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Translated by Ch. Browne and J. Swallow.
Gregory Theologian Bilingual Anthology, Resources Online and in Print
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15 Pages
Page 4
V. And where will you place the butchery of Pelops, [3925] which feasted hungry gods, that bitter and inhuman hospitality? Where the horrible and dark spectres of Hecate, and the underground puerilities and sorceries of Trophonius, or the babblings of the Dodonaean Oak, or the trickeries of the Delphian tripod, or the prophetic draught of Castalia, which could prophesy anything, except their own being brought to silence? [3926] Nor is it the sacrificial art of Magi, and their entrail forebodings, nor the Chaldaean astronomy and horoscopes, comparing our lives with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which cannot know even what they are themselves, or shall be. Nor are these Thracian orgies, from which the word Worship (threskeia) is said to be derived; nor rites and mysteries of Orpheus, whom the Greeks admired so much for his wisdom that they devised for him a lyre which draws all things by its music. Nor the tortures of Mithras [3927] which it is just that those who can endure to be initiated into such things should suffer; nor the manglings of Osiris, [3928] another calamity honoured by the Egyptians; nor the ill-fortunes of Isis [3929] and the goats more venerable than the Mendesians, and the stall of Apis, [3930] the calf that luxuriated in the folly of the Memphites, nor all those honours with which they outrage the Nile, while themselves proclaiming it in song to be the Giver of fruits and corn, and the measurer of happiness by its cubits. [3931]
[3925] The gods came to dine with Tantalus, and he, to do them honour, boiled his son Pelops for their food. They, however, found it out, and restored him to life; not, however, before Demeter had unwittingly eaten his shoulder, in the place of which they substituted one of ivory.
[3926] S. Jerome, commenting on Isaiah xli. 22, says: "Why could they never predict anything concerning Christ and His Apostles, or the ruin and destruction of their own temples? If then they could not foretell their own destruction, how can they foretell anything good or bad?"
[3927] These Mysteries were of Persian origin, connected it is said with the worship of the Sun. The neophytes were made to undergo twelve different kinds of torture.
[3928] The Egyptian Mysteries.
[3929] Zeus fell in love with Isis, and carried her off in the form of a heifer. Here, discovering the fraud, sent a gadfly, which drove Isis mad.
[3930] Apis, the sacred bull, worshipped at Memphis.
[3931] i.e., that the prosperity of the country was proportionate to the annual rise of the River.
Reference address : https://www.elpenor.org/gregory-nazianzen/holy-lights.asp?pg=4
