‘In fine, they dissect their own arms with two-edged knives, which they use constantly to carry about them. In the mean while, one of them begins to rave and sigh, and seems to draw his breath from his very bowels. He at last feigns to fall into a kind of phrenetic fit, pretending that he is replete with the spirit of the Goddess; as if the presence of the Gods ought not to make Men better, instead of rendering them disordered and weak. But now, behold what kind of favour the Divine Will is going to bestow upon him. He begins to vociferate, and, by purposely contrived lies, to upbraid and accuse himself in the same manner as if he had been guilty of having entertained bad designs against the mysteries of their holy Religion. He then proceeds to award a sentence of punishment against himself; and at the same time grasping his scourge, an instrument which those Priests constantly wear about them, and which is made of twisted woollen cords armed with small bones, he lashes himself with repeated blows; all the while manifesting a wonderful, though affected firmness, notwithstanding the violence and number of the stripes.’ From all that is above related, it is pretty evident that those Syrian Priests used (or seemed to use) themselves, in this cruel manner, only with a view to raise admiration in the minds of weak and superstitious persons by this extraordinary affectation of superior sanctity, and thereby to cheat them out of their money. At least this is the conjecture made by Philippus Beroaldus, in his Commentaries on the _Metamorphosis_ of the Golden Ass, who says, that those Priests were no better than Jugglers, or rather Cheats, who only aimed at catching the money of the Fools who gazed at them[31]. Nay, the opinion of the merit of voluntary or religious Flagellations, was in antient times grown so universal, that we find them to have also been practised among the Romans, who had adopted notions on that subject of the same kind with those of the Syrians and the Egyptians, and thought that the Gods were, upon particular occasions, to be appeased by using scourges and whips. An instance of this notion or practice is to be met with in the Satyricon of Petronius, in which _Encolpus_ relates, that, being upon the sea, the people of the ship flagellated him, in order, as they thought, to prevent a storm. ‘It was resolved (he says) among the Mariners, to give us each forty stripes, in order to appease the tutelar Deity of the ship. No time accordingly is lost; the furious Mariners set upon us with cords in their hands, and endeavour to appease the Deity by the effusion of the meanest blood: as to me, I received three lashes, which I endured with Spartan magnanimity[32].’