But of the Syrian Goddess superstitious men believe that if one eats sprats or anchovies, she munches his shins, fills his body with sores, and rots his liver.[[293]]
XI. How then? Is it impious to say bad things about the Gods, but not impious to think them? Or is it the thought of the blasphemer which makes his voice amiss? We men scout abusive language as the outward sign of ill-feeling. We reckon for enemies those who speak ill of us because we think that they also think ill. Now you see the sort of things which the superstitious think about the Gods; they take them to be capricious, |E| faithless, shifty, revengeful, cruel, vexed about trifles, all reasons why the superstitious must perforce hate and fear the Gods. Of course he does, when he thinks that they have been, and will be again, authors of his greatest ills. But if he hates and fears the Gods, he is their enemy. Yet he worships, and sacrifices, and sits before their shrines. And no wonder; men salute tyrants also, and court them, and set up their figures in gold. But ‘in silence’ they hate them, ‘wagging the head’.[[294]] Hermolaus remained Alexander’s courtier, Pausanias served on Philip’s |F| bodyguard, Chaereas on that of Caligula; but each of them would say while he attended on his master
Sure thou shouldst rue it if my arm were strong.[[295]]
The atheist thinks there are no Gods, the superstitious wishes that there were none; he believes against his will, for he fears to disbelieve. And yet, as Tantalus would gladly slip from beneath the stone swinging over his head, so is it with the superstitious and his fear, a pressure no less sore. He would reckon the atheist’s mood a blessed one, for there is freedom in it. As things are, the atheist is quite clear of superstition; the superstitious is at heart an atheist, only too weak to believe what he wishes to believe about the Gods.
|171| XII. Again, the atheist is in no sense responsible for superstition, whereas superstition provides atheism with a principle which brings it into being, and then an apology for its existence which is neither true nor honest, but is in a sense colourable. For it is not because they find anything to blame in sky, or stars, or seasons, or cycles of the moon, or movements of the sun around the earth, ‘those artificers of day and night’,[[296]] or espy confusion and disorder in the breeding of animals or the increase of fruits, that they condemn the universe to godlessness. No! Superstition and its ridiculous doings and emotions, words, |B| gestures, juggleries, sorceries, coursings around and beatings of cymbals, purifications which are impure, and cleansings which are filthy, weird illegal punishments and degradations at temples—these give certain persons a pretext for saying that better no Gods than Gods, if Gods accept such things and take pleasure in them, Gods so violent, so petty, so sore about trifles.
XIII. Were it not better then for those Gauls[[297]] and Scythians to have had no notion at all about Gods, neither imagination nor record of them, than to think that there are Gods who take |C| pleasure in the blood of slaughtered men and who accept that as the supreme form of solemn sacrifice? What? Were it not an advantage to the Carthaginians to have had a Critias or a Diagoras for their first lawgiver and to recognize neither God nor daemon, than to offer such sacrifices as they did offer to Cronus?[[298]] It was not the case which Empedocles puts against those who sacrifice animals:
Father, uplifting his son, not marking the change of the body,
Prays as he takes the dear life, poor fool.
Knowing and recognizing their own children, they used to sacrifice them—nay, the childless would buy children from poor parents and cut their throats as though they were lambs or chickens—, and the mother would stand by dry-eyed and with |D| never a groan. If she should groan or weep, she would have to lose the merit, and the child was sacrificed all the same, while the whole space in front of the shrine was filled with the rattle of drums and the din of fifes, in order that the sound of the wailing might be drowned. Suppose that Typhons, say, or Giants, had turned out the Gods and were our rulers, in what sacrifices but these would they delight, or what other solemnities would they require? Amestris,[[299]] wife of Xerxes, buried twelve men alive, as her own offering to Hades, who, as Plato[[300]] tells us, is |E| kind and wise and detains souls by persuasion and reason, and so has been named ‘Hades’. Xenophanes,[[301]] the natural philosopher, when he saw the Egyptians beating their breasts and wailing at their feasts, gave them a home lesson: ‘If these are Gods, do not mourn them; if men, why sacrifice to them?
XIV. There is no sort of disease so capricious and so varied in emotions, such a medley of opposite, or rather conflicting, opinions, as is that of superstition. We must flee from it then, but as safety and advantage point, not like men who run for their lives from robbers or beasts or fire, never looking round or using their heads, and plunge into pathless wastes with pits and |F| precipices. For that is how some flee from superstition and plunge into a rough and flinty atheism, overleaping Piety seated in the middle space.