Exhortation to the Greeks 2.12

What if I were to go through the mysteries for you? I will not mock them by dancing them out in public, as they say Alcibiades did; but I will strip bare, according to the word of truth, the sorcery hidden in them, and I will wheel out your so-called gods themselves, whose mystic rites these are, as on the stage of life, before the spectators of truth. The Bacchants hold orgies in honor of the frenzied Dionysus, celebrating their sacred madness by eating raw flesh; wreathed with snakes, they complete the sharing out of the flesh of their slaughtered victims, shrieking out “Eua!”, the Eve through whom error came in; and the emblem of the Bacchic orgies is a consecrated serpent. Indeed, according to the precise Hebrew pronunciation, the name “Hevia,” with a rough breathing, means “the female serpent.” Demeter and Kore have become a mystic drama, and Eleusis celebrates with torches their wandering, the abduction, and their grief.