the one assails divine matters with false crimes, the other embraces the games of those very crimes among divine matters; the one, in the songs of men, resounds with wicked figments concerning the gods, the other consecrates them at the festivities of the gods themselves; the one sings the misdeeds and outrages of the deities, the other loves them; the one betrays or feigns them, the other either attests them as true or takes delight even in the false. Both are base, and both are damnable; but the one, which is theatrical, professes a public shamefulness; the other, which is civic, is adorned with the shamefulness of the former. Is eternal life to be hoped for from that source, whence this brief and temporal life is polluted?
But does the fellowship of wicked men pollute life, if they insinuate themselves into our affections and assents, while the society of demons—who are worshipped by their very crimes—does not pollute it? If by true crimes, how wicked they are! if by false, how wickedly they are worshipped! When we say these things, it may perhaps seem to someone too ignorant of these matters that only those things unworthy of divine majesty—those ridiculous and detestable things—are celebrated of such gods, which are sung in poetic songs and acted in stage games; but that those sacred rites which not actors, but priests perform, are purged and free from all disgrace.
If this were so, no one would ever judge that theatrical shamefulness ought to be celebrated in their honor, nor would the gods themselves ever command such things to be exhibited to them. But for this very reason there is no shame in doing such things in the theaters for the homage of the gods, because like things are done in the temples. In short, when the aforesaid author tried to distinguish civil theology, as a certain third kind of its own, from the fabulous and the natural, he wished it to be understood as rather tempered from both than separated from both. For he says that the things which the poets write are less than the peoples ought to follow; but that those which the philosophers write are more than it is expedient for the common crowd to scrutinize. 'These so far diverge,' he says, 'that nevertheless not a few things have been taken from both kinds into the civil systems.
Wherefore what things shall be common with the proper, we shall write together with the civil; among which we ought to have a greater fellowship with the philosophers than with the poets.' Not, then, none with the poets. And yet in another place he says that concerning the generations of the gods the peoples were more inclined to the poets than to the natural philosophers. For here he said what ought to be done, there what is done. He said that the physicists wrote for the sake of usefulness, the poets for the sake of delight. And by this, those things which, written by the poets, the peoples ought not to follow, are the crimes of the gods, which nevertheless delight both the peoples and the gods. For the poets write, as he says, for the sake of delight, not of usefulness; yet they write those things which the gods demand and the peoples exhibit.
[VII] Therefore the fabulous, theatrical, stage-theology is brought back to the civil theology; and this whole theology, full of unworthiness and shamefulness, which is deservedly judged to be blamed and rejected, is a part of that which is judged to be worshipped and observed—not indeed an incongruous part, as I have undertaken to show, one that, foreign to the whole body, has been unseasonably connected and hung upon it, but wholly consonant, and, as a member of the same body, most fittingly joined to it. For what else do those images show—the shapes, ages, sexes, garb of the gods? Do the poets have a bearded Jupiter, a beardless Mercury, while the pontiffs do not? Did the mimes make monstrous private parts for Priapus, and not also the priests?
Does a god stand to be adored in sacred places in any different way than he comes forward to be laughed at in the theatres? Are aged Saturn and youthful Apollo the masks of actors in such a way that they are not also the statues of the shrines? Why are Forculus, who presides over doors, and Limentinus, who presides over the threshold, male gods, while among these Cardea is a female who guards the hinge? Are not these things found in the books of divine matters, which serious poets judged unworthy of their own songs? Does the theatrical Diana bear arms while the city's Diana is simply a virgin? Is the stage-Apollo a lyre-player while the Delphic one is free of that art? But these are more respectable in comparison with fouler things. What did they think about Jupiter himself, who set up his nurse in the Capitol?
Did they not bear witness to Euhemerus, who recorded—not by fabulous chatter but by historical diligence—that all such gods had been men and mortal? And those who appointed banqueting gods, the parasites of Jupiter, at his table—what else did they intend but that the rites should be like a mime-show? For if a mime-actor had said that the parasites of Jupiter were brought to his feast, he would surely have seemed to be seeking a laugh. Yet Varro said it! And he said it not while mocking the gods, but while commending them; the books of divine, not human, affairs testify that he wrote this, and not where he was setting forth the stage-games, but where he was expounding the laws of the Capitol. In short, he is overcome by such things and confesses that, just as they made the gods in human form, so they believed the gods to be delighted with human pleasures.
For the malignant spirits, too, did not fail in their business, so as to confirm these harmful opinions by the deluding of human minds. Hence also comes this: the keeper of Hercules' temple, being idle and at leisure, played at dice by himself, alternating with both hands, placing Hercules in the one hand and himself in the other, on this condition, that if he himself won, he would prepare a supper for himself from the temple's alms-money and hire a mistress; but if the victory fell to Hercules, he would furnish the very same for the pleasure of Hercules out of his own money. Then, when he had been beaten by himself as though by Hercules, he gave the due supper and the most famous courtesan Larentina to the god Hercules.
But she, having slept in the temple, saw in her dreams that Hercules had lain with her and had told her that, on departing from there, she would find her wages with the first young man she met, and that she should believe this to be paid to her by Hercules. And so, as she was going away, when the very wealthy young man Tarutius met her first and, having grown fond of her, kept her long with him, she was left his heir when he died. Having obtained an immense fortune, so that she might not seem ungrateful for the divine wages, she wrote the Roman people her own heir—which she deemed most acceptable to the divine powers—and when she disappeared, her will was found. For which services they say she even merited divine honors.
If poets were to invent these things, if mime-actors were to perform them, they would without doubt be said to belong to the fabulous theology and would be judged as things to be separated from the dignity of the civil theology. But since these disgraceful matters are betrayed by so great a teacher as belonging not to the poets but to the peoples, not to the mimes but to the sacred rites, not to the theatres but to the temples—that is, not to the fabulous but to the civil theology—then it is not without cause that the actors feign by their playful arts so great a baseness of the gods; but it is plainly in vain that the priests attempt, as by sacred rites, to feign a decency of the gods which does not exist. The rites of Juno are sacred, and these were celebrated on her beloved island Samos, where she was given in marriage to Jupiter; the rites of Ceres are sacred, where Proserpine, snatched away by Pluto, is sought;
the rites of Venus are sacred, where her beloved Adonis, a most beautiful youth slain by a boar's tusk, is lamented; the rites of the Mother of the gods are sacred, where Attis, a handsome young man loved by her and, out of a woman's jealousy, castrated, is bewailed together with the misfortune of the castrated men whom they call Galli. Since these things are more deformed than every stage-obscenity, what reason is there that they should strive to set apart the fabulous inventions of the poets about the gods—belonging plainly to the theatre—from the civil theology, which they wish to belong to the city, as if the shameful and unworthy from the honorable and worthy? Therefore thanks are rather owed to the actors, who spared the eyes of men and did not lay bare in their spectacles all those things which are hidden within the walls of the sacred temples.
What good is to be thought of their rites which are covered over in darkness, when the things brought into the light are so detestable? And certainly, what they do in secret by means of the castrated and effeminate, let them see to that themselves; yet those same men, unhappily and shamefully unmanned and corrupted, they could by no means conceal. Let them persuade whomever they can that they perform something holy through such men, whom they cannot deny to be numbered and busied among their sacred things. We do not know what they do, but we do know through what sort of men they do it. Now we know what things are performed on the stage, into which no castrated or effeminate man has ever entered, not even into the chorus of harlots; and yet even those things are performed by the base and infamous—for indeed they ought not to have been performed by the honorable.
What then are those sacred rites, for whose performance holiness chose such men as even the obscenity of the stage did not admit into itself? [VIII] But, they say, these things have certain physiological interpretations—that is, interpretations of natural principles. As if indeed in this discussion we were seeking physiology and not theology, that is, the account not of nature but of God. For although he who is the true God is God not by opinion but by nature, yet not every nature is God; for there is certainly the nature of a man, and of a beast, and of a tree, and of a stone, none of which is God. But if the head of this interpretation, when the rites of the Mother of the gods are treated, is certainly that the Mother of the gods is the earth—what more do we seek, what else do we scrutinize?
What more evidently supports those who say that all these gods were men? For they are earth-born, and thus the earth is their mother. But in the true theology the earth is the work of God, not his mother. Nevertheless, however they may interpret her rites and refer them to the nature of things: for males to suffer what belongs to women is not according to nature, but against nature. This disease, this crime, this disgrace has among those sacred rites an open profession, which among the vicious morals of men scarcely has confession even under torture. Then if these rites, which are proven to be fouler than the stage's obscenities, are excused and cleared on this ground, that they have their own interpretations by which they are shown to signify the nature of things:
why should not the poetic inventions likewise be excused and cleared? For many have interpreted these too in the same manner, to such a degree that what is said by them to be most monstrous and unspeakable—that Saturn devoured his own sons—some interpret thus: that the length of time, which is signified by the name of Saturn, itself consumes whatever it begets; or, as the same Varro thinks, that Saturn pertains to the seeds which fall back again into the earth from which they arise. And likewise others interpret the rest in another manner and in the same way.
And yet the fabulous theology is called such, and together with all interpretations of this kind it is censured, rejected, and disapproved—not only by the natural theology, which is the philosophers', but also by that civil one which we are discussing, which is asserted to belong to the cities and peoples; and on the ground that it has feigned unworthy things about the gods, it is deservedly discerned as something to be repudiated. And this indeed by such a design that, since the most acute and most learned men, by whom these things were written, understood that both were to be disapproved—both the fabulous, that is, and the civil—they yet dared to disapprove the former but did not dare the latter; they set forth the former as blameworthy, but they exhibited the latter as its like, to be compared with it—
not so that this latter should be chosen to be held in preference to the former, but so that it might be understood as needing to be rejected along with the former; and thus, without danger to those who feared to censure the civil theology, both being held in contempt, that which they call the natural might find a place among the better minds. For both the civil and the fabulous are both fabulous and both civil; whoever prudently inspects the vanities and obscenities of both will find both to be fabulous; and both to be civil, whoever observes the stage-games, which belong to the fabulous, at the festivals of the civil gods and in the divine rites of the cities.
How then is the power of granting eternal life attributed to any of these gods, whom their own images and rites convict of being most manifestly most like the fabulous gods—already most openly reproved—in forms, ages, sex, dress, marriages, generations, and rites? In all of which they are understood either to have been men, for each of whom, according to his life or death, sacred and solemn rites were established, while demons insinuated and confirmed this error; or else, from whatever occasion, that most unclean spirits have crept in to deceive human minds. [IX] What then?
The very functions of the divinities, so cheaply and minutely cut up—on account of which they say that supplication ought to be made to each for his own proper office, whereof we have already said not indeed all, but many things—do they not accord more with the buffoonery of the mime than with divine dignity? If someone were to employ two nurses for an infant, of whom one gave nothing but food and the other nothing but drink, just as these men employed two goddesses for this purpose, Educa and Potina: surely he would seem to be playing the fool and doing something like a mime in his own house. They wish Liber to be named from 'liberation' (liberamentum), because through his benefit males are freed in intercourse by the emission of seed; and they say that Libera does this same thing in females, whom they also think to be Venus, because they hold that she too emits seed;
and on this account they place in the temple the male part of the body for Liber and the female part for Libera. To this they add women assigned to Liber, and wine for the exciting of lust. Thus the Bacchanalia were celebrated with the utmost frenzy; and Varro himself confesses that such things could not have been done by the Bacchants except with a mind disturbed. Yet these things afterward displeased a saner senate, and it ordered them to be removed. Here at least, perhaps, they at last perceived what unclean spirits, while they are held to be gods, can accomplish in the minds of men. These things certainly would not be done in the theatres; for there they play, they do not rage—though to have gods who are delighted even by such games is itself akin to madness.
But what sort of thing is this, that although he distinguishes the religious man from the superstitious by this distinction—that the gods are feared by the superstitious, but merely revered by the religious as parents are revered, not feared as enemies, and he says they are all so good that it is easier for them to spare the guilty than to harm any innocent person—yet he records that to a woman who has just given birth three guardian gods are employed, lest the god Silvanus enter by night and vex her; and that, to signify these guardians, three men go round the thresholds of the house by night, and first strike the threshold with an axe, then with a pestle, thirdly sweep it with brooms, so that by these given signs of cultivation the god Silvanus may be kept from entering—because trees are neither cut nor pruned without iron, nor is meal made without a pestle, nor are crops heaped up without brooms;
and from these three things three gods are named: Intercidona from the cutting of the axe (intercisio), Pilumnus from the pestle (pilum), Deverra from the brooms (scopae), by which guardian gods the woman who has given birth might be preserved against the violence of the god Silvanus. Thus against the savagery of a harmful god the guardianship of the good ones would not have prevailed, unless they were more against one, and unless against him—rough, dreadful, uncouth, and, being of the woods, wild—they fought back with the signs of cultivation as with things contrary to him. Is this then the innocence of the gods, this the concord? Are these the wholesome divinities of cities, more to be laughed at than the mockeries of the theatres? When male and female are joined, the god Iugatinus is employed; let this be borne. But she who marries must be led home; and the god Domiducus is employed; that she may be in the home, the god Domitius is employed;
that she may remain with her husband, the goddess Manturna is added. What more is sought? Let human modesty be spared; let the concupiscence of flesh and blood complete the rest, the secret of shame having been provided for. Why is the bedchamber filled with a throng of divinities, when even the groomsmen depart from it? And it is filled for this purpose—not that by the thought of their presence greater care for chastity might be had, but that from the woman, weak in her sex and timid in the novelty, with their cooperation, virginity might be taken away without any difficulty. For the goddess Virginensis is present, and the father-god Subigus, and the mother-goddess Prema, and the goddess Pertunda, and Venus and Priapus. What is this? If it was altogether necessary for the man laboring in that work to be aided by the gods, would not some one god or some one goddess suffice?
Would Venus alone be too little, who is even said to be named from this—that without force (vis) a woman does not cease to be a virgin? If there is any shame in men which is not in the divinities, will not married people, when they believe that so many gods of both sexes are present and pressing upon this work, be so affected with shame that the man is less moved and the woman resists more? And certainly, if the goddess Virginensis is present to loose the virgin's girdle; if the god Subigus is present that she may be subdued to the man; if the goddess Prema is present that, once subdued, she may be pressed down so as not to stir—what does the goddess Pertunda do there? Let her blush, let her go outside; let the husband also do something. It is very indecent that anyone but he should accomplish what she is named for.
But perhaps she is tolerated for this reason, because she is said to be a goddess, not a god. For if a male were believed and were called Pertundus, the husband would demand greater aid against him for his wife's chastity than the woman in childbed against Silvanus. But why should I say this, when even Priapus is there, an over-mighty male, upon whose monstrous and most shameful member the new bride was bidden to sit, by the most honorable and most religious custom of matrons? Let them still go on and, by whatever subtlety they can, try to distinguish the civil theology from the fabulous theology, cities from theatres, temples from stages, the sacred rites of the pontiffs from the songs of the poets, as honorable things from base, truthful from deceitful, weighty from trifling, serious from playful, things to be sought from things to be spat out.
We understand what they are doing: they know that the theatrical and fabulous theology hangs upon this civil one, and is reflected back from the songs of the poets as from a mirror; and therefore, this civil theology being set forth—which they dare not condemn—they more freely accuse and censure that image of it, so that those who recognize what they mean may detest this very face itself, of which the other is an image. And yet the gods themselves so love it, as though beholding themselves in the same mirror, that who and what sort they are may be better seen in both.
Hence also they have compelled their own worshippers by terrible commands to dedicate to them the filth of the fabulous theology, to place it in their solemnities, to hold it among divine matters; and thus they have both taught more manifestly that they themselves are most unclean spirits, and have made that abject and reprobate theatrical theology a member and part of this urban theology, as though it were chosen and approved—so that, since the whole is base and deceitful and contains within itself fictitious gods, one part of it is in the writings of the priests, the other in the songs of the poets. Whether it has yet other parts is another question: now, on account of Varro's division, I have shown sufficiently, I think, that both the urban and the theatrical theology belong to the one civil theology.
Wherefore, since both are of like baseness, absurdity, unworthiness, and falsehood, far be it from true religious men that eternal life should be hoped for from either the one or the other. Finally, Varro himself began to record and enumerate the gods from the conception of a man, of which number he began with Janus, and carried that series through to the death of a decrepit man; and he closed the gods pertaining to the man himself with the goddess Nenia, who is sung at the funerals of the aged. Then he began to display other gods, who pertained not to the man himself but to those things which are man's, such as food and clothing and whatever else is necessary for this life, showing in all cases what is the office of each and for what each is to be supplicated;
in all which diligence he pointed out and named no gods from whom eternal life is to be sought—for the sake of which one thing alone we are properly Christians.
Who then would be so dull as not to understand that this man, by so diligently expounding and opening up the civil theology, and by demonstrating it to be like that fabulous, unworthy, and shameful one, and by teaching clearly enough that this very fabulous theology is a part of the civil, is contriving a place in the minds of men for none but that natural theology which he says belongs to the philosophers—and this with such subtlety that he censures the fabulous, but does not indeed dare to censure the civil, yet by betraying it shows it to be reprehensible; and thus, both being rightly reproved by the judgment of those who understand aright, the natural alone remains to be chosen? Concerning which, in its own place, with the help of the true God, we must discuss more diligently.
[X] The freedom, indeed, which this man lacked—so that he did not dare openly to censure this urban theology, most like the theatrical, as he censured the latter—was not lacking, not indeed wholly but in some part, to Annaeus Seneca, whom by certain indications we find to have flourished in the times of our apostles. It was present to him as he wrote, but lacking to him as he lived. For in that book which he composed against superstitions, he himself censured this civil and urban theology far more copiously and vehemently than Varro censured the theatrical and fabulous. For when he was treating of images:
"They dedicate," he says, "the sacred, immortal, and inviolable gods in the vilest and most immovable matter; they clothe them with the shapes of men, of beasts, and of fishes, and some indeed with mixed sex and diverse bodies; they call them divinities which, if they suddenly came to life having received breath, would be held to be monsters." Then somewhat later, when in praising the natural theology he had reviewed the opinions of certain philosophers, he set against himself a question and said: "At this point someone says: Shall I believe that heaven and earth are gods, and some others above the moon, others below? Shall I bear either Plato or the Peripatetic Strato, of whom the one made a god without a body, the other without a mind?" And answering this:
"What then, in the end," he says, "do the dreams of Titus Tatius or Romulus or Tullus Hostilius seem to you truer? Tatius dedicated the goddess Cluacina; Romulus, Picus and Tiberinus; Hostilius, Fear (Pavor) and Pallor, most hideous affections of men, of which the one is a movement of a terrified mind, the other not even a disease of the body, but a color. Will you rather believe these to be divinities and receive them into heaven?" But concerning the rites, cruelly base, how freely he wrote! "That one," he says, "cuts off his own male parts, that one gashes his arms. Where do they fear the angry gods, who thus earn their favor? But the gods ought to be worshipped by no kind of rite, if they wish this.
So great is the frenzy of a mind disturbed and driven from its seat, that the gods are appeased in a manner in which not even the most hideous of men, and those handed down in fables for their cruelty, rage. Tyrants have torn the limbs of some, but they ordered no one to tear his own. Some have been castrated for the pleasure of royal lust; but no one, at his master's bidding, laid hands on himself so as not to be a man. They butcher themselves in the temples, they make supplication with their own wounds and blood. If anyone has leisure to observe what they do and what they suffer, he will find things so unbecoming to the honorable, so unworthy of the free, so unlike the sane, that no one would have doubted them to be mad, if they raged with the few;
now the throng of the insane is the patronage of sanity." Already those things which he records as accustomed to be done in the Capitol itself, and which he intrepidly refutes altogether—who would believe them to be done except by mockers or madmen? For when in the Egyptian rites Osiris, lost, is mourned, and then, being found, is celebrated with great joy, he derided this—since both his loss and his finding are feigned, yet that grief and gladness are truly expressed by those who have lost nothing and found nothing: "Yet to this frenzy," he says, "there is a fixed time. It is tolerable to go mad once a year. Come into the Capitol; one will be ashamed of the madness made public, which vain frenzy has assigned to itself as a duty. One assigns names to the god, another announces the hours to Jupiter;
one is a bather, another an anointer, who by a vain motion of his arms imitates one anointing. There are women who arrange the hair of Juno and Minerva (standing far from the temple, not to say far from the image, they move their fingers in the manner of those who dress the hair); there are those who hold a mirror; there are those who summon the gods to their court-bonds; there are those who offer petitions and instruct them in their case. A learned archmime, an old man already decrepit, daily performed a mime in the Capitol, as though the gods gladly watched him whom men had ceased to watch. Every kind of craftsman there sits idle, having done his work for the immortal gods." And a little after: "These, however," he says, "promise the god a use that is at least superfluous, not base nor infamous. Certain women sit in the Capitol who think that they are loved by Jupiter;
they are not even frightened, if you are willing to believe the poets, by the regard of most wrathful Juno." This freedom Varro did not have; he dared only to censure the poetic theology, he did not dare the civil, which this man cut to pieces. But if we attend to the truth, the temples where these things are done are worse than the theatres where they are feigned. Whence, in these sacred rites of the civil theology, Seneca rather chose these parts for the wise man—that he should not hold them in the religion of his soul, but feign them in his acts. For he says: "All these things the wise man will observe as commanded by laws, not as pleasing to the gods." And a little after: "What of the fact," he says, "that we join even the marriages of the gods, and not even piously, marriages of brothers and sisters! We match Bellona with Mars, Venus with Vulcan, Salacia with Neptune.
Yet some we leave unwed, as though a match had been wanting—especially since certain of them are widows, such as Populonia or Fulgora and the goddess Rumina; for whom I do not wonder that a suitor was lacking. All that ignoble throng of gods, which long superstition has heaped together over a long age, we shall," he says, "so adore that we remember its worship pertains rather to custom than to reality." Neither those laws, therefore, nor custom instituted in the civil theology anything that was pleasing to the gods or pertained to reality. But this man, whom the philosophers made as it were free, nevertheless, because he was an illustrious senator of the Roman people, worshipped what he censured, did what he condemned, adored what he found fault with;