Exhortation to the Greeks 2.16

Are not the mysteries a mockery? What if I were to add the rest? Demeter conceives, Kore is reared, and this same Zeus who fathered her has intercourse again, with Persephone, his own daughter, after her mother Demeter, forgetting his earlier pollution [Zeus, the father and seducer of the girl]; and he has intercourse with her in the form of a serpent, exposed as what he really was. So in the Sabazian mysteries the token given to the initiates is “the god through the bosom”: this is a serpent, drawn through the bosom of the initiates, a proof of the incontinence of Zeus. Persephone too bears a child in the shape of a bull. Indeed, as a certain idolatrous poet says: “The bull is father of the serpent, and the serpent father of the bull; on the mountain the hidden thing, the herdsman's goad”; by the herdsman's goad, I think, he means the fennel stalk that the Bacchants wreathe.