Minucius Felix — Octavius 9

IX. "And already, as the more wicked things come forth more fruitfully, with morals going to ruin day by day like serpents, those most foul shrines of an impious coalition grow through the whole world. This conspiracy is altogether to be dug out and cursed. By secret signs and marks they recognize one another and love mutually almost before they know: everywhere also among them a kind of religion of lusts is mixed, and they promiscuously call one another brothers and sisters, so that even ordinary debauchery becomes incest by the intervention of a sacred name. Thus their empty and mad superstition glories in crimes.

Nor would shrewd rumor speak of them things most nefarious and to be prefaced by apology unless truth underlay it. I hear they venerate the consecrated head of a most shameful beast, an ass, by I-know-not-what silly persuasion: a religion worthy and born for such morals! Others report they worship the genitals of the very overseer and priest and adore the nature of their parent as it were: I do not know whether false, certainly a suspicion fitted to secret and nocturnal rites! And whoever invents that a human punished with the highest penalty for crime and the funeral woods of the cross are their ceremonies attributes fitting altars to the ruined and wicked, so that they worship what they deserve.

Already the story about initiating novices is as detestable as it is known. An infant covered with grain, to deceive the unwary, is set before the one to be imbued with the rites. That infant is killed by the novice, provoked as if to harmless blows on the grain's surface, with blind and hidden wounds. Of this—O crime!—they thirstily lick the blood, of this they eagerly distribute the limbs; by this victim they are covenanted, by this consciousness of crime they are pledged to mutual silence. These rites are fouler than all sacrileges.

And about the banquet it is known; everywhere all speak of it; the speech of our man of Cirta also witnesses it. On a solemn day they gather to feasts with all children, sisters, mothers, humans of every sex and every age. There after many courses, when the banquet has warmed and the heat of incestuous lust has blazed with drunkenness, a dog tied to the lampstand is provoked by a throw of a morsel beyond the length of the line by which it is bound to rush and leap. Thus with the conscious light overturned and extinguished, in shameless darkness the bonds of unspeakable desire wrap them by the uncertainty of lot, and even if not all by the deed, yet equally incestuous by conscience, since by the wish of all is sought whatever can happen in the act of individuals."