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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 honors,
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. Let him
consider if it be not rather to the unclean. 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 to God
Himself who rounded the world.
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