To the Nations 2.8

There remains that national kind of gods among the peoples, which a merely local knowledge shows to have been taken up by whim, not out of knowledge of the truth. I consider God, then, to be known everywhere, present everywhere, ruling everywhere, to be worshipped by all and to be won over by all. But since even those whom the whole world worships in common fall short of the proof of true divinity, how much more these whom not even their own townsmen know? For what fit authority has gone before such a theology, which even rumor has abandoned? How many are there who know by sight or by hearing Atargatis of the Syrians, Caelestis of the Africans, Varsutina of the Moors, Obodas and Dusares of the Arabs, Belenus of Noricum, or those whom Varro lists: Delventinus of the people of Casinum, Visidianus of Narnia, Numiternus of Atina, Ancharia of Asculum, and Nortia, whom the Volsinians have received, gods whose names do not even differ in dignity from human surnames? I laugh enough, too, at the gods who are town councillors of each municipality, whose honor is confined within their own walls. How far this freedom of adopting gods has gone is shown by the superstitions of the Egyptians, who even worship their own private beasts, cats, crocodiles, and their snake. It is a small matter that they have also deified a man: I mean the one whom not only Egypt or Greece but the whole world worships, and by whom the Africans swear. What can be conjectured about his state from our writings, so as to seem likely, is set down here. For this Serapis was once called Joseph, of the race of the saints. Younger than his other brothers, but loftier in mind, he was sold into Egypt by those same brothers out of envy and served in the household of Pharaoh, king of the Egyptians. Desired by the unchaste queen, but refusing to comply, he was instead denounced by her and cast into prison by the king. There, by interpreting dreams for certain persons correctly, he showed the power of his spirit. Meanwhile the king too dreams certain terrible things. Joseph was brought out to him, because, when summoned, he was able to explain them, having given proof of this in prison; and he opens the dream to the king: that those seven very fat and sleek cows signified the plenty of as many years, and the seven after them, likewise starved, foretold the want of the seven years following. So he advises laying up stores out of the earlier plenty against the famine to come. The king believed him; the outcome proved him prudent, holy, and always indispensable. So Pharaoh set him over all Egypt, to gather in the grain and afterwards to manage it. Him they called Serapis from the headdress with which his head was adorned; the bushel-shaped figure of this headdress seals the memory of his grain-gathering, and the ears of grain with which it is marked round about show that the care of the crops rested on his head. For this reason too they placed under his right hand the dog, which they assign to the underworld, because the Egyptians were held under his hand and care. And they join to him Pharia, whom the derivation of her name shows to be the daughter of king Pharaoh. For at that time Pharaoh, among his other honors and rewards, had also given him his daughter in marriage. But since they had undertaken to worship both beasts and men, they combined both faces into one Anubis, in whom one might rather see the proofs of its own nature and condition which that quarrelsome nation had consecrated: rebellious toward its own kings, abject before foreigners, and indeed a slave itself to a dog's gluttony and filth.