駁異教徒 第 5 章

So be it: let all those disgraces of the immortal gods have been put forth by playful poets. What then? Are those things which grave, serious, and painstaking histories contain, and which are handed down in the secret mysteries, the inventions of poetic wantonness? If these seemed to you to be tales of such trifling, you would neither retain some of them in their proper use, nor through the annual course would you celebrate rejoicings as festivals, nor would you preserve them in your rites as images of deeds performed. Of these, so many as they are, I will for the present set down one — following a measured restraint — in which that very Jupiter is brought in as stupid and imprudent, played upon by the ambiguities of words. In the second book of Antias [Annals, Fr.]

[Fr. 6 Peter] — that no one may perchance suppose that we are trumping up charges through slanders — such a tale is recorded: that king Numa, since he did not possess the knowledge of averting the thunderbolt, and had a desire to learn it, at the advice of Egeria hid twelve young men on watch near a spring with bonds, so that, when Faunus and Martius Picus should come to that place to drink — for they had a customary route hither for watering — they might set upon them, bind them fast, and take them captive. But that the thing might be done more readily, the king filled goblets, no small number, with wine and honey-mead, and set a treacherous snare around the approaches of the spring for those who should come. And they, seized as usual by the appetite for drinking, came to the familiar resort.

But when they had come upon the goblets fragrant with scented liquors, they preferred the new things to their older draughts, fell upon them greedily, and, drawn on by the sweetness of the drink, drank far too much and, becoming heavy, fell asleep; then the twelve fell upon the slumbering pair, cast bonds upon them as they lay soaked with drink, and, when they had awoken, at once thoroughly instructed the king by what means Jupiter could be drawn down to the earth and elicited by sacrifices. And the king, having received the knowledge, performed the sacred rite on the Aventine, drew Jupiter down to earth, and asked of him the ritual and manner of the expiation. Jupiter, long hesitating, said: 'You shall expiate things struck by lightning with a head'; the king answered: 'With that of an onion'; Jupiter again: 'With a human one'; the king rejoined: 'But with hair'; the god in reply: 'With a living thing';

'A sprat,' Pompilius put in. Then Jupiter, caught by the ambiguous propositions, uttered these words: 'You have deceived me, Numa; for I had appointed that things struck by lightning should be expiated with human heads, not with a sprat, hair, and onion. Yet since your cunning has circumvented me, keep the rite you wished, and with these things which you have bargained for you shall ever undertake the expiation of things thunder-struck.' What the mind should first pursue, and what last, or where it should fall silent, is neither easy to say nor made simple by any considerations.

For all these things are so contrived and framed for mockery that you would do better to strive that they be believed false, even if they were true, than to wish to maintain them as true and to insinuate them as something marvelous, not without contempt of the deity himself. For what do you say, you people? Are we to believe that that Faunus and Martius Picus, if they belong to the number of the gods and to that everlasting and immortal nature, were ever parched dry with thirst and, that they might slake the burning of their veins, went along the streams of the springs? Are we to believe that, captivated by the wine and enticed by the sweetness of the mead, they gorged themselves so long on the treacherous cups that it came even to the peril of drunkenness?

Are we to believe that, bound fast by sleep and sunk in the oblivion of deepest slumber, they offered to earthly creatures the opportunity of binding them? On what parts, then, were those fastenings of the bonds thrown? Had their hands anything of solidity, or were they formed of hard bones, such as could be tied fast with nooses and constrained by the knotting of cords? For I do not ask, I do not demand, whether they could utter anything as they tottered in the estrangement of drunkenness, or whether — Jupiter being unwilling, or rather unaware — anyone could publish the rite for drawing him down to the earth:

This alone I desire to hear: why, if Faunus and Picus are of divine race and power, they did not themselves rather disclose to the inquirer that which Numa desired, more perilously, to hear from Jupiter himself. Or was it that Jupiter alone possessed the knowledge of this matter? For do the thunderbolts fall upon himself, so that some discipline of knowledge must be needed to avert their impending threats? Or, since he himself hurls these fires, is it another's task to know by what means it is fitting to temper his wraths and his moods? For truly it is most foolish to believe that he himself knows the remedies by which can be averted those things which he has determined should come to pass among human affairs by the casting of the thunderbolt. For this is to say:

'By that kind of rite you shall appease my wraths; and whenever I signify by lightnings that something is impending, do this and that, so that what I have determined should come to pass may become idle and empty and vanish away by the power of the sacred rites.' But let us grant, as is said, that Jupiter himself knew the remedies against himself and the arts by which it was fitting to go to meet his own signs: shall we even believe that a god of so great a divinity was drawn down to the earth and, standing on the little hillock of a single hill with a manikin, joined in a wrangling conversation? And what, I ask, was that divine matter which compelled Jupiter to be called away from so great a rush of affairs and to present himself to the summonses of mortals? Salted meal, incense, blood, the fumigation of vervain, and the roarings of terrible names?

And were all these things more powerful than Jupiter, so as to compel him against his will to obey commands, or to surrender himself, willing, to their entrapments? What of this — will it gain credence — that the son of Saturn was so improvident that he either proposed things by whose riddles he himself would be caught, or did not foresee by what means a mortal's cunning and craft would make sport of him? 'You shall expiate,' he says, 'things struck by lightning with a head.' The utterance is still incomplete, neither a full statement nor a rounded sentence. For it is necessary to know whether Diespiter ordains that this expiation be accomplished with the head of a wether, or a swine, or an ox, or of any other creature whatsoever:

And since he had not yet determined this specifically, and it was still in suspense and the sentence not yet finished, how could Numa know that Jupiter would say a human head, so as to forestall him, to get ahead, and to divert the uncertainties of that ambiguity onto the head of an onion? 'Unless perchance you will say that the king was divine': — could he possibly have been more divine than Jupiter himself? Unless a man, presuming what Jupiter would say, outwitted the god: could the god not know by what means a man was preparing to outwit him? Does it not then lie open at hand and clear that these are the little devices of childish fictions, by which, while liveliness of wit is acquired for Numa, the greatest imprudence is imputed to Jupiter?

For what is so imprudent as to confess yourself caught by the shrewdness of a human wit, and, while you grieve that you have been deceived, to yield to the will of the victor and to lay down the remedy you had offered? For if there was a reason and a certain natural fitness why the expiation of a lightning-strike ought to be undertaken with a human head, I do not see why the reply of the onion was made by the king: but if it could also be settled with an onion, then it was wantonly that a lust was felt for human blood. And thus each side is turned to its opposite, so that Numa is not shown to have wished to know what he wished, and Jupiter is proved to have been cruel — he who said that what could be undertaken with a sprat and an onion he had wished to be expiated with human heads.

In Timotheus, a man of no mean rank among the theologians, and likewise in others equally learned, concerning the Great Mother of the gods and concerning her rites, this origin is set down — dug out, as he himself writes and intimates, from the hidden books of antiquity and from the innermost mysteries. 'In the borders of Phrygia,' he says, 'there is a certain rock of an all but unheard-of vastness, whose name is Agdus, so called by the natives of that region. From it, stones taken up — as Themis had bidden in her forewarning — Deucalion and Pyrrha cast into a world empty of mortals; and from these, among the rest, was this so-called Great Mother formed and given life by divine power.'

'Her, given over to rest and sleep on the very summit of the rock, Jupiter assailed with incestuous desires; but when, having struggled long, he could not obtain what he had promised himself, he poured out his lust, defeated, upon the stone. Thereupon the rock conceived, and, after many bellowings had first been uttered, in the tenth month there is born one surnamed, from his mother's name, Agdestis. To him belonged unconquered strength and an untamable ferocity of spirit, a mad and frenzied lust, and that of both sexes; to lay waste what he had seized by force, to destroy, whithersoever the savagery of his mind had led him; to care for neither gods nor men, and to believe that nothing more powerful than himself held together the lands, the heaven, and the stars.'

'When it had often been sought in the deliberation of the gods by what means his boldness might be either weakened or repressed, and the rest were hesitating, Liber takes upon himself the charge of this task. A spring familiar to Agdestis, with which he had been wont to soothe the burning heat kindled by sport and hunting, and the raging of his thirst, Liber inflamed with the strongest force of unmixed wine. In the hour of need Agdestis runs up for a draught, and with gaping veins snatches the drink too immoderately: whereby it comes to pass that, overcome by the unaccustomed thing, he is sunk into the deepest slumber. Liber is at hand for the ambush; from bristles most skillfully twisted together he casts a noose about the sole of his foot, and with the other part he takes hold of his offspring together with the genitals themselves.'

'When the force of the wine has been breathed out, he starts up with a rush, and, as his foot draws the noose taut, by his own strength he deprives himself of that sex in which he had been a male. With the tearing away of the parts an immense flow of blood pours forth; these are caught up and drunk in by the earth, and suddenly from them is born a pomegranate tree with its fruits. Nana, the daughter of king Sangarius, or of the river, contemplating its beauty, plucks a fruit, marveling, and lays it in her bosom: from it she becomes pregnant. Her father shuts her up as though defiled and takes care that she should die of starvation: but she is sustained by the mother of the gods with fruits and other nourishment. She brings forth a little child. But Sangarius orders it to be exposed:'

'Someone or other, finding it, takes it up and nourishes it with goat's milk; and because the Lydian tongue calls pretty ones by this name, or because the Phrygians call goats "attagi" in their speech, thence it came about that he should be allotted the name Attis. Him the mother of the gods loved uniquely, since he was of most excellent countenance. Agdestis too loved him, a coaxing companion to the youth as he grew, and — in the only way he could — leading the youth, bound to him by less than upright flatteries, through the wooded glades and forests, and bestowing on him many gifts of wild game; which the boy Attis at first, boasting, said were the fruit of his own toil and labor; but afterward, through wine, he confesses that he is loved by Agdestis and honored by him with sylvan gifts: whence, because wine betrayed his silence, it is forbidden for the polluted to bring themselves into his holy rite.'

'Then Midas, king of Pessinus, wishing to draw the boy away from so infamous a union, betroths his own daughter to him in marriage, and, lest some ill-omened person should interrupt the nuptial joys, he had the town shut up. But the mother of the gods, knowing the fate of the young man — that he would be safe among men only so long as he remained free from the bond of marriage — and lest anything sorrowful should befall, enters the city closed with walls, having lifted up its head; whence, for this reason, it began to be towered. Agdestis, seething with anger that the boy was torn from him and diverted to the zeal for a wife, instills madness and frenzy into all the banqueters:'

'The terrified Phrygians cry aloud, "Adore, adore!"; the daughter of the concubine cuts off her own breasts; Attis snatches the flute which the very instigator of the madness was carrying, and, now himself full of the furies, having raged wildly and been tossed about, at last flings himself down and, beneath a pine tree, cuts off his own genitals, saying: "Take these for yourself, Agdestis, for whose sake you have stirred up such great commotions of frenzied conflicts." With the gushing of the blood his life flies away; but the Great Mother of the gods gathers up and washes what had been cut off, casts earth upon them, and covers and wraps them, as they were, in the garment of the dead. From the flowing of the blood a violet flower is born, and from it the tree is wreathed: hence has arisen the custom that even now the sacred pines are veiled and crowned.'

'The maiden who had been his betrothed — whom the pontiff Valerius records to have been named Ia — veils the breast of the lifeless youth with softer wool, gives her tears together with Agdestis, and slays herself: the blood of her who has perished is turned into purpling violets. The Mother buries the god as well, whence an almond tree is born, signifying the bitterness of the funeral. Then the pine tree, beneath which Attis had despoiled himself of his manhood, she carries down into her cave, and, with lamentations shared with Agdestis, she beats and wounds her breast around the trunk of the felled tree. Jupiter, entreated by Agdestis that Attis might come to life again, does not permit it;'

'yet what could be done by fate he grants without any difficulty: that his body should not rot, that his hair should grow forever, and that the smallest of his fingers should live and be perpetually moved, alone, of its own motion. Content with these favors, Agdestis is said to have consecrated the body at Pessinus, and to have honored it with annual ceremonies and with priestly presiders.' If some despiser of the deities, frenzied by the savagery of a sacrilegious heart, had set his mind to revile your gods, would he dare to say anything of them more grievous than what this history sets forth — which you have entered into a formal record as though it were something marvelous, and, lest the force of time and the long span of antiquity should render it obsolete, have solemnized with the honor of perpetuity?

For what is there set down or recorded concerning the gods in it which, if you were to say it of a man reared in modest ways and in the sterner disciplines, would not make you liable to a charge of insult and injury, and bring upon you a hatred procured by unatonable offenses and quarrels? 'From the stones,' you say, 'which Deucalion and Pyrrha cast, the mother of the gods was engendered.' What do you say, O theologians? what do you say, O presiders over the powers above? Was the mother of the gods, then, in no part of nature before the disaster of the flood, and, unless the force of the rains had destroyed the whole race of mortals, would the cause and origin of her engendering have failed to come to be?

It is, then, a human gift that she perceives that she exists, and it is to the benefactions of Pyrrha that she owes it that she sees herself to cling in the quality of some substance: which, if it be true, then this too will of necessity be not false — that she was a human being, not a goddess. For if it is certain that men derive the origin of their birth from that casting of stones, then it is necessary to believe that she too was one of us, engendered by the reckoning of like causes. For it could not come to pass, through any contradiction of things, that from one kind of stones and from the same manner of casting some should be substituted of an immortal lot, and others of a human condition.

That famous Varro, a Roman preeminent in manifold branches of learning and a searcher in the investigation of antiquity, in the first of the four books which he left written concerning the race of the Roman people, teaches by careful computations that from the time of the flood, of which we made mention above, down to the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, there are not yet two thousand years: and if his authority stands firm, then the Great Mother too must be said to have her span of life confined within the bounds of this number; and thus the matter is brought to this, that she who is related to be the progenitress of all the deities is not a mother but a daughter — nay rather an infant and a little child — since we grant that the gods have obtained, in perpetual continuation, neither beginnings nor ends of the ages.

But why do we speak of your having wrapped the mother of the gods in earthly filth, when you have not been able to make any pause from the revilings of Jupiter himself, not even for the interval of the briefest time? 'When the mother of the gods was sleeping on the topmost summit of Agdus,' you say, 'her son, an ambusher, strove to creep upon the modesty of her as she reposed.' — After countless maidens and matrons despoiled of their chastity, did Jupiter conceive even against his mother the hope of an unspeakable desire? And could not that horror avert him from the ardor of that lust — the horror to which nature herself has made subject not men alone but even some of the animals, and that sense implanted in common?

Was he lacking any regard for the piety and honour of the Capitols, guardian though he was — and could he not, with his mind thrown into confusion by madness, either reconsider or clearly perceive what crime he was lusting after? Yet, as the matter stands, forgetting his dignity and majesty, he went creeping toward that shameful theft, fearful and trembling, the breath of his mouth held in, his steps suspended through dread; and, set in the very borderland between anxiety and hope, he groped at her inmost parts, testing the depth of the sleeping woman and the endurance of his mother. O unseemly imagining of things! O foul posture of Jove, made ready for the campaign of an obscene contest!

So then, did that king of the world, when — incautious and hasty — he was thrown back from the theft as his stealthy attempt was rebuffed, turn himself to violence; and, since he could not seize his pleasure by treacherous deceit, assault his mother with force and most openly begin to overthrow her venerable chastity? He wrestled, then, for a very long time with her against her will; overcome, broken, and vanquished he gave way; and him whom filial piety could not tear away from an unspeakable craving for his mother, unleashed lust did tear apart. Unless perhaps you will say: 'The human race shuns and abhors a union of this kind, but among the gods there are no incests.' — And why did the mother fight most fiercely against the son who was bringing force upon her? Why did she flee from his embraces, avoiding his touches as unlawful?

For if there had been nothing evil in the matter, she ought to have complied without any hesitation, just as eagerly as he wished to fulfil the incitements of his craving. And indeed at this point the authors — men of great frugality and rather sparing even in matters of a shameful deed, lest those holy seeds should seem to have been spilled in vain — say: 'the flint drank up the filthiness of Jove's incontinence.' — And what, I ask, followed next? Tell us. 'In the middle of the stone's bosom, and in the hardness of that rock, an infant was formed and given life, the future offspring of great Jove.' — It is not easy to contradict conceptions so prodigious and so marvellous.

For since the human race is said by you to have arisen and been begotten from stones, one must believe both that the stones had generative receptacles, and that they drank in the seed once cast, and that when the time was complete they raised up heavy wombs, and at last gave birth, straining with the difficulty of the female manner. This drives our curiosity to inquire: 'Since you say that the offspring was delivered after ten months, during that time when it was shut up in the womb of the stone, with what nourishments was it watered, with what juices, or what sustenance could it draw from stony rigidity, as is customary for foetuses to draw from their mothers?' 'It had not yet,' he says, 'reached the light, and already, bellowing, it imitated and echoed its father's thunder:

and after it was granted him to behold the sky and the day, he laid waste to whatever met him, charging on, and pledged that he could thrust the very gods down from the region of heaven.' — O cautious and provident mother of the god, who — lest she should incur the ill-will of so insolent a child, or lest the bellowing foetus should trouble her sleep or interrupt her rest — withdrew herself, and sent that most noxious poison of the seed far away from her, and served it up to the roughness of the rocks. 'It was debated in the councils of the gods by what means that untameable ferocity might be mastered; and since no way remained, they had recourse to the one remedy: that he should be soaked with much unmixed wine, and stripped of his manhood by cutting it off.'

— As though indeed those afflicted with such bodily losses become of feebler audacity, and as though we did not daily see that those who have mown off these parts from themselves become of greater wantonness, and — casting aside all the restraints of modesty and shame — burst forth into obscene vileness, their disgraces published by open confession.

Yet I should like to see, if it had been granted me to be born in these times, that father Liber, the vanquisher of Agdestis's ferocity: fallen from the heights of heaven after the most august courts of the gods, docking the tails of his geldings, weaving movable snares, wounding the harmless purity of the waters with much force of unmixed wine; and, after drunkenness surfaced from the drink, warily slipping in his hands, handling the private parts of the sleeper, and — so that the encircling bites of the nooses might gird all about — applying the pains of his craft thus to things that were to perish. Could anyone say this of gods, however slightly tainted by esteem for them?

Or if they are taken up with such business, thoughts, and cares, would any wise man believe them to be gods, or reckon them at least in the number of mortals? This Agdestis, I ask, whose obscene part, once cut off, was to have brought security to the heavenly ones — was he one of the earthly living creatures, or some one of the gods, endowed with the honour of immortality? For if he was held to be of our lot and human condition, why did he strike such terror into the divinities? But if he had been a god, how could he be deceived, or how could anything be cut off from a divine body? Yet we raise no question on this point; let him have been, if you will, of divine race or one of ourselves, if you think it more correct to say so: was then, by a flow of blood

and from the amputated genitals there sprang a tree of the pomegranate, and just as soon as that force of the earth was covered by its bosom, the soil embraced it with a root; it shot up into the strength of a trunk, poured forth branches laden with pomegranate-blossoms, and in the space of a moment brought forth ripe fruits, complete in the maturity proper to them? And because these arose from red blood, therefore their colour is somewhat yellowish, tinged with a purple light; add too that for this reason they are juicy, for this reason wine-like, because they draw their kind from the blood of one weighed down — and you have fittingly filled out the tale. O Abdera, Abdera, what great occasions for men's mockery you would afford, if such a tale had been thus concocted among you!

All fathers recite it and supercilious cities read it through, and you are judged to be foolish and of the most frigid stupidity. 'Through her bosom,' he says, 'Nana conceived a son from the fruit.' — The reasoning follows on: for where crags and hard rocks give birth, there fruits must needs sprout. 'With acorns and figs Berecyntia fed her while she was bound.' — Fittingly and rightly: for she who had been made a mother from fruit ought to live on fruits. 'After the offspring was brought forth, it was ordered to be cast far away by Sangarius': — he who had for some time believed it divinely conceived disdained that it should be called the pledge of his own line. 'The infant was reared on she-goat's milk.'

— O tale ever hostile to the sex and most bitterly hostile to the male, in which not only do humans set the male otherwise, but even beasts of the male kind become mothers. 'He was marked with renowned and much-praised beauty, distinguished by comeliness.' — A wonderful thing indeed, that a goatish stench did not render him a thing to be shunned and fled from. 'The Great Mother loved him.' — If as a grandmother loves a grandson, the matter is plain; but if, as the theatres resound, it is an infamous and shameful love. 'And Agdestis loved him, enriching him with hunter's gifts.' — From a half-man indeed there could be no danger to chastity; but what Midas dreaded is not easy for those who suspect it to estimate. 'The Mother herself entered together with the walls.'

— We were indeed marvelling in this part at the might and fortitude of the divinity, but again we blame her negligence, in that — though she remembered law and fate — she less providently laid open the city to enemies. 'While they were celebrating the nuptial vows, Agdestis let loose the furies and madness.' — If King Midas had given offence, who was binding the youth to a wife in marriage, what had Gallus committed, what had the concubine's daughter, that the one should deprive himself of his manhood, the other of the honour of her breasts? 'Keep for yourself,' he said, 'these things on whose account you have stirred up such great matters by the overthrowings of minds.' — We should still all be ignorant of what the fury Agdestis had desired in the grown man's body, had not the boy, having cut himself, cast the offending members before the offended one. What do you say, O nations? What do you peoples given over to opinions of this kind?

when these things are brought forth, does not shame seize you, and abashment at such great foulnesses? We long to hear or learn from you something worthy concerning the gods; but you, in truth, set forth to us cuttings-off of breasts, amputations of male members, wraths, blood, furies, the voluntary deaths of maidens, and flowers and trees begotten from the blood of the dead.

Tell us once again, O men: did then the mother of the god, mourning by herself, gather up with dutiful diligence those severed genitals with their flowings — did she herself with holy hands, herself with divine hands, handle and take up the instruments of that shameful and foul deed, and even commit them to the earth to be hidden; and, lest they should melt away naked in the lap of the bare ground, before she veiled and covered them with a garment, did she at any rate wash them, and anoint them with balsams? For whence could fragrant violets have sprung, unless that infusion of unguents tempered the stench of the member?

When you read through such histories, I ask, do you not seem to yourselves either to be listening to weaving-girls contriving delays for their tedious task, or to aged crones seeking distractions for credulous infants and setting forth various fictions under the image of truth? 'Agdestis spoke with Jove, that he might restore life to his beloved; Jupiter refused to consent, because he was forbidden by fates more powerful; and, lest he should be altogether most harsh, he granted one favour: that the body should be dissolved by no rot, that the hair should ever grow, and that the least of the fingers alone should live in the body, alone display perpetual motion.' — Would anyone admit this, or confirm it by the assent of credulity — that a hair should grow on a corpse,

that a part should not have perished, and that a mortal body, set apart from the law of putrefaction, should endure right up until now? We could long since have pressed you to prove this thing, were it not of equal folly both to say such things and to demand proofs of matters of this kind. 'But this history is false and contains in itself no part of the truth.' — It is indeed of no concern to us — we for whose sake you contend that the gods have been driven out from the lands — whether it be consistent and propped up by the firmness of faith, or on the contrary lyingly and composed by the fiction of some falsehood.

For it is enough for us — whose purpose today is to show that these divinities which you promise, if they exist anywhere among the nations and grow hot with the boilings of wrath, receive the causes of their furious offences no more from us than from you; and that this tale exists among things, has been set down by you in commentaries, is daily read through by those who wish, and is handed on in order for the instruction of the time to come by those who come after. — And if it is in any case true, we see no reason underlying it why the gods of heaven should be said to be angry with us, since we have neither betrayed their so great turpitudes, nor put them into any writings, nor sent them forth into public testimony by the celebrations of sacred rites.

But if, as you remember, it is false and interpolated with deceitful lies, no man can doubt that you are the cause of the offence, you who either allowed certain persons to write such things, or suffered what was written to endure in the memory of the ages. And yet how can you accuse this writing of falsehood, when the very sacred rites — which you keep performing through the course of the years — are witnesses, and it is both believed by you to be true and judged to be of proven trustworthiness? For what does that pine mean, which you always, on fixed days, carry into the sanctuary of the mother of the god? Is it not the likeness of that tree, beneath which the frenzied and unhappy youth laid violent hands on himself, and which the mother of the gods consecrated as a solace for her wound?

What of the tufts of wool, with which you bind and wind about the trunk of the tree? Is it not a repetition of those wools with which Ia covered the failing youth, and thought she could impart some warmth to his freezing limbs? What of the little branches of the tree, decked and wreathed with violet-coloured garlands? Do they not indicate that the mother adorned the pine with its first flowers, the mark and testimony of a pitiable fortune? What of the priests of Cybele beating their palms against their breasts with dishevelled hair? Do they not recall to memory those laments with which the turret-crowned mother, together with Agdestis, followed the boy with tearful wailing? What of the bread abstained from as nourishment, to which practice you have given the name 'the fast'?

Is it not an imitation of that time when the divinity, by the violence of her grief, abstained from the corn of Ceres? Or, if the things we say are not so, do you explain, do you tell us: those emasculated and effeminate ones, whom we see taking part with you in the rites of this divinity — what business, what solicitude, what care have they there, and why do they, after the manner of mourners, beat their arms together with their breasts, and imitate the fortune of those set in a lamentable lot? What of the garlands, what of the violets, what of the wrappings, the coverings of soft wool? Why, finally, the pine itself, a little before a most useless log nodding among the thickets, is soon, as though some present and most august divinity, set up in the seats of the mother of the gods?

For either this is the reason which we find in your writings and commentaries, and it is manifest that you are not performing divine ceremonies but renewing the image of sad deeds; or, if there is some other reason, which the obscurity of the mystery has denied us, that too must needs share in the infamy of some turpitude. For who is there who would believe that there is anything of honour in that matter which base Galli initiate, effeminate worn-out wretches perform?

The greatness of the subject and the very duty of this defence indeed demands that we should similarly pursue the other kinds of turpitudes — whether those which the histories of antiquity report, or those which those holy mysteries contain, to which initiations a name is given and which are handed down not to all in common, but by the reticence of a few. But the innumerable rites of the sacred things, and the deformity attached to each in bodily fashion, forbid us to go through them all: nay rather, to speak more truly, from certain of them we ourselves turn aside by design and reason, lest, while we strive to unfold them all, we should be polluted by the contaminations of the very exposition. Let us then pass over Fenta Fatua, who is called the Good Goddess, whom — beaten with myrtle rods because

without her husband's knowledge she had drunk up a jar full of unmixed wine, was beaten with myrtle rods, as Sextus Clodius relates in his sixth book on the gods, in Greek; and he shows that a sign is displayed — that, when the women perform a divine rite to her, a covered wine-jar is set up, and it is not permitted to bring in myrtle sprigs, as Butas writes in his 'Causal Explanations.' But let us also, with equal manner and dissembling, pass over the gods called Conserentes, whom, together with the rest, Flaccus writes were turned into the likeness of a human penis and buried themselves in the ashes which had been formed beneath a little pot for the entrails; and when Tanaquil, skilled in the disciplines of Etruria, moved it aside, the gods rose up and hardened with divine sinews. Then she commanded the captive of Corniculum to understand and recognise what the thing meant for her;

and Ocrisia, a most prudent woman, inserted the gods into her genitals, and unfolded certain movements: then the holy divinities, boiling up, spat forth the force of Lucilius, and King Servius the Roman was born. Let us also pass by the monstrous Bacchanalia, to which the Greek name is Omophagia, in which, with feigned frenzy and with soundness of mind set aside, you wreathe yourselves about with serpents, and — so as to prove yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the god — with bloody mouths you tear apart the entrails of bleating she-goats. And moreover let us pass by those hidden initiations of the Cyprian Venus, whose founder is said to have been King Cinyras, in which those who take part bring in fixed offerings as to a harlot, and carry off phalli, as gifts of the propitious divinity's signs.

Let the Corybantic rites also be given over to oblivion, in which that holy mystery is handed down: a brother slaughtered by his brothers; from the blood of the slain one, parsley born; that herb forbidden to be set on tables, lest an inexpiable offence should be incurred from the Manes of the dead. But we forbear also to proclaim those other Bacchanalia, in which a secret and unspeakable thing is disclosed and insinuated to the initiated: how Liber, occupied with childish playthings, was drawn away by the Titans, how he was cut limb from limb by them and cast into little pots to be cooked; how Jupiter, allured by the sweetness of the smell, flew unbidden to the meal, and — having learned the grave matter — overwhelmed the marauders with his thunderbolt and hurled them down into the lowest seats of Tartarus.

As testimony of this matter and as a proof of his fortune, the Thracian handed down in his poems the knuckle-bones, the mirror, the tops, the whirling little wheels, the smooth balls, and the golden apples taken from the virgin Hesperides. It was our plan to pass over and sail past those mysteries also by which Phrygia is initiated, and that whole nation, had not the name of Jove, interposed among them, forbidden us to pass over his injuries and disgraces briefly — not that it is sweet to us to ride over mysteries so foul, but that it may become clear to you yourselves, again and again, how much injury you heap upon those whose guardians, avengers, and worshippers you profess yourselves to be.

'Once upon a time,' they say, 'Diespiter, when he was inflamed with base lusts and forbidden desires toward Ceres his own mother — for she is handed down by the inhabitants of that region as the mother of Jove — yet did not dare to seek by most open force what he had conceived in wanton craving, contrived ingenious snares by which he might diminish in her chastity the mother who feared no such thing: he became a bull out of a god, and, hiding under the appearance of a beast the mind and audacity of an ambusher, he was let loose, raging, with sudden force upon the unwary and unsuspecting woman; he carried out his incestuous business, and — his deceit betrayed by lust, being understood and recognised — he flew away.'

'The mother blazes up with furies and indignation, foams, pants, boils over; and, unable to contain the roar and tempest of her wrath, from her continual suffering she thenceforth took the name of being called Brimo; nor is anything else at heart for her than to pursue her son's audacity with such punishments as she is able.' 'Jupiter is in a flurry, broken with fear, nor does he find with what remedies to soothe the spirits of the violated one. He pours out prayers and supplicates: the ears of the grieving one are stopped up. The whole order of the gods is called in as intercessors: no one's authority is great enough to be heeded. At last the son, seeking ways of satisfaction, contrives such a remedy: he selects a noble ram with quite large testicles, cuts these off himself, and strips them of the covering of the woolly little sac.'

'Approaching his mother, mourning and submissive, and as though he had by his own verdict condemned himself, he throws himself into her lap and casts these things down before her. At the sight of the manly pledge she takes on a milder spirit, and is recalled to care for the offspring conceived: after the tenth month she gives birth to a daughter of splendid body, whom the succeeding age of mortals named now Libera, now Proserpina.'

'When the ram-like Jupiter beheld that she was quite vigorous, blooming, and full of richer sap, forgetting what evils and crime and how great a rashness he had a little before undertaken, he returned to his former acts; and because it seemed abominable enough that a father should be joined in wifely union hand-to-hand with his daughter, he passed into the terrible form of a serpent, bound the frightened virgin with huge coils, and under a savage guise sported and fawned upon her with the softest embraces. It comes about that she too is filled with the seed of most mighty Jove, but not on the same condition as her mother: for she gave back a daughter fashioned with her own lineaments, but from the maiden's childbirth there was poured forth, in the shape of a bull, the monuments of Jove's guile.' — Someone will require an authority for the matter:

then we shall cite that man of Tarentum and the well-known senarius which antiquity chants, saying: 'The bull begot a dragon, and the dragon a bull.' Finally, the very sacred rites and the ritual of that initiation itself, to which the name Sabadia belongs, can be a testimony to the truth: in which a golden serpent is let down into the bosom of the consecrated, and drawn out again from their lower and hindmost parts. I do not think it necessary here to go through the members one by one at great length in words, and to show how great swarms of turpitudes and of shameful deeds lie in those base parts. For who is there among mortals, bearing even a slight sense of humanity, who does not himself clearly see what all these things are —

how criminal, how foul, and what great disgraces they carry from the very sacred mysteries and from the indecent origins of the sacred rites? 'Jupiter,' he says, 'blazed up toward Ceres.' — What so great thing, I ask, has this Jupiter — whoever he is — deserved of you, that there is no kind of reproach, no infamy, no adultery, which you do not heap upon his head as though upon some cheap and muddy character? 'Leda betrayed the law of matrimony': — Jupiter is said to be the author of the fault. 'Danae could not guard her virginity': — the theft is narrated to be Jove's. 'Europa hastened to the name of a woman': — the same Jove is boasted to be the stormer of chastity.

'Alcmena, Electra, Latona, Laodamia, a thousand other maidens and a thousand mothers, and along with them the boy Catamitus, were despoiled of the honour of their modesty': — everywhere it is the same tale of Jupiter, nor is there any kind of turpitude in which you do not sow his name among associated lusts, so that he seems altogether pitiable, born for no other cause than to be the seat of crimes, the material of curses, a certain exposed place into which all foulnesses drain themselves off with the sewage-floods of bilge-water. Yet if you were to say that he had had commerce with women who were strangers, the thing would indeed be impious, but the injury of the curse would be tolerable.

Did he even neigh with the appetites of a maddened heart after his mother, even after his daughter, and could neither the sanctity nor the reverence of a parent, nor even the horror of offspring begotten from himself, lead him away from the image of so foul a thought? I should therefore like to see that father of the gods, Jupiter, the eternal power over things and men, honoured with the horns of an ox, wagging his shaggy ears, his gait drawn together into hooves, chewing the cud of pale grasses, and — in his hinder part — smeared with soft dung on his tail, hocks, and ankles, and befouled with the flux of his entrails.

I should like, I say — for it must be said more often — to see him twisting the stars, and he who with his crash terrifies and lays low the pale nations, pursuing herds of wethers, inspecting the testicles of rams, seizing these with that censorial and divine hand with which he is wont to brandish the flashing fires and to rage with thunderbolts; then next probing the hidden parts with a fervent castrating-knife, and, the witnesses removed, tearing away the little membranes wrapped about the offspring; and offering them, still fervent, to the mother as though certain fillets for the eliciting of pity — brought forth pale, wounded, feigning the torments of grief, and, to establish credit for the deed, defiled with ram's blood, and, for the lie of a wound, covered over with woollen bands and little linen cloths.

Is this to be heard and read through beneath this vault of the world? And are those who handle these things to wish themselves to be thought pious, holy, and guardians of religions? Is there any sacrilege greater than this, or can any mind be found so endowed with irreligious opinions as one that believes, or accepts, or in the innermost mysteries of the sacred rites betrays such things? That Jupiter, whoever he is — if he perceived that he existed, or if he were affected by any sense of injury — would it not be a worthy occasion on which, angered and roused, he should draw the earth from beneath our steps, extinguish the lights of the sun and moon, nay rather confound all things into the appearance of that ancient unity? 'But these rites,' he says, 'do not belong to our commonwealth.'

— And who says that, or who rejoins it? A Roman, a Gaul, a Spaniard, an African, a German, or a Sicilian? And how does it help your cause, if these things are not yours, when those who perform them are of your parties? Or what does it matter whether you approve of them or not, when the things that are properly your own are found to be either of like foulness or of a greater kind of turpitude? For do you wish us to consider those mysteries also, and those divine ones, which are named Thesmophoria by the Greeks, by which — from the Attic people — those holy sleepless vigils were consecrated, and the grave all-night celebrations?

Do you wish us, I say, to see what origins they have, or what causes, so that we may prove that Athens herself, mighty in the arts and studies of humane culture, speaks things as insulting toward the gods as others keep repeating — and that reproaches no less than the rest are cast upon them by you, published under the appearance of religion? 'At a certain time,' they say, 'when Proserpina — not yet a woman, but still a maiden — was gathering purple flowers in the little meadows of Sicily, and while the eagerness of the gathering was calling her here and there at random through the flowery harvest, the king of the Manes, springing forth through a cavern of profound depth, carries off the ravished maiden with him and hides himself again in the recesses of the earth.'

'And since Ceres was ignorant that this had happened, nor could she suspect where in the world her daughter might be, she set her mind to search out the lost one over the whole globe: she takes up twin torches laden with the weight of Aetnaean flames, by which, lighting her way before her, she goes on to seek her through all the regions of the earth.' 'In the wandering of this search she is also carried into the Eleusinian borders. This is the name of a district established in the region of Attica. There dwelt at that time in these parts earth-born men, whose names were these: Baubo, Triptolemus, Eumolpus, Eubuleus, Dysaules:'

Triptolemus the yoker of oxen, Dysaules the keeper of she-goats, Eubuleus of swine, Eumolpus of the woolly flock — from whom flows the race of the Eumolpidae, and from whom is drawn that famous name among the Cecropians, and those who afterward flourished as heralds-of-the-caduceus, hierophants, and criers. So then that Baubo, whom we said had been a dweller in the Eleusinian district, receives Ceres — wearied with manifold ills — as a guest, fawns upon her with gentle obsequiousness, begs that she may take care to refresh her body, and offers to her thirsting ardour a draught of cinnus, which Greece calls the cyceon: the mourning goddess turns away from and rejects the offices of humanity, nor does her fortune permit her to be mindful of the common care of health.

She, on the other hand, begs and exhorts her, as is the custom in such cases, not to take up a disdain for her kindness; but Ceres holds out most stubbornly and keeps up the obstinacy of an untamed rigidity. And when this happened again and again, and her unconquerable resolve could not be worn down by any compliances, Baubo changed her arts, and her whom she could not entice by earnest means she resolved to cheer with laughable marvels: that part of the body through which the female sex is wont both to bring forth offspring and to gain the name of mother, she frees from its longer neglect, makes it take on a cleaner aspect and be smoothed into the semblance of a boy not yet hardened and bristly.

She returns to the sorrowing goddess, and amid those commonplaces by which it is usual to break and soften grief, she uncovers her own self and, with her private parts laid bare, displays all those places of shame. And the goddess fixes her eyes upon the pubes and is nourished by the strange kind of comfort: then, made more relaxed through laughter, she takes up and drinks down the potion she had scorned, and what Baubo's modesty could not for a long time draw forth, the obscenity of a shameful deed extorted. If perchance any man suspects that we are dishonestly slandering, let him take up the books of the Thracian bard (Orpheus), which he records to be of divine antiquity, and he will find that we neither cleverly invent anything nor seek out and manufacture holy rites in order to make the gods a laughing-stock.

For we shall set forth in your midst the very verses which the son of Calliope (Orpheus) uttered with Greek mouth and, by singing them down the ages, published to human law: 'Thus having spoken, she at once drew up her garment from below and set before her eyes the things shaped at the groin; and Baubo, shaking them with hollowed hand — for they had a boyish look — patted and fondled them affectionately. Then the goddess, fixing the orbs of her august light, being a little softened, laid aside the sorrows of her mind: then she takes the cup in her hand and, with laughter following, gladly drains the whole liquid of the cyceon.' — What say you, O cunning sons of Erechtheus, what say you, citizens of Minerva?

My mind longs to know with what eloquence you will defend such perilous matters, or what arts you possess by which to give safety to persons so riddled with wounds and charges. This is no false indictment, nor are you assailed by a calumnious accusation. The tokens and origins of your Eleusinian rites bring forth base things, and so do the inscriptions of ancient letters, and finally the very passwords which, when questioned, you answer at the receiving of the sacred things: 'I have fasted and drunk the cyceon'; 'I have taken from the chest and put into the basket'; 'I have received again, and transferred into the little chest.'

So then, as those holy and secret mysteries reveal, are your gods carried off and do they carry off others, do they join in marriages sought by stealthy frauds, is the honor of virginity torn from the resisting and unwilling, are impending injuries unforeseen, is it unknown what befell the ravished, do they seek the lost like men, and beneath the brightest sun traverse the vastness of the world with lamps and torches? They are afflicted, they fall sick, they put on the squalor of mourners and the marks of miseries; and, that they may be able to turn their mind to nourishment and to taking food, no reason, no season, no grave speech or serious kindliness is employed, but the shameful obscenity of bodies is displayed...

...that obscenity, and those parts are thrust forward which common modesty, which the law of natural shame bids to hide, which among chaste ears it is a sin to name without pardon and without prefacing due honors. What spectacle, I ask, what was there in the shameful and reverend parts of Baubo, that could turn a goddess of the female sex, formed with a like member, into admiration and laughter — that, set before the divine light and gaze, could both give forgetfulness of miseries and lead her over into a merrier disposition by sudden mirth? O what things, O how great things could we, mocking and jeering, bring forth, were we not restrained by the religion of a nation and its lettered authority!

For a long while now, I confess, I hesitate, look about, and hang back — 'doubling the Tellenian tangles,' as the saying goes — while shame holds me from bringing forth those Alimuntian mysteries, in which, in honor of Father Liber, Greece erects the phallus and all its territories flower with images of male members. What this is, is perhaps obscure, and it is investigated by what reasoning it comes about. — Whoever is ignorant of this, learn, and, having marveled at such great matters, keep them ever in pure senses with scrupulous observance. 'When Liber, the Nysian and son of Semele,' they say, 'was still among men, he sought to know the underworld and to inquire what was being done beneath the seats of Tartarus:'

and this desire of his was hindered by certain difficulties, because through ignorance of the road he did not know by what way to go and proceed. A certain Prosumnus arises, a disgraceful lover of the god and quite prone to nefarious lusts, who promises he will point out the door of Dis and the approaches to Acheron, if the god would gratify him and allow conjugal pleasures to be plucked from himself. The god, easy-going, swears he will be at his power and pleasure — but only once he had first returned from the lower world, his vow and expedition accomplished. Prosumnus courteously sets forth the way, and at the very threshold of the underworld prostitutes himself.

Meanwhile, while Liber surveys the Styx, Cerberus, the Furies, and all other things with curious inquiry, the guide of the way falls from the number of the living and is buried in the human manner. Euius (Bacchus) emerges from the lower world and recognizes his dead guide; and, in order to fulfill the faith of the pact and to release himself from the obligation of the oath he had sworn, he proceeds to the place of burial and, cutting off a very strong branch from a fig tree, he shapes, planes, and smooths it and fashions it into the likeness of a human penis; he fixes it over the mound of the tomb and, bared on his hinder part, draws near, sets it beneath, and settles down upon it. Then, assuming the wantonness of one lusting, he twists his buttocks this way and that and contrives to suffer from the wood what he had long ago promised in reality.

And lest anyone perchance suppose that such impious things have been fabricated by us, we do not require him to believe Heraclitus as witness, nor do we wish him to take from the reading of the man himself what he thought about such mysteries: let him question all Greece as to what these phalli mean, which the ancient custom erects and venerates through the fields and the towns, and he will find the causes to be those we state — or if it should be a matter of shame to explain the truth plainly, what will it profit to obscure, what to cover up the cause and origin of the rite, when the very accusation lies in the substance of the religion itself? What say you, O peoples, what say you, O nations occupied with and given over to the venerations of temples?

Is it to rites like these that you compel us by flames, exiles, slaughters, and every other kind of punishment, and by the fear of cruelty? Are these the gods you bring in upon us, insinuate, inflict — gods whose like you would not wish either yourselves to be, or any other person joined to you by degree of blood and right of kinship? Can you disclose to your beardless boys, still in their bordered togas, the bargains that Liber struck with his lovers? Can you drive your daughters-in-law — nay, those wedded to you in marriage — to the shamelessness of Baubo and to the 'chaste' pleasures of Ceres? Do you wish your young men to know, hear, and learn what sort Jupiter himself proved to be toward one mother and then another?

Do you wish grown maidens and fathers still in their prime to learn by what art this same one played upon his own daughter? Do you wish full-blooded brothers, sprung from the same seeds, to be told in turn that he did not disdain the couch and couplings of his sister? Must one not, then, forthwith flee far from gods of this kind, and, lest the obscenity of so impure a religion creep into the mind, close off all hearing entirely? For what mortal is there, trained in morals so chaste, whom the precedents of the gods would not incite to frenzies of this kind? Or who could restrain his own desires from kinsfolk and reverend persons, when among the gods above he sees nothing sacred preserved amid the confusion of lusts?

For once it has been established that the first and perfect nature (the gods) could not curb its own desire within just bounds, why should not man pour himself out into promiscuous appetites — man, both cast headlong by inborn frailty and encouraged by the tutelage of holy divinity? For a long while now, I confess, as I ponder within my mind such monstrous deeds of this kind, I have been wont to marvel that you dare to call anyone among these an atheist, irreligious, sacrilegious — anyone, that is, who either altogether deny or doubt that the gods exist, or who maintain that they were men, enrolled in the number of the gods on account of some power and merit:

whereas, if the truth were reached and an examination held, it would be fitting that none should be named by such appellations more than you, who, under the guise of worship, heap upon them more curses and charges than if you had openly done so and imbibed them with avowed cursings. He who doubts that the gods exist, or who altogether denies it — although the boldness of following monstrous opinions may seem blameworthy — yet, without persecuting any person, merely withholds his belief from obscure matters; and he who asserts that they were of earthly race, although he strips them of the sublimity of the heavenly ones, yet heaps upon them incidental praises, since he affirms that they were raised to the merit of divinity by their benefactions and by admiration of their virtues.

But you, who contend to be the champions and propagators of their immortality — have you passed over any single one of these unwounded by your curses? Or is there any kind of reproach, damnable in common estimation, which you have feared to fasten upon them, held back even by the mere authority of their name? Who declared that the gods loved perishable and mortal bodies? — Was it not you? Who declared that they perpetrated those sweetest thefts in the marriage-beds of others? — Was it not you? Who declared that children mingled ill-omened couplings with their mothers, and fathers again with their own maidens? — Was it not you? Who declared that pretty boys and youths were incestuously desired for their most charming figures? — Was it not you?

Who declared them castrated, who debauched, who shape-shifters, who thieves, who held in bonds, who in chains, who at last assailed by thunderbolts, who wounded, who to have met their final days, and even to have merited earthly burials? — Was it not you? Since, therefore, so many and such great charges have been forged by you to the outrage of the gods, do you dare to object that the minds of the deities are offended on account of our name — when it might long since prove you to be the defendants guilty of such great wraths and the authors of divine indignation? 'But you err,' he says, 'and slip, and you show yourself to be quite unskilled, unlearned, and rustic by this very reviling of the matter.'

'For all those tales, which seem base to you and to pertain to divine disgrace, contain holy mysteries within themselves, meanings wondrous and deep, and such as no one could easily grasp by liveliness of wit. For it is not that which is written and set at the very forefront of the words that is signified and said, but all those things are understood by allegorical and substituted secret meanings. Thus he who says that Jupiter lay with his own mother does not signify the incestuous or shameful embraces of Venus, but names Jupiter for rain and Ceres for earth.'

'And again, he who relates that he practiced wantonness with his daughter says nothing of foul pleasures, but sets Jupiter in place of the name of rain-shower, and in the signification of the daughter, the sowing. So too he who says that Proserpina was carried off by Father Dis does not say, as you suppose, that the maiden was seized into most base appetites, but, because we hide the seeds in the clods, means that the goddess went beneath the earth and, with Orcus, establishes the covenants of generative offspring. By a like reasoning, in the other tales too one thing indeed is said, but another understood, and beneath the common plainness of the speech there lies a secret meaning and the enfolded depth of a mystery.'

These are all, as is plain, mere subtleties and clever devices, with which it is customary to prop up bad causes in the courts — nay rather, to speak more truly, the specious colorings of sophistical disputations, by which not truth, but ever an image and semblance of truth, and a shadow, is sought. For since it is shameful, unbecoming, and unseemly to accept the plain readings, recourse has been had to these expedients, so that one thing might be substituted for another and an interpretation of baseness be forced into a semblance of decency. But what is it to us, whether other senses and other meanings underlie those empty writings?

For it is enough for us, who maintain that the gods are wickedly and impiously handled by you, to accept what is written, what is heard, and not to care what lies in the hidden depth — since the insult to the deities is held not in the obscure mind of the meanings but in the signification of the prominent words. And yet, lest we seem unwilling to examine what sort of thing this is that is alleged, we first inquire this of you — if only you are willing to lend your patience: that these things were written in an allegorical manner, or ought to be understood in that same manner — whence has it become known to you, or whence intimated? Are you wont to summon the writers into your counsel? Were you lurking in their breasts, when, having seized the truth, they substituted one thing for another?

Next, if they, from fear of some reasoning and of religion, wished to wrap up those mysteries in shadowy obscurity, how great is your boldness, that what they were unwilling should be known, you wish to understand — you, to know it and lay it open to the knowledge of all, what they in vain concealed with words signifying less than the truth? But granting that in all these fables hinds are said in place of Iphigenias, whence yet is it clear to you, when you wish either to explain or to unfold those allegories, that you interpret the same things and mean the same things which were meant under the silent thoughts by the very authors — and set forth not by proper words, but by other significations?

You say that the union of Jupiter and Ceres was meant to signify the rain-shower fallen into the lap of the earth: another can invent something else, and more cleverly, and conjecture it with a likeness of truth; a third can invent something else, a fourth something else; and as the qualities of the conjecturing wits carry them, so each single thing can be explained by infinite interpretations. For since all this that is called allegory is drawn from hidden matters, and has no fixed limit in which the meaning of the thing spoken is fixed and unmoved, each man is free to drag the reading in whatever direction he wishes, and to affirm that to be intended toward which his own suspicion and plausible conjecture has led him.

Since this is so, how can you take certain things from doubtful ones and attach one single signification to a saying which you see drawn out through countless modes by the variety of expositions? Finally, if you deem it fitting, we also inquire this of you by a repeated question: do you judge all these fables — that is, each one entire — to be written in ambiguous, double-tongued, and shifting modes? Or do some of their parts say nothing ambiguous, while others are many-cleft and veiled by the overlaying of an allegorical covering?

For if from head to end the whole text and sequence of the account is shut up with allegorical veils, then expound, show, what we ought to substitute for each single thing that each fable utters, and bring it forth, and to what other things and meanings we should summon each. For just as you would have Jupiter heard for rain, Ceres, say, for earth, and for Libera and Father Dis the submersion and casting of seed, so it befits you to say what we ought to take for the bull...

...what we ought to understand, what for the indignation and wrath of Ceres, what the word 'Brimo' means, what the supplication of the anxious Jupiter, what the heaven-dwellers sent as envoys and not heard, what the castrated ram, what the offspring of the castrated ram, what the satisfaction made to these, what those things which were again done with more obscene lust upon the daughter.

Likewise, in the other fable, what the grove of Henna and its flowers are, what the fire taken from Etna and the torches kindled by it, what the traversing of the world with these, what the Attic region, what the Eleusinian village, what Baubo's hut and rustic hospitality, what the drink of the cyceon signifies, what the spurning of the drink, what the refashioning and revelation of the shameful parts, what the disgraceful sweetness of the spectacle, and the forgetfulness of bereavement procured by such remedies. But if for all these things you show what ought to be substituted by a changing of the meanings, then it shall be that we grant you assent regarding such an assertion:

but if you can neither set out each thing for each, nor summon the one into the context of the other things, why do you dignify with allegorical obscurities that which is written plainly and published for common understanding? 'Unless perhaps you will say that these allegories are not throughout the whole body of the narrative, but that some parts are written commonly, others however are veiled in a double and ambiguous covering.' — That is an urbane subtlety, and plain to any dullard. For because it is most impracticable for you to transpose, invert, and derive everything that is written, you pick out certain things suited to your wish...