19. We shall pass by the
wild Bacchanalia also, which are named in Greek Omophagia, in which
with seeming frenzy and the loss of your senses you twine snakes about
you; and, to show yourselves full of the divinity and majesty of the
god, tear in pieces with gory mouths the flesh of loudly-bleating
goats. Those hidden mysteries of Cyprian Venus we pass by also,
whose founder is said to have been King Cinyras,4391
in which being initiated, they bring
stated fees as to a
harlot, and carry away
phalli, given as
signs of the
propitious
deity. Let the rites of the Corybantes also be
consigned to oblivion, in which is
revealed that
sacred mystery, a
brother slain by his
brothers, parsley sprung from the
blood of the
murdered one, that vegetable forbidden to be placed on
tables, lest the
manes of the dead should be unappeasably offended. But
those other Bacchanalia also we refuse to
proclaim, in which there is
revealed and taught to the initiated a
secret not to be spoken; how
Liber, when taken up with boyish sports, was torn asunder by the
Titans; how he was
cut up limb by limb by them also, and thrown into
pots that he might be cooked; how
Jupiter, allured by the sweet savour,
rushed unbidden to the meal, and discovering what had been done,
overwhelmed the revellers with his terrible thunder, and hurled them to
the lowest part of Tartarus. As evidence and proof of which, the
Thracian
bard handed down in his poems the dice, mirror, tops,
hoops, and smooth balls, and golden apples taken from the virgin
Hesperides.
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
