Saturn, a man, castrated himself and ate his own children: a cruel tyrant driven from his kingdom by his son Jupiter, as good a god as he was—a wicked, lecherous, contemptible king of Crete, whose rapes, lusts, murders and villainies would fill more than a whole volume. Venus, a notorious prostitute, as freely available as a barber’s chair, the whore of Mars, Adonis and Anchises, is a great goddess like the rest, just as celebrated by their poets; and there are many more like them.

These gods, so fancifully and foolishly invented, “they celebrate with ceremonies, hymns and songs”: their misdeeds, “sorrows and joys, loves, angers, marriages and the begetting of children,” as Eusebius rightly censures them. Weddings, merriment and mourning, loves, angers and quarrels they celebrated in hymns and sang about in their ordinary songs, as though publicizing their villainies.

But consider further accounts of their origins. When Romulus was killed in the senators’ revolt, Julius Proculus, to pacify the people, announced that Jupiter had taken Romulus up into heaven, and that the Romans should therefore worship him as a god for ever afterwards.

Syrophanes of Egypt had an only son whom he dearly loved. He set up the boy’s statue in his house, and his servants adorned it with crowns and garlands to soothe their master’s anger when he was enraged. Thus, little by little, the son came to be worshipped as a god. Semiramis did the same for her husband Belus, and the emperor Hadrian for his favourite Antinous.

Flora was a rich prostitute in Rome, and because she made the commonwealth her heir, her birthday was celebrated long afterwards. To make it a more acceptable holy day, they made her goddess of flowers and sacrificed to her among the rest.

The matrons of Rome, Dionysius of Halicarnassus relates, dedicated a temple to Women’s Fortune because Coriolanus abandoned his war at their entreaty. And a temple was erected to Bearded Venus because something had gone wrong with people’s hair; and so with the rest.

The citizens of Alabanda, a small town in Asia Minor, wanted to curry favour with the Romans, who were then fighting Perseus of Macedon in Greece and inspired fear in those regions. They dedicated a temple to the city of Rome and made her a goddess, with yearly games and sacrifices. Thus a town of houses was deified: shameful flattery on the one side in offering the honour, and intolerable arrogance on the other in accepting it, on so base and absurd a pretext.

Cicero writes to Atticus that his daughter Tulliola might be made a goddess and worshipped like Juno and Minerva—and she deserved it just as well. Their holy days and acts of worship were equally ridiculous: Pan’s Lupercalia, Flora’s Floralia, the festivals of the Good Goddess and Anna Perenna, the Saturnalia, and so on. Consider how they were celebrated: the lewd and wanton gestures, the paltry ceremonies, the bawdy priests; how they hang their noses over the smoke of sacrifices, Lucian says, and like flies lick the blood spilled around the altars.

Their carved idols and gilded images of wood, iron, ivory, silver, brass and stone—“once I was a tree-trunk,” and so on—were utterly absurd, since they were their own handiwork. As Seneca observes, “They worship wooden gods, while despising the craftsmen who made them”: they adore the work and despise the worker. And as Tertullian continues the argument, “If people were not favourable to the gods, there would be no gods.” Had it not been for people, they would never have been gods, but still blocks and lifeless statues, in which mice, swallows and other birds built their nests, spiders their webs, and left their droppings in the very mouths.

Those images, I say, were every bit as gross as the shapes in which they represented the gods: Jupiter with a ram’s head, Mercury with a dog’s, Pan like a goat, Hecate with three heads; one bearded, another beardless. Read more in Carterius and du Verdier about their monstrous forms and ugly pictures. More absurd still, they told people these images had come from heaven, like Minerva’s in her temple at Athens, “which the local people believed had fallen from the sky,” as Pausanias says. They made some like storks, apes and bulls, yet believed in them in earnest.

And, impiously and abominably, they made their gods notorious whoremongers and incestuous sodomites—as they commonly all were, along with Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Neptune and the rest—thieves, slaves and drudges. Apollo and Neptune made tiles in Phrygia and kept sheep; Hercules cleaned out stables; Vulcan was a blacksmith. Their villainies made them unfit to live on earth, much less in heaven, as Mornay rightly says; yet such were the beings they proclaimed as gods.

They were so weak and brutish: some whined, lamented and roared, like Isis for her son and Cenocephalus, and all her weeping priests; Mars in Homer was wounded and distressed; Venus ran away crying; and so on. What could be more ridiculous? “Is it not ridiculous to mourn what you worship, or worship what you mourn?” Minucius objects. “If they are gods, why do you mourn them? If they are dead, why do you worship them?”

No wonder Lucian, that unyielding assailant of superstition, and Pliny mocked them and their horrible idolatry as they did; or that Diagoras took an image of Hercules and put it under his pot to boil his soup—Hercules’s thirteenth labour, as he called it.