Eusebius of Caesarea · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
praef.1| PREFACE. Such, then, were the conclusions about Greek theology reached by the best of the philosophers and by the ancient first rulers of the Roman state: they in no way admitted natural explanations in the myths about the gods, nor the solemn-seeming, sophistical quibbling.
praef.2| But since we have once set out to refute these as well, come, let us look together at their interpretations and speculations and see what solemn and godworthy thing they bring forward. We will contribute nothing of our own, but use their own words throughout, so that we may learn their solemn secrets once more from themselves.
praef.3| Countless others among those who profess philosophy have spent great labor on these matters. They have produced differing ingenious interpretations, each insisting that whatever occurred to him and seemed right to him was the truth. For my part, it is enough to draw the proofs from the most eminent men, those known to all philosophers, who have won no small fame for philosophy among the Greeks.
praef.4| Of these, first take up and read the words of Plutarch of Chaeronea on the subjects before us. In them he speaks in lofty terms and turns the myths aside toward what he calls mystic theologies. Explaining these, he says Dionysus is drunkenness, no longer the mortal man whom history disclosed in the previous book, and that Hera is the married life of husband and wife. Then, as though he had forgotten this explanation, he attaches another account straight after it: he now names Hera not as before but as the earth, and Leto as forgetfulness and night; and then again he says Hera is identical with Leto. After this he brings in Zeus, allegorized into the power of the upper air.
praef.5| But why should I anticipate this, when one can hear the man himself, in the work he entitled On the Daedala at Plataea, bringing to light, in words something like these, what is hidden from most people in the secret natural philosophy about the gods:
1.1| "That the ancient natural philosophy, among Greeks and barbarians alike, was a physical account hidden in myths, for the most part a concealed and mystic theology conveyed through riddles and hidden meanings, in which what was spoken was clearer to the many than what was kept silent, and what was kept silent more suggestive than what was spoken, is evident from the Orphic poems and from the Egyptian and Phrygian writings. But above all the orgiastic ceremonies of the rites, and the things performed symbolically in the sacred services, reveal the mind of the ancients.
1.2| For example, so as not to stray far from the subject in hand, they do not believe or allow that Hera has any fellowship with Dionysus. They take care not to mingle their sacred things; the priestesses at Athens, it is said, do not greet one another when they meet, and no ivy at all is brought into Hera's precinct. This is not because of mythical and foolish jealousies, but because the goddess has charge of marriage and leads the bride home, and drunkenness is unseemly for bridegrooms and most unsuited to weddings, as Plato says; for drinking unmixed wine, he says, produces turmoil in both souls and bodies, and because of it what is sown and conceived takes root badly, unformed and wandering. Again, those who offer sacrifice to Hera do not dedicate the gall but bury it next to the altar, since the life together of wife and husband ought to be without anger and without gall, pure of all wrath and bitterness."
1.3| "This symbolic kind is found still more in the stories and the myths. For example, they relate that Hera, while still a maiden being reared in Euboea, was stolen away by Zeus, carried over to this place, and hidden here, Cithaeron providing them with a shady recess and a bridal chamber made by nature. When Macris came searching for her (she was Hera's nurse) and wanted to search the place, Cithaeron would not let her pry or approach the spot, saying that Zeus was resting and spending his time there with Leto. When Macris had gone away, Hera escaped notice in this way for the time being; later, remembering the favor with gratitude, she gave Leto a share in her altar and her temple, so that the first sacrifice is offered to Leto Mychia, 'of the recess'; some say Nychia, 'of the night'. In either name what is hidden and has escaped notice is signified. Some say that Hera herself, while she was secretly with Zeus there and escaping notice, was thus called Leto Nychia; and that when the marriage was made public, and their union was first disclosed here, around Cithaeron and Plataea, she was called Hera Teleia and Gamelios, 'the fulfilled' and 'of marriage'.
1.4| "Those who take the myth in a more natural and fitting way thus bring Hera and Leto together into the same thing. Hera is earth, as has been said, and Leto is night, a kind of Lethe (forgetfulness) of those turning to sleep; and night is nothing other than the shadow of the earth. For when it draws near the setting and hides the sun, it spreads out and darkens the air; this is the eclipsing slip that happens at full moons, when, as the moon moves round, the shadow of the earth touches it and clouds its light.
1.5| "That Leto is no one other than Hera you may learn from this. We call Artemis the daughter of Leto, but we also name the same Eileithyia; so Hera and Leto are two names for one goddess. Again, Apollo is born of Leto and Ares of Hera, yet the power of both is one: Ares is so called as a helper (arogon) in the events that come by force and battle, and Apollo as one who releases and frees (apallattei, apoluei) a man from the diseased conditions of the body. Therefore of the most blazing and fiery of the stars, the sun is called Apollo, and the fire-like one is named Ares. And it is not out of place for the same goddess to be called the goddess of marriage and to be held mother both of Eileithyia and of the sun. For marriage has birth as its end, and birth is the journey from darkness into the sun and light. And well did the poet say: 'But when Eileithyia, the helper in labor, brought him forth into the light and he saw the rays of the sun.' The poet did well to squeeze the compound with the preposition, showing the forced character of the labor pain, and he made the end of birth to be the seeing of the sun. So the same goddess brought about the coming together in marriage in order to provide for birth."
1.6| "But perhaps one should also tell the sillier myth. It is said that Zeus, when Hera was at odds with him and no longer willing to share the same place, but hid herself, was at a loss and wandering, and met Alalcomeneus the native, and was taught by him how to deceive Hera by pretending to marry another. With Alalcomeneus' help they secretly cut down a fine, well-grown oak, shaped it, and dressed it as a bride, calling it Daedale. Then the wedding hymn was sung, the Tritonid nymphs brought the baths, and Boeotia provided pipes and revels; and when these things were being carried out Hera could no longer hold out, but came down from Cithaeron, the women of Plataea following her, rushing to Zeus in anger and jealousy; and when the fabrication was revealed, she was reconciled with joy and laughter and herself led the bride. She added honor to the wooden image and called the festival the Daedala, but nonetheless burned it, lifeless as it was, out of jealousy."
1.7| "Such is the myth, and this is its meaning. The quarrel and strife of Hera and Zeus is nothing other than a bad mixture and disturbance of the elements, when they are no longer proportioned to one another according to the order of the world, but, with unevenness and roughness arising, in a hard-fought contest they dissolve their union and bring about the ruin of the universe. If Zeus, that is, the hot and fiery power, gives the cause of the destruction, drought seizes the earth; but if some excess or overflow arises around Hera, that is, the moist and breathy nature, a great flood came and rained down together and drowned everything. Something of this kind happened in those times, and Boeotia especially was sunk; and as soon as the plain emerged and the flooding subsided, the order of the surrounding air, restored by fair weather, was called the concord and reconciliation of the gods, and first of the plants of the earth the oak rose up, and men loved it, because it provided sustenance of life and the means of survival, not for the pious only, as Hesiod says, but also for those left over from the destruction: 'The top bears acorns, the middle bees.'"
2.1| So says Plutarch. But we see from the passages he has set out that the wonderful and secret natural philosophy of Greek theology yielded nothing divine, nothing great, godlike, or worthy of exaltation.
2.2| For you have heard Hera at one moment proclaimed goddess of marriage and signifying the life together of husband and wife, at another named again the earth, at another the moist essence; Dionysus carried over into drunkenness, Leto into night, Apollo into the sun, and Zeus himself into the hot and fiery power.
2.3| So, in addition to the unseemliness of the myths, the account that seemed more dignified, the natural philosophy, did not lead up to any heavenly, intelligent, and divine powers, nor to rational and bodiless essences, but turned the parts of the world downward again, into drunkenness and weddings and human passions, into fire and earth and sun and the remaining elements of matter, and deified nothing more.
2.4| Plato knew this too. At any rate he plainly admits in the Cratylus that the first men of Greece knew no more of the parts of the world than the visible ones, and thought the luminaries in heaven and the rest of the visible things were the only gods.
2.5| He says there, word for word: "It seems to me that the first men in Greece believed in only those gods in whom many of the barbarians now believe: sun, moon, earth, stars, and heaven."
2.6| But such is the Greek material. Let us look at that which is older than it, namely the Egyptian. Isis and Osiris, they say, are the sun and moon, that Zeus is the breath that moves through all things, Hephaestus the fire, and that the earth is named Demeter; that the Egyptians take Ocean to be the moist element and their own river the Nile, to which they also ascribe the origins of the gods; and the air, they say, they call Athena.
2.7| These five gods, I mean Air, Water, Fire, Earth, and Breath, go through the whole inhabited world, taking shape at different times in different ways into the forms and appearances of men and of animals of every kind; and mortal men who shared their names came to be among the Egyptians themselves, named Helios, Cronus, and Rhea, and also Zeus, Hera, Hephaestus, and Hestia. Manetho writes about these matters at greater length, Diodorus in a condensed way in the work I named earlier, relating it in about the following words, verbatim:
3.1| "These gods, they say, Helios and Selene, who for the Egyptians are Osiris and Isis, govern the entire world, nourishing and increasing all things by three seasons that complete the cycle by an invisible movement, the spring, the summer, and the winter; and these, though of natures most opposed to one another, complete the year in the best harmony.
3.2| The nature of these gods, they say, contributes most to the generation of life in all things, the one with fiery and breathy matter, the other with moist and dry, and both in common with air; and through these all things are born and nourished. Therefore the whole body of the nature of the universe is completed by sun and moon, and the parts of these are the five mentioned, the breath, the fire, the dry, the moist, and last the airy, just as in a human being we count up the head, hands, feet, and other parts, and in the same way the whole body of the world is composed of those mentioned.
3.3| Each of these they considered a god, and the first men in Egypt, using articulate speech, assigned to each an individual name suited to it. Breath they called Zeus, the word being translated; since he is the cause of the life-breath in living things, they considered him a kind of father of all.
3.4| They say that the most distinguished of the Greek poets agrees with them, saying this of the god: 'father of men and of gods.' Fire, translated, they named Hephaestus, considering him a great god who contributes much to all in their birth and full growth. The earth, taking it as a kind of vessel of what grows, they called mother; and the Greeks likewise call her Demeter, the word having been slightly altered through time.
3.5| For in ancient times, they say, the earth was called mother, as Orpheus also attests, saying: 'Earth, mother of all, Demeter, wealth-giver.' The moist element, they say, the ancients named Ocean, which, translated, means mother of nourishment, though among some of the Greeks it has been understood as Ocean, of whom the poet too says: 'Ocean, the origin of the gods, and mother Tethys.'
3.6| For the Egyptians hold that Ocean is their own river, the Nile, beside which the births of the gods took place. For of the whole inhabited world it is in Egypt alone that there are many cities founded by the ancient gods, for example the cities of Zeus, Helios, Hermes, Apollo, Pan, Eileithyia, and a number of others.
3.7| The air, they say, they called Athena, the word being translated, and they considered her the daughter of Zeus and supposed her a virgin, both because the air is by nature incorruptible and because it occupies the highest place of the whole world; for this reason the story is told that she was born from the head of Zeus. She was also named Tritogeneia because her nature changes three times a year, in spring, summer, and winter.
3.8| She is also called gray-eyed, not, as some of the Greeks supposed, from having gray eyes (for that would be silly), but because the air has a grayish-blue look to the sight. They say that the five gods mentioned go through the whole inhabited world, appearing to men in the shapes of sacred animals, and sometimes changing into the shapes of men or of some other things.
3.9| And this is not fabulous but possible, if indeed these are in truth the begetters of all things. The poet too, having visited Egypt and shared in such accounts from the priests, set down in his poetry the statement as a thing that happens: 'And the gods, in the likeness of strangers from foreign lands, taking all manner of shapes, go about the cities, watching the violence and the lawfulness of men.' So much, then, the Egyptians say about the gods in heaven who have an everlasting origin."
3.10| Others, sprung from these, they say, became earthly gods, being mortal to begin with but gaining immortality through understanding and through benefit to men in common, and some of these were kings in Egypt. Translated, some of them share names with the heavenly gods, and some have a name of their own: Helios, Cronus, and Rhea, and also Zeus, called Ammon by some, and in addition Hera, Hephaestus, Hestia, and finally Hermes. And first Helios reigned among the Egyptians, being named after the star in heaven."
3.11| This is what the writer I mentioned says. And Plutarch in his work On Isis writes the following, word for word: "From another starting point, let us first consider the simplest of those who seem to say something more philosophical. These are the ones who say that just as the Greeks allegorize Cronus as time, Hera as air, and the birth of Hephaestus as the change of air into fire, so among the Egyptians Osiris is the Nile, joined to Isis, who is the earth, and Typhon the sea, into which the Nile pours and disappears."
3.12| After saying these and such things, he refers the myths of the gods in question back again to demons, and again renders them otherwise, and again allegorizes in yet another way.
3.13| It would be reasonable to ask of which gods they will say the wooden images keep the forms impressed upon them. Of demons? Or of fire, air, earth, and water? Or are they images resembling men and women, and shapes of irrational animals and beasts?
3.14| For since it has been conceded even by them that mortal men existed who shared their names with the sun and the general elements, and that these were proclaimed gods, whose forms and likenesses is it likely the carvings in the lifeless wooden images represent? Those of the general elements, or, as the evidence of the eye itself shows, those of mortals lying among the dead?
3.15| But even if they themselves do not say so, true reason cries out and shouts, all but giving voice, testifying that those spoken of were mortal men. And Plutarch even adds, in superabundance, what sort of bodily form they had, saying in his work On Isis and the Egyptian gods something like this:
3.16| "For the Egyptians relate that Hermes was short-armed in body, Typhon red in color, Ares white, and Osiris dark, as men born by nature."
3.17| So says Plutarch. The whole of their deification, then, consists of dead men, and the natural explanations have been fabricated for them. For why was it necessary to mold the shapes of men and women as living figures, when one could worship the sun, the moon, and the world's other elements without these?
3.18| And which of the two did they start from, and from what, when they gave out such names? I mean, for instance, Hephaestus, Athena, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera. Were these names first those of the general elements, and did they afterward put them on mortals who shared the names of the heavenly ones? Or, the other way round, did they carry the transfer from the appellation among men over to the essences?
3.19| And why should general natures be given mortal names? As for the mysteries of each god, the hymns, the songs, and the secrets of the rites, do their tokens refer to the general elements, or to the mortal men of old who shared the names of the gods?
3.20| Indeed, how could anyone assign wanderings, drunkenness, loves, the seduction of women, plots against men, and countless other things, truly mortal and shameful and undignified, to the general elements, when they carry with them from the start the mortal and the human-passioned?
3.21| So from all this this wonderful and noble natural philosophy is caught out as touching truth in no respect, introducing nothing truly divine, but having a forced and falsified solemnity on the outside. Listen then to what Porphyry too relates about the same matters in his Letter to Anebo the Egyptian:
4.1| "Chaeremon and the others consider nothing else to exist before the visible worlds, putting those of the Egyptians in the place of a first principle, and no other gods than those called planets, and those that complete the zodiac, and as many as rise beside them; and the divisions into decans, the horoscopes, and those called mighty rulers, whose names are given in the almanacs, along with the treatments of ailments, the risings and settings, and the signs of things to come.
4.2| For he saw that those who call the sun the Maker, and who treat the tales of Osiris and Isis, together with all the priestly myths, wind them round either the stars and their appearances, disappearances, and risings, or the waxing and waning of the moon, or the course of the sun, or the night hemisphere or the day hemisphere, or the river; and in general they interpret everything in terms of natural things, and nothing in terms of bodiless and living essences. Most of them also hung what is up to us on the movement of the stars, binding everything, I do not know how, in unbreakable bonds of necessity, which they call fate, and attaching everything to these gods. Thus they serve, in temples and wooden images and the rest, only the releasers from fate."
4.3| Let these things, from the letter mentioned, stand, saying plainly that the secret theology of the Egyptians too theologized about no others than the stars in heaven, both the so-called fixed and the so-called wandering, and introduced no bodiless Maker of the universe at all, no creative Word, no God, no gods, no intelligent and unseen powers, only the visible sun. This is why they assigned the cause of the universe to the stars alone, attaching everything to fate and to the stars' movement and course, as indeed this opinion still prevails among them even now.
4.4| If, then, the Egyptians' interpretation was to the visible elements alone of the world, and to nothing bodiless and living, and the elements and all visible bodies by their own definition are lifeless, irrational, flowing by nature and perishable, see into what depths their theology has fallen, deifying lifeless substance and dead, irrational bodies, above all when they referred nothing to bodiless and intelligent essences, nor to a mind and creative Word of the universe.
4.5| Since it was agreed earlier that the Greeks carried over their theology from the Egyptians, it is time for the Greeks, too, to keep step with them and give the same natural explanations as the Egyptians do, and stand convicted of deifying nothing more than lifeless matter. For these were the dignified teachings of the Egyptians according to the writing of the author mentioned, who again, in the work he entitled On Abstinence from Animal Food, goes through such things about the same matters:
4.6| “Starting from this discipline and from their kinship with the divine, they came to know that the divine did not pass through man alone, nor did the soul make its dwelling on earth in man alone, but that nearly the same soul passed through all living creatures. For this reason they took every animal into their deification, and they mingled beasts and men alike, and again the bodies of birds and of men.
4.7| For among them a figure is fashioned that is manlike as far as the neck, but has the face of a bird, a lion, or some other animal; and again a human head, and parts of other animals, set now beneath and now above. By these they show that according to the will of the gods these creatures share with one another, and that wild beasts are brought up with us and tamed not without some divine intention.
4.8| Hence the lion is worshiped as a god, and a certain division of Egypt, called a nome by them, takes its name from him as Leontopolite, another is Busirite, and another Cynopolite. For they worshiped the power that extends over all things through the animals of the same nome, which each of the gods had provided.
4.9| They revere water and fire, the finest of the elements, as most responsible for our preservation, and they display these in their temples; so even now, at the opening of the holy shrine of Sarapis, the service is performed with fire and water, as the hymn-singer pours out the water and shows the fire, when, standing on the threshold, he wakes the god in the ancestral tongue of the Egyptians.
4.10| So they worship these things that partake, and they revered most of all those that partake most fully of sacred things. All animals are of this kind, since they also worship a man, in the village of Anabis, where sacrifice is made to him too and the offerings are burned on the altars;
4.11| but a little later he would eat the portions prepared for him as a man. As a man, then, is to be abstained from, so are the others.
4.12| Moreover, out of their surpassing wisdom and familiarity with the divine, they discovered that some animals are dearer to certain gods than men are, as the hawk is to the sun: its whole nature is made of blood and breath, yet it pities even a man, and wails over a corpse lying on the ground and scratches earth upon it. And after a few remarks he says:
4.13| “The ignorant man, who has no understanding of divine things, may loathe the scarab, but the Egyptians revered it as a living likeness of the sun. For every scarab is male; it drops its seed in the mud, shapes it into a ball, and rolls it back with its hind feet, just as the sun does with the heaven, and it waits out a lunar cycle of days.
4.14| In the same way they have their philosophy about the ram, and something else about the crocodile, and about the vulture and the ibis, and, in general, about every one of the animals, so that out of understanding and exceeding divine wisdom they came to reverence even the animals.”
5.1| Such are the statements that the author just named has set down about the noble natural science of the wise Egyptians, explaining to us the secret teachings of the Egyptians: that they worship fire and water, and that among them one essence is judged to belong to rational and irrational creatures alike, not only of their bodies but of their soul, so that in his view it is reasonable that the beasts were proclaimed gods.
5.2| And yet how is it not utterly absurd to take the irrational and bestial nature into deification on the ground that it shares, as they say, an equal soul with men? Surely, if that were so, they ought to have regarded the animals as men, and to give them a share of human reputation and honor.
5.3| But they did not do this: creatures that are by their very nature irrational beasts, that have been allotted that very name and have not been thought worthy even of the name of men, they did not see fit to accept even on a level with men; yet the highest title of the universal King and of God, the Maker of all things, they have carried down and cast upon the nature of beasts, and have called gods things which God himself has not thought worthy even of the name given to men.
5.4| Besides this you have heard of the mystic divine wisdom on account of which the marvelous Egyptians revered wolves and dogs and lions; you have learned the wonder of the scarab and the excellence of the hawk. Laugh no more, then, at the gods, but pity the thrice-wretched race of men for its great simplicity and blindness.
5.5| And consider, looking all around, what blessings the Christ of God has come to give us, who through his gospel teaching has delivered even the souls of the Egyptians from so great a disease, a long and enduring disablement, so that the majority of those in Egypt have already been freed from this disease too.
6.1| But such are the beliefs among the Egyptians, whose traditions are recorded as older than all those of the Greeks. You have therefore, besides the mythical theology, the more natural theology also of Greeks and Egyptians alike, who of old established the superstition of many gods, and you have learned that among them nothing of what is truly divine, of incorporeal and intelligent essences, was known.
6.2| Still, let it be granted and conceded to these chatterers about the heavens that they speak the truth and are right in their natural science of allegories; let the sun be at one time Apollo, and again Horus, and again the same one Osiris, and countless other things as many as they like; and likewise the moon, either Isis or Artemis, and as many names as one might care to enumerate.
6.3| Let these not be mortal men, but names signifying the heavenly luminaries themselves; it follows, then, that the sun and moon and stars and the remaining parts of the universe are to be worshiped as gods.
6.4| And in this way the noble philosophy of the Greeks has appeared as if by stage machinery, raising on high the promise of its account, but turning the thinking of its wise men downward around the visible and apparent creation of God, and deifying nothing more than fire and the hot substance, the parts of the universe by means of the heavenly luminaries, and, let it be, the moist and the dry and the blending of bodies.
6.5| How, then, is the gospel of our Savior Jesus, the Christ of God, not great and wonderful, teaching every race of mankind to worship with fitting conceptions the God and Master of sun and moon, and the Maker of the entire universe, the very one who is highest and beyond all things?
6.6| And it teaches us not to hymn the elements of bodies, but the nourisher of life itself and steward of all good things; not to be awestruck at the visible parts of the universe and at everything perceptible to the senses of the flesh, as being of corruptible nature, but to marvel only at the one invisible in all these things, the creative mind of the whole and of the parts, and to speak of that one divine power alone as God, which pervades and orders all things, which is incorporeal and intelligent in nature, or rather ineffable and incomprehensible to speak of, showing itself through all things by which it works; pervading incorporeally and without entanglement and passing through all things, and through all things, not the heavenly only but those on earth, both the general elements and the particular, displaying the enduring great work of the Godhead, presiding invisibly over all and unperceived by us, and governing the whole universe by the reasons of an inexpressible wisdom.
6.7| Now that so much has been demonstrated by us to refute the incoherent wisdom or theology, both the so-called more mythical and the loftier and more natural, which the ancient Greeks and the Egyptians were shown to have revered, it is time to look also at the finery of those of our own day who profess to philosophize. For these men, having tried to weave together with the theology of the ancients what was discovered long afterward by Plato and his circle concerning the Mind that is Maker of the universe, and concerning incorporeal ideas and powers both intelligent and rational, and conceived by sound reasonings, have exalted their profession about the myths with greater pomp. So hear also their natural science, and with what boastfulness Porphyry has put it forth:
7.1| “I shall speak to those for whom it is right; close the doors, you profane. I show the thoughts of a theologian’s wisdom, by which men indicated God and the powers of God through images akin to the senses, outlining the unseen in visible figures, for those who have learned to read out what concerns the gods from statues as from books. It is no wonder that the most ignorant take the images for wood and stone, just as the foolish, when they look at inscribed writings, see stones in the pillars, wood in the tablets, and woven papyrus in the books.”
7.2| Having adorned his work with such a preface, hear what he writes next, in his own words: “Since the divine is luminous in form, and lives enveloped in ethereal fire, and is invisible to a perception occupied with mortal life, they led men toward the thought of its light by means of translucent material, such as crystal or Parian stone or even ivory, and toward the conception of its fire by means of gold, and of its being undefiled, because gold is not stained.
7.3| Many again indicated the invisibility of its essence with black stone. They shaped the gods in human form because the divine is rational, and beautiful because beauty in them is unmarred; and in different forms and ages, in seatings and standings and garments, some male, some female, maidens and youths, and some who have known marriage, to set out their differences.
7.4| Hence they assigned everything white to the heavenly gods, and the sphere and all spherical things especially to the universe and to the sun and moon, and in some places also to Fortune and Hope; the circle and circular things to Eternity and to the movement of heaven and to the belts and circles in it; portions of circles to the moon's phases; obelisks and pyramids to the essence of fire, and for that reason to the Olympian gods; just as the cone belongs to the sun, the cylinder to the earth, the phallus to sowing and generation, and the triangular figure to the female part.”
7.5| This is what the marvelous philosopher says. What could be more unseemly than this solemn talk about shameful things, or more forced than to claim that lifeless materials, gold and stone and the like, bear images of the light of the gods and are signs of the heavenly and ethereal nature? That these are the sophistries of the moderns, which never came even in a dream into the mind of the ancients, you may learn when you find that statues made of gold and of the material thought more costly were rejected by the earlier men. Plutarch, at any rate, says the following, in his own words:
8.1| “The making of wooden images seems to be something ancient and old, if indeed the first image for Apollo on Delos, brought by Erysichthon at the sacred embassies, was of wood, and the image of the Polias set up by the earth-born was of wood, which the Athenians guard to this day. The Samians too had a wooden seat of Hera, as Callimachus says: ‘You were not yet the well-polished work of Scelmis, but, after the long-standing custom, a plank unworked by chisels.’ For so they set up gods in those days; and indeed in Lindos Danaus set a stone as the seat of Athena. It is said that Peiras, the first to found a temple of Argive Hera, and who made his own daughter Callithyia priestess, cut a wild pear tree from the woods around Tiryns and shaped from it a richly endowed image of Hera. For they did not wish to cut a god’s likeness from rock, hard and hard to work and lifeless, and they thought that gold and silver were sickly colors and blotches of an unfruitful and spoiled earth, breaking out like bruises when it had been beaten by fire; ivory they sometimes used in play, as an ornament of luxury.”
8.2| So Plutarch says; and long before him Plato, knowing full well that there is nothing august or akin to the divine nature in gold and stones and ivory and the products made from lifeless material, listen to what he lays down in the Laws: “The earth and the hearth of the house are sacred to all the gods; let no one, then, consecrate sacred things to the gods a second time. Gold and silver, in other cities, are a possession that provokes envy, both in private and in temples; and ivory, from a body that the soul has left, is not a pure offering; iron and bronze are instruments of war.” I think these words plainly contain the overthrow of the natural science set before us. Come, let us look into the rest of it as well. So hear what he says:
9.1| “See the wisdom of the Greeks, examining it in this way. They take Zeus to be the mind of the universe, who made what is in it while holding the universe within himself, and in their theologies those who have spoken the verses attributed to Orpheus have handed down the following about him:
9.2| Zeus was first, Zeus last, the lord of the bright thunderbolt; Zeus the head, Zeus the middle, and from Zeus all things are made. Zeus was born a male, Zeus became an immortal bride. Zeus is the foundation of earth and of starry heaven. Zeus is king, Zeus himself the first begetter of all. One power, one deity came to be, great ruler of all, one royal body, in which all these things revolve: fire and water and earth and aether, night and day, and Metis, the first begetter, and Eros full of delight; for all these things lie in the great body of Zeus. His head and fair face one may see as the shining heaven, around which golden locks of gleaming stars hang most beautifully, and on either side two golden horns of a bull, the rising and the setting, the paths of the heavenly gods; his eyes are the sun and the moon opposite. His mind is true, kingly, immortal aether, by which he turns and perceives all things, and there is no voice, no cry, no noise, no report that escapes the ear of Zeus, mighty son of Cronus. Such is his immortal head and thought. His body is radiant, boundless, unshakable, mighty, strong of limb, mightily made. The shoulders and breast and broad back of the god are the wide-ruling air, and wings grew from him, with which he flies upon all things; his belly is sacred, the all-mothering earth and the steep peaks of the mountains; the middle belt is the swell of the loud-roaring sea and the deep; the lowest base is the roots within the ground, dank Tartarus and the farthest limits of the earth. When he had hidden all things away, he was about to bring them forth again from his heart into the joyful light, working marvels.
9.3| Zeus, then, is the whole universe, a living creature from living creatures and a god from gods; and Zeus, insofar as he is mind, is that out of which he brings forth all things and creates by his thoughts.
9.4| Since the theologians have thus expounded the matter concerning God, it was not possible to fashion an image such as the account has described; and even if someone had thought of the sphere, it would not have shown what is living and intelligent and providential.
9.5| They have made the figure of Zeus human in form because it was mind by which he created, and by seminal reasons he brought all things to completion. He sits, hinting at the steadiness of his power. His upper parts are bare, since he is manifest among the intelligible and heavenly parts of the universe; his front parts are covered, because he is invisible to those hidden below. In his left hand he holds the scepter, on which side the most governing and most intelligent organ of the body, the heart, has its lodging; for the creative mind is king of the universe. With his right he holds out either an eagle, because he rules the gods who travel the air, as the eagle rules the birds that fly high, or a Victory, because he himself has conquered all.”
9.6| That is what Porphyry gives you. Now that this has been set out in the manner stated, it is good to examine calmly and at leisure who the verses say Zeus is. For I think he is nothing other than the visible universe, made up of all kinds of parts, both those in heaven and aether and the stars that appear in them, set in front like the head of a great body, and those in the air, the earth, the sea, and the like.
9.7| The earth, at any rate, together with mountains and hills, is part of the universe, and the sea winds in the middle of them in the manner of a belt, and fire and water and night and day would be parts belonging to the same nature of the universe. These things, I think, plainly reveal the visible universe, unless I am somehow mistaken, and teach that the whole is made up of parts.
9.8| He says, indeed, “for all these things lie in the great body of Zeus.” And he makes clear what the “all” is: fire and water and earth and aether, night and day. “His head and fair face one may see as the shining heaven, around which golden locks of gleaming stars hang most beautifully,”
9.9| and what follows; in which he goes on to say that the mind of Zeus is aether and nothing else, in accord with the Stoics, who say that the fiery and hot substance is the governing principle of the universe, that God is a body, and that the Maker himself is nothing other than the power of fire. For it is in the same sense, I think, that the verses say, “His mind is true, kingly, immortal aether, by which he turns and perceives all things.”
9.10| By these words he openly supposes the universe to be a great living creature, calls it Zeus, and declares its mind to be the aether and its body the remaining parts of the universe.
9.11| Such is the Zeus sketched out through the verses. The interpreter of the verses begins in agreement with the verses and says, “Zeus, then, is the whole universe, a living creature from living creatures, a god from gods,” interpreting plainly that the Zeus of whom the verses speak as God is nothing other than the visible and perceptible universe.
9.12| This is the Egyptians’ account, from whom Orpheus too took his theology and supposed that the universe is God, composed of a number of gods, which are its parts (for it was shown earlier that they made gods of the parts of the universe), and the words of the verses set out here made clear nothing more than this.
9.13| After the first interpretation he adds a second of his own, saying that this creative mind is the God and Maker of the universe who is spoken of as God.
9.14| But how could he be speaking of this very being as God, when the poet of the verses, whether he was the Thracian Orpheus or someone else, did not know him at all? Indeed, the content of the theology came to him, if from anywhere, from the Egyptians or from the first Greeks; and these were shown to know nothing intelligible, nothing contained in an invisible and incorporeal essence (if Plato is a sufficient witness for anyone, since in the Cratylus he agrees that the first men around Greece considered only these to be gods, the ones many of the barbarians still hold so now: namely the sun and moon, earth and stars, and heaven).
9.15| And Chaeremon testified a little earlier that the Egyptians held nothing else before the visible universe, and no other gods except the planets and the remaining stars, and interpreted everything as the visible parts of the universe and nothing as incorporeal and living essences.
10.1| The poet who starts from these sources, then, from where or how or from whom did he take the God beyond the universe and lay down in his verses the Maker of sun, moon, and stars, of heaven itself, and of the whole universe? And where did he get his knowledge of an incorporeal being?
10.2| But he knows none of these things. For the creative mind of the universe is not composed of many parts, nor could heaven be his head, nor fire and water and earth his body, nor could the sun and moon be his eyes. And how could the shoulders, breast, back, and belly of the God who is Maker of the universe be the wide-ruling air and the earth and the steep peaks of the mountains? Or how could the aether ever be conceived as the mind of the universe's Maker, or of the creative mind?
10.3| That these are the contrivances of the interpreter of the verses, there is no need to add. For my part, I say that the man who claims the parts of the universe are parts of God commits the extreme of impiety, and still more the man who declares God to be the same as the universe, and on top of these the man who supposes that the mind of the universe is the Maker of all.
10.4| For it is pious to declare him the Maker and Savior of the universe, distinct from what he has made; but to claim that he is the universe's mind, as a soul is of some living creature, united throughout and clothing the whole, would no longer be holy.
10.5| And yet our sacred oracles teach that he is present to the whole and provides for the universe, speaking of God worthily and in a manner fitting to God in the words, “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord,” and again, “God is in heaven above and on the earth beneath,” and again, “In him we live and move and are”; but not as in a part of the universe, nor as in its soul and mind.
10.6| But if an illustration must be used, the sacred word has proclaimed, more fittingly to God and more truly, saying, “Heaven is my throne, while earth is the footstool of my feet.”
10.7| For if one had to speak of him in a personal manner at all, in more human terms, see the difference in the theology. The one who called heaven a throne set the universal King, God, beyond the throne and above all things, and yet did not shut out the earth from his providence, since he teaches that the powers of the Godhead that exercise providence come down together to the things here below; therefore he says, “and the earth is a footstool for my feet.”
10.8| But neither the footstool nor the throne is the body of the one who is seated, and they could never be called his parts. The man who says that heaven and what is in it is the head of God, and the aether his mind, and the rest of the universe's parts his limbs and body, is caught knowing neither a Maker nor a God.
10.9| For he would not be making himself, nor could that be called a mind whose mind was the aether. And what sort of god would it be whose parts are the earth and the mountains upon it, irrational masses of bodies? And how is it reasonable to proclaim as God the brother and kinsman of fire and air and water, offspring of irrational and perishable matter?
10.10| And if the mind of Zeus was nothing other than the aether just described, and aether is the highest and fiery air, having received this name, as they say, from aithesthai, that is, “to be burned,” and both air and aether are bodies, see where the mind of Zeus has fallen for you.
10.11| And which of the sensible would still call God one whose mind was mindless and irrational, if such is the nature of every body? For this reason, in our theologies we must take everything in the opposite sense to what has been said: that he is not heaven, nor aether, nor sun, nor moon, nor the whole chorus of the stars, nor the entire universe itself; these are the works of his hands, still small and slight when compared with the incorporeal and intelligent powers; for every body is perishable and irrational, and this is the nature of visible things; whereas the things beyond, among the invisible, rational and immortal, living through the ages together with the blessed life of God the universal King, would be far better than all visible things.
10.12| Reasonably, then, the divine oracles teach about the visible parts of the universe in some such way as this: “I shall see the heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have established”; and again, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the works of your hands”; and again, “Raise your eyes to the height, and see who has shown all these things.”
10.13| Let this suffice for the first interpretation of the verses; come, let us look at what follows. He says that since it was not possible to fashion an image such as the account indicated, for this reason they fashioned Zeus's figure in human form, since it was mind by which he created, and by seminal reasons he brought all things to completion.
10.14| And how could it be possible to make an image of the kind the account described, when it described the parts of the apparent and visible universe, heaven and what is in heaven, air and earth and what is in them? If, then, no image could be constructed of the parts of the universe that are seen, inasmuch as God was mind, how could anyone fashion an image of him?
10.15| And what would a human body have that resembles the mind of God? For I think it has nothing in common even with the human mind; since the mind is incorporeal and uncompounded and without parts, while the statue is the work of artisans and imitates the nature of a mortal body, and the likeness of living flesh is drawn, mute and voiceless, in lifeless and dead material.
10.16| The rational and immortal soul, then, and the impassible mind in the nature of man seem to me rightly said to preserve the image and likeness of God, insofar as it is constituted immaterial and incorporeal, intelligent and rational in essence, capable of receiving virtue and wisdom.
10.17| If anyone were able to fashion the statue and form of a soul in an image, he might perhaps manage something of the higher sort too; but if the human mind is without form, without shape, and without figure, neither visible to sight nor grasped in essence by speech and hearing, who could be so mad as to declare that a man-shaped wooden statue bears the form and image of the God who is above all?
10.18| The nature of God, then, appears outside all mortal matter, conceived by a clear mind and in the silence of purified souls; but the shape of the visible Zeus in the figure would be the likeness of a mortal man, and not even of the whole man, but imitating some inferior part of him, since it carries no trace of life or soul.
10.19| How, then, could the God over all and the Mind who is Maker of the universe be the same as the Zeus in bronze or in dead ivory? And how could the creative mind of the universe ever itself be that Zeus, the father of Heracles son of Alcmene and of the rest of the men fabled as sons of Zeus, who ended their mortal lives like all other men, and left to those after them imperishable memorials of their own nature?
10.20| The first theologians of the Phoenicians, as we established in the first treatise, recorded Zeus, the son of Cronus, as a mortal born of a mortal, a man Phoenician by race, and the Egyptians, who claimed the man as their own, agreed again that he was mortal, in this at least in accord with the Phoenicians.
10.21| And the Cretans too, who show a tomb of Zeus among themselves, would be a third witness to the same; and the Atlanteans and all those previously mentioned, each claiming Zeus as their own in their own history, all together declared him mortal, writing of his deeds as mortal and human, not august or philosophical, but full of all shameful deeds and licentiousness.
10.22| For those who profess to turn the myths toward the more solemn, Zeus was at one time a certain hot and fiery power, at another the breath; and now, somehow, I do not know how, to them the Mind who is Maker of the universe has been revealed.
10.23| We must ask, then, whom they would name as his father, and as the forefather before that father; since according to all the theologians Zeus is agreed to be the son of Cronus, and the verses of Orpheus set before us also mentioned “mighty son of Cronus,” and Cronus is the son of Uranus.
10.24| Let it be conceded to them, then, that Zeus is the Mind who made all things, the God over all. Who then is his father? Cronus. And his grandfather? Uranus. But if Zeus is first as Maker of all, then those made by him ought surely to be listed as coming after him.
10.25| For whether Cronus is some sort of time, born as the offspring of Uranus, or time came into being together with heaven, and Uranus himself is the father of Cronus and time comes after him, yet before these is God, the cause of the universe and Maker of both heaven and time. And if so, Zeus could not be third from Uranus.
10.26| How is it, then, that among all the Egyptians and Phoenicians, Greeks and philosophers, the creative Mind of the universe is traced in genealogy as third from Uranus? The philosopher’s fabrication is exposed, and it will be exposed still more by what he adds, saying as follows:
11.1| “They made Hera the wife of Zeus, calling the aethereal and airy power Hera. For aether is the finest-grained air.
11.2| Higher up, the verses showed the mind of Zeus to be the aether; now the account defines what the aether is, saying it is the finest-grained air; but air is a body, and aether much more so.
11.3| The mind of Zeus, then, is proved to be a body, even if the finest-grained of all. And how could body and mind, which are opposed in their natures by the whole diameter, be conceived as the same?
11.4| Then, somehow forgetting the verses, which say expressly, “His mind is true, kingly, immortal aether, by which he turns and perceives all things, and there is no voice, no cry, no noise, no report that escapes the ear of Zeus, mighty son of Cronus,” by which the aether is plainly said to be the mind of Zeus.
11.5| Yet he says again that Hera is the aethereal and airy power. Then, dividing, he adds: “The power of the whole air, Hera, has her name called from the air; of the air illuminated and darkened beneath the moon, Leto is the symbol; for she is lethe, forgetting, on account of the insensibility of sleep, and because forgetfulness of the divine accompanies souls that come to be beneath the moon; for this same reason she is also mother of Apollo and of Artemis, the causes of light by night.”
11.6| And in this he says that the air beneath the moon is the mother of the sun and moon, for this, he says, is Leto. And how could the air be mother of the causes of illumination, being acted upon rather than acting? For the sun and the moon change the air, now in one way, now in another.
11.7| Then, going on, he says next: “The governing part of the earthly power is called Hestia, whose maidenly image is set up on the hearth of fire; but insofar as the power is fertile, they signify her in the form of a full-breasted woman. They called Rhea the power of rocky and mountainous earth, and Demeter that of the plain and fertile earth. Demeter in other respects is like Rhea, but differs in that she bears the Maiden by Zeus, that is, satiety from the brushwood seeds. This is why her statue is crowned with ears of grain, and poppies are around her as a symbol of abundant offspring.”
11.8| Here again see how he has cast down Rhea, who is called mother of the gods, and even of Zeus himself, somewhere below, to rock and earth, and, confusing everything, says she is the same as Demeter, except that Demeter differs in that, he says, she bears the Maiden by Zeus, as the plain earth bears satiety from the brushwood seeds. See, once more Zeus has been changed into brushwood seeds.
11.9| Next he joins to this, saying: “Since there was also a certain power of the seeds cast into the earth, which the sun draws as it passes through the lower hemisphere at the winter solstices, the seed-bearing power is the Maiden, and Pluto is the sun going beneath the earth and traveling around the unseen world at the winter solstices; he is said to seize the Maiden, whom Demeter longs for as she is hidden under the earth.
11.10| The power of fruit trees and of plants in general is named Dionysus. And see their images too. For the Maiden carries symbols of the putting forth of the growths of the fruits above the earth, and Dionysus has horns in common with the Maiden, but is feminine in form, showing the male-female power concerned with the birth of tree fruits.
11.11| Pluto, the seizer of the Maiden, wears a cap, which symbolizes the unseen pole, and the truncated scepter is a sign of the kingdom below; his dog indicates the conception of the fruits divided into three: the casting, the receiving, and the giving back. For it is not called a dog because it has the Keres, which means the souls, as food, but from kyein, to conceive, in which Pluto is the provider, when he seizes the Maiden.
11.12| Attis and Adonis belong to the analogy of the fruits. But Attis belongs to the flowers that appear in spring and drop away before they bring their fruit to completion, and from this they attached to him the cutting off of the genitals, because the fruits did not arrive in time at seminal perfection; Adonis is the symbol of the cutting of the ripe fruits.
11.13| Silenus is a symbol of the movement of the breath, which contributes not a little to the whole. Symbols are his bald and shining head, for the heavenly revolution, and the hair that surrounds the lower parts of him, an illustration of the thickness near the earth about the air.
11.14| Since a power also shared in the prophetic faculty, that power is named Themis, from saying what is laid down and lies appointed for each.
11.15| Through all these the earthly power, once interpreted, is worshiped: as a virgin, and Hestia, the one who holds the center; as a mother, the nurse; as Rhea, the maker of rock and mountain; as Demeter, the bearer of green growth; as Themis, the giver of oracles; with the seminal reason descending into her depicted in Priapus; the part of whom concerned with dry fruits is called the Maiden, and that concerned with moist fruits and tree fruits is called Dionysus, the Maiden being seized by Pluto, the sun going beneath the earth, at the sowing, while Dionysus, the sufferings of the power which begins to sprout beneath the earth, younger and fair of offspring, and contested, has Attis as the symbol of the power at the flowering, and Adonis for the cutting at completion,
11.16| and the breath-power that runs through all things is molded into Silenus, and the leading forth from them into ecstasy into the Bacchante, as the impulse that rouses to the pleasures of love is represented through the Satyrs. Through these symbols the earthly power is disclosed.”
11.17| So much for these matters, which I have set out in abridged form out of necessity, so that we may not remain unaware of the solemn teachings of the philosophers. So, then, according to what has been given, the Maiden is the power of the sown crops, Dionysus the power of the tree fruits, Attis the symbol of the spring flowers, and Adonis of the ripe fruits.
11.18| Why, then, must these be made gods, when they were produced by the God of all things for the nourishment of the bodies of creatures on earth? And why is it fitting for us to worship the earthly power, we whose nature is a heavenly soul, rational and immortal, from the God who is universal King of all, able to contemplate with the purified eyes of the mind?
11.19| And when you hear that Silenus is the movement of breath, and the power that runs through all things, showing now the heavenly revolution through his head, and now the thickness near the air through the shaggy hair of his beard, how could anyone bear to see that he is deemed worthy of no reverent honor, though he ought to be made a god before all, while Adonis and Dionysus, that is, the fruits and tree fruits, are made gods?
11.20| And who could endure to hear the Satyrs and Bacchants spoken of in solemn terms, when they are the shameful and licentious passions found among men, if the Satyrs signified the impulses that rouse to the pleasures of love, and the Bacchants the leadings forth into ecstasy that follow upon them?
11.21| And why should I refute each particular, when I need only run through them so that none of the secret teachings escape us, and abridge the natural science that follows, which the writer named has set out, proceeding in this way:
11.22| “They called the whole water-making power Oceanus, naming its symbol Tethys. Of the whole, the part that makes drinkable water is called by them Achelous, and the part that makes sea water Poseidon, while Amphitrite is the sea-making power again, in so far as it is generative. The partial powers of sweet waters have the name Nymphs, those of the sea, Nereids.
11.23| Calling the power of fire Hephaestus, they made his image in human form, and put upon him a blue-black cap, as a symbol of the heavenly revolution, where the beginning and purest part of fire is. Fire that has been brought down to earth from heaven is weaker and needs a support and a base in matter; therefore he is lame, needing matter as a prop.
11.24| And taking the sun's power to be of this kind, they called it Apollo, from the pulsation (palsis) of his rays. The nine Muses sing to him: the sphere beneath the moon, the seven of the planets, and the one of the fixed stars. They put the laurel on him, both since the plant is filled with fire and is therefore hateful to demons, and since it crackles when burned, to represent the god’s prophesying.
11.25| Insofar as the sun wards off evils from things on earth, they called him Heracles, from his being bent (klasthai) against the air as he goes from east to west. They fabled that he labored through twelve labors, making them the symbol of the division of the zodiac in heaven; they put a club and a lion skin on him, the one a sign of irregularity, the other of the strength revealed in the zodiac sign.
11.26| The symbol of his saving power is Asclepius; they gave him the staff, as a prop and resting-place for the sick, and the serpent coils around it, bearing a sign of the preservation of body and soul (and indeed the natural philosophers, supposing the universe for us, ascribed the creatures that wriggle on the ground to the thickest and earthiest essence); for the creature is very full of breath, and sheds the weakness of its body. It is also thought to be most skilled in healing; for it found the drug that gives keen sight, and the myth says it knows a certain herb of revival.
11.27| Of the circling and dancing motion by which the power of fire ripens the fruits, Dionysus is the name, in a different sense from Dionysus the power of the moist fruits, either from whirling around, or from the sun completing its revolution through heaven. And in so far as the sun goes around the seasons of the universe and is the maker of times and occasions, he is called Horus.
11.28| Of his farming power, by which wealth is given, the symbol is Pluto. Yet he likewise has a destructive power, which is why they make Sarapis share a home with Pluto, taking the purple tunic as a symbol of the light that has set beneath the earth, the truncated scepter as a symbol of the power below, and the shape of the hand as a symbol of passing over into the unseen.
11.29| Cerberus has three heads because there are three regions of the sun above: rising, midday, and setting.
11.30| They took the moon, from selas, “light,” and called her Artemis, as if aerotemis, “cutter of air”; Artemis is also the goddess of childbirth, though a virgin, because the power of the new moon contributes toward bearing.
11.31| What Apollo is in the sun, Athena is in the moon; for she is a symbol of prudence, being a sort of Athrena, “the one who sees.”
11.32| The moon is again Hecate, from her change of shape and her power in her forms; therefore the power is three-formed, at the new moon bearing the white-robed one with golden sandals and kindled torches; the basket she carries aloft is a symbol of the working of the fruits, which she nurtures with the increase of light; and the bronze-sandaled one is a symbol of the full moon.
11.33| Or from the laurel branch one might take her fieriness, from the poppy her fertility, and the multitude of souls that take up their dwelling in her as in a city, since the poppy is a symbol of a city. She carries bows, like Artemis, because of the sharpness of birth pains.
11.34| Then again the Fates are referred back to her powers: Clotho to the generative power, Lachesis to the nourishing, and Atropos to what is inexorable in God.
11.35| With her they also make the generative power of the fruits share a home, which is Demeter, a power that puts that quality into her. And the moon holds the Maiden together. They also bring Dionysus to dwell with her, on account of the growth of horns and on account of the region of clouds that lies beneath the lower parts.
11.36| They saw the power of Cronus as sluggish, slow, and cold, and so they assigned him the power of time; and they represent him standing, gray-haired, to show that time grows old.
11.37| The Curetes are symbols of the seasons, herding time, because time passes by through the seasons.
11.38| Of the Hours, the Olympian ones belong to the sun, and these open the gates in the air, while those on earth belong to Demeter; and they carry a basket, one of flowers as a symbol of spring, the other of ears of grain as a symbol of summer.
11.39| Perceiving that the power of Ares is fiery, a maker of wars and a shedder of blood, able to harm and to help, they made him so.
11.40| Observing the star of Aphrodite to be a producer of generation, and a cause of desire and of offspring, they molded a woman on account of generation, and a beautiful one, because it is also Hesperus, which stands as the fairest star in heaven.
11.41| They put Eros beside her on account of desire. She covers her breasts and her private part, because the power is a cause of offspring and of rearing. And she comes from the sea, an element moist and warm, much moved and foaming because of its movement, hinting at the seminal.
11.42| Hermes represents the reason that makes and interprets all things. The erect Hermes shows vigor, and also displays the seminal reason that runs through all things.
11.43| Beyond this there is the compound reason: Hermes in the sun, Hecate in the moon, and Hermopan in the universe, for the seminal and creative reason is over all. Compound too, and like a half-Greek, is the Hermanubis among the Egyptians. And since reason also belonged to the loving power, Eros represents this. Therefore Eros is the child of Hermes, and an infant because of the sudden onsets of desire.
11.44| For the universe they set Pan as symbol, giving the horns as symbols of the sun and moon, and the fawnskin as a symbol of the heavenly stars, or of the universe's variety.”
11.45| Such are the Greek matters; and the Egyptian ones, he says, have again such symbols as these: the Maker, whom the Egyptians call Cneph, is manlike, of a blue-black complexion, holding a belt and a scepter, with a royal feather set about his head, because the reason is hard to find, hidden and not manifest, and because it gives life, and because it is king, and because it moves intelligently; therefore the nature of the feather is set on the head.
11.46| They say that this god sends forth an egg from his mouth, from which is born a god whom they call Phtha, and the Greeks Hephaestus; and they interpret the egg as the universe. A sheep is dedicated to this god because the ancients drank milk.
11.47| Of the universe itself they molded a figure of this kind: an image in human form, with the feet joined together, wrapped from above down to the feet in a many-colored garment; on its head it has a golden sphere, because it does not move from place to place, and because of the varied nature of the stars, and because the universe is spherical.
11.48| The sun they sometimes signify by a man standing in a boat, the boat resting on a crocodile. The boat shows movement on the moist element, and the crocodile fresh water, in which the sun is carried. So the image signified that the sun makes its circuit through moist and sweet air.
11.49| They called the power of the heavenly and the earthly land Isis, from isotes, “equality,” from which comes justice; they say the heavenly one is the moon, and the earthly one the fruit-bearing land in which we live.
11.50| Demeter among the Greeks and Isis among the Egyptians have the same meaning, and again the Maiden and Dionysus among the Greeks, and Isis and Osiris among the Egyptians. She nourishes and takes up what is on the earth; Osiris among the Egyptians represents the fruit-bearing power, which they soothe with lamentations as it vanishes into the earth at sowing and is consumed by us for food.
11.51| He is also taken for the power of the river Nile; but when they signify the earthly land, Osiris is taken as the fruit-bearing power, and when they signify the heavenly, Osiris is the Nile, which they think is carried down from heaven; and they mourn this one too, soothing the power that is ceasing and being consumed. The Isis who is joined with Osiris in the myths is the Egyptian land; therefore she is made equal, conceives and makes the crops; hence Osiris is handed down as both husband, brother and son of Isis.”
12.1| In the city of Elephantine an image is honored, fashioned, but manlike and seated, blue-black in color, with the head of a ram, and royal, having goat’s horns on which stands a disk-like circle. It is seated with an earthen vessel placed beside it, on which it fashions a man. It shows, by having a ram’s face and goat’s horns, the conjunction of sun and moon in Aries; and the blue color, because the moon in conjunction brings water.
12.2| The second light, that of the moon, is consecrated in the city of Apollo; its symbol is a hawk-faced man holding a harpoon and overpowering Typhon, fashioned like a hippopotamus. The image is white in color, the whiteness showing that the moon is illuminated, and the hawk’s face that it is lit by the sun and receives breath. For they dedicate the hawk to the sun; and the hawk is for them a symbol of light and breath, on account of its quick movement and its running up to the height where the light is; and the hippopotamus shows the western pole, because it swallows into itself those who go around.
12.3| The god honored in this city is Horus. The city of Eileithyia tends the third light; the statue is shaped as a vulture in flight, whose plumage is made of precious stones. Her vulture form signifies the moon, generator of breaths; for they think the vulture conceives from the wind, declaring all of them female.
12.4| In the Eleusinian mysteries, the hierophant is dressed as an image of the Maker, the torch-bearer as one of the sun; the one at the altar as the moon, and the sacred herald as Hermes.
12.5| A man too is taken up into the temples among the Egyptians. For Anabis is a village of Egypt in which a man is tended, and sacrifice is made to him, and the victims are burned on the altars; but a little later he would eat the portions prepared for him as for a man.
12.6| That they do not consider the animals to be gods, but made them images and symbols of gods, is shown by this: in many places oxen are led up to the gods at the sacred festivals and in the worship of the gods, and are sacrificed. For oxen were consecrated to the sun and the moon.
13.1| But the one dedicated to the sun in Heliopolis, called Mneuis, is the greatest of oxen, very black, chiefly because the strong sun also darkens human bodies. Unlike other oxen, it has its tail and its whole body covered with hair growing the wrong way, just as the sun makes its course opposite to the heaven; and it has very large testicles, since the desire for the pleasures of love arises from heat, and the sun is said to impregnate nature.
13.2| To the moon they dedicated a bull, whom they call Apis, itself also black beyond the others, and bearing signs of the sun and moon, since the moon's light comes from the sun; the sign of the sun is the blackness of the body and the scarab under the tongue; the symbol of the moon is the half-moon and gibbous markings.”
13.3| Let this extract suffice from the writing of the man mentioned, so that none of the secret teachings of the Greek and Egyptian theology together may escape us, a theology of which we confess ourselves deserters and fugitives, having rejected these things also by judgment and sober reasoning.
13.4| For the boastful voice, saying “I shall speak to those for whom it is right; close the doors, you profane,” will not strike me with awe. The profane, at any rate, are not we, but those who have declared that such shameful and indecent myths about scarabs and irrational beasts are thoughts of a theologian’s wisdom, who, in the words of the wonderful apostle, “claiming to be wise, became fools; for they exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for a likeness of the image of corruptible man, and also of birds and of four-footed animals and creeping things.”
13.5| But since they referred the whole secret and more mystical account of these matters allegorically to incorporeal powers, so that their deification would seem no longer to extend to the visible parts of the universe but to some invisible and incorporeal powers, let us consider whether even so we must marvel at one divine power, and not suppose many.
13.6| For because many forms and parts and limbs have been made in a single body, we need not suppose that we have as many souls, nor think that the body has as many makers and creators; rather one soul moves the whole body, and one creative power has fashioned the whole living creature.
13.7| So indeed in the case of the whole universe, which is one and made up of one bodily matter, though divided into very many parts, and which shows one natural sympathy of the whole, a blending and mixing of its elements, and their alterations and changes into one another, displaying the whole as one universe and one harmony, we must not imagine many creative powers, but acknowledge as divine only that which is truly God's power and God's wisdom.
13.8| But he transfers the Egyptian myths again to incorporeal powers, the wisest man deceiving himself. For you have heard in what went before how he agreed with Chaeremon and several others that the Egyptians held nothing before the visible universe, and set it in the place of first principle; for they interpret everything in terms of natural things and nothing in terms of incorporeal and living essences.
13.9| If, then, by the Egyptians’ own admission, they referred nothing to incorporeal and living essences, but transferred all their mythologizing about gods to the natural parts of the universe, why do you, inventing all over again, ascribe to the Egyptians things in no way their own, claiming that they make the reference of their theology to incorporeal powers? In general, then, this is the charge to be brought.
13.10| As for the particulars, I think the refutation of their forced interpretation needs no long argument. For if someone passes over the Egyptian nonsense and their great and garrulous drivel and comes to the natural sciences of the wise Greeks, who of sound mind would not at once blame those who try to misinterpret such things?
13.11| Suppose Zeus is no longer the fiery and aethereal essence, as the ancients thought according to Plutarch, but the highest Mind itself, the Maker of the universe, who gives life to all things. How then will his father be Cronus, who, they say, is time, and his mother Rhea, whom the interpreter said is the rocky and mountainous power? For somehow, after calling Hera the air and aether, he says she is both sister and wife of the world-making and life-giving Mind of all.
13.12| Moreover, let Leto again be called a sort of lethe, “forgetfulness,” because of the insensibility of sleep, as they say, and because forgetfulness accompanies souls that come to be beneath the moon. How then could forgetfulness be the mother of the sun and moon, Apollo and Artemis, Leto's children, having been transferred to sun and moon?
13.13| And why must one revere Rhea or Demeter as a god, if the one was said to bear the symbols of the rocky and mountainous earth, the other of the plain? And what reason do they think there is to honor the Maiden, whom they interpret as satiety, with a reverent title?
13.14| And why should those who name Dionysus, Attis, and Adonis, which are the symbols of the seed-bearing power, and the birth of tree fruits, and the flowers that appear in spring and drop away before they bear, and the cutting of the ripe fruits, revere them as gods, rather than honoring, above all of these, mankind, for whose use and food God, the Maker of the universe, established them?
13.15| Passing on from these, you will refute the rest of the noble natural science in a similar way, and rightly blame the shamelessness of those who declare that the sun is Apollo, and again Heracles, and again Dionysus, and in the same way Asclepius.
13.16| For how could the same one be father and son, Asclepius and Apollo together? And how again could he be transferred into Heracles, if they agree that Heracles is the son of a mortal woman, Alcmene? And how could the sun become mad and slaughter his own children, as has also been recorded of Heracles?
13.17| They say that Heracles, in performing the twelve labors, bears the symbol of the division of the zodiac circle in heaven, which the sun is said to traverse. Who then would Eurystheus be, who orders the sun, just as he orders Heracles, to perform the labors? And how could the fifty daughters of Thestius, and the multitude of the other captive women with whom the story says Heracles lay, from whom mortal children were born to him who extended the succession of the lines to a great length, be referred to the sun? And who would the Centaur be, with whose blood Deianeira stained the tunic and so wrapped the sun, as she did Heracles, in the disaster described?
13.18| But let the sun no longer be Heracles for them; let it be Dionysus. And what has this to do with Dionysus, one might reasonably say? For who is the woman who bore him, whether she is called Semele or Persephone? And in what way could Dionysus be at the same time the sun and the power that sprouts in the moist fruits and tree fruits? What would become of the multitude of women who served as his army? And who is the Ariadne belonging to the sun, as to Dionysus? And why would Dionysus, transferred to the sun, be provider of wine rather than of grain and legumes and all the fruits of the earth?
13.19| And if the sun is again Asclepius for them, how is he struck by the thunderbolt of Zeus for foul love of gain, as the Boeotian lyric poet Pindar says in some such words: “Him too gold shown in his hands turned aside with a lordly fee, ... and the son of Cronus, hurling with his hands through both, quickly took the breath from his chest, and the blazing thunderbolt brought down his doom.”
13.20| And who are the Asclepiads descended from the sun, who were preserved to a long life and had the birth of mortal men like all men? But once more, as if by stage machinery, the account would run back to the sun and moon and the remaining parts of the universe for those who are fleeing the shameful and mythical stories about gods.
13.21| If, indeed, Hephaestus was for them fire and the hot power, Poseidon the moist substance, Hera the air, and again earth, the mountainous and rocky one Rhea, the plain and fertile one Demeter, the Maiden the seed-bearing power, and Dionysus the planting power of tree fruits; and the sun Apollo along with the others listed, and the moon sometimes Artemis, sometimes Athena, and then again Hecate and Eileithyia; then they are convicted of making theology out of the creation rather than the Creator, the workmanship of the universe and not its Maker, quite precariously and dangerously, and to the harm of their own heads.
13.22| But if they say they do not deify the visible bodies of the sun and moon and stars, nor the perceptible parts of the universe, but the invisible powers in them of the one over all (for being one God, he fills all things with powers of every kind, pervades all things, and presides over all, being in all things incorporeally and unseen, and pervading through all, and they say that it is reasonably he whom they worship through the things mentioned), why then do they not reject the shameful and indecent myths about gods as lawless and impious, and make disappear the very books that contain them, as holding impious and licentious matters, and hymn the one and only and invisible God plainly and purely and without any shameful entanglement?
13.23| For this is what those who had come to know the truth ought to have done, and not to drag down and cast the revered name of God into shameful and passionate unspeakable tales; nor to shut themselves up in little houses and in dark recesses and buildings of men, as if God were to be found within; nor to imagine they pay honor to the divine powers by means of statues fashioned from lifeless matter; nor to suppose that they do what pleases God with earthy vapors of blood and gore and the blood of dead animals.
13.24| Freed, as from the bonds of error, from all these things, the wise and those who talk about the heavens ought surely to share their natural contemplation freely with all men, proclaiming to all almost openly that they should marvel not at the things that appear, but only at the unseen Maker of the things that appear, and should worship his invisible and incorporeal powers invisibly and incorporeally, not lighting a fire, nor sacrificing a ram and a bull, nor even supposing they honor the divine with garlands, statues, and the building of temples, but doing so with purified reasonings and correct and true doctrines, in freedom of the soul from passion and in likeness, as far as possible, to him by virtue.
13.25| But no one ever, barbarian or Greek, began this truth for all men, but our Savior alone; who, proclaiming to all the nations a way of escape from the old error, freely won for all the turning toward the true God, the only God of the universe, and the piety due him. But those who were wise to no purpose, boasting of the highest philosophy of life, as the divine apostle says: “knowing God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their reasonings, and their senseless heart grew dark. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”
14.1| After, then, the long and extensive philosophy, and after the solemn talk about the heavens and nature, falling from somewhere above as if from the highest mountain peak, they were swept along with the crowds and mixed up in the polytheistic error of the ancients, pretending to hold the same opinions as the many by sacrificing and falling down before statues, and increasing and strengthening still more the popular belief in the mythical tales about gods.
14.2| How then would they not be plain to all, being solemn in their natural science, and adorning shameful things in words only by twisting the truth, while in deeds they themselves establish the mythical error and the superstition of the whole people? And this is not yet the wonder, when they even write up their own gods as agreeing with the myths about them.
14.3| Hear, then, how Apollo himself teaches about himself in the hymn which he issued about himself, confessing that he was born on the island of Delos of Leto, and again Asclepius in Tricca, and Hermes, confessing that he was born of Maia.
14.4| Porphyry writes this too in the work he entitled On Philosophy from Oracles, where he mentions oracles that run somewhat like this: “O great joy to all mortals, leaping forth from the holy travail of a pure mother.
14.5| To this he adds: “But when sacred labor pains seized all of Leto, as the twin births stirred within the sanctuary, the earth stood still, the air stood still, the island stiffened, the wave stiffened; and you leapt forth, Lycorean seer, archer Phoebus, and king of the oracle-speaking tripods.”
14.6| And Asclepius again about himself: “I come a god from sacred Tricca, whom once my mother, lying with Phoebus, bore, king of wisdom, Asclepius skilled in healing. But why do you ask?”
14.7| And Hermes says: “I whom you call, the son of Zeus and Maia, Hermes, have come forth, leaving the lord of the stars.”
14.8| They also sketch the form of their own shape, as Pan himself says of himself in oracles, teaching as follows: “I pray, being mortal, to Pan, the god akin to me, two-horned, two-footed, goat-legged, luxuriant.”
14.9| These things the man named has put down among the secret teachings of the philosophy from oracles. Pan, then, was no longer a symbol of the universe, but would be some demon of the kind described, the one who issued the oracle; for surely the universe and the whole world did not utter the words set before us. It was the image of this demon, then, and not of the universe, that men molded, copying the form described above.
14.10| And how could Hermes be understood as the reason that makes and interprets all things, when he admits that he had Maia, the daughter of Atlas, as his mother, approving the mythology told about him and not the natural science?
14.11| So too how could Asclepius be transferred to the sun, when he writes down Tricca as his homeland and admits he was born of a mortal mother? And how could he, being the sun, be declared again a son of the sun? For they gave a natural-science interpretation that his father Phoebus was none other than the sun.
14.12| And to claim that he was begotten by the sun upon a mortal woman: is that not the most laughable of all? For how is it likely that the father himself, the sun, whom they say is Apollo, was born on the island of Delos, again of a mortal mother, Leto?
14.13| Here take note for me of how many gods the Greeks have made theology of as born of women, to set beside it, if ever they try to mock the birth of our Savior; and that these are not the voices of poets, but that the statements set out here are those of the gods themselves.
15.1| Now, if poets, as they say, fashion myths about the gods, and philosophers give natural explanations, it would surely be reasonable to scorn the former, while marveling at the latter as philosophers, and to prefer the plausible accounts of the better men to the nonsense of poets. But when the gods themselves and the philosophers come into conflict, the one side teaching accurately in oracles what concerns themselves, as those who know better, the other turning out discordant and unproven inventions about things they do not know, which does reason choose to obey? Or is this not even worth asking?
15.2| If, then, the gods speak the truth in confirming the human sufferings told about them, those who reject them would be false; and if the philosophers’ natural explanations are true, the testimonies of the gods would be false.
15.3| But someone might say that Apollo himself, asked in oracles about who he is, said somewhere: “Sun, Horus, Osiris, lord, son of Zeus, Apollo, steward of seasons and times, of winds and rains, guiding the reins of dawn and of starry night, king of blazing stars and of deathless fire.”
15.4| So the same ones agree both with the myths of the poets and the suppositions of the philosophers, standing with opposing sides. For if they inscribe mortal mothers and admit earthly homelands, how could they be what they explain in natural terms?
15.5| Let Apollo be the sun (for their argument, running up and down back to the same points, will be caught out again): how then could Delos, the island that still appears in the sea, be the homeland of the sun, and Leto the mother? For his oracles were just now confirming these as true. And how could the sun be the father of Asclepius, a man mortal in nature, when he produced him from a mortal woman? Let that be dismissed.
16.1| The falsity of the oracle can be exposed in another way as well. It was certainly not the sun that came down from heaven for them, took possession of the medium, and then pronounced the oracle; for it is neither possible nor lawful that so great a luminary should be made subject to the compulsions of men. Nor was it, even if they should say so, the divine and intelligent power within the sun, since a human soul could never become receptive of that power either.
16.2| The same argument would hold for the moon. For if they will say that she is Hecate, and that she is somehow dragged down by the compulsions of men, gives oracles through the medium, and is pressed into shameful and erotic services as ruler of the evil demons, then it would be reasonable to think that these are the doings of Hecate; and this the same writer himself admits, as we shall prove in due course.
16.3| And how could Pluto and Sarapis be explained in natural terms as the sun, when the same writer declares, again, that Sarapis, who is the same as Pluto, is the ruler of the evil demons? And when he records oracles of Sarapis, how could he say that they are the sun's?
16.4| From all this, then, it remains to admit that the natural explanations set out above contain nothing true, and are the sophistries and ingenious inventions of sophists;
17.1| and to say, with true reason, that the ministers of the oracles are evil demons, who play both parts to deceive men: at one time they fall in with the more mythical notions about themselves, to further the error of the common people; at another they confirm the claims of the philosophers' sorcery, to the ruin and the puffing-up of these men too; so that on every side they are caught telling no truth at all.
17.2| Now that we have said so much, it is time to pass on and take up the third form of the theology of the Greeks, which they call civic and legal. This kind above all is thought to have the power to strike the many with awe, because of the celebrated oracular shrines, the cures and treatments of afflicted bodies given through oracles, and the punishments sent down upon certain people.
17.3| Claiming to have learned these things by experience, they have quite persuaded themselves that in their piety toward the gods they are doing what is right, and that we commit the greatest impiety, since we do not honor powers so manifest and so beneficent with the worship that is their due. Let us, then, make a fresh beginning of our argument and meet these claims as well.
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