He had brought from Emesa the celestial stone, the emblem of Ela-gabal, to which all his prosperity was due, and his first care was to provide the god with a worthy home. A magnificent temple was raised to it, and the stone, encrusted with gems, was borne to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, the Emperor walking backwards before it in an ecstasy of adoration. In the temple a number of altars were set up, and rivers of blood--even the blood of children--were poured out on them; while the Emperor and his family croned the barbaric chants of primitive Syria, and the highest dignitaries of Rome stood in silent respect. As the earlier officials were soon replaced by men of infamy, chosen, very frequently, on a qualification that one may not describe, we need pay little attention to their feelings. If we suppose that the Emperor, or Elagabalus, as he now called himself, was aware that the conical stone was really a phallic emblem, we may find a clue to some of the stranger vagaries of his erotomania. Rome had long been accustomed to the barbarism of the more ancient Oriental cults, and had indeed taken a willing part in the orgiastic processions of the mysterious Mother of the Gods, whenever their rulers permitted them. But the security of the Empire seemed to them in danger when Elagabalus went on to place every other idol in a position of subordinate respect in the temple of his fetich. Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and Mars, were not at that time favoured very widely with a literal belief; nor were the Romans concerned when he stole the Astarte of the Carthaginians, and married her, in a magnificent festival, to his lonely deity. The temples and cults of Rome were like the temples and cults of modern Japan. They contributed to the gaiety of life. But if there was little sincere polytheism at Rome--the educated world was divided between an Epicurean Agnosticism and an eclectic Monotheism--there was much superstition, and few could regard without concern a desecration of the ancient Palladium, or statue in the temple of Vesta, to which the fortune of the city was peculiarly attached, and other ancient emblems. Elagabalus despotically overrode their feelings. He broke forcibly into the home of the Vestal Virgins, and bore away the sacred Palladium; since we may regard the later boast of the Virgins, that they cheated him with a substituted statue, as insincere.