God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, made us alive together with Christ when we were already dead in our trespasses. For the Word, being living and buried together with Christ, is exalted together with God.

But those who are still unbelieving are called children of wrath, nourished by wrath;

while we are no longer nurslings of wrath, we who have been torn away from error, and are darting toward the truth.

In this way, indeed, we who were once sons of lawlessness have now, through the benevolence of the Word, become sons of God;

but for you, your own poet too, Empedocles of Acragas, sinks down:

"Therefore, distraught with grievous miseries, never shall you relieve your spirit of its wretched woes."

The most part, indeed, of the tales told about your gods are mythologized and fabricated;

but as for those things which are supposed actually to have happened, these have been recorded concerning shameful men who lived licentiously;

"in vainglory and madness you walk, and, having forsaken the upright, straight path, you have gone off along the way through thorns and stakes."

"Why do you wander, O mortals? Cease, O vain ones; leave the gloom of night, and lay hold of the light."

These things the prophetic and poetic Sibyl enjoins upon us;

and truth also enjoins them, stripping bare from these stunning and astounding masks the mob of the gods, refuting the false opinions by means of certain synonymies.

For instance, then, there are those who record three Zeuses: the one, son of Aether, in Arcadia; the two remaining, sons of Cronus, of whom the one is in Crete, and the other again in Arcadia.

And there are those who posit five Athenas: the one of Hephaestus, the Athenian;

another of the Nile, the Egyptian;

a third of Cronus, the inventress of war;

a fourth, the daughter of Zeus, whom the Messenians have surnamed Coryphasia after her mother;

and over all these, the daughter of Pallas and of Titanis the daughter of Oceanus, who, having impiously sacrificed her father, adorned herself with her father's skin as with a fleece.

Yes indeed, as for Apollo, Aristotle reckons the first to be the son of Hephaestus and Athena (here, then, Athena is no longer a virgin), the second in Crete the son of Corybas, the third the son of Zeus, and the fourth the Arcadian, the son of Silenus;

this last is called Nomios among the Arcadians;

in addition to these, he reckons the Libyan, the son of Ammon;

and Didymus the grammarian adds to these a sixth, the son of Magnes.

And how many Apollos are there even now—innumerable mortals and certain perishable men—who have been named in like manner with those aforesaid? But what if I should tell you of the many Asclepiuses, or the Hermae that are numbered, or the Hephaestuses that are mythologized? Shall I not seem superfluous, flooding your ears with these many names? But their fatherlands and their crafts and their lives, and besides, their very tombs, convict them of having been men.

Ares, at any rate—even the one honored among the poets, so far as may be: "Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, blood-stained, stormer of walls," this fickle and hostile one—was, as Epicharmus says, a Spartan;

but Sophocles knows him to be a Thracian;

and Homer says that this one was bound for thirteen months:

"Ares endured it, when Otus and mighty Ephialtes, the sons of Aloeus, bound him in a strong bond;

and in a bronze jar he was bound for thirteen months."

"Many good things may the Carians have, who sacrifice dogs to him."

Apollodorus says, and Callimachus: "Phoebus rises for the Hyperboreans at their sacrifices of asses";

the same poet elsewhere: "the fat slaughterings of asses delight Phoebus."

And Hephaestus, whom Zeus hurled from Olympus "from the divine threshold," falling on Lemnos plied the smith's trade, crippled in both feet, "and beneath him his slender legs tottered." ... You have, too, a physician among the gods, not merely a smith;

but the physician was a money-lover—Asclepius was his name.

And I will set before you your own poet, the Boeotian Pindar:

"Him too gold, appearing in his hands as a lordly fee, turned aside;

and so the son of Cronus, hurling with both hands, swiftly took away the breath from his breast, and the blazing thunderbolt drove down his doom."

"For Zeus, having slain my son Asclepius, is to blame, casting the flame upon his breast."

This one, then, lies thunder-struck within the borders of Cynosuris.

And Philochorus says that in Tenos Poseidon is honored as a physician, and that Sicily lies upon Cronus, and that there he was buried.

Patrocles of Thurii and Sophocles the younger, in three tragedies, relate concerning the two Dioscuri:

that these two Dioscuri were two perishable men, if Homer be sufficient witness to confirm what has been said:

"but these two the life-giving earth already held fast there in Lacedaemon, in their own dear native land."

And let the writer of the Cypriac poems come forward as well:

"Castor was mortal, and the fate of death is allotted to him;

but Polydeuces, scion of Ares, is immortal."

This he falsified poetically;

but Homer is more trustworthy than he, having spoken concerning both of the Dioscuri, and besides, having refuted Heracles also as a phantom:

"for the man Heracles..., versed in mighty deeds."

Heracles, then, even Homer himself knows to be a mortal man; and Hieronymus the philosopher describes also the build of his body—small, bristly-haired, robust;

while Dicaearchus describes him as wiry, sinewy, dark, hook-nosed, with somewhat gleaming eyes, and straight-haired.

This Heracles, then, having lived two and fifty years, brought his life to an end, having been given funeral honors by the pyre on Mount Oeta.

As for the Muses, whom Alcman traces in genealogy as daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and whom the rest of the poets and prose writers deify and revere—and now whole cities even consecrate precincts (museums) to them—Megaclo the daughter of Macar bought these as Mysian handmaids.

Now Macar reigned over the Lesbians, but he was always at variance with his wife, and Megaclo was vexed on her mother's behalf;

and why should she not be? And she buys these Mysian handmaids, so many in number, and calls them Moisai (Muses) in the dialect of the Aeolians.

These she had taught to sing and to play the cithara, the deeds of old, tunefully.

And they, continually playing the cithara and singing fair incantations, charmed Macar and made him cease from his wrath.

For which reason, then, Megaclo, as a thank-offering on her mother's behalf, dedicated them in bronze, and commanded that they be honored throughout all the sacred places.

And the Muses, then, are such as these;

and the history is found in Myrsilus the Lesbian.

Hear, then, of the loves of your gods, and the incredible mythologies of their incontinence, and their wounds and bonds and laughters and fights, their slaveries too, and banquets, embraces again and tears and passions and lustful pleasures.

Call up for me Poseidon and the chorus of women corrupted by him: Amphitrite, Amymone, Alope, Melanippe, Alcyone, Hippothoe, Chione, and the rest, the myriads;

and among whom, though they were so many, still the passions of your Poseidon were cramped for room.

Call up for me Apollo too;

this one is Phoebus, both a pure seer and a good counselor;

but Sterope does not say so, nor Aethusa, nor Arsinoe, nor Zeuxippe, nor Prothoe, nor Marpessa, nor Hypsipyle;

for Daphne alone escaped both the seer and the corruption.

He poured himself out so greatly over love-affairs that he desired all women, and fulfilled his desire upon all.

At any rate, he glutted himself with women no less than the he-goat of the Thmuites does with she-goats.

And at your poems too, O Homer, I have marveled:

"He spoke, and with his dark brows the son of Cronus nodded;

and the ambrosial locks streamed down from the king's immortal head;

and he made great Olympus quake."

You fashion Zeus as august, O Homer, and you attach to him a nod that is held in honor.

But if only you display the love-girdle, O man, then both Zeus is exposed and his locks are put to shame.

To what a pitch of licentiousness did that Zeus go, who spent so many nights of pleasure with Alcmene? For not even the nine nights were long for the dissolute one (whereas, on the contrary, his whole life was short through incontinence), so that he might sow for us the god who averts evil.

The son of Zeus is Heracles—truly of Zeus—he who was begotten of that long night, having toiled through the twelve labors over a long time, but having ruined in a single night the fifty daughters of Thestius, becoming at once both adulterer and bridegroom of so many maidens.

Not unfittingly, then, do the poets call this one wretched and a worker of impious deeds.

But it would be a long task to recount his manifold adulteries and corruptions of boys.

For neither did your gods abstain even from boys: one was in love with Hylas, another with Hyacinthus, another with Pelops, another with Chrysippus, another with Ganymede.

Let your women worship these as gods; and let them pray that their own husbands may be such, so self-controlled, that they may be like the gods, having emulated the same things.

Your children are trained to revere these gods, so that growing up they too may take the gods as a vivid image of fornication.

But perhaps it is only the male gods among them who rush headlong after the pleasures of love.

“The goddesses kept to their homes in shame, each one,” says Homer, the goddesses being ashamed for very modesty to look upon Aphrodite caught in adultery.

Yet they too run riot, the more passionately bound in adultery—Eos with Tithonus, Selene with Endymion, the Nereid with Aeacus, Thetis with Peleus, Demeter with Iasion, and Pheredphatta (Persephone) with Adonis.

Aphrodite, put to shame over Ares, went off to Cinyras, married Anchises, ensnared Phaethon, and loved Adonis; she vied with the ox-eyed Hera, and the goddesses, stripping themselves naked for the sake of an apple, presented themselves to the shepherd, that he might judge which of them was the more beautiful.

Come now, let us briefly survey the games as well, and put an end to these funereal festivals—the Isthmian, the Nemean, the Pythian, and the Olympian besides.

At Pytho the Pythian serpent is worshipped, and the festival of the snake is proclaimed as the Pythian games.

At the Isthmus the sea spat up a pitiable piece of refuse, and the Isthmian games mourn Melicertes.

At Nemea another little child, Archemorus, was buried, and the funeral games for that child are called the Nemean games.

Pisa, O all you Greeks, is the tomb of a Phrygian charioteer; and Pheidias’ Zeus appropriates the libations to Pelops, which are the Olympic games.

So these games, it seems, contested over the dead, were really mysteries, as were the oracles too; and both have been made public property.

But the mysteries at Agra and those at Halimus in Attica are confined to Athens; whereas the games and the phalli celebrated in honour of Dionysus are now a worldwide disgrace, an evil pestilence that has overrun human life.

For Dionysus, longing to descend into Hades, did not know the way; a man named Prosymnus promised to tell him—not without a fee.

The fee was not a seemly one—though to Dionysus it seemed fair.

The favour, the fee that was demanded of Dionysus, was a carnal one.

The request was agreeable to the god’s wish; and so he promised to grant it, should he return, confirming the promise with an oath.

He did not find Prosymnus alive, for he had died.

To discharge his vow to his lover, Dionysus hurried to the tomb and indulged his lust.

He fashioned a member out of a branch of a fig tree, sat down upon it, and so fulfilled his promise to the dead man.

As a mystic memorial of this deed, phalli are set up to Dionysus throughout the cities.

“For if it were not to Dionysus that they held the procession and sang the hymn to the shameful parts, they would be acting most shamelessly,” says Heraclitus; “but Hades and Dionysus are one and the same, for whom they rave and keep the Lenaea”—not so much, as I think, because of the body’s drunkenness as because of the disgraceful hierophany of their licentiousness.

It is fitting, then, that such gods of yours, having become slaves of their passions, should serve—indeed, even before those called Helots among the Lacedaemonians, Apollo came under the yoke of slavery to Admetus in Pherae, Heracles to Omphale in Sardis; and Poseidon and Apollo served Laomedon like a useless household slave, not even able, it seems, to obtain freedom from their former master.

It was then that they two also rebuilt the walls of Ilium for the Phrygian.

Homer is not ashamed to show Athena holding a golden lamp in her hands to light the way for Odysseus.

And we have read of Aphrodite, like some wanton little serving-maid, carrying and setting the adulterer’s couch right before Helen’s face, in order to lure her into intercourse.

For Panyassis, besides these, records that the gods served as labourers for very many other men, writing somewhat as follows: