14. Chapter Xiii. Or, On The Origin And Progress Of Idolatry. Chapter Xi.
CHAPTER XIII. OR, ON THE ORIGIN
AND PROGRESS OF IDOLATRY.
CHAPTER XI.
A new and pestilent corruption of the notions of the one supreme God — the Homeric Jupiter occupies his place — contempt for the true
God — Cicero's judgement concerning the religion of the Jews — the Cretan Jupiter, where born, and where he died — the opinion of Papinius and Callimachus — the tomb of Jupiter in Crete — the scholiast of Callimachus — the shade of Jupiter — Summanus — Dis Pater, who and what the manes were — images fashioned to the likeness of bodies — souls in heaven and shades among the dead — the remnants of Sabaism — notions of the true God confused with the superstition of Jupiter and the Sun — the twelve gods — the origin of the superstition — the worship of δαιμόνια [daemons], ancient and recent — the banquet of the dodekatheon
— the nameless throng of gods.
I. The ancient enemy of mankind, abusing this obscure notion of the one supreme God, assailed the idolaters with a new and wonderful piece of trickery. He substituted one of the fictitious gods into the place of the true
God, and feigned that all the others either sat beside that Most High, or
served him. This was the Homeric Jupiter, who most foolishly boasts of his power over the lesser deities, Iliad, book VIII, lines 5–27:
Κέκλυτέ μευ, πάντές τε θεοὶ πᾶσαί τε θέαιναι,Ὄφρ' εἴπω, τά με θυμὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσι κελεύει.
Μήτε τις οὖν θήλεια θεὸς τό γε μήτε τις ἄρσην Πειράτω διακέρσαι ἐμὸν ἔπος, ἀλλ' ἅμα πάντες
Ὃν δ' ἂν ἐγὼν ἀπάνευθε θεῶν ἐθέλοντα νοήσω Ἐλθόντ' ἢ Τρώεσσιν ἀρηγέμεν ἢ Δαναοῖσι, Πληγεὶς οὐ κατὰ κόσμον ἐλεύσεται Οὔλυμπόνδε·
Ἤ μιν ἑλὼν ῥίψω ἐς Τάρταρον ἠερόεντα, Τῆλε μάλ', ἧχι βάθιστον ὑπὸ χθονός ἐστι βέρεθρον,
Ἔνθα σιδήρειαί τε πύλαι καὶ χάλκεος οὐδός, Τόσσον ἔνερθ' Ἀΐδεω ὅσον οὐρανός ἐστ' ἀπὸ γαίης·
Εἰ δ' ἄγε πειρήσασθε, θεοί, ἵνα εἴδετε πάντες· Σειρὴν χρυσείην ἐξ οὐρανόθεν κρεμάσαντες
Πάντές τ' ἐξάπτεσθε θεοὶ πᾶσαί τε θέαιναι· Ἀλλ' οὐκ ἂν ἐρύσαιτ' ἐξ οὐρανόθεν πεδίονδε
Ἀλλ' ὅτε δὴ καὶ ἐγὼ πρόφρων ἐθέλοιμι ἐρύσσαι, Αὐτῇ κεν γαίῃ ἐρύσαιμ' αὐτῇ τε θαλάσσῃ· Σειρὴν μέν κεν ἔπειτα περὶ ῥίον Οὐλύμποιο
[Hear me, all ye gods, and all ye goddesses, while I speak what my heart within my breast bids me.
Let neither goddess nor god attempt to thwart my word; but all together assent, that I may most swiftly bring these matters to their end.
Whomsoever I shall perceive minded to go apart from the gods, to aid either the Trojans or the Danaans, that one, struck in unseemly fashion, shall return to Olympus; or I shall seize and hurl him into misty Tartarus, far away, where is the deepest gulf beneath the earth
— where are gates of iron and a threshold of bronze, as far below Hades as heaven is from earth.
Then shall he know how far I am the mightiest of all the gods.
Come, try me, gods, that ye all may know: hang a golden cord from heaven, and lay hold of it, all ye gods and goddesses — yet could ye not drag down to the plain from heaven Zeus the supreme counsellor, strive as hard as ye might; but if I in turn should wish to draw it in earnest,
I would drag up earth itself and sea withal, and then would I bind the cord about a peak of Olympus, and all those things would hang aloft — by so much am I above the gods and above men.]
So he; all of which Eustathius vainly attempts to accommodate to the doctrine of the Stoics, of Plato, and of others concerning natural things — but he there twists the words of Homer to a meaning of which the poet himself never had the least suspicion, no otherwise than Donatus does in explaining the plots of Terence. Excellently Plato, in the Phaedrus: "If anyone, having no faith in the poetic fables, should wish to reduce them by
some rustic wisdom to a fitting sense, he will assuredly need a great deal of leisure." This Jupiter, however, to whom they assigned the prerogative of supreme dominion, and whatever they judged proper to the supreme God, was none other than that most notorious Cretan scoundrel — or rather the Devil himself, masked under the tradition of that Cretan Jupiter. The greatest of orators, in his speech to the pontiffs For His House, chapter 57:
""Thee, O Capitoline, whom, on account of his benefits, the Roman people named 'Best,' and, on account of his power, 'Greatest'; and thee, Queen
Juno," etc. — the Best and Greatest God, the Capitoline image, the husband of Juno, Statius, with the most shameful confusion, imagines to be one and the same, Thebaid, book IV, line 782: "As the Berecynthian mother, while she bids the trembling Curetes leap and dance about the infant Thunderer."
II. And so, although they professed one supreme deity, they utterly spurned the one God as he had actually revealed himself. Hence their contempt for the religion of the Jews, who alone had the knowledge of the one true God. Cicero, in his oration For Lucius Flaccus, chapter 28, is the most abundant witness. "Every state, Laelius, has its own religion; we have ours. While Jerusalem still stood" (that is, while Judaea was still its own master, not yet subjected to the Romans — for the city had by no means yet been destroyed at that time), "and while the Jews were at peace, still the religion of their rites was abhorrent to the splendour of this empire, to the dignity of our name, to the institutions of our forefathers — and now the more so, because that nation has shown by arms what it thinks of our rule; how dear it was to the immortal gods, it has shown by being conquered, by being made tributary, by being enslaved."
III. Hence, concerning that Jupiter of theirs — whom they knew to be a man sprung from men — they were never able to work out any consistent
account. That most learned poet, who acknowledges that his Thunderer was once a child, nevertheless denies that he died, Thebaid, book I, line 277:
"Yet this honour of a temple is pleasing to thee; guilty Ida is well pleased, and lying Crete, which feigns thy shade." Which he had drawn from Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus:
Ζεῦ, σὲ μὲν Ἰδαίοισιν ἐν οὔρεσί φασι γενέσθαι, Ζεῦ, σὲ δ' ἐν Ἀρκαδίῃ· πότεροι, πάτερ, ἐψεύσαντο;
Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται· καὶ γὰρ τάφον, ὦ ἄνα, σεῖο Κρῆτες ἐτεκτήναντο· σὺ δ' οὐ θάνες, ἐσσὶ γὰρ αἰεί.
[Zeus, they say thou wast born on the Idaean mountains; Zeus, they say in Arcadia: which, father, have lied?
The Cretans, ever liars: for indeed, O king, the Cretans built a tomb for thee — yet thou art not dead, for thou art forever.]
— that is: "Jupiter, they say indeed that thou wast born on the Idaean mountains; Jupiter, that thou wast born in Arcadia: which have lied, father
— the ever-lying Cretans? For indeed, O king, the Cretans built thy tomb; but thou art not dead, for thou art forever." But to acquit the Cretans of the charge of lying about the tomb of Jupiter, they devised no unclever fiction, which the old scholiast on Callimachus records: Ἐν Κρήτῃ … ἐπὶ τῷ τάφῳ τοῦ Μίνωος, ἐπιγέγραπτο· Μίνωος τοῦ Διὸς τάφος· τῷ χρόνῳ δὲ τὸ τοῦ
Μίνωος ἀπηλείφθη, ὥστε περιλειφθῆναι Διὸς τάφος· ἐκ τούτου λέγουσι Κρῆτες τὸν τάφον τοῦ Διός. [In Crete, he says, upon the tomb of Minos was inscribed: "The tomb of Minos, son of Zeus." In time, the name of Minos was effaced, so that only "the tomb of Zeus" remained; from this the Cretans say it is the tomb of Zeus.]
IV. On this account Athenagoras, in his Legation, mocks Callimachus, because, while believing his Jupiter to have been born of men, he would not admit the tomb of a mortal man. He was foolish, too, when he asked which had lied — the Arcadians or the Cretans — each claiming the birth of Jupiter for themselves; whereas Cicero, book III On the Nature of the Gods, teaches that there were three Jupiters, of whom the first two were begotten of Aether and Caelus, in Arcadia, and the third, born of Saturn, in Crete.
Philostratus, in his Lives of the Sophists, book II, also relates that the sophist Antiochus pleaded the cause of the Cretans concerning the tomb of Jupiter; and Lactantius proves, from Euhemerus, that he was indeed buried there.
V. Pluto himself, too, was nothing other than the shade of the dead Jupiter; whence he was called Summanus — that is, the chief of the shades (manes).
Whence the beginning of the formula of devotion: "Dis Pater, or the shade of Jupiter, or by whatever other name it is lawful to call him." For Salmasius most rightly observes, in his Diatribe on Loans, that those whose souls had been received into heaven had their shades placed among the dead. For these manes were, as it were, images of bodies lacking a soul, which the Greeks called σκιαί [shades] and εἴδωλα καμόντων [phantoms of the dead] — concerning which the most learned Reynolds discourses at length and excellently, in his Lectures Against Bellarmine, who contends that an εἴδωλον is merely the image of a false thing, or of something that never existed. This shade Lucretius calls "air deprived of light" book IV, line 369. Thus, the image of Hercules, though he had long since been numbered among the gods, is placed by Homer among the dead. And that image of Achilles, which was raised up from the shades by Apollonius the magician, demanded that sacred rites be established for it by the
Thessalians, as to a god. The soul, therefore, was not the shade which they placed above; nor was it the body, which they saw fail on earth; but an image so fashioned to the likeness of the body that it might be seen and recognised by those to whom he whose shade it was had been known — yet not touched. So Aeneas, in Virgil, Aeneid II, line 771: "As I sought her ... the unhappy image and very shade of Creusa herself seemed before my eyes, a likeness larger than the known form." Deiphobus's shade, too, was mutilated, after the likeness of the body which Menelaus had cruelly maimed, Aeneid VI, line 494: "And here he saw Deiphobus, son of Priam, his whole body torn, his face cruelly mangled."
This Jupiter, then, whom all confessed to have been born, whom most held to have been buried, and whose shade they placed among the dead, they strove to raise up to the throne of the supreme God, and to drain out into him the entire knowledge of the one true God. Hence, too, in the worship of the nations, and in all their rites, there was ever a wondrous confusion — no less absurd, and no less ridiculous, than that which Plautus contrived in his double Amphitryon and double Sosia.
VI. Nor does the heap of confusion end here. Among almost all idolaters everywhere, Sabaism — that is, the worship of the heavenly bodies — firmly held some station at least, if not the very one it had held from the beginning. In this the Sun alone was supreme, the highest, almost a Lunar
God as well. He too usurped the place of the Most High God. This we have shown above at greater length. Hence a new delusion, a new mockery arose
— as though it had pleased the ancient serpent to make sport of wretched little men, enslaved to blindness and to crimes. The notions of the true God, the Cretan Jupiter (or Satan masked in that idol), and the Sun, a heavenly
body — the best and the worst — were all confounded together into one idol.
VII. But this wretched confusion of idolatrous superstition went still further. In heaven, angels — the noblest of creatures — serve the true God, awaiting his nod in all things. Some knowledge of these, too, the nations retained, as in Orpheus:
Σῷ δὲ θρόνῳ πυρόεντι παριστᾶσιν πολύμοχθοι Ἄγγελοι, οἷσι μέμηλε βροτοῖς ὡς πάντα τελεῖται.
[By thy fiery throne stand the toil-worn angels, whose care it is that all things be accomplished for mortals.]
But even here that word of Jude, verse 10, holds true: Ὅσα φυσικῶς, ὡς τὰ ἄλογα ζῶα, ἐπίστανται, ἐν τούτοις φθείρονται [What things they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves]. These angels they transformed into what I know not what lesser gods — makers of the world, and inferior governors, to be adored and worshipped with the utmost religion and divine cult. In their Hellenism, they substituted for these, in place of God and his angels, the gods of what they call the "greater nations," who always stood beside Jupiter, and were chiefly deified men — embracing, in place of God and his angels, mere shades of Jupiter and of the gods of the greater nations.
VIII. They imagined, too, that lesser deities, minor stars, served the Sun.
Chiefly they invented the twelve signs of the zodiac; hence twelve gods of the second rank — or eleven, together with Jupiter himself — were also admitted into Hellenism. Ennius comprised them all in this couplet: "Juno,
Vesta, Minerva, Ceres, Diana, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Jove, Neptune, Vulcan, Apollo." Others say that there were twelve besides Jupiter himself, assigned to him as counsellors and assessors. So Seneca: "Jupiter, indeed,
sends the second sort of lightning, but by the counsel's decision; for he summons the twelve gods." Hence, they were called the "consenting gods," because their assent was sought on every decree passed in heaven. Whence that saying of Augustine: "Who can bear it, that happiness has been placed neither among the consenting gods, whom they say are called into Jupiter's council, nor among the gods they call select?" Others reckon eleven besides
Jupiter himself: "If Jupiter should bring with him eleven gods besides himself" — Plautus, Epidicus, act V, scene 1, line 4: "Twelve gods, more than there are immortal gods in heaven, now aid and assist me", ibid., act V, scene 2, line 10 — by which he implies that there are that same number in heaven. And Demochares: Ὦ Θεόφραστε, Ἀθηναῖοι ἦσαν ἀλλ' οὐχ οἱ δώδεκα θεοὶ οἱ δικάζοντες ["O Theophrastus, the judges were Athenian men, not the twelve gods"]. To all these together altars were erected in many places — in the territory of Ilium: Ἐπὶ τῷ Λεκτῷ βωμὸς τῶν δώδεκα θεῶν δείκνυται· καλοῦσι δ' Ἀγαμέμνονος ἵδρυμα [At Lectum is shown an altar of the twelve gods; they call it the foundation of Agamemnon] —
Strabo, Geography, book XIII, chapter 1; and again: Εἶτ' Ἀχαιῶν λιμὴν ὅπου οἱ βωμοὶ τῶν δώδεκα θεῶν [Then the Harbour of the Achaeans, where the altars of the twelve gods are]. And at Athens, in the very marketplace, by the tyrant Pisistratus — as Thucydides attests, History, book VI. These, according to Apollodorus, were called in as arbiters between Neptune and Minerva, disputing over the name of Athens, and before them Mars, accused of the slaying of Halirrhothius, pleaded his cause for his life on the Areopagus — that is, "at the rock," so called afterwards from that trial. Hence the δωδεκάθεος [twelve-god] banquet of Augustus, in Suetonius, at which so many guests were present, adorned in the guise of the gods.
IX. The rise of the superstition, according to Herodotus, book II, chapter 4, was from Egypt: Δώδεκα θεῶν … ἐπωνυμίας ἔλεγον πρώτους
Αἰγυπτίους νομίσαι, καὶ Ἕλληνας παρὰ σφέων ἀναλαβεῖν. [They say the Egyptians were the first to devise the naming of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks took it over from them.] But among the Egyptians the twelve gods were nothing other than the twelve signs of the zodiac.
X. Among these they preferred one, as we have said, infinitely above all the rest, and imagined that all the others ordered themselves according to his will. Whence that saying of Plautus, in the Casina, act II, scene 5, line
23: "So long as this one Jupiter is favourable to you, take care you count those lesser gods for nothing." And Ulysses, of Hector, to Achilles, in Homer:
— that is: "He rages boundlessly, trusting in Jove, and reveres neither mortals nor gods."
These, then, they supposed to perform a kind of mediatorial office, on behalf of mortals, before that supreme God. No scene occurs more frequently among the poets than that of gods of the second rank interceding with the Most High, on behalf of those with whom they had some connection. So Venus, on behalf of the Trojans in peril, in Virgil, Aeneid X, lines 18–20: "O father! O eternal power over gods and men! Seest thou how the Rutulians exult? And Turnus is borne through the midst upon his splendid horses?" Such too are those words of Pindar, Pythian VI, line 23:
[Above all, to reverence the son of Cronos, deep-voiced lord of lightnings and of thunders, among the gods.] The mediators themselves, moreover, mortals pursued with orations and with prayers — just as still today, among the Papists, is practised the worship of δαιμόνια [lesser divine beings] — on which the most learned
Mede's Discourse on the Apostasy of the Latter Times should be consulted.
And thus, God and the angels, the sun and the signs of the zodiac, the Cretan Jupiter, and other dead men, being confounded together by a dreadful madness of superstition, all notions of the one God were rendered utterly corrupt, vain, and useless.
XI. There is no need for us to say anything further concerning the remaining rabble of gods, whose origin is most uncertain. Plautus distributes them into the upper gods, the lower gods, and those in between; elsewhere into the great, the least, and the household gods. Ovid calls them the "plebs of the upper gods," in the Ibis, line 79: "You too, plebs of the upper gods — Fauns, and Satyrs, and Lares, and rivers, and Nymphs, and the race of demigods." In fashioning fables about these, the ancients scarcely ever agreed among themselves anywhere; hence Pausanias, in his
Boeotica, having recounted the opinion of the Thebans concerning certain gods, adds: Καὶ Μεγαρεῦσιν ἐς αὐτὴν οὐχ ὁμολογοῦσι· διάφορα καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ, ὡς τὸ πολύ, ἀλλήλοις λέγουσιν Ἕλληνες. [Nor do the Megarians agree with this; and the rest of the Greeks generally say different things from one another concerning them.] — that is: "The Greeks generally disagree among themselves about these matters." They distributed them all into fixed classes, assigning some to heaven, who were called ὑπερουράνιοι
[above heaven], ἐνουράνιοι [within heaven], and ἐπουράνιοι [heavenly];
some to the air, who were ἐναιθέριοι [in the ether] and ἐναέριοι [in the air]; others to earth and sea, who were commonly called ἐπίγειοι [earthly], and, more specifically, ἐπιχθόνιοι [of the land], ἐνάλιοι [of the sea], θαλάττιοι
[maritime], ἐνθαλάττιοι [in the sea]; others to the underworld, who were called ὑπόγειοι [subterranean], χθόνιοι [chthonic], ὑποχθόνιοι, καταχθόνιοι
[beneath the earth]; and they were named too from their particular offices and cares: ἑστιοῦχοι [hearth-keepers], πολιοῦχοι [city-keepers], πατρῷοι
[ancestral], ξένιοι [of hospitality], πάτριοι [paternal], ἀγοραῖοι [of the marketplace], ἐπικάρπιοι [of the harvest], στράτιοι [of the army], τροπαιοῦχοι [trophy-bearers], ἱκέσιοι [of suppliants], τρόπαιοι, ἀποτρόπαιοι [averters of evil], λύσιοι [releasers], καθάρσιοι [purifiers], σωτῆρες [saviours], ἀσφάλειοι [securers], παλαμναῖοι [avengers of bloodshed], προστρόπαιοι [of supplication], γενέθλιοι [of birth], γαμήλιοι
[of marriage], and so forth. There is scarcely anyone who does not know that Popery has carried this whole apparatus of the pagan stage over into the Christian religion.