I know will excite your laughter, although on account of the exposure by no means inclined to laugh. I have eaten out of the drum, I have drunk out of the cymbal, I have carried the Cernos,[1] I have slipped into the bedroom. Are not these signs a disgrace? Are not the mysteries absurdity?
What if I add the rest? Demeter becomes a mother, Kore[2] is reared up to womanhood. And, in course of time, he who begot her,—this same Zeus has intercourse with his own daughter Pherephatta,—after Ceres, the mother,—forgetting his former abominable wickedness. Zeus is both the father and the seducer of Kore, and has intercourse with her in the shape of a dragon; his identity, however, was discovered. The token of the Sabazian mysteries to the initiated is "the deity gliding over the breast,"—the deity being this serpent crawling over the breasts of the initiated. Proof surely this of the unbridled lust of Zeus. Pherephatta has a child, though, to be sure, in the form of a bull, as an idolatrous poet says:
"The bull
The dragon's father, and the father of the bull the dragon,
On a hill the herdsman's hidden ox-goad,"—
alluding, as I believe, under the name of the herdsman's ox-goad, to the reed wielded by the bacchanals. Do you wish me to go into the story of Pherephatta' s gathering of flowers, her basket, and her seizure by Pluto (Aidoneus), and the rent in the earth, and the swine of Eubouleus that were swallowed up with the two goddesses; for which reason, in the Thesmophoria, speaking the Megaric tongue, they thrust out swine? This mythological story the women celebrate variously in different cities in the festivals called Thesmophoria and Scirophoria; dramatizing in many forms the rape of Pherephatta (Proserpine).
The mysteries of Dionysus are wholly inhuman; for while still a child, and the Curetes danced around [his cradle] clashing their weapons, and the Titans having come upon them by stealth, and having beguiled him with childish toys,
