PREFACE

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...so that not even Deverra The Roman goddess of the broom; the author suggests the previous edition was so "filthy" with errors that even a goddess of sweeping could not clean it herself would be equal to purging the filth with which it abundantly teems, and it clearly ceased to be mine. Foreign "orphans" likely referring to unauthorized editors or "foster-parents" of his manuscript were embezzling the goods and substituting forged tablets to defraud it, gravely violating both the Latorian law Lex Latoria: a Roman law protecting minors from fraud and the Cornelian law Lex Cornelia: a Roman law against forgery and falsification. As for the errors original: "Errata" which I was not able to notice here—owing to that degrading task of correcting the typesetting original: "elementa," referring to the physical characters of type while I was occupied elsewhere—I present them collected together at the end of this small book. If you intend to be a reader, I would ask that you first rewrite those emendations throughout the text and do not omit the additions that are to be inserted.

Whatever has been achieved in this investigation will, I hope, be all the more beautiful and more gratefully received by honorable minds because the matters pertaining to this study are both more laborious and rarer than those which belong to that monstrous Theology of the Greeks and Latins. The author contrasts his specialized research into obscure deities with the common, well-known stories of the Olympian gods. But if any high-priest of critics Lucumo: an Etruscan title for a prince or high priest; the author uses it here sarcastically for an arrogant critic should reach such a state of either madness or malice toward this literature that he judges these Gods to be altogether neglected, and considers the inquiry I have undertaken to be entirely superfluous and futile—since it relies on the mixing of sacred with profane literature, often based on the mere strokes of letters, or...