consistent with itself_.
To what purpose, then, is it that this most learned and most acute
man Varro attempts, as it were, with subtle disputation, to reduce
and refer all these gods to heaven and earth? He cannot do it. They
go out of his hands like water; they shrink back; they slip down and
fall. For when about to speak of the females, that is, the goddesses,
he says, "Since, as I observed in the first book concerning places,
heaven and earth are the two origins of the gods, on which account
they are called celestials and terrestrials, and as I began in the
former books with heaven, speaking of Janus, whom some have said to be
heaven, and others the earth, so I now commence with Tellus in speaking
concerning the goddesses." I can understand what embarrassment so
great a mind was experiencing. For he is influenced by the perception
of a certain plausible resemblance, when he says that the heaven is
that which does, and the earth that which suffers, and therefore
attributes the masculine principle to the one, and the feminine to
the other,--not considering that it is rather He who made both heaven
and earth who is the maker of both activity and passivity. On this
principle he interprets the celebrated mysteries of the Samothracians,
and promises, with an air of great devoutness, that he will by writing
expound these mysteries, which have not been so much as known to his
countrymen, and will send them his exposition. Then he says that he
had from many proofs gathered that, in those mysteries, among the
images one signifies heaven, another the earth, another the patterns of
things, which Plato calls ideas. He makes Jupiter to signify heaven,
Juno the earth, Minerva the ideas. Heaven, by which anything is made;
the earth, from which it is made; and the pattern, according to which
it is made. But, with respect to the last, I am forgetting to say
that Plato attributed so great an importance to these ideas as to
say, not that anything was made by heaven according to them, but that
according to them heaven itself was made.[287] To return, however,--it
is to be observed that Varro has, in the book on the select gods, lost
that theory of these gods, in whom he has, as it were, embraced all
things. For he assigns the male gods to heaven, the females to earth;
among which latter he has placed Minerva, whom he had before placed
above heaven itself. Then the male god Neptune is in the sea, which
pertains rather to earth than to heaven. Last of all, father Dis, who
is called in Greek Πλούτων, another male god, brother of both (Jupiter
and Neptune), is also held to be a god of the earth, holding the
upper region of the earth himself, and allotting the nether region to
his wife Proserpine. How, then, do they attempt to refer the gods to
heaven, and the goddesses to earth? What solidity, what consistency,
what sobriety has this disputation? But that Tellus is the origin
of the goddesses,--the great mother, to wit, beside whom there is
continually the noise of the mad and abominable revelry of effeminates
and mutilated men, and men who cut themselves, and indulge in frantic
gesticulations,--how is it, then, that Janus is called the head of
the gods, and Tellus the head of the goddesses? In the one case error
does not make one head, and in the other frenzy does not make a sane
one. Why do they vainly attempt to refer these to the world? Even if
they could do so, no pious person worships the world for the true God.
Nevertheless, plain truth makes it evident that they are not able even
to do this. Let them rather identify them with dead men and most wicked
demons, and no further question will remain.