Mother_.
Concerning the effeminates consecrated to the same Great Mother, in
defiance of all the modesty which belongs to men and women, Varro has
not wished to say anything, nor do I remember to have read anywhere
aught concerning them. These effeminates, no later than yesterday,
were going through the streets and places of Carthage with anointed
hair, whitened faces, relaxed bodies, and feminine gait, exacting from
the people the means of maintaining their ignominious lives. Nothing
has been said concerning them. Interpretation failed, reason blushed,
speech was silent. The Great Mother has surpassed all her sons, not
in greatness of deity, but of crime. To this monster not even the
monstrosity of Janus is to be compared. His deformity was only in his
image; hers was the deformity of cruelty in her sacred rites. He has a
redundancy of members in stone images; she inflicts the loss of members
on men. This abomination is not surpassed by the licentious deeds of
Jupiter, so many and so great. He, with all his seductions of women,
only disgraced heaven with one Ganymede; she, with so many avowed and
public effeminates, has both defiled the earth and outraged heaven.
Perhaps we may either compare Saturn to this Magna Mater, or even set
him before her in this kind of abominable cruelty, for he mutilated his
father. But at the festivals of Saturn men could rather be slain by the
hands of others than mutilated by their own. He devoured his sons, as
the poets say, and the natural theologists interpret this as they list.
History says he slew them. But the Romans never received, like the
Carthaginians, the custom of sacrificing their sons to him. This Great
Mother of the gods, however, has brought mutilated men into Roman
temples, and has preserved that cruel custom, being believed to promote
the strength of the Romans by emasculating their men. Compared with
this evil, what are the thefts of Mercury, the wantonness of Venus, and
the base and flagitious deeds of the rest of them, which we might bring
forward from books, were it not that they are daily sung and danced in
the theatres? But what are these things to so great an evil,--an evil
whose magnitude was only proportioned to the greatness of the Great
Mother,--especially as these are said to have been invented by the
poets? as if the poets had also invented this, that they are acceptable
to the gods. Let it be imputed, then, to the audacity and impudence of
the poets that these things have been sung and written of. But that
they have been incorporated into the body of divine rites and honours,
the deities themselves demanding and extorting that incorporation,
what is that but the crime of the gods? nay more, the confession of
demons and the deception of wretched men? But as to this, that the
Great Mother is considered to be worshipped in the appropriate form
when she is worshipped by the consecration of mutilated men, this is
not an invention of the poets, nay, they have rather shrunk from it
with horror than sung of it. Ought any one, then, to be consecrated to
these select gods, that he may live blessedly after death, consecrated
to whom he could not live decently before death, being subjected to
such foul superstitions, and bound over to unclean demons? But all
these things, says Varro, are to be referred to the world.[282] Let
him consider if it be not rather to the unclean.[283] But why not
refer that to the world which is demonstrated to be in the world?
We, however, seek for a mind which, trusting to true religion, does
not adore the world as its god, but for the sake of God praises the
world as a work of God, and, purified from mundane defilements, comes
pure[284] to God Himself who founded the world.[285]