The gods were deified humans

Read the historians or the philosophers, and you will find the same facts I do. Euhemerus sets forth that men were considered gods for their merits of virtue or for their gifts, and he counts up their birthdays, their homelands, and their tombs, pointing them out province by province: Jupiter of Dicte, Apollo of Delphi, Isis of Pharos, Ceres of Eleusis.

Prodicus says that men were taken up as gods because in their wanderings they discovered new crops and benefited humanity. Persaeus philosophizes along the same lines, and adds that the crops that were discovered and the discoverers of those crops themselves received the same names. As the comic poet says, Venus without Liber and Ceres grows cold.

Alexander the Great wrote to his mother in a remarkable volume that a priest had disclosed to him, out of fear of his power, the secret that the gods were men. There he makes Vulcan the first of all, and after him the race of Jupiter.

For all the ancient writers, Greek and Roman, have handed down that Saturn, the first of this race and line, was a man. The historians Nepos and Cassius know this, and Thallus and Diodorus say the same.

So Saturn, a fugitive from Crete, came to Italy in fear of his raging son, and was received as a guest by Janus. He taught those rough and rustic men many things, as a polished Greekling would: how to stamp letters, how to mark coins, how to make tools.

And so he preferred his hiding place to be called Latium, because he had hidden there safely. Saturn gave his name to the city of Saturnia, and Janus gave his name to the Janiculum. Each left a memorial to posterity.

So he was certainly a man who fled, certainly a man who hid, and the father of a man and born from a man. He was called the son of Earth or Sky because among the Italians he was handed down with unknown parents. Just as today we call people of unknown and obscure origin sons of the earth when they are seen unexpectedly, as if sent from heaven.

His son Jupiter reigned in Crete after shutting out his father, died there, and had sons there. To this day the cave of Jupiter is visited and his tomb is pointed out, and by his own rites he is accused of being human.

It would be tedious to go through them one by one and unfold the whole line of that family, since once mortality has been proved in the first parents, it flows into the rest by the very order of succession. Unless, of course, you invent gods after death. Romulus became a god when he died, as Proculus testified, and Juba is a god because the Moors wanted it, and all the other deified kings, who are consecrated not for belief in their deity but to honor their earned power.

In fact, this name is given to them against their will. They wish to remain human. They fear being made gods, and even when they are old they refuse. So gods cannot come from the dead, because God cannot die, nor from the born, because everything that is born dies. What is divine is that which has neither beginning nor end.

For why, if they were born, are they not still being born today? Unless Jupiter has grown old and childbirth has failed in Juno, and Minerva went gray before she gave birth. Or has that generation ceased because no one gives any credence to such fables?

Besides, if gods could beget children, they could not perish. We would have more gods than men, so that the sky could not contain them, nor the air hold them, nor the earth bear them. From this it is clear that those whom we read were born and whom we know died were men.

And you despise Isis with her swallow and her sistrum, and at the empty tomb of your Serapis or Osiris, with limbs scattered.