celebrated with great solemnity; all the gods, the entire brute
creation, the whole of mankind attended, except one young woman named
Chelone, who laughed at the ceremonies, for which impiety she was
changed by Mercury into a tortoise, and condemned to perpetual silence.
He was the most powerful of all the gods, and considered as the king and
father both of gods and men: his worship was very extended, performed
with greater solemnity, than that of any other god. Upon his altars
smoked goats, sheep, and white bulls, in which he is said to have
particularly delighted; the oak was rendered sacred to him, because he
taught mankind to live upon acorns; he had many oracles where his
precepts were delivered, the most celebrated of these were at Dodona and
Ammon in Lybia; he was supposed to be invisible to the inhabitants of
the earth; the Lacedemonians erected his statue with four heads, thereby
indicating, that he listened readily to the solicitations of every
quarter of the earth. Minerva is represented as having no mother, but to
have come completely armed from his brains, when his head was opened by
Vulcan; by which it is meant to infer that wisdom is the result of this
ethereal fluid. Thus, following the same fictions, the sun, that
beneficent star which has such a marked influence over the earth, became
an Osiris, a Belus, a Mithras, an Adonis, an Apollo. Nature, rendered
sorrowful by his periodical absence, was an Isis, an Astarte, a Venus, a
Cybele. Astarte had a magnificent temple at Hieropolis served by three
hundred priests, who were always employed in offering sacrifices. The
priests of Cybele, called Corybantes, also Galli, were not admitted to
their sacred functions without previous mutilation. In the celebration
of their festivals these priests used all kinds of indecent expressions,
beat drums, cymbals, and behaved just like madmen: his worship extended
all over Phrygia, and was established in Greece under the name of
_Eleusinian mysteries_. In short, every thing was personified: the sea
was under the empire of Neptune; fire was adored by the Egyptians under