VIII. PHILOSTRATUS’S LIFE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA…

VIII. PHILOSTRATUS’S LIFE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA

Compared with Apuleius—Philostratus’s sources—Time and space covered—Philostratus’s audience—Object of the Life—Apollonius charged with magic—A confusion of terms—The Magi and magic—Apollonius and the Magi—Philostratus on wizards—Apollonius and wizards—Quacks and old-wives—The Brahmans—Marvels of the Brahmans—Magical methods of the Brahmans—Medicine of the Brahmans—Some signs of astrology—Interest in natural science—Natural law or special providence?—Cases of scepticism—Anecdotes of animals—Dragons of India—Occult virtues of gems—Absence of number mysticism—Mantike or the art of divination—Divining power of Apollonius—Dreams—Interpretation of omens—Animals and divination—Divination by fire—Other so-called predictions—Apollonius and the demons—Not all demons are evil—Philostratus’s faith in demons—The ghost of Achilles—Healing the sick and raising the dead—Other marvels—Golden wrynecks and the iunx—Why named iunx?—Apollonius in the middle ages.

[Sidenote: Compared with Apuleius.]

Some fifty years after the birth of Apuleius occurred that of Philostratus, whose career and interests were somewhat similar, although he came from the Aegean island of Lemnos instead of the neighborhood of Carthage and wrote in Greek rather than Latin. But like Apuleius he was a student of rhetoric and went first to Athens and then to Rome. The resemblance is perhaps closer between Apuleius and Apollonius of Tyana, whose life Philostratus wrote and of whom we know more than of his biographer. Like Apuleius Apollonius had to defend himself in court against the accusation of magic, and Philostratus gives us what purports to be his apology on that occasion. Two centuries afterwards Augustine in one of his letters[1122] names Apollonius and Apuleius as examples of men who were addicted to the magic art and who, the pagans said, performed greater miracles than Christ did. A century before Augustine Lactantius states[1123] that a certain philosopher who had “vomited forth” three books “against the Christian religion and name” had compared the miracles of Apollonius favorably with those of Christ; Lactantius marvels that he did not mention Apuleius as well. Like Apuleius, Apollonius was a man of broad learning who traveled widely and sought initiation into mysteries and cults. Apuleius was a Platonist; Apollonius, a Pythagorean. We may also note a resemblance between the Metamorphoses and the Life of Apollonius. Both seem to elaborate earlier writings and both have much to say of transformations, wizards, demons, and the occult. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, however, must be taken more seriously than the Metamorphoses. If the African’s work is a rhetorical romance embodying a certain autobiographical element, a Milesian tale to which personal religious experiences are annexed, then the work by Philostratus is a rhetorical biography with a tinge of romance and a good deal of sermonizing.

[Sidenote: Philostratus’s sources.]

Philostratus[1124] composed the Life of Apollonius about 217 A. D. at the request of the learned wife of the emperor Septimius Severus, to whose literary circle he belonged. The empress had come into possession of some hitherto unknown memoirs of Apollonius by a certain Damis of Nineveh, who had been his disciple and had accompanied him upon many of his travels. Some member of Damis’s family had brought these documents to the empress’s attention. Some scholars incline to the view that she was deceived by an impostor, but it hardly seems that there would be sufficient profit in the venture to induce anyone to take the pains to forge such memoirs. Also I can see no reason why a contemporary of Apollonius should not have said and believed everything which Philostratus represents Damis as saying; on the contrary it seems to me just what would be said by a naïf, gullible, and devoted disciple, who was inclined to exaggerate the abilities and achievements of his master and to take literally everything that Apollonius uttered ironically or figuratively. Other accounts of Apollonius were already in existence by a Maximus of Aegae, where Apollonius had spent part of his life, and by Moeragenes, but the memoirs of Damis seem to have offered much new material. Philostratus accordingly wrote a new life based largely upon Damis, but also making use of the will and epistles of Apollonius, many of which the emperor Hadrian had earlier collected, and of the traditions still current in the cities and temples which Apollonius had frequented and which Philostratus now took the trouble to visit. It has sometimes been suggested, chiefly by Christian writers intent upon discrediting the career of Apollonius, that Philostratus invented Damis and his memoirs. But Philostratus seems straightforward in describing the pains he has been to in preparing the Life, and certainly is more explicit and systematic in stating his sources than other ancient biographers like Plutarch and Suetonius are. He appears to follow his sources rather closely and not to invent new incidents, although he may, like Thucydides and other ancient historians, have taken liberties with the speeches and arguments put into his characters’ mouths. And through the work, despite his belief in demons and marvels, he now and then gives evidence of a moderate and sceptical mind, at least for his times.

[Sidenote: Time and space covered.]

Apollonius lived in the first century of our era and died during the reign of Nerva well advanced in years. It is therefore of a period over a century before his own that Philostratus writes. He is said to commit a number of errors in history and geography,[1125] but we must remember that mistakes in geography were a failing of the best ancient historians such as Polybius, and the general picture drawn of the emperors and politics of Apollonius’s time is not far wrong. It is true that Philostratus also makes use of tradition which has gradually formed since the death of Apollonius, and introduces explanations or comments of his own on various matters. It is, however, not the facts either of Apollonius’s career or of his times that concern us but the beliefs and superstitions which we find in Philostratus’s Life of him. Whether these are of the first, second, or early third century is scarcely necessary or possible for us to distinguish. If Damis records them, Philostratus accepts them, and the probability is that they apply not only to all three centuries but to a long period before and after. The territory covered in the Life is almost as extensive; it ranges all over the Roman Empire, alludes occasionally to the Celts and Scythians, and opens up Ethiopia and India[1126] to our gaze. Apollonius was a great traveler and there are many interesting and informing passages concerning ships, sailing, pilots, merchants and sea-trade.[1127]

[Sidenote: Philostratus’s audience.]

If we ask further, for what class of readers was the Life intended, the answer is, for the intellectual and learned. Apollonius himself was distinctly a Hellene. Philostratus represents him as often quoting Homer and other bygone Greek authors, or mentioning names from early Greek history such as Lycurgus and Aristides. One of his aims was to restore the degenerate Greek cities of his own day to their ancient morality. Furthermore, Apollonius never cared for many disciples, and neither required them to observe all the rules of life which he himself followed, nor admitted them to all his interviews with other sages and his initiations into sacred mysteries. This aloofness of the sage is somewhat reflected in his biographer. The Life is an attempt not to popularize the teachings of Apollonius but to justify him before the learned world.

[Sidenote: Object of the Life.]

The charge had been frequently made that Apollonius came illegitimately by his wisdom and acquired it violently by magic. Philostratus would restore him to the ranks of true philosophers who gained wisdom by worthy and licit methods. He declares that he was not a wizard, as many suppose, but a notable Pythagorean, a man of broad culture, an intellectual and moral teacher, a religious ascetic and reformer, probably even a prophet of divine and superhuman nature. It is not now so generally held by Christian writers as it used to be that Philostratus wrote the Life with the Gospel story of Christ in mind, and that his purpose was to imitate or to parody or to oppose a rival narrative to the Christian story and teaching. At no point in the Life does Philostratus betray unmistakably even a passing acquaintance with the Gospels, much less display any sign of animus against them. Moreover, the Christian historian and apologist, Eusebius, who lived in the century following Philostratus and was familiar with his Life of Apollonius, in writing a reply to a treatise in which Hierocles, a provincial governor under Diocletian, had compared Apollonius with Jesus, distinctly states that Hierocles was the first to suggest such an idea.[1128] Such similarities then as may exist between the Life and the Gospels must be taken as examples of beliefs common to that age.

[Sidenote: Apollonius charged with magic.]

Apollonius was accused of sorcery or magic during his lifetime by the rival philosopher Euphrates. The four books on Apollonius written by Moeragenes also portrayed him as a wizard;[1129] and Eusebius in his reply to Hierocles ascribed the miracles wrought by Apollonius to sorcery and the aid of evil demons.[1130] Earlier the satirist Lucian described Alexander the pseudo-prophet as having been in his youth an apprentice to “one of the charlatans who deal in magic and mystic incantations, ... a native of Tyana, an associate of the great Apollonius, and acquainted with all his heroics.”[1131]

[Sidenote: A confusion of terms]

In defending his hero against these charges Philostratus is guilty himself both of some ambiguous use of terms and of some loose thinking. The same ambiguous terminology, however, will be found in other discussions of magic. In a few passages Philostratus denies that Apollonius was a μάγος but much oftener exculpates him from the charge of being a γόης or γοήτης. With the latter word or words there is no difficulty. It means a wizard, sorcerer, or enchanter, and is always employed in a sinister or disreputable sense. With the term μάγος the case is different, as with the Latin magus. It may signify an evil magician, or it may refer to one of the Magi of the East, who are generally regarded as wise and good men. This delicate distinction, however, is not easy to maintain and Philostratus fails to do so, while Mr. Conybeare in his English translation[1132] makes confusion worse confounded not only by translating μάγος as “wizard” instead of “magician,” but by sometimes doing this when it really should be rendered as “one of the Magi.” It may also be noted that Philostratus locates the Magi in Babylonia as well as in Persia.

[Sidenote: The Magi and magic]

To begin with, in his second chapter Philostratus says that some consider Apollonius a magician “because he consorted with the Magi of the Babylonians, and the Brahmans of the Indians, and the Gymnosophists in Egypt.” But they are wrong in this. “For Empedocles and Pythagoras himself and Democritus, although they associated with the Magi and spake many divine utterances, yet did not stoop to the art” (of magic). Plato, too, he goes on to say, although he visited Egypt and its priests and prophets, was never regarded as a magician. In this passage, then, Philostratus closely associates the Magi with the magic art, and I am not sure whether the last “Magi” should not be “magicians.” On the other hand his acquittal of Democritus and Pythagoras from the charge of magic does not agree with Pliny, who ascribed a large amount of magic to them both.

[Sidenote: Apollonius and the Magi.]

Apollonius himself evidently did not regard the Magi whom he met in Babylon and Susa as evil magicians. One of the chief aims of his scheme of oriental travel “was to acquaint himself thoroughly with their lore.” He wished to discover whether they were wise in divine things, as they were said to be[1133]. Sacrifices and religious rites were performed under their supervision[1134]. Apollonius did not permit Damis to accompany him when he visited the Magi at noon and again about midnight and conversed with them[1135]. But Apollonius himself said that he learned some things from them and taught them some things; he told Damis that they were “wise men, but not in all respects”; on leaving their country he asked the king to give the presents which the monarch had intended for Apollonius himself to the Magi, whom he described then as “men who both are wise and wholly devoted to you.”[1136]

[Sidenote: Philostratus on wizards.]

Quite different is the attitude towards witchcraft and wizards of both Apollonius and his biographer. In the opinion of Philostratus wizards are of all men most wretched[1137]. They try to violate nature and to overcome fate by such methods as inquisition of spirits, barbaric sacrifices, incantations and besmearings. Simple-minded folk attribute great powers to them; and athletes desirous of winning victories, shopkeepers intent upon success in business ventures, and lovers in especial are continually resorting to them and apparently never lose faith in them despite repeated failures, despite occasional exposure or ridicule of their methods in books and writing, and despite the condemnation of witchcraft both by law and nature.[1138] Apollonius was certainly no wizard, argues Philostratus, for he never opposed the Fates but only predicted what they would bring to pass, and he acquired this foreknowledge not by sorcery but by divine revelation.[1139]

[Sidenote: Apollonius and wizards.]

Nevertheless Apollonius is frequently accused of being a wizard by others in the pages of Philostratus. At Athens he was refused initiation into the mysteries on this ground,[1140] and at Lebadea the priests wished to exclude him from the oracular cave of Trophonius for the same reason.[1141] When the dogs guarding the temple of Dictynna in Crete fawned upon him instead of barking at his approach, the guardians of the shrine arrested him as a wizard and would-be temple robber who had bewitched the dogs by something that he had given them to eat.[1142] Apollonius also had to defend himself against the accusation of witchcraft in his hearing or trial before Domitian.[1143] He then denied that one is a wizard merely because one has prescience, or that wearing linen garments proves one a sorcerer. Wizards shun the shrines and temples of the gods; they make use of trenches dug in the earth and invoke the gods of the lower world. They are greedy for gain and pseudo-philosophers. They possess no true science, depending for success in their art upon the stupidity of their dupes and devotees. They imagine what does not exist and disbelieve the truth. They work their sorcery by night and in darkness when those employing them cannot see or hear well. Apollonius himself was accused to Domitian of having sacrificed an Arcadian boy at night and consulted his entrails with Nerva in order to determine the latter’s prospects of becoming emperor.[1144] When before his trial Domitian was about to put Apollonius in fetters, the sage proposed the dilemma that if he were a wizard he could not be kept in bonds, or that if Domitian were able to fetter him, he was obviously no wizard.[1145] This need not imply, however, that Apollonius believed that wizards really could free themselves, for he was at times ironical. If so, Domitian replied in kind by assuring him that he would at least keep him in fetters until he transformed himself into water or a wild beast or a tree.

[Sidenote: Quacks and old-wives.]

Closely akin to the goëtes or wizards are the old hags and quack-doctors who offer one Indian spices or boxes supposed to contain bits of stone taken from the moon, stars, or depths of earth.[1146] Likewise the divining old-wives who go about with sieves in their hands and pretend by means of their divination to heal sick animals for shepherds and cowherds.[1147] We also read that Apollonius expelled from the cities along the Hellespont various Egyptians and Chaldeans who were collecting money on the pretense of offering sacrifices to avert the earthquakes which were then occurring.[1148]

[Sidenote: The Brahmans.]

We have heard Philostratus mention the Brahmans of India in the same breath with the Magi of Persia and imply that Apollonius’s association with them contributed to his reputation as a magician.[1149] In another passage[1150] Philostratus places goëtes and Brahmans in unfortunate juxtaposition, and, immediately after condemning the wizards and defending Apollonius from the charge of sorcery, goes on to say that when he saw the automatic tripods and cup-bearers of the Indians, he did not ask how they were operated. “He applauded them, it is true, but did not think fit to imitate them.” But of course Apollonius should not even have applauded these automatons, which set food and poured wine before the guests of the Brahmans, if they were the contrivances of wizards. And in another passage,[1151] where he defends the signs and wonders wrought by the Brahmans against the aspersions cast upon them by the Gymnosophists of Ethiopia, Apollonius explains their practice of levitation as an act of worship and communion with the sun god, and hence far removed from the rites performed in deep trenches and hollows of the earth to the gods of the lower world which we have heard him mention before as a practice characteristic of wizards.

[Sidenote: Marvels of the Brahmans.]

Nevertheless the feats ascribed to the Brahmans are certainly sufficiently akin to magic to excuse Philostratus for mentioning them along with the Magi and wizards and to justify us in considering them. Indeed, modern scholarship informs us that in the Vedic texts the word “bráhman” in the neuter means a “charm, rite, formulary, prayer,” and “that the caste of the Brahmans is nothing but the men who have bráhman or magic power.”[1152] In marked contrast to the taciturnity of Apollonius as to his interviews with the Magi of Babylon and Susa is the long account repeated by Philostratus from Damis of the sayings and doings of the sages of India. As for Apollonius himself, “he was always recounting to everyone what the Indians said and did.”[1153] They knew that he was approaching when he was yet afar off and sent a messenger who greeted him by name.[1154] Iarchas, their chief, also knew that Apollonius had a letter for him and that a delta was missing in it, and he told Apollonius many events of his past life. “We see, O Apollonius,” he said, “the signs of the soul, tracing them by a myriad symbols.”[1155] The Brahmans lived in a castle concealed by clouds, where they rendered themselves invisible at will. The rocks along the path up to their abode were still marked by the cloven feet, beards, faces, and backs of the Pans who had tried to scale the height under the leadership of Dionysus and Heracles, but had been hurled down headlong.[1156] Here too was a well for testing oaths, a purifying fire, and the jars in which the winds and rain were bottled up.

[Sidenote: Magical methods of the Brahmans.]

When the messenger of the Brahmans greeted Apollonius by name, the latter remarked to the astounded Damis, “We have come to men who are wise without art (ἀτεχνῶς), for they seem to have the gift of foreknowledge.”[1157] As a matter of fact, however, most of the subsequent wonders wrought by the Brahmans were not performed without the use of paraphernalia and rites very similar to those of magic. Each Brahman carries a staff—or magic wand—and wears a ring, which are both prized for their occult virtue by which the Brahmans can accomplish anything they wish.[1158] They clothe themselves in sacred garments made of “a wool that springs wild from the ground” (cotton?) and which the earth will not permit anyone else to pluck. Iarchas also showed Apollonius and Damis a marvelous stone called Pantarbe, which attracted and bound other stones to itself and which, although only the size of his finger-nail and formed in earth four fathoms deep, had such virtue that it broke the earth open.[1159] But it required great skill to secure this gem. “We only,” said the Brahman, “can obtain this pantarbe, partly by doing things and partly by saying things,” in other words by incantations and magical operations. Before performing their rite of levitation they bathed and anointed themselves with a certain drug. “Then they stood like a chorus with Iarchas as leader and with their rods uplifted struck the earth, which heaving like the sea-wave raised them up in the air two cubits high.”[1160] The metallic tripods and cup-bearers which served the king of the country when he came to visit the Brahmans appeared from nowhere laden with food and wine exactly as if by magic.[1161]

[Sidenote: Medicine of the Brahmans.]

The medical practice, if we may so call it, of the Brahmans was tinged, to say the least, with magic. A dislocated hip, indeed, they appear to have cured by massage, and a blind man and a paralytic are healed by unspecified methods.[1162] But a boy is cured of inherited alcoholism by chewing owl’s eggs that have been boiled; a woman who complains that her sixteen-year-old son has for two years been vexed by a demon is sent away with a letter full of threats or incantations to employ against the spirit; and another woman’s sufferings in childbirth are prevented by directing her husband to enter her chamber with a live hare concealed in his bosom and to release the hare after he has walked around his wife once. Iarchas, indeed, attributed the origin of medicine to divination or divine revelation.[1163] His theory was that Asclepius, as the son of Apollo, learned by oracles what drugs to employ for the different diseases, in what amounts to mix the drugs, what the antidotes for poisons were, and how to use even poisons as remedies. This last especially he affirmed that no one would dare attempt without foreknowledge.

[Sidenote: Some signs of astrology.]

The Brahmans seem to have made some use of astrology in working their feats of magic. Damis at any rate said that when Apollonius bade farewell to the sages, Iarchas made him a present of seven rings named after the planets, which he wore in turn upon the appropriate days of the week.[1164] Perhaps, too, the seven swords of adamant which Iarchas had rediscovered as a child had some connection with the planets.[1165] Moeragenes ascribed four books on foretelling the future by the stars to Apollonius himself, but Philostratus was unable to find any such work by Apollonius extant in his day.[1166] And unless it be an allusion to Chaldeans which we have already noted, there is no further mention of astrology in Philostratus’s Life—a rather remarkable fact considering that he wrote for the court of Septimius Severus, the builder of the Septizonium.

[Sidenote: Interest in natural science.]

The philosopher Euphrates, who is represented by Philostratus as jealous of Apollonius, once advised the emperor Vespasian, when Apollonius was present, to embrace natural philosophy—or a philosophy in accordance with natural law—but to beware of philosophers who pretended to have secret intercourse with the gods.[1167] There was justification in the latter charge against Apollonius, but it should not be assumed that his mysticism rendered him unfavorable to natural science. On the contrary he is frequently represented by Philostratus as whiling away the time along the road by discussing with Damis such natural problems as the delta of the Nile or the tides at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. He was especially interested in the habits of animals and the properties of gems. Vespasian was fond of listening to “his graphic stories of the rivers of India and the animals” of that country, as well as to “his statements of what the gods revealed concerning the empire.”[1168] Some of the questions which Apollonius put to the Brahmans concerned nature.[1169] He asked of what the world was composed, and when they said, “Of elements,” he asked if there were four. They believed, however, in a fifth element, ether, from which the gods had been generated and which they breathe as men breathe air. They also regarded the universe as a living animal. He further inquired of them whether land or sea predominated on the earth’s surface,[1170] and this same attitude of scientific inquiry and of curiosity about natural forces and objects is frequently met in the Life.

[Sidenote: Natural law or special providence?]

Apollonius believed, as we shall see, in omens and portents, and interpreted an earthquake at Antioch as a divine warning to the inhabitants.[1171] The Brahman sages, moreover, regarded prolonged drought as a punishment visited by the world soul upon human sinfulness.[1172] On the other hand, Apollonius gave a natural explanation of volcanoes and denied the myths concerning Enceladus being imprisoned under Mount Aetna and the battle of the gods and giants.[1173] And in the case of the earthquake the people had already accepted it as a portent and were praying in terror, when Apollonius took the opportunity to warn them to cease from their civil factions. As a matter of fact, both Apollonius and Philostratus appear to regard portents as an extraordinary sort of natural phenomena. A knowledge of natural science helps in recognizing them and in interpreting them. When a lioness of enormous size with eight whelps in her is slain by hunters, Apollonius at once recognizes the event as portentous because as a rule lionesses have whelps only thrice and only three of them on the first occasion, two in the second litter, and finally but a single whelp, “but I believe a very big one and preternaturally fierce.”[1174] Here Apollonius is not in strict agreement with Pliny and Aristotle[1175] who say that the lioness produces five whelps at the first birth and one less every succeeding year.

[Sidenote: Cases of scepticism]

The scepticism of Apollonius concerning the Aetna myth is not an isolated instance. At Sardis he ridiculed the notion that trees could be older than earth,[1176] and he was one of the few ancients to question the swan’s song.[1177] He denied “the silly story that the young of vipers are brought into the world without mothers” as “consistent neither with nature nor experience,”[1178] and also the tale that the whelps of the lioness claw their way out into the world.[1179] In India Apollonius saw a wild ass or unicorn from whose single horn a magic drinking horn was made.[1180] A draught from this horn was supposed to protect one for that day from disease, wounds, fire, or poison, and on that account the king alone was permitted to hunt the animal and to drink from the horn. When Damis asked Apollonius if he credited this story, the sage ironically replied that he would believe it if he found the king of the country to be immortal. Either, however, the scepticism of Apollonius, as was the case with so many other ancients and medieval men, was sporadic and inconsistent, or it came to be overlaid with the credulity of Damis and Philostratus, as the following example suggests. Iarchas told Damis and Apollonius flatly that the races described by Scylax of men with long heads or huge feet with which they were said to shade themselves did not exist in India or anywhere else; yet in a later book Philostratus states that the shadow-footed people are a tribe in Ethiopia.[1181]

[Sidenote: Anecdotes of animals.]

At any rate the marvels of India are more frequently credited than criticized in the Life by Philostratus, and the same holds true of the extraordinary conduct and well-nigh human intelligence attributed to animals. Especially delightful reading are six chapters on the remarkable sagacity of elephants and their love for mankind.[1182] On this point, as by Pliny, use is made of the work of Juba. We read again of sick lions eating apes, of the lioness’s love affair with the panther, of the fondness of leopards for the fragrant gum of a certain tree and of goats for the cinnamon tree; of apes who are made to collect pepper for men by appealing to their instinct towards mimicry;[1183] and of the tiger, whose loins alone are eaten by the Indians. “For they decline to eat the other parts of this animal, because they say that as soon as it is born it lifts up its front paws to the rising sun.”[1184] In the river Hyphasis is a creature like a white worm which yields when melted down a fat or oil that once set afire cannot be extinguished and which the king uses to burn walls and capture cities.[1185] In India are griffins who quarry gold with their powerful beaks, and the luminous phoenix with its nest of spices and swan-like funeral song.[1186]

[Sidenote: Dragons of India.]

Especially remarkable are the snakes or dragons with which all India is filled and which often are of enormous size, thirty or even seventy cubits long.[1187] Those found in the marshes are sluggish and have no crests; but those on the hills and ridges move faster than the swiftest rivers and have both beards and crests.[1188] Those in the plain engage in combats with elephants which terminate fatally for both parties as we have already learned from Pliny.[1189] The mountain dragons have bushy beards, fiery crests, golden scales, and a ferocious glance.[1190] They burrow into the earth, making a noise like clashing brass, or go hissing down to the shore and swim far out to sea. Terrifying as they are, the Indians charm them by showing them golden characters embroidered on a cloak of scarlet and by incantations of a secret wisdom. They eat the dragon’s heart and liver in order to be able to understand the language and thoughts of animals.[1191]

[Sidenote: Occult virtues of gems.]

The dragons, however, are prized more for the precious stones in their heads, which the Indians quickly cut off as soon as they have bewitched them. The pupils of the eyes of the hill dragons are a fiery stone possessing irresistible virtue for many occult purposes,[1192] while in the heads of the mountain dragons are many brilliant stones of flashing colors which exert occult virtue if set in a ring, “and they say that Gyges had such a ring.”[1193] But there are many marvelous stones outside the heads of dragons. “Who does not know the habits of birds,” says Apollonius to Damis in one of his disquisitions upon natural phenomena,[1194] “and that eagles and storks will not build their nests without placing in them, the one the stone aetites, and the other the lychnites, as aids in hatching and to drive snakes away?” On parting from the Indian king Phraotes, Apollonius as usual refused to accept money presents but picked up one of the gems that were offered him with the exclamation, “O rare stone, how opportunely and providentially have I found you!”[1195] Philostratus supposes that he detected some occult and divine power in this particular stone. The Brahmans had gems so huge that from one of them a goblet could be carved large enough to slake the thirst of four men in midsummer, but in this case nothing is said of occult virtue.[1196] The Brahman Iarchas felt sure that he was the reincarnation of the hero Ganges, son of the river Ganges, because as a mere child he knew where to dig for the seven swords of adamant which Ganges had fixed in the earth.[1197] Presumably these were magic swords and their virtue in part due to the stone adamant of which they were made. Less is said in the Life of the virtues of herbs than of gems, but the Indians made a nuptial ointment or love-charm from balm distilled from trees,[1198] and drugs and poisons are mentioned more than once, mandragora being described as a soporific drug rather than a deadly poison.[1199]

[Sidenote: Absence of number mysticism.]

Considering that Apollonius was a Pythagorean, there is surprisingly little said concerning perfect numbers and their mystic significance. Aside from the seven rings and seven swords already mentioned, about the only instance is the question asked by Apollonius whether eighteen, the number of the Brahman sages at the time of his visit, had any especial importance.[1200] He remarked that eighteen was not a square, nor a number usually held in esteem and honor like ten, twelve, and sixteen. The Brahmans agreed that there was no particular significance in eighteen, and further informed him that they maintained no fixed number of members but had varied from only one to as many as seventy according to the available supply of worthy men.

[Sidenote: Mantike or the art of divination.]

If Philostratus denies that Apollonius was a magician, he does depict him as endowed with prophetic gifts, with power over demons, and with “secret wisdom.” He rather likes to give the impression that the sage foretold things by innate prophetic gift or divine inspiration, but even μαντική or the art of divination is not condemned as γοητεία or witchcraft was. Iarchas the Brahman says that those who delight in mantike become divine thereby and contribute to the safety of mankind.[1201] Apollonius himself, when condemning wizards as pseudo-wise, made the reservation that mantike, if true in its predictions, was not a pseudo-science, although he professed ignorance whether it could be called an art or not.[1202] He denied that he practiced it, when he was examined by Tigellinus, the favorite of Nero, who was persecuting philosophers on the ground that they were addicted to mantike.[1203] His accusers before Domitian again adduced his alleged practice of divination as evidence that he was a wizard.[1204]

[Sidenote: Divining power of Apollonius.]

If Apollonius practiced neither wizardry nor mantike, the question arises how he was able to foretell the future. In his trial before Domitian he did not attempt to deny that he had predicted the plague at Ephesus, but attributed his “sense of the coming disaster” to his abstemious diet, which kept his senses clear and enabled him to see as in an unclouded mirror “all that is happening or about to occur.”[1205] For he was credited with knowledge of distant events the moment they occurred as well as with foreknowledge of the future. Thus at Ephesus he was aware of the assassination of Domitian at Rome; and at Tarsus, although he arrived after the incident had occurred, he was able to describe and to find the mad dog by whom a boy had been bitten.[1206] Iarchas told Apollonius that health and purity were requisite for divination;[1207] and Apollonius in turn, in recounting his life story to the naked sages of Egypt, represented the Pythagorean philosophy as appearing before him and promising, “And when you are pure, I will grant you the faculty of foreknowledge.”[1208]

[Sidenote: Dreams.]

Apollonius often was warned by dreams. When he dreamt of fish who were cast gasping upon dry land and who appealed for succour to a dolphin swimming by, he knew that he ought to visit and restore the graves and assist the descendants of the Eretrians whom Darius had taken captive to the Persian kingdom over five centuries before.[1209] Another dream he interpreted as a command to visit Crete.[1210] In defending his linen apparel before Domitian he declared, “It is a pure substance under which to sleep at night, for to those who live as I do dreams bring the truest of their revelations.”[1211] He was not the only dreamer of the time, however, and when some of his followers were afraid to accompany him to Rome in Nero’s reign, they made warning dreams their excuse for deserting him.[1212]

[Sidenote: Interpretation of omens.]

It has been seen that Apollonius not only had prophetic dreams but was skilful in interpreting them. He was equally adept in explaining the meaning of omens. The dead lion with her eight unborn whelps he took as a sign that Damis and he would remain a year and eight months in that land.[1213] When Damis objected that Homer interpreted the sparrow and her eight nestlings whom the snake devoured as nine years’ duration of the Trojan war, Apollonius retorted that the birds had been hatched but that the whelps, being yet unborn, could not signify complete years. On another occasion he interpreted the birth of a three-headed child as a sign of the year of the three emperors.[1214]

[Sidenote: Animals and divination.]

Such interpretation of dreams and omens suggests an art or arts of divination rather than foreknowledge by direct divine inspiration. So does the passage in which Apollonius informs Domitian, when accused before him of having divined the future by sacrificing a boy, that human entrails are inferior to those of animals for purposes of divination, since the beasts are less perturbed by knowledge of their approaching death.[1215] Apollonius himself would not sacrifice even animal victims, but he enlarged his powers of divination during his sojourn among the Arab tribes by learning to understand the language of animals and to listen to the birds as these predict the future.[1216] The Arabs acquire this power by eating, some say the heart, others the liver, of dragons,—a fact which gave the church historian Eusebius an opportunity to charge Apollonius with having broken his taboo of animal flesh.

[Sidenote: Divination by fire.]

Although he did not sacrifice animals and divine from their entrails, Apollonius appears to have employed practices akin to those of the art of pyromancy when he threw a handful of frankincense into the sacrificial fire with a prayer to the sun, “and watched to see how the smoke of it curled upwards, and how it grew turbid, and in how many points it shot up; and in a manner he caught the meaning of the fire, and observed how it appeared of good omen and pure.”[1217] Again he visited an Egyptian temple and sacrificed an image of a bull made of frankincense and told the priest that if he really understood the science of divination by fire (ἐμπύρου σοφίας), he would see many things revealed in the circle of the rising sun.[1218]

[Sidenote: Other so-called predictions.]

It should be added that only a very ardent admirer of Apollonius or an equally ardent seeker after prophecies would see anything prophetic in some of the apparently chance remarks of the sage which have been perverted into predictions. At Ephesus he did not actually predict the plague, which had already begun to spread judging from the account of Philostratus, but rather warned the heedless population to take measures to prevent its becoming general.[1219] When visiting the isthmus of Corinth he began to say that it would be cut through, an idea which had doubtless occurred again and again to many; but then said that it would not be cut through.[1220] This sane, if somewhat vacillating, state of mind received confirmation soon afterwards when Nero attempted an Isthmian canal but left it uncompleted. Another similarly ambiguous utterance was elicited from Apollonius by an eclipse of the sun accompanied by thunder: “There shall be some great event and there shall not be.”[1221] This was believed to receive miraculous fulfillment three days later when a thunderbolt dashed the cup out of which Nero was drinking from his hands but left him unharmed. Once Apollonius saved his life by changing from a ship which sank soon afterwards to another vessel.[1222] An instance of more specific prophecy is the case of the consul Aelian, who testified that when he was but a tribune under Vespasian, Apollonius took him aside and told him his name and country and parentage, “and you foretold to me that I should hold this high office which is accounted by the multitude the highest of all.”[1223] But Aelian may have exaggerated the accuracy of Apollonius’s prediction, or the latter may have made a shrewd guess that Aelian was likely to rise to high office.

[Sidenote: Apollonius and the demons.]

The divining faculty of Apollonius enabled him to detect the presence and influence of demons, phantoms, and goblins, whose ways he understood as well as the language of the birds. At Ephesus he detected the true cause of the plague in a ragged old beggar whom he ordered the people to stone to death.[1224] At this command the blinking eyes of the aged mendicant suddenly shot forth malevolent and fiery gleams and revealed his demon character. Afterwards, when the people removed the stones, they found underneath, pounded to a pulp, an enormous hound still vomiting foam as mad dogs do. Later, when accused of magic before Domitian, Apollonius requested that the emperor question him in private about the causes of this pestilence at Ephesus, which he said were too deep to be discussed publicly.[1225] And earlier in the reign of Nero, when asked by Tigellinus how he got the better of demons and phantasms, he evaded the question by a saucy retort.[1226] On one occasion, however, we are told that he got rid of a ghostly apparition by heaping abuse upon it;[1227] and a satyr, who remained invisible but created annoyance by running amuck through the camp, he disposed of by the expedient of filling a trough with wine and letting the spirit get drunk on it. When the wine had all disappeared, Apollonius led his companions to the cave of the nymphs where the satyr was now visible in a drunken sleep.[1228] He also reformed the character of a licentious youth by expelling a demon from him,[1229] and at Corinth exposed a lamia who, under the disguise of a dainty and wealthy lady, was fattening up a beautiful youth named Menippus with the intention of eventually devouring his blood.[1230] On his return by sea from India Apollonius passed a sacred island where lived a sea nymph or female demon who was as destructive to mariners as Scylla or the Sirens were of old.

[Sidenote: Not all demons are evil]

But the word “demon” is not always employed by Philostratus in the sense of an evil spirit. The annunciation of the birth of Apollonius was made to his mother by Proteus in the form of an Egyptian demon.[1231] Damis looked upon Apollonius himself as a demon and worshiped him as such, when he heard him say that he comprehended not only all human languages but also those things concerning which men maintain silence.[1232] In a letter to Euphrates[1233] Apollonius affirms that the all-wise Pythagoras should be classed among demons. But when Domitian, on first meeting Apollonius said that he looked like a demon, the sage replied that the emperor was confusing demons and human beings.[1234]

[Sidenote: Philostratus’s faith in demons.]

Philostratus adds his own bit of personal testimony to the existence of demons, although it cannot be said to be very convincing. After telling the satyr story he warns his readers not to be incredulous as to the existence of satyrs or to doubt that they make love. For they should not mistrust what is supported by experience and by Philostratus’s own word. For he knew in Lemnos a youth of his own age whose mother was said to be visited by a satyr, and such he probably was, since he wore a fawn skin tied around his neck by the two front paws.[1235]

[Sidenote: The ghost of Achilles.]

Apollonius had an interview with the ghost of Achilles which strongly suggests necromancy. He sent his companions on board ship and passed the night alone at the hero’s tomb. Nor did he allude to what had happened until questioned by the curious Damis. He then averred that his method of invoking the dead had not been that of Odysseus, but that he had prayed to Achilles much as the Indians do to their heroes. A slight earthquake then occurred and Achilles appeared. At first he was five cubits tall but gradually increased to some twelve cubits in height. At cock-crow he vanished in a flash of summer lightning.[1236]

[Sidenote: Healing the sick and raising the dead.]

Apollonius, as well as the Brahmans, wrought some cures. One was of a boy who had been bitten by a mad dog and consequently “behaved exactly like a dog, for he barked and howled and went on all fours.”[1237] Apollonius first found and quieted the dog, and then made it lick the wound, a homeopathic treatment which cured the boy. It now only remained to cure the dog, too, and this the philosopher effected by praying to the river which was near by and then making the dog swim across it. “For,” concludes Philostratus, “a drink of water will cure a mad dog if he only can be induced to take it.” The modern reader will suspect that the dog was not mad to begin with and that Apollonius cleverly cured the boy’s complaint by the same force that had induced it—suggestion. Apollonius once revived a maiden who was being borne to the grave by touching her and saying something to her, but Philostratus honestly admits that he is not sure whether he restored her to life or detected signs of life in the body which had escaped the notice of everyone else.[1238]

[Sidenote: Other marvels.]

When Apollonius was brought before Tigellinus, the scroll on which the charges against him had been written was found to have become quite blank when Tigellinus unrolled it.[1239] Upon that occasion and again before Domitian he intimated that his body could not be bound or slain against his will.[1240] The former contention he proved to the satisfaction of Damis, who visited him in prison, by suddenly removing his leg from the fetters and then inserting it again.[1241] Damis regarded this exhibition as a divine miracle, since Apollonius performed it without magical ceremony or incantations. He is also represented as escaping from his bonds at about midnight when imprisoned later in life in Crete.[1242] Philostratus, too, implies that he vanished miraculously from the courtroom of Domitian and that he sometimes passed from one place to another in an incredibly short time, and is somewhat doubtful whether he ever died. But we have seen that even on the testimony of Damis and Philostratus themselves many of the marvels and predictions of Apollonius were not “artless” but involved a knowledge of contemporary natural science and medicine, or of arts of divination, or the employment, in a way not unlike the procedure of magic, of forces and materials outside himself, namely, the occult virtues of things in nature or incantations, rites, and ceremonies.

[Sidenote: Golden wrynecks and the iunx.]

So much for Apollonius and his magic, but the Life contains some interesting allusions to the ἴυγξ or wryneck, which throw light upon the use of that bird in Greek magic, but which have seldom been noted and then not correctly interpreted.[1243] The wryneck was so much employed in Greek magic, as references to it from Pindar to Theocritus show, that the word iunx was sometimes used as a synonym or figurative expression for spells or charms in general. Philostratus, too, employs it in this sense, representing the Gymnosophists as accusing the Brahmans of “appealing to the crowd with varied enchantments (or iunges).”[1244] But in other passages he makes it clear that the wryneck is still employed as a magic bird. Describing the royal palace at Babylon[1245] he states that the Magi have hung four golden wrynecks, which they themselves attune and which they call the tongues of the gods, from the ceiling of the judgment hall to remind the king of divine judgment and not to set himself above mankind. Golden wrynecks were also suspended in the Pythian temple at Delphi, and in this connection they are said to possess some of the virtue of the Sirens,[1246] or, as Mr. Cook translates it, “to echo the persuasive note of siren voices.” These two passages seem to point clearly to the employment of mechanical metal birds which sang and moved as if by magic. The Greek mathematician Hero in his explanation of mechanical devices employed in temples tells how to make a bird turn itself about and whistle by turning a wheel.[1247]

[Sidenote: Why named iunx?]

Now this is precisely what the wryneck does in its “wonderful way of writhing its head and neck” and emitting hissing sounds. The bird’s “unmistakable note” is “que, que, que, repeated many times in succession, at first rapidly, but gradually slowing and in a continually falling key.”[1248] I would therefore suggest that as the English name for the bird is derived from its writhing its neck, so the Greek name comes from its cry, for “que” and the root ἰυγ, if repeated rapidly many times in succession, sound much alike.[1249]

[Sidenote: Apollonius in the middle ages.]

The name, Apollonius, continued to be associated with magic in the middle ages, when the Golden Flowers of Apollonius, a work on the notory art or theurgy,[1250] is found in the manuscripts. And we shall find Cecco d’Ascoli[1251] in the early fourteenth century citing a “book of magic art” by Apollonius and also a treatise on spirits, De angelica factione. In 1412 Amplonius listed in the catalogue of his manuscripts a “book of Apollonius the magician or philosopher which is called Elizinus.”[1252] Works on the causes and properties of things are also ascribed to Apollonius in medieval manuscripts,[1253] and a Balenus or Belenus to whom works on astrological images and seals are ascribed in the manuscripts[1254] is perhaps a corruption for Apollonius.[1255]

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Chapter IX

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ATTACKS UPON SUPERSTITION: CICERO, FAVORINUS, SEXTUS EMPIRICUS, AND LUCIAN

Authors to be considered—Their standpoint—De divinatione; argument of Quintus—Cicero attacks past authority—Divination distinct from natural science—Unreasonable in method—Requires violation of natural law—Cicero and astrology—His crude historical criticism—Favorinus against astrologers—Sextus Empiricus—Lucius, or The Ass: is it by Lucian?—Career of Lucian—Alexander the pseudo-prophet—Magical procedure in medicine satirized—Snake-charming—A Hyperborean magician—Some ghost stories—Pancrates, the magician—Credulity and scepticism—Menippus, or Necromancy—Astrological interpretation of Greek myth—History and defense of astrology—Lucian not always sceptical—Lucian and medicine—Inevitable intermingling of scepticism and superstition—Lucian on writing history.

[Sidenote: Authors to be considered.]

Having noted the large amount of magic that still existed both in the leading works of natural science of the early Roman empire and in the more general literature of that period, it is only fair that we should note such extremes of scepticism towards the superstitions then current as can be found during the same period. They are, however, few and far between, and we shall have to go back to the close of the Republican period for the best instance in the De divinatione of Cicero. As Pliny’s Natural History was mainly a compilation of earlier Greek science, so Cicero’s arguments against divination were not entirely original with him. As his other philosophical writings are largely indebted to the Greeks, so his attack upon divination is supposed to be under considerable obligations to Clitomachus and Panaetius,[1256] philosophers of the New Academy and the Stoic school who flourished respectively at Carthage and Athens and at Rhodes and Rome in the second century before our era. We shall next briefly note the criticisms of astrologers and astrology made by Favorinus, a rhetorician from Gaul who resided at Rome under Hadrian and was a friend of Plutarch but whose argument against the astrologers has been preserved only in the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius,[1257] and by Sextus Empiricus,[1258] a sceptical philosopher who wrote about 200. Finally we shall consider Lucian’s satirical depiction of various superstitions of his time.

[Sidenote: Their standpoint.]

It will be noticed that no one of these critics of magic, if we may so designate them, is primarily a natural scientist. Cicero and Lucian and Favorinus are primarily men of letters and rhetoricians. And all four of our critics write to a greater or less extent from the professed standpoint of a general sceptical attitude in all matters of philosophy and not merely in the matter of superstition. Thus the attack of Sextus Empiricus upon astrology occurs in a work which is directed against learning in general, and in which he assails grammarians, rhetoricians, geometricians, arithmeticians, students of music, logicians, physicists, and students of ethics, as well as the casters of horoscopes. Aulus Gellius did not know whether to take the arguments of Favorinus against the astrologers seriously or not. He says that he heard Favorinus make the speech the substance of which he repeats, but that he is unable to state whether the philosopher really meant what he said or argued merely in order to exercise and to display his genius. There was reason for this perplexity of Aulus Gellius, since Favorinus was inclined to such tours de force as eulogies of Thersites or of Quartan Fever.

[Sidenote: De divinatione: argument of Quintus.]

De divinatione takes the form of a supposititious conversation, or better, informal debate, between the author and his brother Quintus. In the first book Quintus, in a rather rambling and leisurely fashion and with occasional repetition of ideas, upholds divination to the best of his ability, citing many reported instances of successful recourse to it in antiquity. In the second book Tully proceeds with a somewhat patronizing air to pull entirely to pieces the arguments of his brother who assents with cheerful readiness to their demolition. On the whole the appeal to the past is the main point in the argument of Quintus. What race or state, he asks, has not believed in some form of divination? “For before the revelation of philosophy, which was discovered but recently, public opinion had no doubt of the truth of this art; and after philosophy emerged no philosopher of authority thought otherwise. I have mentioned Pythagoras, Democritus, Socrates. I have left out no one of the ancients save Xenophanes. I have added the Old Academy, the Peripatetics, the Stoics. Epicurus alone dissented.”[1259] Quintus closes his long argument in favor of the truth of divination by solemnly asserting that he does not approve of sorcerers, nor of those who prophesy for the sake of gain, nor of the practice of questioning the spirits of the dead—which nevertheless, he says, was a custom of his brother’s friend Appius.[1260]

[Sidenote: Cicero attacks past authority.]

When Tully’s turn to speak comes, he rudely disturbs his brother’s reliance upon tradition. “I think it not the part of a philosopher to employ witnesses, who are only haply true and often purposely false and deceiving. He ought to show why a thing is so by arguments and reasons, not by events, especially those I cannot credit.”[1261] “Antiquity,” Cicero declares later, “has erred in many respects.”[1262] The existence of the art of divination in every age and nation has little effect upon him. There is nothing, he asserts, so widespread as ignorance.[1263]

[Sidenote: Divination distinct from natural science.]

Both brothers distinguish divination as a separate subject from the natural or even the applied sciences. Quintus says that medical men, pilots, and farmers foresee many things, yet their arts are not divination. “Not even Pherecydes, that famous Pythagorean master, who predicted an earthquake when he saw that the water had disappeared from a well which usually was well filled, should be regarded as a diviner rather than a physicist.”[1264] Tully carries the distinction a step further and asserts that the sick seek a doctor, not a soothsayer; that diviners cannot instruct us in astronomy; that no one consults them concerning philosophic problems or ethical questions; that they can give us no light on the problems of the natural universe; and that they are of no service in logic, dialectic, or political science.[1265] An admirable declaration of independence of natural science and medicine and other arts and constructive forms of thought from the methods of divination! But also one more easy to state in general terms of theory than to enforce in details of practice, as Pliny, Galen, and Ptolemy have already shown us. None the less it is indeed a noteworthy restriction of the field of divination when Cicero remarks to his brother, “For those things which can be perceived beforehand either by art or reason or experience or conjecture you regard as not the affair of diviners but of scientists.”[1266] But the question remains whether too large powers of prediction may not be claimed by “science.”

[Sidenote: Unreasonable in method.]

Cicero proceeds to attack the methods and assumptions of divination as neither reasonable nor scientific. Why, he asks, did Calchas deduce from the devoured sparrows that the Trojan war would last ten years rather than ten weeks or ten months?[1267] He points out that the art is conducted in different places according to quite different rules of procedure, even to the extent that a favorable omen in one locality is a sinister warning elsewhere.[1268] He refuses to believe in any extraordinary bonds of sympathy between things which, in so far as our daily experience and our knowledge of the workings of nature can inform us, have no causal connection. What intimate connection, he asks, what bond of natural causality can there be between the liver or heart or lung of a fat bull and the divine eternal cause of all which rules the universe?[1269] “That anything certain is signified by uncertain things, is not this the last thing a scientist should admit?”[1270] He refuses to accept dreams as fit channels either of natural divination or divine revelation.[1271] The Sibylline Books, like most oracles, are vague and the evident product of labored ingenuity.[1272]

[Sidenote: Requires violation of natural law.]

Moreover, divination asserts the existence of phenomena which science denies. Such a figment, Cicero scornfully affirms, as that the heart will vanish from the carcass of a victim is not believed even by old-wives now-a-days. How can the heart vanish from the body? Surely it must be there as long as life lasts, and how can it disappear in an instant? “Believe me, you are abandoning the citadel of philosophy while you defend its outposts. For in your effort to prove soothsaying true you utterly pervert physiology.... For there will be something which either springs from nothing or suddenly vanishes into nothingness. What scientist ever said that? The soothsayers say so? Are they then, do you think, to be trusted rather than scientists?”[1273] Cicero makes other arguments against divination such as the stock contentions that it is useless to know predetermined events beforehand since they cannot be avoided, and that even if we can learn the future, we shall be happier not to do it, but his outstanding argument is that it is unscientific.

[Sidenote: Cicero and astrology.]

Cicero’s attack upon divination is mainly directed against liver divination and analogous methods of predicting the future, but he devotes a few chapters[1274] to the doctrines of the Chaldeans. They postulate a certain force in the constellations called the zodiac and hold that between man and the position of the stars and planets at the moment of his birth there exists a relation of sympathy so that his personality and all the events of his life are thereby determined. Diogenes the Stoic limited this influence to the determination of one’s aptitude and vocation, but Cicero regards even this much as going too far. The immense spaces intervening between the different planets seem to him a reason for rejecting the contentions of the Chaldeans. His further criticism that they insist that all men born at the same moment are alike in character regardless of horizons and different aspects of the sky in different places is one that at least did not hold good permanently against astrology and is not true of Ptolemy. He asks if all the men who perished at Cannae were born beneath the same star and how it came about that there was only one Homer if several men are born every instant. He also adduces the stock argument from twins. He attacks the practice, which we shall find continued in the middle ages, of astrological prediction of the fate of cities. He says that if all animals are to be subjected to the stars, then inanimate things must be, too, than which nothing can be more absurd. This suggests that he hardly conceives of the fundamental hypothesis of medieval science that all inferior nature is under the influence of the celestial bodies and their motion and light. At any rate his arguments are directed against the casting of horoscopes or genethlialogy. And in the matter of the influence of the planets upon man he was not entirely antagonistic, at least in other writings than the De divinatione, for in the Dream of Scipio he speaks of Jupiter as a star wholesome and favorable to the human race, of Mars as most unfavorable. He further calls seven and eight perfect numbers and speaks of their product, fifty-six, as signifying the fatal year in Scipio’s life. Incidentally, as another instance that Cicero was not always sceptical, it may be recalled that it was in Cicero that Pliny read of a man who could see one hundred and thirty-five miles.[1275]

[Sidenote: His crude historical criticism.]

Such apparent inconsistency is perhaps a sign of somewhat indiscriminating eclecticism on Cicero’s part. We experience something of a shock, although perhaps we should not be surprised, to find him in his Republic[1276] arguing as seriously in favor of the ascension or apotheosis of Romulus as a historic fact as a professor of natural science in a denominational college might argue in favor of the historicity of the resurrection of Christ. Although in the De divinatione he impatiently brushed aside the testimony of so great a cloud of witnesses and of most philosophers in favor of divination, he now argues that the opinion that Romulus had become a god “could not have prevailed so universally unless there had been some extraordinary manifestation of power,” and that “this is the more remarkable because other men, said to have become gods, lived in less learned times when the mind was prone to invent and the inexperienced were easily led to believe,” whereas Romulus lived only six centuries ago when literature and learning had already made great progress in removing error, when “Greece was already full of poets and musicians, and little faith was placed in legends unless they concerned remote antiquity.” Yet a few chapters later Cicero notes that Numa could not have been a pupil of Pythagoras, since the latter did not come to Italy until 140 years after his death;[1277] and in a third chapter[1278] when Laelius remarks, “That king is indeed praised but Roman History is obscure, for although we know the mother of this king, we are ignorant of his father,” Scipio replies, “That is so; but in those times it was almost enough if only the names of the kings were recorded.” We can only add, “Consistency, thou art a jewel!”

[Sidenote: Favorinus against astrologers.]

Favorinus denied that the doctrine of nativities was the work of the Chaldeans and regarded it as the more recent invention of marvel-mongers, tricksters, and mountebanks. He regards the inference from the effect of the moon on tides to that of the stars on every incident of our daily life as unwarranted. He further objects that if the Chaldeans did record astronomical observations these would apply only to their own region and that observations extended over a vast lapse of time would be necessary to establish any system of astrology, since it requires ages before the stars return to their previous positions. Like Cicero, Favorinus probably manifests his ignorance of the technique of astrology in complaining that astrologers do not allow for the different influence of different constellations in different parts of the earth. More cogent is his suggestion that there may be other stars equal in power to the planets which men cannot see either for their excess of splendor or because of their position. He also objects that the position of the stars is not the same at the time of conception and the time of birth, and that, if the different fate of twins may be explained by the fact that after all they are not born at precisely the same moment, the time of birth and the position of the stars must be measured with an exactness practically impossible. He also contends that it is not for human beings to predict the future and that the subjection of man not merely in matters of external fortune but in his own acts of will to the stars is not to be borne. These two arguments of the divine prerogative and of human free will became Christian favorites. He complains that the astrologers predict great events like battles but cannot predict small ones, and declares that they may congratulate themselves that he does not propose such a question to them as that of astral influence on minute animals. This and his further question why, out of all the grand works of nature, the astrologers limit their attention to petty human fortune, suggest that like Cicero he did not realize that astrology was or would become a theory of all nature and not mere genethlialogy.

[Sidenote: Sextus Empiricus.]

To the arguments against nativities that men die the same death who were not born at the same time and that men who are born at the same time are not identical in character or fortune Sextus Empiricus adds the derisive question whether a man and an ass born in the same instant would suffer exactly the same destiny. Ptolemy would of course reply that while the influence of the stars is constant in both cases it is variably received by men and donkeys; and Sextus’s query does not show him very well versed in astrology. He mentions the obstacle of free will to astrological theory but does not make very much of it. The chief point which he makes is that even if the stars do rule human destiny, their effect cannot be accurately measured. He lays stress on the difficulty of exactly determining the date of birth or of conception, or the precise moment when a star passes into a new sign of the zodiac. He notes the variability and unreliability of water-clocks. He calls attention to the fact that observers at varying altitudes as well as in different localities would arrive at different conclusions. Differences in eyesight would also affect results, and it is difficult to tell just when the sun sets or any sign of the zodiac drops below the horizon owing to reflection and refraction of rays. Sextus thus leaves us somewhat in doubt whether his objections are to be taken as indicative of a spirit of captious criticism towards an art, the fundamental principles of which he tacitly recognizes as well-nigh incontestable, or whether he is simply trying to make his case doubly sure by showing astrology to be impracticable as well as unreasonable. In any case we shall find his argument that the influence of the stars cannot be measured accurately repeated by Christian writers.

[Sidenote: Lucius or The Ass: is it by Lucian?]

The main plot of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius appears, shorn of the many additional stories, the religious mysticism, and the autobiographical element which characterize his narrative, in a brief and perhaps epitomized Greek version, entitled Lucius or The Ass, among the works of Lucian of Samosata, the contemporary of Apuleius and noted satirist. The work is now commonly regarded as spurious, since the style seems different from that of Lucian and the Attic Greek less pure. The narrative, too, is bare, at least compared with the exuberant fancy of Apuleius, and seems to avoid the marvelous and romantic details in which he abounds. Photius, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, who regarded the work as Lucian’s, said that he wrote in it as one deriding the extravagance of superstition. Whether this be true of The Ass or not, it is true of other satires by Lucian of undisputed genuineness, in which he ridicules the impostures of the magic and pseudo-science of his day. In place of the genial humor and fantastic imagination with which his African contemporary credulously welcomed the magic and occult science of his time, the Syrian satirist probes the same with the cool mockery of his keen and sceptical wit.

[Sidenote: Career of Lucian.]

Lucian was born at Samosata near Antioch about 120 or 125 A. D. and after an unsuccessful beginning as a sculptor’s apprentice turned to literature and philosophy. He practiced in the law courts at Antioch for some time and also wrote speeches for others. For a considerable period of his life he roamed about the Mediterranean world from Paphlagonia to Gaul as a rhetorician, and like Apuleius resided both at Athens and Rome. After forty he ceased teaching rhetoric and devoted himself to literary production, living at Athens. Towards the close of his life, “when he already had one foot in Charon’s boat,”[1279] he was holding a well paid and important legal position in Egypt. His death occurred perhaps about 200 A. D. Some ascribe it to gout, probably because he wrote two satires on that disease. Suidas states that Lucian was torn to pieces by dogs as a punishment for his attacks upon Christianity, which again is probably a perversion of Lucian’s own statement in Peregrinus that he narrowly escaped being torn to pieces by the Cynics.

[Sidenote: Alexander the pseudo-prophet.]

It was at the request of that same adversary of Christianity against whom Origen composed the Reply to Celsus that Lucian wrote his account of the impostor, Alexander of Abonutichus, a pseudo-prophet of Paphlagonia. This Alexander pretended to discover the god Asclepius in the form of a small viper which he had sealed up in a goose egg. He then replaced the tiny viper by a huge tame serpent which he had purchased at Pella in Macedon and which was trained to hide its head in Alexander’s armpit, while to the crowd, who were also permitted to touch the tail and body of the real snake, was shown a false serpent’s head made of linen with human features and a mouth that opened and shut and a tongue that could be made to dart in and out. Having thus convinced the people that the viper had really been a god and had miraculously increased in size, Alexander proceeded to sell oracular responses as from the god. Inquirers submitted their questions in sealed packages which were later returned to them with appropriate answers and with the seals unbroken and apparently untouched. Similarly Plutarch tells of a sceptical opponent of oracles who became converted into their ardent supporter by receiving such an answer to a sealed letter.[1280] Lucian, however, explains that Alexander sometimes used a hot needle to melt the seal and then restore it to practically its original shape, or employed other methods by which he took exact impressions of the seal, then boldly broke it, read the question, and afterwards replaced the seal by an exact replica of the original made in the mould. Lucian adds that there are plenty of other devices of this sort which he does not need to repeat to Celsus who has already made a sufficient collection of them in his “excellent treatises against the magicians.” Lucian tells later, however, how Alexander made his god seem to speak by attaching a tube made of the windpipes of cranes to the artificial head and having an assistant outside speak through this concealed tube. In our later discussion of the church father Hippolytus we shall find that he apparently made use of this exposé of magic by Lucian as well as of the arguments of Sextus Empiricus against astrology. Lucian’s personal experiences with this Alexander were quite interesting but are less germane to our investigation.

[Sidenote: Magical procedure in medicine satirized.]

We must not fail, however, to note another essay, Philopseudes or Apiston, in which the superstition and pseudo-science of antiquity are sharply satirized in what purports to be a conversation of several philosophers, including a Stoic, a Peripatetic, and a Platonist, and a representative of ancient medicine in the person of Antigonus, a doctor. Some of the magical procedure then employed in curing diseases is first satirized. Cleodemus the Peripatetic advises as a remedy for gout to take in the left hand the tooth of a field mouse which has been killed in a prescribed manner, to wrap it in the skin of a lion freshly-flayed, and thus to bind it about the ailing foot. He affirms that it will give instant relief. Dinomachus the Stoic admits that the occult virtue of the lion is very great and that its fat or right fore-paw or the bristles of its beard, if combined with the proper incantations, have wonderful efficacy. But he holds that for the cure of gout the skin of a virgin hind would be superior on the ground that the hind is speedier than the lion and so more beneficial to the feet. Cleodemus retorts that he used to think the same, but that a Libyan has convinced him that the lion can run faster than the hind or it would never catch one. The sceptical reporter of this conversation states that he vainly attempted to convince them that an internal disease could not be cured by external attachments or by incantations, methods which he regards as the veriest sorcery (goetia).

[Sidenote: Snake-charming.]

His protests, however, merely lead Ion the Platonist to recount how a Magus, a Chaldean of Babylonia, cured his father’s gardener who had been stung by an adder on the great toe and was already all swollen up and nearly dead. The magician’s method was to apply a splinter of stone from the statue of a virgin to the toe, uttering at the same time an incantation. He then led the way to the field where the gardener had been stung; pronounced seven sacred names from an ancient volume, and fumigated the place thrice with torches and sulphur. All the snakes in the field then came forth from their holes with the exception of one very aged and decrepit serpent, whom the magician sent a young snake back to fetch. Having thus assembled every last serpent, he blew upon them, and they all vanished into thin air.

[Sidenote: A Hyperborean magician.]

This tale reminds the Stoic of another magician, a barbarian and Hyperborean, who could walk through fire or upon water and even fly through the air. He could also “make people fall in love, call up spirits, resuscitate corpses, bring down the moon, and show you Hecate herself as large as life.”[1281] More specific illustration of the exercise of these powers is given in an account of a love spell which he performed for a young man for a big fee. Digging a trench, he raised the ghost of the youth’s father and also summoned Hecate, Cerberus, and the Moon. The last named appeared in three successive forms of a woman, an ox, and a puppy. The sorcerer then constructed a clay image of the god of love and sent it to fetch the girl, who came and stayed until cock-crow, when all the apparitions vanished with her. In vain the sceptic argues that the girl in question would have come willingly enough without any magic. The Platonist matches the previous story with one of a Syrian from Palestine who cast out demons.

[Sidenote: Some ghost stories.]

The discussion then further degenerates into ghost stories and tales of statuettes that leave their pedestals after the household has retired for the night. One speaker says that he no longer has any fear of ghosts since an Arab gave him a magic ring made of nails from crosses and taught him an incantation to use against spooks. At this juncture a Pythagorean philosopher of great repute enters and adds his testimony in the form of an account of how he laid a ghost at Corinth by employing an Egyptian incantation.

[Sidenote: Pancrates, the magician.]

Eucrates, the host, then tells of Pancrates, whom he had met in Egypt and who “had spent twenty-three years underground learning magic from Isis,” and whom crocodiles would allow to ride on their backs. They traveled a time together without a servant, since Pancrates was able to dress up the door-bar or a broom or pestle, turn it into human form, and make it wait upon them. There follows the familiar story of Eucrates’ overhearing the incantation of three syllables which Pancrates employed and of trying it out himself when the magician was absent. The pestle turned into human form all right enough and obeyed his order to bring in water, but then he discovered that he could not make it stop, and when he seized an axe and chopped it in two, the only effect was to produce two water-carriers in place of one.

[Sidenote: Credulity and scepticism.]

The conversation is turning to the subject of oracles when the sceptic can stand it no longer and retires in disgust. As he tells what he has heard to a friend, he remarks upon the childish credulity of “these admired teachers from whom our youth are to learn wisdom.” At the same time, the stories seem to have made a considerable impression even upon him, and he wishes that he had some lethal drug to make him forget all these monsters, demons, and Hecates that he seems still to see before him. His friend, too, declares that he has filled him with demons. Their dialogue then concludes with the consoling reflection that truth and sound reason are the best drugs for the cure of such empty lies.

[Sidenote: Menippus, or Necromancy.]

The Menippus or Necromancy, while an obvious imitation and parody of Odysseus’ mode of descent to the underworld to consult Teiresias, also throws some light on the magic of Lucian’s time. In order to reach the other world Menippus went to Babylon and consulted Mithrobarzanes, one of the Magi and followers of Zoroaster. He is also called one of the Chaldeans. Besides a final sacrifice similar to that of Odysseus, the procedure by which the magician procured their passage to the other world included on his part muttered incantations and invocations, for the most part unintelligible to Menippus, spitting thrice in the latter’s face, waving torches about, drawing a magic circle, and wearing a magic robe. As for Menippus, he had to bathe in the Euphrates at sunrise every morning for the full twenty-nine days of a moon, after which he was purified at midnight in the Tigris and by fumigation. He had to sleep out-of-doors and observe a special diet, not look anyone in the eye on his way home, walk backwards, and so on. The ultimate result of all these preparations was that the earth was burst asunder by the final incantation and the way to the underworld laid open. When it came time to return Menippus crawled up with difficulty, like Dante going from the Inferno to Purgatory, through a narrow tunnel which opened on the shrine of Trophonius.

[Sidenote: Astrological interpretation of Greek myth.]

An essay on astrology ascribed to Lucian is usually regarded as spurious.[1282] Denial of its authenticity, however, should rest on such grounds as its literary style and the manuscript history of the work rather than upon its—to modern eyes—superstitious character. In antiquity a man might be sceptical about most superstitions and yet believe in astrology as a science. Lucian’s sceptical friend Celsus, for example, as we shall see in our chapter on Origen’s Reply to Celsus, believed that the future could be foretold from the stars. And whether the present essay is genuine or spurious, it is certainly noteworthy that for all his mockery of other superstition Lucian does not attack astrology in any of his essays. Moreover, this essay on astrology is very sceptical in one way, since it denies the literal truth of various Greek myths and gives an astrological interpretation of them, as in the case of Zeus and Kronos and the so-called adultery of Mars. This is not inconsistent with Lucian’s ridicule elsewhere of the anthropomorphic Olympian divinities. What Orpheus taught the Greeks was astrology, and the planets were signified by the seven strings of his lyre. Teiresias taught them further to distinguish which stars were masculine and which feminine in character and influence. A proper interpretation of the myth of Atreus and Thyestes also shows the Greeks at an early date acquainted with astrological doctrine. Bellerophon soared to the sky, not on a horse but by the scientific power of his mind. Daedalus taught Icarus astrology and the fable of Phaëthon is to be similarly interpreted. Aeneas was not really the son of the goddess Venus, nor Minos of Jupiter, nor Aesculapius of Mars, nor Autolycus of Mercury. These are to be taken simply as the planets under whose rule they were born. The author also connects Egyptian animal worship with the signs of the zodiac.

[Sidenote: History and defense of astrology.]

The author of the essay also delves into the history of astrology, to which he assigns a high antiquity. The Ethiopians were the first to cultivate it and handed it on in a still imperfect stage to the Egyptians who developed it. The Babylonians claim to have studied it before other peoples, but our author thinks that they did so long after the Ethiopians and Egyptians. The Greeks were instructed in the art neither by the Ethiopians nor the Egyptians, but, as we have seen, by Orpheus. Our author not only states that the ancient Greeks never built towns or walls or got married without first resorting to divination, but even asserts that astrology was their sole method of divination, that the Pythia at Delphi was the type of celestial purity and that the snake under the tripod represented the dragon among the constellations. Lycurgus taught his Lacedaemonians to observe the moon, and only the uncultured Arcadians held themselves aloof from astrology. Yet at the present day some oppose the art, declaring either that the stars have naught to do with human affairs or that astrology is useless since what is fated cannot be avoided. To the latter objection our author makes the usual retort that forewarned is forearmed; as for the former denial, if a horse stirs the stones in the road as it runs, if a passing breath of wind moves straws to and fro, if a tiny flame burns the finger, will not the courses and deflexions of the brilliant celestial bodies have their influence upon earth and mankind?

[Sidenote: Lucian not always sceptical.]

The manner of the essay does not seem like Lucian’s usual style, and the astrological interpretation of religious myth was characteristic of the Stoic philosophy, whereas Lucian’s philosophical affinities, if he can be said to have any, are perhaps rather with the Epicureans. But Celsus was an Epicurean and yet believed in astrology. It must not be thought, however, that Lucian in his other essays is always sceptical in regard to what we should classify as superstition. He tells us how his career was determined by a dream in the autobiographical essay of that title. In the Dialogues of the Gods magic is mentioned as a matter-of-course, Zeus complaining that he has to resort to magic in order to win women and Athene warning Paris to have Aphrodite remove her girdle, since it is drugged or enchanted and may bewitch him.

[Sidenote: Lucian and medicine.]

The writings of Lucian contain many allusions to the doctors, diseases, and medicines of his time.[1283] On the whole he confirms Galen’s picture. Numerous passages show that the medical profession was held in high esteem, and Lucian himself first went to Rome in order to consult an oculist. At the same time Lucian satirizes the quacks and medical superstition of the time, as we have already seen, and describes several statues which were believed to possess healing powers. In the burlesque tragedy on gout, Tragodopodagra, whose authenticity, however, is questioned, the disease personified is triumphant, and the moral seems to be that all the remedies which men have tried are of no avail. On the other hand, Lucian wrote seriously of the African snake whose bite causes one to die of thirst (De dipsadibus). He admits that he has never seen anyone in this condition and has not even been in Libya where these snakes are found, but a friend has assured him that he has seen the tombstone epitaph of a man who had died thus, a rather indirect mode of proof which we are surprised should satisfy the author of How to Write History. Lucian also repeats the common notion that persons bitten by a mad dog can be cured only by a hair or other portion of the same animal.[1284]

[Sidenote: Inevitable intermingling of scepticism and superstition.]

Our chapter which set out to note cases of scepticism in regard to superstition has ended by including a great deal of such superstition. The sceptics themselves seem credulous on some points, and Lucian’s satire perhaps more reveals than refutes the prevalence of superstition among even the highly educated. The same is true of other literary satirists of the Roman Empire whose jibes against the astrologers and their devotees only attest the popularity of the art and who themselves very probably meant only to ridicule its more extreme pretensions and were perhaps at bottom themselves believers in the fundamentals of the art. Our authors to some extent, as we have pointed out, provided an arsenal of arguments from which later Christian writers took weapons for their assaults upon pagan magic and astrology. But sometimes subsequent writers confused scepticism with credulity, and the influence of our authors upon them became just the opposite of what they intended. Thus Ammianus Marcellinus, the soldier-historian of the falling Roman Empire upon whom Gibbon placed so much reliance, was so attached to divination that he even quoted its arch-opponent, Cicero, in support of it. For he actually concludes his discussion of the subject in these words: “Wherefore in this as in other matters Tully says most admirably,‘Signs of future events are shown by the gods.’”[1285]

[Sidenote: Lucian on writing history.]

But in order to conclude our chapter on scepticism with a less obscurantist passage, let us return to Lucian. His essay, How to Write History, gives serious expression to those ideals of truth and impartiality which also lie behind his mockery of impostors and the over-credulous. “The historian’s one task,” in his estimation, “is to tell the thing as it happened.” He should be “fearless, incorruptible, independent, a believer in frankness, ... an impartial judge, kind to all but too kind to none.” “He has to make of his brain a mirror, unclouded, bright, and true of surface.” “Facts are not to be collected at haphazard but with careful, laborious, repeated investigation.” “Prefer the disinterested account.”[1286] Such sentences and phrases as these reveal a scientific and critical spirit of high order and seem a vast improvement upon the frailty of Cicero’s historical criticism. But how far Lucian would have been able to follow his own advice is perhaps another matter.

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Chapter X

THE SPURIOUS MYSTIC WRITINGS OF HERMES, ORPHEUS, AND ZOROASTER

Mystic works of revelation—The Hermetic books—Poimandres and the Hermetic Corpus—Astrological treatises ascribed to Hermes—Hermetic works of alchemy—Nechepso and Petosiris—Manetho—The Lithica of Orpheus—Argument of the poem—Magic powers of stones—Magic rites to gain powers of divination—Power of gems compared with herbs—Magic herbs and demons in Orphic rites—Books ascribed to Zoroaster—The Chaldean Oracles.

[Sidenote: Mystic works of revelation.]

There were in circulation in the Roman Empire many writings which purported to be of divine origin and authorship, or at least the work of ancient culture-heroes and founders of religions who were of divine descent and divinely inspired. These oracular and mystic compositions usually pretend to great antiquity and often claim as their home such hoary lands as Egypt and Chaldea, although in the Hellenic past Apollo and in the Roman past the Sibylline books[1287] also afford convenient centers about which forgeries cluster. Assuming as these writings do to disclose the secrets of ancient priesthoods and to publish what should not be revealed to the vulgar crowd, they may be confidently expected to embody a great deal of superstition and magic along with their expositions of mystic theologies. Also the authors, editors, or publishers of astrological, alchemistic, and other pseudo-scientific treatises could not be expected to resist the temptation of claiming a venerable and cryptic origin for some of their books. Moreover, such pseudo-literature was not entirely unjustified in its affirmation of high antiquity. Few things in intellectual history antedate magic, and these spurious compositions are not especially distinguished by new ideas, although they to some extent reflect the progress made in learning, occult as well as scientific, in the Hellenistic age. It must be added that much of their contents depends for its effect entirely upon its claim to eminent authorship and great antiquity and upon the impressionability of its public. To-day most of it seems trivial commonplace or marked by the empty vagueness characteristic of oracular utterances. I shall attempt no complete exposition or exhaustive treatment of such writings[1288] but touch upon a few examples which bear upon the relations of science and magic.

[Sidenote: The Hermetic books.]

Chief among these are the Hermetic books or writings attributed to Hermes the Egyptian or Trismegistus. “Under this name,” wrote Steinschneider in 1906, “there exists in many languages a literature, for the most part superstitious, which seems to have not yet been treated in its totality.”[1289] The Egyptian god Thoth or Tehuti, known in Greek as Θωύθ, Θώθ, and Τάτ, was identified with Hermes, and the epithet “thrice-great” is also derived from the Egyptian aā aā, “the great Great.” Citations of works ascribed to this Hermes Trismegistus can be traced back as early as the first century of our era.[1290] He is also mentioned or quoted by various church fathers from Athenagoras to Augustine and often figures in the magical papyri. The historian Ammianus Marcellinus[1291] in the fourth century ranks him with the great sages of the past such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Apollonius of Tyana. Our two chief descriptions of the Hermetic books from the period of the Roman Empire are found in the Stromata[1292] of the Christian Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 220 A. D.) and in the De mysteriis[1293] ascribed to the Neo-Platonist Iamblichus (died about 330 A. D.). Clement speaks of forty-two books by Hermes which are regarded as “indispensable.” Of these ten are called “Hieratic” and deal with the laws, the gods, and the training of the priests. Ten others detail the sacrifices, prayers, processions, festivals, and other rites of Egyptian worship. Two contain hymns to the gods and rules for the king. Six are medical, “treating of the structure of the body and of diseases and instruments and medicines and about the eyes and the last about women.” Four are astronomical or astrological, and the remaining ten deal with cosmography and geography or with the equipment of the priests and the paraphernalia of the sacred rites. Clement does not say so, but from his brief summary one can imagine how full these volumes probably were of occult virtues of natural substances, of magical procedure, and of intimate relations and interactions between nature, stars, and spirits. Iamblichus repeats the statement of Seleucus that Hermes wrote twenty thousand volumes and the assertion of Manetho that there were 36,525 books, a number doubtless connected with the supposed length of the year, three hundred and sixty-five and one-quarter days.[1294] Iamblichus adds that Hermes wrote one hundred treatises on the ethereal gods and one thousand concerning the celestial gods.[1295] He is aware, however, that most books attributed to Hermes were not really composed by him, since in other passages he speaks of “the books which are circulated under the name of Hermes,”[1296] and explains that “our ancestors ... inscribed all their own writings with the name of Hermes,”[1297] thus dedicating them to him as the patron deity of language and theology. By the time of Iamblichus these books had been translated from the Egyptian tongue into Greek.

[Sidenote: Poimandres and the Hermetic Corpus.]

There has come down to us under the name of Hermes a collection of seventeen or eighteen fragments which is generally known as the Hermetic Corpus. Of the fragments the first and chief is entitled Poimandres (Ποιμάνδρης), a name which is sometimes applied to the entire Corpus. Another fragment entitled Asclepius, since it is in the form of a dialogue between him and “Mercurius Trismegistus,” exists in a Latin form which has been ascribed probably incorrectly to Apuleius of Madaura as translator (Asclepius ... Mercurii trismegisti dialogus Lucio Apuleio Madaurensi philosopho Platonico interprete). None of the Greek manuscripts of the Corpus seems older than the fourteenth century, although Reitzenstein thinks that they may all be derived from the version which Michael Psellus had before him in the eleventh century.[1298] But the concluding prayer of the Poimandres exists in a third century papyrus, and the alchemist Zosimus in the fourth century seems acquainted with the entire collection. The treatises in this Corpus are concerned primarily with religious philosophy or theosophy, with doctrines similar to those of Plato concerning the soul and to the teachings of the Gnostics. The moral and religious instruction is associated, however, with a physics and cosmology very favorable to astrology and magic. Of magic in the narrow sense there is little in the Corpus, but a Hermetic fragment preserved by Stobaeus affirms that “philosophy and magic nourish the soul.” Astrology plays a much more prominent part, and the stars are ranked as visible gods, of whom the sun is by far the greatest. All seven planets nevertheless control the changes in the world of nature; there are seven human types corresponding to them; and the twelve signs of the zodiac also govern the human body. Only the chosen few who possess gnosis or are capable of receiving nous can escape the decrees of fate as administered by the stars and ultimately return to the spiritual world, passing through “choruses of demons” and “courses of stars” and reaching the Ogdoad or eighth heaven above and beyond the spheres of the seven planets.[1299] Such Gnostic cosmology and demonology, especially the location of demons amid the planetary spheres, provides favorable ground for the development of astrological necromancy.

[Sidenote: Astrological treatises ascribed to Hermes.]

Not only is a belief in astrology implied throughout the Poimandres, but a number of separate astrological treatises are extant in whole or part under the name of Hermes Trismegistus,[1300] and he is frequently cited as an authority in other Greek astrological manuscripts.[1301] The treatises attributed to him comprise one upon general method,[1302] one on the names and powers of the twelve signs, one on astrological medicine addressed to Ammon the Egyptian,[1303] one on thunder and lightning, and some hexameters on the relation of earthquakes to the signs of the zodiac. This last is also ascribed to Orpheus.[1304] There are various allusions to and versions of tracts concerning the relation of herbs to the planets or signs of the zodiac or thirty-six decans.[1305] These treatises attribute magic virtues to plants, include a prayer to be repeated when plucking each herb, and tell how to use the astrological figures of the decans, engraved on stones, as healing amulets.

[Sidenote: Hermetic works of alchemy.]

Works under the name of Hermes Trismegistus are cited by Greek alchemists of the closing Roman Empire, such as Zosimus, Stephanus, and Olympiodorus, but those Hermetic treatises of alchemy which are extant are of late date and much altered.[1306] Some treatises are preserved only in Arabic; others are medieval Latin fabrications. The Greek alchemists, however, seem to have recited the mystic hymn of Hermes from the Poimandres.[1307]

[Sidenote: Nechepso and Petosiris.]

Hellenistic and Roman astrology sought to extend its roots far back into Egyptian antiquity by putting forth spurious treatises under the names, not only of Hermes Trismegistus, but also of Nechepso and Petosiris,[1308] who were regarded respectively as an Egyptian king and an Egyptian priest who had lived at least seven centuries before Christ. Indeed, they were held to be the recipients of divine revelation from Hermes and Asclepius. A lengthy astrological treatise, which Pliny[1309] is the first to cite and from a fourteenth book of which Galen[1310] mentions a magic ring of jasper engraved with a dragon and rays, seems to have appeared in their names probably at Alexandria in the Hellenistic period. Only fragments and citations ascribed to Nechepso and Petosiris are now extant.[1311]

[Sidenote: Manetho.]

Yet another astrological work which claims to be drawn from the secret sacred books and cryptic monuments of ancient Egypt is ascribed to Manetho. It is a compilation in verse of prognostications from the various constellations and is regarded as the work of several writers, of whom the oldest is placed in the reign of Alexander Severus in the third century.[1312]

[Sidenote: The Lithica of Orpheus.]

Orpheus is another author more cited than preserved by classical antiquity. Pliny called him the first writer on herbs and suspected him of magic. Ernest Riess affirms that Rohde (Psyche, p. 398) “has abundantly proved that Orpheus’ followers were among the chief promulgators of purifications and charms against evil spirits.”[1313] Among poems of some length extant under Orpheus’ name the one of most interest to us is the Lithica, where in 770 lines the virtues of some thirty gems are set forth with considerable allusion to magic.[1314] The authorship is uncertain, but the verse is supposed to follow the prose treatise by Damigeron who lived in the second century B. C. The date of the poem is now generally fixed in the fourth century of our era, although King[1315] argued for an earlier date. I agree with him that the allusion in lines 71-74 to decapitation on the charge of magic is, taken alone, too vague and blind to be associated with any particular event or time; editors since Tyrwhitt have connected it with the law of Constantius against magic and the persecution of magicians in 371 A. D. But King’s contention that the Lithica is by the same author as the Argonautica, also ascribed to Orpheus, and is therefore of early date, falls to the ground since the Argonautica, too, is now dated in the fourth century.

[Sidenote: Argument of the poem.]

The Lithica opens by representing Hermes as bestowing upon mankind the precious lore of the marvelous virtues of gems. In his cave are stored stones which banish ghosts, robbers, and snakes, which bring health, happiness, victory in war and games, honor at courts and success in love, and which insure safety on journeys, the favor of the gods, and enable one to read the hidden thoughts of others and to understand the language of the birds as they predict the future. Few persons, however, avail themselves of this mystic lore, and those who do so are liable to be executed on the charge of magic. After this introduction, which may be regarded as a piquant appetizer to whet the reader’s taste for further details, the virtues of individual stones are described, first in the words of Theodamas, a wise and divine man[1316] whom the author meets on his way to perform annual sacrifice at an altar of the Sun, where as a child he narrowly escaped from a deadly snake, and then in a speech of the seer Helenus to Philoctetes which Theodamas quotes. Greek gods are often mentioned; as the poem proceeds the virtues of a number of gems are attributed to Apollo rather than Hermes; and there are allusions to Greek mythology and the Trojan war. Some gems are found in animals, for instance, in the viper or the brain of the stag.

[Sidenote: Magic powers of stones.]

Let us turn to some examples of the marvelous virtues of particular stones. The crystal wins favorable answers from the gods to prayers; kindles fire, if held over sticks, yet itself remains cold; as a ligature benefits kidney trouble. Sacrifices in which the adamant is employed win the favor of the gods; it is also called Lethaean because it makes one forget worries, or the milk-stone (galactis) because it renews the milk of sheep or goats when powdered in brine and sprinkled over them. Worn as an amulet it counteracts the evil eye and gains royal favor for its bearer. The agate is an agricultural amulet and should be attached to the plowman’s arm and the horns of the oxen. Other stones help vineyards, bring rain or avert hail and pests from the crops. Lychnis prevents a pot from boiling on a fire and makes it boil when the fire is dead. The magnet was used by the witches Circe and Medea in their spells; an unchaste wife is unable to remain in the bed where this stone has been placed with an incantation. Other stones cure snake-bite and various diseases, serve as love-charms or aids in child-birth, or counteract incantations and enchantments.

[Sidenote: Magic rites to gain powers of divination.]

To make the gem sideritis or oreites utter vocal oracles the operator must abstain for three weeks from animal food, the public baths, and the marriage bed; he is then to wash and clothe the gem like an infant and employ various sacrifices, incantations, and illuminations. The gem Liparaios, known to the learned Magi of Assyria, when burnt on a bloodless altar with hymns to the Sun and Earth attracts snakes from their holes to the flame. Three youths robed in white and carrying two-edged swords should cut up the snake who comes nearest the fire into nine pieces, three for the Sun, three for the earth, three for the wise and prophetic maiden. These pieces are then to be cooked with wine, salt, and spices and eaten by those who wish to learn the language of birds and beasts. But further the gods must be invoked by their secret names and libations poured of milk, wine, oil, and honey. What is not eaten must be buried, and the participants in the feast are then to return home wearing chaplets but otherwise naked and speaking to no one whom they may meet. On their arrival home they are to sacrifice mixed spices. It will be recalled that Apollonius of Tyana and the Arabs also learned the language of the birds by eating snake-flesh.

[Sidenote: Powers of gems compared with herbs.]

Thus gems are potent in religion and divination, love-charms and child-birth, medicine and agriculture. The poem fails, however, to touch upon their uses in alchemy or relations to the stars, nor does it contain much of anything that can be called necromancy. But the author ranks the virtues of stones above those of herbs, whose powers disappear with age. Moreover, some plants are injurious, whereas the marvelous virtues of stones are almost all beneficial as well as permanent. “There is great force in herbs,” he says, “but far greater in stones,”[1317] an observation often repeated in the middle ages.

[Sidenote: Magic herbs and demons in Orphic rites.]

More stress is laid upon the power of demons and herbs in a description which has been left us by Saint Cyprian,[1318] bishop of Antioch in the third century, of some pagan mysteries upon Mount Olympus into which he was initiated when a boy of fifteen and which have been explained as Orphic rites. His initiation was under the charge of seven hierophants, lasted for forty days, and included instruction in the virtues of magic herbs and visions of the operations of demons. He was also taught the meaning of musical notes and harmonies, and saw how times and seasons were governed by good and evil spirits. In short, magic, pseudo-science, occult virtue, and perhaps astrology formed an important part of Orphic lore.

[Sidenote: Books ascribed to Zoroaster.]

Cumont states in his Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism that “towards the end of the Alexandrine period the books ascribed to the half-mythical masters of the Persian science, Zoroaster, Hosthanes and Hystaspes, were translated into Greek, and until the end of paganism those names enjoyed a prodigious authority.”[1319] Pliny regarded Zoroaster as the founder of magic and we have met other examples of his reputation as a magician. Later we shall find him cited several times in the Byzantine Geoponica which seems to use a book ascribed to him on the sympathy and antipathy existing between natural objects.[1320] Naturally a number of pseudo-Zoroastrian books were in circulation, some of which Porphyry, the Neo-Platonist, is said to have suppressed. At least he tells us in his Life of Plotinus[1321] that certain Christians and other men claimed to possess certain revelations of Zoroaster, but that he advanced many arguments to show that their book was not written by Zoroaster but was a recent composition.

[Sidenote: The Chaldean Oracles.]

There has been preserved, however, in the writings of the Neo-Platonists a collection of passages known as the Zoroastrian Logia or Chaldean Oracles[1322] and which “present ... a heterogeneous mass, now obscure and again bombastic, of commingled Platonic, Pythagorean, Stoic, Gnostic, and Persian tenets.”[1323] Not only are these often cited by the Neo-Platonists, but Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus composed commentaries upon them.[1324] Some think that these citations and commentaries have reference to a single work put together by Julian the Chaldean in the period of the Antonines. This “mass of oriental superstitions, a medley of magic, theurgy, and delirious metaphysics,”[1325] was reverenced by the Neo-Platonists of the following centuries as a sacred authority equal to the Timaeus of Plato. Our next chapter will therefore deal with the writings of the Neo-Platonists upon whom this spurious mystic literature had so much influence.

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XI. NEO-PLATONISM AND ITS RELATIONS TO ASTROLOGY AND THEURGY

Neo-Platonism and the occult—Plotinus on magic—The life of reason is alone free from magic—Plotinus unharmed by magic—Invoking the demon of Plotinus—Rite of strangling birds—Plotinus and astrology—The stars as signs—The divine star-souls—How do the stars cause and signify?—Other causes and signs than the stars—Stars not the cause of evil—Against the astrology of the Gnostics—Fate and free-will—Summary of the attitude of Plotinus to astrology—Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo—Its main argument—Questions concerning divine natures—Orders of spiritual beings—Nature of demons—The art of theurgy—Invocations and the power of words—Magic a human art: theurgy divine—Magic’s abuse of nature’s forces—Its evil character—Its deceit and unreality—Porphyry on modes of divination—Iamblichus on divination—Are the stars gods?—Is there an art of astrology?—Porphyry and astrology—Astrological images—Number mysticism—Porphyry as reported by Eusebius—The emperor Julian on theurgy and astrology—Julian and divination—Scientific divination according to Ammianus Marcellinus—Proclus on theurgy—Neo-Platonic account of magic borrowed by Christians—Neo-Platonists and alchemy.

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonism and the occult.]

That the Neo-Platonists were much given to the occult has been a common impression among those who have written upon the period of the decline of the Roman Empire, of the end of paganism, and the passing of classical philosophy. This is perhaps in some measure the result of Christian viewpoint and hostility; probably the Christians of the period would seem equally superstitious to a modern Neo-Platonist. If the lives of the philosophers by Eunapius sound like fairy tales,[1326] what do the lives of the saints of the same period sound like? If the Neo-Platonists were like our mediums, what were the Christian exorcists like? But let us turn to the writings of the leading Neo-Platonists themselves, the only accurate mirror of their views.

[Sidenote: Plotinus on magic.]

Plotinus,[1327] who lived from about 204 to 270 A. D. and is generally regarded as the founder of Neo-Platonism, was apparently less given to occult sciences than some of his successors.[1328] One of his charges against the Gnostics[1329] is that they believe that they can move the higher and incorporeal powers by writing incantations and by spoken words and various other vocal utterances, all which he censures as mere magic and sorcery. He also attacks their belief that diseases are demons and can be expelled by words. This wins them a following among the crowd who are wont to marvel at the powers of magicians, but Plotinus insists that diseases are due to natural causes.[1330] Even he, however, accepted incantations and the charms of sorcerers and magicians as valid, and accounted for their potency by the sympathy or love and hatred which he said existed between different objects in nature, which operates even at a distance, and which is an expression of one world-soul animating the universe.[1331]

[Sidenote: The life of reason is alone free from magic.]

Plotinus held further, however, that only the physical and irrational side of man’s nature was affected by drugs and sorcery, just as “even demons are not impassive in their irrational part,”[1332] and so are to some extent subject to magic. But the rational soul may free itself from all influence of magic.[1333] Moreover, remorselessly adds the clear-headed Plotinus with a burst of insight that may well be attributed to Hellenic genius, he who yields to the charms of love and family affection or seeks political power or aught else than Truth and true beauty, or even he who searches for beauty in inferior things; he who is deceived by appearances, he who follows irrational inclinations, is as truly bewitched as if he were the victim of magic and goetia so-called. The life of reason is alone free from magic.[1334] Whereat one is tempted to paraphrase a remark of Aelian[1335] and exclaim, “What do you think of that definition of magic, my dear anthropologists and sociologists and modern students of folk-lore?”

[Sidenote: Plotinus unharmed by magic.]

This immunity of the true philosopher and sincere follower of truth from magic received illustration, according to Porphyry,[1336] in the case of Plotinus himself, who suffered no harm from the magic arts which his enemy, Alexandrinus Olympius, directed against him. Instead the baleful defluxions from the stars which Olympius had tried to draw down upon Plotinus were turned upon himself. Porphyry also states[1337] that Plotinus was aware at the time of the “sidereal enchantments” of Olympius against him. Incidentally the episode provides one more proof of the essential unity of astrology and magic.

[Sidenote: Invoking the demon of Plotinus.]

Plotinus, indeed, was regarded by his admirers as divinely inspired, as another incident from the Life by Porphyry will illustrate.[1338] An Egyptian priest had little difficulty in persuading Plotinus, who although of Roman parentage had been born in Egypt, to allow him to try to invoke his familiar demon. Plotinus was then teaching in Rome where he resided for twenty-six years, and the temple of Isis was the only pure place in the city which the priest could find for the ceremony. When the invocation had been duly performed, there appeared not a mere demon but a god. The apparition was not long enduring, however, nor would the priest permit them to question it, on the ground that one of the friends of Plotinus present had marred the success of the operation. This man had feared he might suffer some injury when the demon appeared and as a counter-charm had brought some birds which he held in his hands, apparently by the necks, for at the critical moment when the apparition appeared he suffocated them, whether from fright or from envy of Plotinus Porphyry declares himself unable to state.

[Sidenote: The rite of strangling birds.]

This practice of grasping birds by the necks in both hands is shown by a number of works of art to have been a custom of great antiquity. We may see a winged Gorgon strangling a goose in either hand upon a plate of the seventh century B.C. from Rhodes now in the British Museum.[1339] A gold pendant of the ninth century B.C. from Aegina, now also in the British Museum, consists of a figure holding a water-bird by the neck in either hand, while from its thighs pairs of serpents issue on whose folds the birds stand with their bills touching the fangs of the snakes.[1340] There also is a figure of a winged goddess grasping two water-birds by the necks upon an ivory fibula excavated at Sparta.[1341]

[Sidenote: Plotinus and astrology.]

Porphyry also tells us in the Life that Plotinus devoted considerable attention to the stars and refuted in his writings the unwarrantable claims of the casters of horoscopes.[1342] Such passages are found in the treatises on fate and on the soul, while one of his treatises is devoted entirely to the question, “Whether the stars effect anything?”[1343] This was one of four treatises which Plotinus a little before his death sent to Porphyry, and which are regarded as rather inferior to those composed by him when in the prime of life. In the next century the astrologer, Julius Firmicus Maternus, regards Plotinus as an enemy of astrology and represents him as dying a horrible and loathsome death from gangrene.[1344]

[Sidenote: The stars as signs.]

As a matter of fact the criticisms made by Plotinus were not necessarily destructive to the art of astrology, but rather suggested a series of amendments by which it might be made more compatible with a Platonic view of the universe, deity, and human soul. These amendments also tended to meet Christian objections to the art. His criticisms were not new; Philo Judaeus had made similar ones over two centuries before.[1345] But the great influence of Plotinus gave added emphasis to these criticisms. For instance, the point made by him several times that the motion of the stars “does not cause everything but signifies the future concerning each”[1346] man and thing, is noted by Macrobius both in the Saturnalia[1347] and the Dream of Scipio;[1348] while in the twelfth century John of Salisbury, arguing against astrology, fears that its devotees will take refuge in the authority of Plotinus and say that they detract nothing from the Creator’s power, since He established once for all an unalterable natural law and disposed all future events as He foresaw them. Thus the stars are merely His instruments.[1349]

[Sidenote: The divine star-souls.]

But let us see what Plotinus says himself rather than what others took to be his meaning. Like Plato, who regarded the stars as happy, divine, and eternal animals, Plotinus not only believes that the stars have souls but that their intellectual processes are far above the frailties of the human mind and nearer the omniscience of the world-soul. Memory, for example, is of no use to them,[1350] nor do they hear the prayers which men address to them.[1351] Plotinus often calls them gods. They are, however, parts of the universe, subordinate to the world-soul, and they cannot alter the fundamental principles of the universe, nor deprive other beings of their individuality, although they are able to make other beings better or worse.[1352]

[Sidenote: How do the stars cause and signify?]

In his discussion of problems concerning the soul Plotinus says that “it is abundantly evident ... that the motion of the heavens affects things on earth and not only in bodies but also the dispositions of the soul,”[1353] and that each part of the heavens affects terrestrial and inferior objects. He does not, however, think that all this influence can be accounted for “exclusively by heat or cold,”—perhaps a dig at Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos.[1354] He also objects to ascribing the crimes of men to the will of the stars or every human act to a sidereal decision,[1355] and to speaking of friendships and enmities as existing between the planets according as they are in this or that aspect towards one another.[1356] If then the admittedly vast influence of the stars cannot be satisfactorily accounted for either as material effects caused by them as bodies or as voluntary action taken by them, how is it to be explained? Plotinus accounts for it by the relation of sympathy which exists between all parts of the universe, that single living animal, and by the fact that the universe expresses itself in the figures formed by the movements of the celestial bodies, which “exert what influence they do exert on things here below through contemplation of the intelligible world.”[1357] These figures, or constellations in the astrological sense, have other powers than those of the bodies which participate in them, just as many plants and stones “among us” have marvelous occult powers for which heat and cold will not account.[1358] They both exert influence effectively and are signs of the future through their relation to the universal whole. In many things they are both causes and signs, in others they are signs only.[1359]

[Sidenote: Other causes and signs than the stars.]

For Plotinus, however, the universe is not a mechanical one where but one force prevails, namely, that produced by or represented by the constellations. The universe is full of variety with countless different powers, and the whole would not be a living animal unless each living thing in it lived its own life, and unless life were latent even in inanimate objects. It is true that some powers are more effective than others, and that those of the sky are more so than those of earth, and that many things lie under their power. Nevertheless Plotinus sees in the reproduction of life and species in the universe a force independent of the stars. In the generation of any animal, for example, the stars contribute something, but the species must follow that of its forebears.[1360] And after they have been produced or begotten, terrestrial beings add something of their own. Nor are the stars the sole signs of the future. Plotinus holds that “all things are full of signs,” and that the sage can not merely predict from stars or birds, but infer one thing from another by virtue of the harmony and sympathy existing between all parts of the universe.[1361]

[Sidenote: Stars not the cause of evil.]

Nor can the gods or stars be said to cause evil on earth, since their influence is affected by other forces which mingle with it. Like the earlier Jewish Platonist, Philo, Plotinus denies that the planets are the cause of evil or change their own natures from good to evil as they enter new signs of the zodiac or take up different positions in relation to one another. He argues that they are not changeable beings, that they would not willingly injure men, or, if it is contended that they are mere bodies and have no wills, he replies that then they can produce only corporeal effects. He then solves the problem of evil in the usual manner by ascribing it to matter, in which reason and the celestial force are received unevenly, as light is broken and refracted in passing through water.[1362]

[Sidenote: Against the astrology of the Gnostics.]

Plotinus repeats much the same line of argument in his book against the Gnostics, where he protests against “the tragedy of terrors which they think exists in the spheres of the universe,”[1363] and the tyranny they ascribe to the heavenly bodies. His belief is that the celestial spheres are in perfect harmony both with the universe as a whole and with our globe, completing the whole and constituting a great part of it, supplying beauty and order. And often they are to be regarded as signs rather than causes of the future. Their natures are constant, but the sequence of events may be varied by chance circumstances, such as different hours of nativities, place of residence, and the dispositions of individual souls. Amid all this diversity one must also expect both good and evil, but not on that account call nature or the stars either evil themselves or the cause of evil.

[Sidenote: Fate and free-will.]

As the allusion just made in the preceding paragraph to “the dispositions of individual souls” shows, Plotinus made a distinction between the extent of the control exercised by the stars over inanimate, animate, and rational beings. The stars signify all things in the sensible world but the soul is free unless it slips and is stained by the body and so comes under their control. Fate or the force of the stars is like a wind which shakes and tosses the ship of the body in which the soul makes its passage. Man as a part of the world does some things and suffers many things in accordance with destiny. Some men become slaves to this world and to external influences, as if they were bewitched. Others look to their inner souls and strive to free themselves from the sensible world and to rise above demonic nature and all fate of nativities and all necessity of this world, and to live in the intelligible world above[1364].

[Sidenote: Summary of the attitude of Plotinus to astrology.]

Thus Plotinus arrives at practically what was to be the usual Christian position in the middle ages regarding the influence of the stars, maintaining the freedom of the human will and yet allowing a large field to astrological prediction. He is evidently more concerned to combat the notion that the stars cause evil or are to be feared as evil powers than he is to combat the belief in their influence and significations. His speaking of the stars both as signs and causes in a way doubles the possibility of prediction from them. If he attacked the language used by astrologers of the planets, and perhaps to a certain extent the technique of their art, he supported astrology by reconciling the existence of evil and of human freedom with a great influence of the stars and by his emphasis upon the importance of the figures made by the movements of the heavenly bodies above any purely physical effects of their bodies as such. Thus he reinforced the conception of occult virtue, always one of the chief pillars, if not the chief support, of occult science and magic. On the other hand, men were not likely to reform a language and technique sanctioned by as great an astronomer as Ptolemy merely because a Neo-Platonist questioned its propriety.

[Sidenote: Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo.]

Although Plotinus denied that diseases were due to demons, we once heard him speak of “demonic nature,” and one of the Enneads discusses Each man’s own demon. Here, however, the discussion is limited to the power presiding in each human soul, and nothing is said of magic. For the connection of demons with magic and for the art of theurgy we must turn to the writings of Porphyry and Iamblichus, and especially to The Letter to Anebo of Porphyry, who lived from about 233 to 305, and the reply thereto of the master Abammon, a work which is otherwise known as Liber de mysteriis[1365]. The attribution of the latter work to Iamblichus, who died about 330, is based upon an anonymous assertion prefixed to an ancient manuscript of Proclus and upon the fact that Proclus himself quotes a passage from the De mysteriis as the words of Iamblichus. This attribution has been questioned, but if not by Iamblichus, the work seems to be at least by some disciple of his with similar views[1366]. Other works of Iamblichus are largely philosophical and mathematical; among the chief works of Porphyry, apart from his literary work in connection with Plotinus, were his commentaries on Aristotle and fifteen books against the Christians.

[Sidenote: Its main argument.]

The Letter to Anebo inquires concerning the nature of the gods, the demons, and the stars; asks for an explanation of divination and astrology, of the power of names and incantations; and questions the employment of invocations and sacrifice. Other topics brought up are the rule of spirits over the world of nature, partitioned out among them for this purpose; the divine inspiration or demoniacal possession of human beings; and the occult sympathy between different things in the material universe. In especial the art of theurgy, a word said to be used now for the first time by Porphyry,[1367] is discussed. It may be roughly defined for the moment as a sort of pious necromancy or magical cult of the gods. Porphyry raises various objections to the procedure and logic of the theurgists, diviners, enchanters, and astrologers, which Iamblichus, as we shall henceforth call the author of the De mysteriis as a matter of convenience if not of certainty, endeavors to answer, and to justify the art of theurgy.

[Sidenote: Questions concerning divine natures.]

We may first note the theory of demons which is elicited from Iamblichus in response to Porphyry’s trenchant and searching questions. The latter, declaring that ignorance and disingenuousness concerning divine natures are no less reprehensible than impiety and impurity, demands a scientific discussion of the gods as a holy and beneficial act. He asks why, if the divine power is infinite, indivisible, and incomprehensible, different places and different parts of the body are allotted to different gods. Why, if the gods are pure intellects, they are represented as having passions, are worshiped with phallic ritual, and are tempted with invocations and sacred offerings? Why boastful speech and fantastic action are taken as indications of the divine presence; and why, if the gods dwell in the heavens, theurgists invoke only terrestrial and subterranean deities? How superior beings can be invoked with commands by their inferiors, why the Sun and Moon are threatened, why the man must be just and chaste who invokes spirits in order to secure unjust ends or gratify lust, and why the worshiper must abstain from animal food and not touch a corpse when sacrifices to the gods consist of the bodies of dead victims? Porphyry wishes further an explanation of the various genera of gods, visible and invisible, corporeal and incorporeal, beneficent and malicious, aquatic and aerial. He wants to know whether the stars are not gods, how gods differ from demons, and what the distinction is between souls and heroes.

[Sidenote: Orders of spiritual beings.]

Iamblichus in reply states that as heroes are elevated above souls, so demons are inferior and subservient to the gods and translate the infinite, ineffable, and invisible divine transcendent goodness into terms of visible forms, energy, and reason.[1368] He further distinguishes “the etherial, empyrean, and celestial gods,” and angels, archangels, and archons.[1369] As for corporeal, visible, aerial, and aquatic gods, he affirms that the gods have no bodies and no particular allotments of space, but that natural objects participate in or are related to the gods etherially or aerially or aquatically, each according to its nature.[1370] “The celestial divinities,” for example, “are not comprehended by bodies but contain bodies in their divine lives and energies. They are not themselves converted to body, but they have a body which is converted to its divine cause, and that body does not impede their intellectual and incorporeal perfection.”[1371] Iamblichus denies that there are any maleficent gods, saying that “it is much better to acknowledge our inability to explain the occurrence of evil than to admit anything impossible and false concerning the gods.”[1372] But he admits the existence of both good and evil demons and makes of the latter a convenient scapegoat upon whom to saddle any inconsistencies or impurities in religious rites and magical ceremony.

[Sidenote: Nature of demons.]

Iamblichus does not, however, hold the view of Apuleius that demons are subject to passions. They are impassive and incapable of suffering.[1373] He scorns the notion that even the worst demons can be allured by the vapors of animal sacrifice or that petty mortals can supply such beings with anything;[1374] it is rather in the consumption of foul matter by pure fire in the act of sacrifice that they take delight. Demons are not, however, like the gods entirely separated from bodies. The world is divided up into prefectures among them and they are more or less inseparable from and identified with the natural objects which they govern.[1375] Thus they may serve to enmesh the soul in the bonds of matter and of fate, and to afflict the body with disease.[1376] Also the evil demons “are surrounded by certain noxious, blood-devouring, and fierce wild beasts,” probably of the type of vampires and empousas.[1377] Iamblichus further holds that there is a class of demons who are without judgment and reason, each of whom has some one function to perform and is not adapted to do anything else.[1378] Such demons or forces in nature men may well address as superiors in invoking them, since they are superior to men in their one special function; but when they have once been invoked, man as a rational being may also well issue commands to them as his irrational inferiors.[1379]

[Sidenote: The art of theurgy.]

Iamblichus also undertakes the defense of theurgy and carefully distinguishes it from magic, as we shall soon see. It is also different from science, since it does not merely employ the physical forces of the natural universe,[1380] and from philosophy, since its ineffable works are beyond the reach of mere intelligence, and those who merely philosophize theoretically cannot hope for a theurgic union or communion with the gods.[1381] Even theurgists cannot as a rule endure the light of spiritual beings higher than heroes, demons, and angels,[1382] and it is an exceedingly rare occurrence for one of them to be united with the supramundane gods.[1383] This theurgy, or “the art of divine works,” operates by means of “arcane signatures” and “the power of inexplicable symbols.”[1384] It is thus that Iamblichus explains away most of the details in sacred rites and sacrifices to which Porphyry had objected as obscene or material and as implying that the gods themselves were passive and passionate. They are mystic symbols, “consecrated from eternity” for some hidden reason “which is more excellent than reason.”[1385] Occult virtues indeed! We have already heard Iamblichus state that natural objects participate in or are related to the gods etherially or aerially or aquatically; theurgists therefore quite properly employ in their art certain stones, herbs, aromatics, and sacred animals.[1386] By employing such potent symbols mere man takes on such a sacred character himself that he is able to command many spiritual powers.[1387]

[Sidenote: Invocations and the power of words.]

Invocations and prayers are also much used in theurgical operations. But such invocations do not draw down the impassive and pure gods to this world; rather they purify those who employ them from their passions and impurity and exalt them to union with the pure and the divine.[1388] These prayers are symbolic, too. They do not appeal to human passions or reason, “for they are perfectly unknown and arcane and are alone known to the God whom they invoke.”[1389] In another passage[1390] Iamblichus replies to Porphyry’s objection that such prayers are often composed of meaningless words and names without signification by declaring—somewhat inconsistently with his previous assertion that these invocations are “perfectly unknown”—that some of the names “which we can scientifically analyze” comprehend “the whole divine essence, power and order.” Moreover, if translated into another language, they do not have exactly the same meaning, and even if they do, they no longer retain the same power as in the original tongue. We shall meet a similar passage concerning the power of words and divine names in the church father Origen who lived earlier in the third century than Porphyry and Iamblichus. Iamblichus concludes that “it is necessary that ancient prayers ... should be preserved invariably the same.”[1391]

[Sidenote: Magic a human art: theurgy divine.]

Neither Porphyry nor Iamblichus, I believe, employs the word, “magic,” but they both often allude to its practitioners and methods by such expressions as “jugglers” and “enchanters” or by contrasting what is done “artificially” or by means of art with theurgical operations. In the last case the distinction is between what on the one hand is regarded as a divine mystery or revelation and what on the other hand is looked upon as a mere human art and contrivance. And “nothing ... which is fashioned by human art is genuine and pure.”[1392] Christian writers drew a like distinction between prophecy or miracle and divination or magic. Sometimes, however, Iamblichus speaks of theurgy itself as an art, an involuntary admission of the close resemblance between its methods and those of magic. We are also told that if the theurgist makes a slip in his procedure, he thereby reduces it to the level of magic.[1393]

[Sidenote: Magic’s abuse of nature’s forces.]

Another distinction is that theurgy aims at communion with the gods while magic has to do rather with “the physical or corporeal powers of the universe.”[1394] Both Porphyry and Iamblichus believed that harmony, sympathy, and mutual attraction existed between the various objects in the universe, which Iamblichus asserted was one animal.[1395] Thus it is possible for man to draw distant things to himself or to unite them to, or separate them from, one another.[1396] But art may also use this force of sympathy between objects in an extreme and unseemly manner, and this disorderly forcing of nature, we are left to infer, constitutes an essential feature of magic, whose procedure is not truly natural or scientific.

[Sidenote: Its evil character.]

Magic not only disorders the law and harmony, and makes a perverse and contrary use of natural forces. Its practitioners are also represented as aiming at evil ends and as themselves of evil character.[1397] They may try by their illicit and impure procedure to have intercourse with the gods or with pure spirits, but they are unable to accomplish this. All that they succeed in doing is to secure the alliance of evil demons by associating with whom they become more depraved than ever. Such wicked demons may pose as angels of light by requiring that those who invoke them should be just or chaste, but afterwards they show their true colors by assisting in crimes and the gratification of lusts.[1398] It is they, too, who assuming the guise of superior spirits are responsible for the boastful and arrogant utterances of which Porphyry complained in persons supposed to be divinely inspired.[1399]

[Sidenote: Its deceit and unreality.]

Finally magic is unstable and fantastic. “The imaginations artificially produced by enchantment” are not real objects. Those who foretell the future by “standing on characters” are no theurgists, but employ a superficial, false, and deceptive procedure which can attract only evil demons.[1400] These demons are themselves deceitful and produce “fictitious images.”[1401] Porphyry in the Letter to Anebo also alluded to the frauds of “jugglers.” Although the attitude both of Porphyry and Iamblichus is thus professedly unfavorable to the magic arts, we find that one of Iamblichus’s disciples, named Sopater, was executed under Constantine on a charge of having charmed the winds.[1402]

[Sidenote: Porphyry on modes of divination.]

How is divination to be placed in reference to magic and theurgy? Porphyry had inquired concerning various methods of divination: in sleep, in trances, and when fully conscious; in ecstasy, in disease, and in states of mental aberration or enchantment. He mentioned divination on hearing drums and cymbals, by drinking water and other potions, by inhaling vapor; divination in darkness, in a wall, in the open air or in the sunlight; by observing entrails or the flight of birds or the motion of the stars, or even by means of meal. Yet other modes of determining the future which he lists are by characters, images, incantations, and invocations, with which the use of stones and herbs is often combined. These details make it evident how impossible it is to draw any dividing line between the methods of magic and divination, and Porphyry himself states that those who invoke the gods concerning the future not only “have about them stones and herbs,” but are able to bind and to free from bonds, to open closed doors, and to change men’s intentions. Among the virtues of parts of animals mentioned in his treatise upon abstinence from animal food are the powers of divination which may be obtained by eating the heart of a hawk or crow.[1403]

[Sidenote: Iamblichus on divination.]

Porphyry states that all diviners attribute their predictions to gods or demons, but that he wonders if foreknowledge may not be a power of the human soul or perhaps accountable for by the sympathy which exists between different parts of the universe. Iamblichus holds, however, that divination is neither a human art nor the work of nature but of divine origin.[1404] He perhaps regards it as little more than a branch of theurgy. He distinguishes between human dreams which are sometimes true, sometimes false, and dreams and visions divinely sent.[1405] If one is able to predict the future by drinking water, it is because the water has been divinely illuminated.[1406] That we can predict when the mind is diseased and disordered, and that stupid or simple-minded men are often better able to prophesy than the wise and learned, are for him but further proofs that foreknowledge is a divine gift and not a human science, while divination by such means as rods, pebbles, grains of corn and wheat simply excites the more his pious admiration at the greatness of divine power.[1407] He disapproves of divination by standing on characters,[1408] but sees no reason why divination in darkness, in a wall, or in sunlight, or by potions and incantations, may not be divinely directed. He will not, however, connect the disordered imaginations excited by disease with divine presentiments.[1409] From true divination he also separates the “natural prescience” of certain animals whose acuteness of sense or occult sympathy with other parts and forces of nature enables them to perceive some coming events before men do. Their power resembles prophecy, “yet falls short of it in stability and truth.”[1410] Augury is an art whose conjectures have great probability, but they are based upon divine signs or portents effected in nature by the agency of demons.[1411]

[Sidenote: Are the stars gods?]

The stars are on a totally different plane from the other substances employed in divination. To Porphyry’s question whether they are not gods Iamblichus is not content to reply that the celestial divinities comprehend these heavenly bodies and that the bodies in no way impede “their intellectual and incorporeal perfection.”[1412] He must needs go on to argue that the stars themselves, as simple indivisible bodies, unchanging in quality and uniform in movement, closely approach to “the incorporeal essence of the gods.” He then triumphantly if illogically concludes, “Thus therefore the visible celestials are all of them gods and after a certain manner incorporeal.” We may add the opinion of Chaeremon and others, noted by Porphyry, that the only gods were the physical ones of the Egyptians and the planets, signs of the zodiac, decans, and horoscope; all religious myths were explained by Chaeremon as astrological allegories.

[Sidenote: Is there an art of astrology?]

Porphyry objected that those who thus reduce religion to astrology submit everything to fate and leave the human soul no freedom, and furthermore that in any case astrology is an unattainable science. Iamblichus defends it against these objections, insisting that the universe is divided under the rule of planets, signs, and decans;[1413] that the Egyptians do not make everything physical but ascribe two souls to man, one of which obeys the revolutions of the stars, while the other is intellectual and free;[1414] and that there is a systematic art of astrology based on divine revelation and the long observations of the Chaldeans, although like any other science it may at times degenerate and become contaminated by error.[1415] Iamblichus further regards as ridiculous the contention of those “who ascribe depravity to the celestial bodies because their participants sometimes produce evil.”[1416] In the brief separate treatise, De fato,[1417] he again holds that all things are bound by the indissoluble chain of necessity which men call fate, but that the gods can loose the bonds of fate, and that the human mind, too, has power to rise above nature, unite with the gods, and enjoy eternal life.

[Sidenote: Porphyry and astrology.]

Whether Porphyry in his other extant works evidences a belief in astrology or not, and whether he wrote an Introduction to the Tetrabiblos or astrological handbook of Ptolemy, has been disputed.[1418] This Introduction ascribed to Porphyry was much cited by subsequent astrologers[1419] and was printed in 1559 together with a much longer anonymous commentary on the Tetrabiblos which some ascribe to Proclus.[1420]

[Sidenote: Astrological images.]

Towards astrological images at least, Porphyry shows himself in the Letter to Anebo more favorable than Iamblichus, saying, “Nor are the artificers of efficacious images to be despised, for they observe the motion of celestial bodies.” Iamblichus, on the other hand, rather grudgingly admits that “the image-making art attracts a certain very obscure genesiurgic portion from the celestial effluxions.”[1421] He seems to have the same feeling against images as against characters, perhaps regarding both as bordering upon idolatry.[1422]

[Sidenote: Number mysticism.]

Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus were all given to number mysticism. The sixth book of the sixth Ennead is entirely devoted to this subject, while Porphyry and Iamblichus both wrote Lives of Pythagoras and treatises upon his doctrine of number.

[Sidenote: Porphyry as reported by Eusebius.]

Other works by Porphyry than the Letter to Anebo are cited or quoted a good deal by Eusebius in Praeparatio evangelica, especially his Περὶ τῆς ἐκ λογίων φιλοσοφίας, but the extracts are made for Eusebius’s own purposes, which are to discredit pagan religion, and neither express Porphyry’s complete thought nor probably even tend to prove his original point. Besides showing that Porphyry was inconsistent in distinguishing the different victims to be sacrificed to terrestrial and subterranean, aerial, celestial, and sea gods in the above-mentioned work, when in his De abstinentia a rebus animatis he held that beings who delighted in animal sacrifice were no gods but mere demons, Eusebius quotes him a good deal to show that the pagan gods were nothing but demons, that they themselves might be called magicians and astrologers, that they loved characters, and that they made their predictions of the future not from their own foreknowledge but from the stars by the art of astrology, and that like men they could not even always read the decrees of the stars aright. The belief is also mentioned that the fate foretold from the stars may be avoided by resort to magic.[1423]

[Sidenote: The Emperor Julian on theurgy and astrology.]

The Emperor Julian was an enthusiastic follower of Iamblichus whom he praises[1424] in his Hymn to the Sovereign Sun delivered at the Saturnalia of 361 A. D. He also describes “the blessed theurgists” as able to comprehend unspeakable mysteries which are hidden from the crowd, such as Julian the Chaldean prophesied concerning the god of the seven rays.[1425] The emperor tells us that from his youth he was regarded as over-curious (περιεργότερον, a word which almost implies the practice of magic) and as a diviner by the stars (ἀστρόμαντιν). His Hymn to the Sun contains a good deal of astrological detail, speaks of the universe as eternal and divine, and regards planets, signs, and decans as “the visible gods.” In short, “there is in the heavens a great multitude of gods.”[1426] The Sun, however, is superior to the other planets, and as Aristotle has pointed out “makes the simplest movement of all the heavenly bodies that travel in a direction opposite to the whole.”[1427] The Sun is also the link between the visible universe and the intelligible world, and Julian infers from his middle station among the planets that he is also king among the intellectual gods.[1428] For behind his visible self is the great Invisible. He frees our souls entirely from the power of “Genesis,” or the force of the stars exercised at nativity, and lifts them to the world of the pure intellect.[1429]

[Sidenote: Julian and divination.]

Julian believed in almost every form of pagan divination as well as in astrology. To the oracles of Apollo he ascribed the civilizing of the greater part of the world through the foundation of Greek colonies and the revelation of religious and political law.[1430] The historian Ammianus Marcellinus[1431] tells us that Julian was continually inspecting entrails of victims and interpreting dreams and omens, and that he even proposed to re-open a prophetic fountain whose predictions were supposed to have enabled Hadrian to become emperor, after which that emperor blocked it up from fear that someone else might supplant him through its instrumentality. In another passage[1432] he defends Julian from the charge of magic, saying, “Inasmuch as malicious persons have attributed the use of evil arts to learn the future to this ruler who was a learned inquirer into all branches of knowledge, we shall briefly indicate how a wise man is able to acquire this by no means trivial variety of learning. The spirit behind all the elements, seeing that it is incessantly and everywhere active in the prophetic movement of perennial bodies, bestows upon us the gift of divination by the different arts which we employ; and the forces of nature, propitiated by varied rites, as from exhaustless springs provide mankind with prophetic utterances.”

[Sidenote: Scientific divination.]

Ammianus thus regards the arts of divination as serious sciences based upon natural forces, although of course in the characteristic Neo-Platonic way of thinking he confuses the spiritual and physical and substitutes propitiatory rites for scientific experiments. His phrase, “the prophetic movement of perennial bodies” almost certainly means the stars and shows his belief in astrology. In another passage[1433] he indicates the widespread trust in astrology among the Roman nobles of his time, the later fourth century, by saying that even those “who deny that there are superior powers in the sky,” nevertheless think it imprudent to appear in public or dine or bathe without having first consulted an almanac as to the whereabouts of Mercury or the exact position of the moon in Cancer. The passage is satirical, no doubt, but Ammianus probably objects quite as much to their disbelief in superior powers in the sky as he does to the excess of their superstition. That astrology and divination may be studied scientifically he again indicates in a description of learning at Alexandria. Besides praising the medical training to be had there, and mentioning the study of geometry, music, astronomy, and arithmetic, he says, “In addition to these subjects they cultivate the science which reveals the ways of the fates.”[1434]

[Sidenote: Proclus on theurgy.]

Iamblichus’s account of theurgy is repeated in more condensed form by Proclus (412-485) in a brief treatise or fragment which is extant only in its Latin translation by the Florentine humanist Ficinus, entitled De sacrificio et magia.[1435] Neither magic nor theurgy, however, is mentioned by name in the Latin text. Proclus states that the priests of old built up their sacred science by observing the sympathy existing between natural objects and by arguing from manifest to occult powers. They saw how things on earth were associated with things in the heavens and further discovered how to bring down divine virtue to this lower world by the force of likeness which binds things together. Proclus gives several examples of plants, stones, and animals which evidence such association. The cock, for instance, is reverenced by the lion because both are under the same planet, the sun, but the cock even more so than the lion. Therefore demons who appear with the heads of lions (leonina fronte) vanish suddenly at the sight of a cock unless they chance to be demons of the solar order. After thus indicating the importance of astrology as well as occult virtue in theurgy or magic, Proclus tells how demons are invoked. Sometimes a single herb or stone “suffices for the divine work”; sometimes several substances and rites must be combined “to summon that divinity.” When they had secured the presence of the demons, the priests proceeded, partly under the instruction of the demons and partly by their own industrious interpretation of symbols, to a study of the gods. “Finally, leaving behind natural objects and forces and even to a great extent the demons, they won communion with the gods.”

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonic account of magic borrowed by Christians.]

Despite the writings of Porphyry and other Neo-Platonists against Christianity, much use was made by Christian theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries of the Neo-Platonic accounts of magic, astrology, and divination, especially of Porphyry’s Letter to Anebo. Eusebius in his Praeparatio Evangelica[1436] made large extracts from it on these themes and also from Porphyry’s work on the Chaldean oracles. Augustine in The City of God[1437] accepted Porphyry as an authority on the subjects of theurgy and magic. On the other hand, we do not find the Christian writers repeating the attitude of Plotinus that the life of reason is alone free from magic, except as they substitute the word “Christianity” for “the life of reason.”

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonists and alchemy.]

The Neo-Platonists showed some interest in alchemy as well as in theurgy and astrology. Berthelot published in his Collection des Alchimistes Grecs “a little tract of positive chemistry” which is extant under the name of Iamblichus; and Proclus treated of the relations between the metals and planets and the generation of the metals under the influence of the stars.[1438] Of Synesius, who was both a Neo-Platonist and a Christian bishop, and who seems to have written works of alchemy, we shall treat in a later chapter.

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XII. AELIAN, SOLINUS AND HORAPOLLO

Aelian On the Nature of Animals—General character of the work—Its hodge-podge of unclassified detail—Solinus in the middle ages—His date—General character of his work; its relation to Pliny—Animals and gems—Occult medicine—Democritus and Zoroaster not regarded as magicians—Some bits of astrology—Alexander the Great—The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo—Marvels of animals—Animals and astrology—The cynocephalus—Horapollo the cosmopolitan.

[Sidenote: Aelian On the Nature of Animals.]

From mystic and theurgic compositions we return to works of the declining Roman Empire which deal more directly with nature but, it must be confessed, in a manner somewhat fantastic. About the beginning of the third century, Aelian of Praeneste, who is included by Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists, wrote On the Nature of Animals.[1439] Its seventeen books, written in Greek, which Aelian used fluently despite his Latin birth, are believed to have reached us partly in interpolated form through two families of manuscripts, of which the older and less interpolated text is found in a thirteenth century manuscript at Paris and a somewhat earlier Vatican codex.[1440] A number of its chapters are similar to and perhaps borrowed from Pliny’s Natural History; at any rate they are commonplaces of ancient science; but the work also has a marked individuality. Parallels have also been noted between this work and the later Hexaemeron of the church father Basil. Aelian was much cited in Byzantine literature and learning, and if he was not directly used in the Latin west, at least the attitude toward animals which he displays and his selection of material concerning them are as apt precursors of medieval Latin as of medieval Greek scientific literature.

[Sidenote: General character of the work.]

In preface and epilogue Aelian himself adequately indicates the character of his work. He is impressed by the customs and characteristics of animals, and marvels at their wisdom and native shrewdness, their justice and modesty, their affection and piety, which should put human beings to blush. Thus Aelian’s work is marked by that tendency which runs through ancient and medieval literature to admire actions in the irrational brutes which seem to indicate almost human intelligence and virtue on their part, and to moralize therefrom at the expense of human beings. Another striking feature of his work is its utterly whimsical and haphazard order. He mentions things simply as they happen to occur to him. This fact, too, he recognizes, but refuses to apologize for, stating that it suits him, if it does not suit anyone else, and that he regards a mixed-up order as more motley, variegated, and pleasing. Not only does he attempt no classification whatever of his animals and mention snakes and quadrupeds and birds in the same breath; he also does not complete the treatment of a given animal in one passage but may scatter detached items about it throughout his work. There is, for instance, probably at least one chapter concerning elephants in each of his seventeen books.

[Sidenote: Its hodge-podge of unclassified detail.]

It would therefore be absurd for us to attempt any logical arrangement in discussing his contents; we may do justice to him most adequately by adopting his own lack of method and noting a few items and topics taken more or less at random from his work. Ants never go out in the new moon. Yet they neither gaze at the sky, nor count the number of days on their fingers, like the learned Babylonians and Chaldeans, but have this marvelous gift from nature.[1441] In sexual intercourse the female viper conceives through the mouth and bites off the head of the male; afterwards her young gnaw their way out of her vitals. “What have your Oresteses and Alcmaeons to say to that, my dear tragedians?”[1442] Doves put laurel boughs in their nests to guard against fascination and the evil eye, and the hoopoe similarly employs ἀδίαvτον or καλλίτριχον as an amulet;[1443] and other unreasoning animals guard against sorcery by some mystic and marvelous natural power. Another chapter treats of divinations from the crow and how hairs are dyed black with its eggs.[1444] Others tell us of the generation of serpents from the marrow of a dead man’s spine,[1445] and of venomous women like Medea and Circe who are worse than the asp with its incurable sting, since they kill by mere touch.[1446]

We go on to read of swift little beasts called Pyrigoni who are generated from fire and live in it, of salamanders who extinguish flames, of the remedies used by the tortoise against snakes, of the chastity of doves whose marriages never result in divorce, and of the incontinence of the partridge.[1447] Also of the jealousies of certain animals like the stag which hides its right horn, the lizard who devours its cast-off skin, and the mare who eats the hippomanes from its colt, lest men obtain these precious substances.[1448] Of the care taken by storks, herons, and pelicans of their aged parents.[1449] How the swallow by the virtue of an herb gives sight to its young who are born blind, and how a hoopoe found an herb whose virtue dissolved the mud with which the caretaker of a building had plugged up the hole in the wall which it used for its nest.[1450] How the lion and basilisk fear the cock, and of a lake without fish in a place where the cocks do not crow.[1451]

How elephants venerate the waxing moon; how the weasel eats rue when about to fight the snake; and of the jealousy of the hedgehog and lynx, the latter concealing his precious urine, the other watering his own hide when he is captured in order to spoil it.[1452] How the Indians fight griffins when collecting gold.[1453] How the presence of a cock aids a woman’s delivery.[1454] Of unnamed beasts in Libya who know how to count and leave an eleventh part of their prey untouched.[1455] That the sea dragon is easily captured with the left hand but not with the right.[1456] Dragons know the force of herbs and cure themselves with some and increase their venom with others.[1457] How dogs, cows, and other animals sense a famine or plague beforehand.[1458] How the Egyptians by their magic charm birds from the sky and snakes from their holes.[1459] When it rains in Egypt, mice are born from the small drops and plague the country. Traps and fences and ditches are of no avail against them, as they can leap over trenches and walls. Consequently the Egyptians are forced to pray God to end the calamity,[1460]—an interesting variant on the Old Testament account of the plagues of Egypt.

In dogs there exists a certain dialectical faculty of ratiocination.[1461] The weather may be predicted from birds, quadrupeds, and flies.[1462] The she-goat can cure suffusion of its eyes.[1463] Eagles drop tortoises on rocks to break their shells and the bald-headed poet Aeschylus met his death by having his pate mistaken thus for a smooth round stone.[1464] Some predict the future by birds, others by entrails, or by grains, sieves, and cheeses; the Lycians practice divination by fish.[1465] A stork whom a widow of Tarentum helped when it was too young to fly brought her a luminous precious stone the following year.[1466] Solon did not have to enact a law ordering children to support their aged parents in the case of lions, whose cubs are taught by nature filial piety toward their elders.[1467] Only the horn of the Scythian ass can hold the water of the Arcadian river Styx; Alexander the Great sent a sample of it to Delphi with some accompanying verses which Aelian quotes.[1468] In Epirus dragons sacred to Apollo are employed in divination, and in the Lavinian Grove dragons spit out again the frumenty offered them by unchaste virgins.[1469] By flying beneath it an eagle saved the life of its young one who had been thrown down from a tower.[1470] Different fish eat different sea herbs.[1471] There are fish who live in boiling water.[1472] There are scattered mentions of the marvels of India throughout Aelian’s work, and in his sixteenth book the first fourteen chapters are almost exclusively concerned with the animals of that land.

[Sidenote: Solinus in the middle ages.]

A well-known work in the middle ages dating from the period of the Roman Empire was the Collectanea rerum memorabilium or Polyhistor of Solinus. Mommsen’s edition lists 153 manuscripts from 32 places,[1473] and we shall find many citations of Solinus in our later medieval authors. Martianus Capella and Isidore were the first to make extensive use of his work. In the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus had little respect for Solinus as an authority and expressed more than once the quite accurate opinion that his work was full of lies. Nevertheless copies of it continued to abound in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and by 1554 five printed editions had appeared. “From it directly come most of the fables in works of object so different as those of Dicuil, Isidore, Capella, and Priscian.”[1474]

[Sidenote: His date.]

The first extant author to make use of Solinus is Augustine in The City of God, while he is first named in the Genealogus of 455 A. D. None of the manuscripts of the work antedate the ninth century, but many of them have copied an earlier subscription from a manuscript written “by the zeal and diligence of our lord Theodosius, the unconquered prince.” This is taken to refer to the emperor Theodosius II, 401-450. The work itself, however, has no Christian characteristics; on the contrary it is very fond of mentioning places famed in pagan religion and Greek mythology and of recounting miracles and marvels connected with heathen shrines and rites. Indeed, Solinus seldom, if ever, mentions anything later than the first century of our era. He speaks of Byzantium, not of Constantinople, and makes no mention of the Roman provinces as divided in the system of Diocletian. His book, however, is a compilation from earlier writings so that we need not expect allusions to his own age. The Latin style and general literary make-up of the work are characteristic of the declining empire and early medieval period. Mommsen was inclined to date Solinus in the third rather than the fourth century, but the work seems to have been revised about the sixth century, after which date it became customary to call it the Polyhistor rather than the Collectanea rerum memorabilium. It is also referred to, however, as De mirabilibus mundi, or Wonders of the World.

[Sidenote: General character of his work: its relation to Pliny.]

The work is primarily a geography and is arranged by countries and places, beginning with Rome and Italy. As each locality is considered, Solinus sometimes tells a little of its history, but is especially inclined to recount miraculous religious events or natural marvels associated with that particular region. Thus in describing two lakes he rather apologizes for mentioning the first at all because it can scarcely be called miraculous, but assures us that the second “is regarded as very extraordinary.”[1475] Sometimes he digresses to other topics such as calendar reform.[1476] Solinus draws both his geographical data and further details very largely from Pliny’s Natural History; but inasmuch as Pliny treated of these matters in separate books, Solinus has to re-organize the material. He also selects simply a few particulars from Pliny’s wealth of detail on any given subject, and furthermore considerably alters Pliny’s wording, sometimes condensing the thought, sometimes amplifying the phraseology—apparently in an effort to make the point clearer and easier reading. Of Pliny’s thirty-seven books only those from the third to the thirteenth inclusive and the last book are used to any extent by Solinus. That is to say, he either was acquainted with only, or confined himself to, those books dealing with geography, man and other animals, and gems, omitting almost entirely, except for the twelfth and thirteenth books, Pliny’s elaborate treatment of vegetation and of medicinal simples[1477] and discussion of metals and the fine arts. Solinus does not acknowledge his great debt to Pliny in particular, although he keeps alluding to the fulness with which everything has already been discussed by past authors, and although he cites other writers who are almost unknown to us. Of his known sources Pomponius Mela is the chief after Pliny but is used much less. On the other hand, the number of passages for which Mommsen was unable to give any source is not inconsiderable. As may have been already inferred, the work of Solinus is brief; the text alone would scarcely fill one hundred pages.[1478]

[Sidenote: Animals and gems.]

It would perhaps be rash to conjecture which quality commended the book most to the following period: its handy size, or its easy style and fairly systematic arrangement, or its emphasis upon marvels. The last characteristic is at least the most germane to our investigation. Solinus rendered the service, if we may so term it, of reducing Pliny’s treatment of animals and precious stones in particular to a few common examples, which either were already the best known or became so as a result of his selection. Indeed, King was of the opinion that the descriptions of gems in Solinus were more precise, technical, and systematic than those in Pliny, and found his notices “often extremely useful.”[1479] Solinus describes such animals as the wolf, lynx, bear, lion, hyena, onager or wild ass, basilisk, crocodile, hippopotamus, phoenix, dolphin, and chameleon; and recounts the marvelous properties of such gems as achates or agate, galactites, catochites, crystal, gagates, adamant, heliotrope, hyacinth, and paeanites. The dragons of India and Ethiopia also occupy his attention, as they did that of Philostratus in the Life of Apollonius of Tyana; indeed, he repeats in different words the statement found in Philostratus that they swim far out to sea.[1480] In Sardinia, on the contrary, there are no snakes, but a poisonous ant exists there. Fortunately there are also healing waters there with which to counteract its venom, but there is also native to Sardinia an herb called Sardonia which causes those who eat it to die of laughter.[1481]

[Sidenote: Occult medicine.]

Although Solinus makes no use of Pliny’s medical books, he shows considerable interest in the healing properties of simples and in medicine. He tells us that those who slept in the shrine of Aesculapius at Epidaurus were warned in dreams how to heal their diseases,[1482] and that the third daughter of Aeetes, named Angitia, devoted herself “to resisting disease by the salubrious science” of medicine.[1483] According to Solinus Circe as well as Medea was a daughter of Aeetes, but usually in Greek mythology she is represented as his sister.

[Sidenote: Democritus and Zoroaster not regarded as magicians.]

This allusion to Circe and Medea shows that magic, to which medicine and pharmacy are apparently akin, does not pass unnoticed in Solinus’s page. He copies from Mela the account of the periodical transformation of the Neuri into wolves.[1484] But instead of accusing Democritus of having employed magic, as Pliny does, Solinus represents him as engaging in contests with the Magi, in which he made frequent use of the stone catochites in order to demonstrate the occult power of nature.[1485] That is to say, Democritus was apparently opposing science to magic and showing that all the latter’s feats could be duplicated or improved upon by employing natural forces. In two other passages[1486] Solinus calls Democritus physicus, or scientist, and affirms that his birth in Abdera did more to make that town famous than any other thing connected with it, despite the fact that it was founded by and named after the sister of Diomedes. Zoroaster, too, whom Pliny called the founder of the magic art, is not spoken of as a magician by Solinus, although he is mentioned three times and is described as “most skilled in the best arts,” and is cited concerning the power of coral and of the gem aetites.[1487]

[Sidenote: Some bits of astrology.]

It is not part of Solinus’s plan to describe the heavens, but he occasionally alludes to “the discipline of the stars,”[1488] as he calls astronomy or astrology. On the authority of L. Tarrutius, “most renowned of astrologers,”[1489] he tells us that the foundations of the walls of Rome were laid by Romulus in his twenty-second year on the eleventh day of the kalends of May between the second and third hours, when Jupiter was in Pisces, the sun in Taurus, the moon in Libra, and the other four planets in the sign of the scorpion. He also speaks of the star Arcturus destroying the Argive fleet off Euboea on its return from Ilium.[1490]

[Sidenote: Alexander the Great.]

Alexander the Great figures prominently in the pages of Alexander Solinus, being mentioned a score of times, and this too corresponds to the medieval interest in the Macedonian conqueror. Stories concerning him are repeated from Pliny, but Solinus also displays further information. He insists that Philip was truly his father, although he adds that Olympias strove to acquire a nobler father for him, when she affirmed that she had had intercourse with a dragon, and that Alexander tried to have himself considered of divine descent.[1491] The statement concerning Olympias suggests the story of Nectanebus, of which a later chapter will treat, but that individual is not mentioned, although Aristotle and Callisthenes are spoken of as Alexander’s tutors, so that it is doubtful if Solinus was acquainted with the Pseudo-Callisthenes. He describes Alexander’s line of march with fair accuracy and not in the totally incorrect manner of the Pseudo-Callisthenes.

[Sidenote: The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo.]

In seeking a third text and author of the same type as Aelian and Solinus to round out the present chapter, our choice unhesitatingly falls upon the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo, a work which pretends to explain the meaning of the written symbols employed by the ancient Egyptian priests, but which is really principally concerned with the same marvelous habits and properties of animals of which Aelian treated. In brief the idea is that these characteristics of animals must be known in order to comprehend the significance of the animal figures in the ancient hieroglyphic writing. Horapollo is supposed to have written in the Egyptian language in perhaps the fourth or fifth century of our era,[1492] but his work is extant only in the Greek translation of it made by a Philip who lived a century or two later and who seems to have made some additions of his own.[1493]

[Sidenote: Marvels of animals.]

The zoology of Horapollo is for the most part not novel, but repeats the same erroneous notions that may be found in Aristotle’s History of Animals, Pliny’s Natural History, Aelian, and other ancient authors. Again we hear of the basilisk’s fatal breath, of the beaver’s discarded testicles, of the unnatural methods of conception of the weasel and viper, of the bear’s licking its cubs into shape, of the kindness of storks to their parents, of wasps generated from a dead horse, of the phoenix, of the swan’s song, of the sick lion’s eating an ape to cure himself, of the bull tamed by tying it to the branch of a wild fig tree, of the elephant’s fear of a ram or a dog and how it buries its tusks.[1494] Less familiar perhaps are the assertions that the mare miscarries, if she merely treads on a wolf’s tracks;[1495] that the pigeon cures itself by placing laurel in its nest;[1496] that putting the wings of a bat on an ant-hill will prevent the ants from coming out.[1497] The statement that if the hyena, when hunted, turns to the right, it will slay its pursuer, while if it turns to the left, it will be slain by him, is also found in Pliny.[1498] But his long enumeration of virtues ascribed to parts of the hyena by the Magi does not include the assertion in Horapollo’s next chapter[1499] that a man girded with a hyena skin can pass through the ranks of his enemies without injury, although it ascribes somewhat similar virtues to the animal’s skin. In Horapollo it is the hawk rather than the eagle which surpasses other winged creatures in its ability to gaze at the sun; hence physicians use the hawkweed in eye-cures.[1500]

[Sidenote: Animals and astrology.]

Animals also serve as astronomical or astrological symbols in the system of hieroglyphic writing as interpreted by Horapollo. Not only does a palm tree represent the year because it puts forth a new branch every new moon,[1501] but the phoenix denotes the magnus annus in the course of which the heavenly bodies complete their revolutions.[1502] The scarab rolls his ball of dung from east to west and gives it the shape of the universe.[1503] He buries it for twenty-eight days conformably to the course of the moon through the zodiac, but he has thirty toes to correspond to the days of the month. As there is no female scarab, so there is no male vulture. The female vulture symbolizes the Egyptian year by spending five days in conceiving by the wind, one hundred and twenty in pregnancy, the same period in rearing its young, and the remaining one hundred and twenty days in preparing itself to repeat the process.[1504] The vulture also visits battlefields seven days in advance and by the direction of its glance indicates which army will be defeated.

[Sidenote: The cynocephalus.]

The cynocephalus, dog-headed ape, or baboon, was mentioned several times by Pliny, but Horapollo gives more specific information concerning it, chiefly of an astrological character. It is born circumcised and is reared in temples in order to learn from it the exact hour of lunar eclipses, at which times it neither sees nor eats, while the female ex genitalibus sanguinem emittit. The cynocephalus represents the inhabitable world which has seventy-two primitive parts, because the animal dies and is buried piecemeal by the priests during a period of as many days, until at the end of the seventy-second day life has entirely departed from the last remnant of its carcass.[1505] The cynocephalus not only marks the time of eclipses but at the equinoxes makes water twelve times by day and by night, marking off the hours; hence a figure of it is carved by the Egyptians on their water-clocks.[1506] Horapollo associates together the god of the universe and fate and the stars which are five in number, for he believes that five planets carry out the economy of the universe and that they are subject to God’s government.[1507]

[Sidenote: Horapollo the cosmopolitan.]

Horapollo cannot be given high rank either as a zoologist and astronomer, or a philologer and archaeologist; but at least he was no narrow nationalist and had some respect for history. The Egyptians, he says, “denote a man who has never left his own country by a human figure with the head of an ass, because he neither hears any history nor knows of what is going on abroad.”[1508]

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II. EARLY CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

Foreword. Chapter 13. The Book of Enoch. ” 14. Philo Judaeus. ” 15. The Gnostics. ” 16. The Christian Apocrypha. ” 17. The Recognitions of Clement and Simon Magus. ” 18. The Confession of Cyprian and some similar stories. ” 19. Origen and Celsus. ” 20. Other Christian Discussion of Magic before Augustine. ” 21. Christianity and Natural Science; Basil, Epiphanius, and the Physiologus. ” 22. Augustine on Magic and Astrology. ” 23. The Fusion of Pagan and Christian Thought in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries.

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Foreword

We now turn back chronologically to the point from which we started in our survey of classical science and magic in order to trace the development of Christian thought in regard to the same subjects. How far did Christianity break with ancient science and superstition? To what extent did it borrow from them?

[Sidenote: Magic and religion.]

It has often been remarked that, as a new religion comes to prevail in a society, the old rites are discredited and prohibited as magic. The faith and ceremonies of the majority, performed publicly, are called religion: the discarded cult, now practiced only privately and covertly by a minority, is stigmatized as magic and contrary to the general good. Thus we shall hear Christian writers condemn the pagan oracles and auguries as arts of divination, and classify the ancient gods as demons of the same sort as those invoked in the magic arts. Conversely, when a new religion is being introduced, is as yet regarded as a foreign faith, and is still only the private worship of a minority, the majority regard it as outlandish magic. And this we shall find illustrated by the accusations of sorcery and magic heaped upon Jesus by the Jews, and upon the Jews and the early Christians by a world long accustomed to pagan rites. The same bandying back and forth of the charge of magic occurred between Mohammed and the Meccans.[1509]

[Sidenote: Relation between early Christian and medieval literature.]

It is perhaps generally assumed that the men of the middle ages were widely read in and deeply influenced by the fathers of the early church, but at least for our subject this influence has hardly been treated either broadly or in detail. Indeed, the predilection of the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for anything written in Greek and their aversion to medieval Latin has too long operated as a bar to the study of medieval literature in general. And scholars who have edited or studied the Greek, Syriac, and other ancient texts connected with early Christianity have perhaps too often neglected the Latin versions preserved in medieval manuscripts, or, while treasuring up every hint that Photius lets fall, have failed to note the citations and allusions in medieval Latin encyclopedists. Yet it is often the case that the manuscripts containing the Latin versions are of earlier date than those which seem to preserve the Greek original text.

[Sidenote: Method of presenting early Christian thought.]

There is so much repetition and resemblance between the numerous Christian writers in Greek and Latin of the Roman Empire that I have even less than in the case of their classical contemporaries attempted a complete presentation of them, but, while not intending to omit any account of the first importance in the history of magic or experimental science, have aimed to make a selection of representative persons and typical passages. At the same time, in the case of those authors and works which are discussed, the aim is to present their thought in sufficiently specific detail to enable the reader to estimate for himself their scientific or superstitious character and their relations to classical thought on the one hand and medieval thought on the other.

Before we treat of Christian writings themselves it is essential to notice some related lines of thought and groups of writings which either preceded or accompanied the development of Christian thought and literature, and which either influenced even orthodox thought powerfully, or illustrate foreign elements, aberrations, side-currents, and undertows which none the less cannot be disregarded in tracing the main current of Christian belief. We therefore shall successively treat of the literature extant under the name of Enoch, of the works of Philo Judaeus, of the doctrines of the Gnostics, of the Christian Apocrypha, of the Pseudo-Clementines and Simon Magus, and of the Confession of Cyprian and some similar stories. We shall then make Origen’s Reply to Celsus, in which the conflict of classical and Christian conceptions is well illustrated, our point of departure in an examination of the attitude of the early fathers towards magic and science. Succeeding chapters will treat of the attitude toward magic of other fathers before Augustine, of Christianity and natural science as shown in Basil’s Hexaemeron, Epiphanius’ Panarion, and the Physiologus, and of Augustine himself. A final chapter on the fusion of paganism and Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries will terminate this second division of our investigation and also serve as a supplement to the preceding division and an introduction to the third book on the early middle ages. Our arrangement is thus in part topical rather than strictly chronological. The dates of many authors and works are too dubious, there is too much of the apocryphal and interpolated, and we have to rely too much upon later writers for the views of earlier ones, to make a strictly or even primarily chronological arrangement either advisable or feasible.

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XIII. THE BOOK OF ENOCH

Enoch’s reputation as an astrologer in the middle ages—Date and influence of the literature ascribed to Enoch—Angels governing the universe; stars and angels—The fallen angels teach men magic and other arts—The stars as sinners—Effect of sin upon nature—Celestial phenomena—Mountains and metals—Strange animals.

[Sidenote: Enoch’s reputation as an astrologer in the middle ages.]

In collections of medieval manuscripts there often is found a treatise on fifteen stars, fifteen herbs, fifteen stones, and fifteen figures engraved upon them, which is attributed sometimes to Hermes, presumably Trismegistus, and sometimes to Enoch, the patriarch, who “walked with God and was not.”[1510] Indeed in the prologue to a Hermetic work on astrology in a medieval manuscript we are told that Enoch and the first of the three Hermeses or Mercuries are identical.[1511] This treatise probably has no direct relation to the Book of Enoch, which we shall discuss in this chapter and which was composed in the pre-Christian period. But it is interesting to observe that the same reputation for astrology, which led the middle ages sometimes to ascribe this treatise to Enoch, is likewise found in “the first notice of a book of Enoch,” which “appears to be due to a Jewish or Samaritan Hellenist,” which “has come down to us successively through Alexander Polyhistor and Eusebius,” and which states that Enoch was the founder of astrology.[1512] The statement in Genesis that Enoch lived three hundred and sixty-five years would also lead men to associate him with the solar year and stars.

[Sidenote: Date and influence of the literature ascribed to Enoch.]

The Book of Enoch is “the precipitate of a literature, once very active, which revolved ... round Enoch,” and in the form which has come down to us is a patchwork from “several originally independent books.”[1513] It is extant in the form of Greek fragments preserved in the Chronography of G. Syncellus,[1514] or but lately discovered in (Upper) Egypt, and in more complete but also more recent manuscripts giving an Ethiopic and a Slavonic version.[1515] These last two versions are quite different both in language and content, while some of the citations of Enoch in ancient writers apply to neither of these versions. While “Ethiopic did not exist as a literary language before 350 A. D.,”[1516] and none of the extant manuscripts of the Ethiopic version is earlier than the fifteenth century,[1517] Charles believes that they are based upon a Greek translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic original, and that even the interpolations in this were made by an editor living before the Christian era. He asserts that “nearly all the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it,” and influenced by it,—in fact that its influence on the New Testament was greater than that of all the other apocrypha together, and that it “had all the weight of a canonical book” with the early church fathers.[1518] After 300 A. D., however, it became discredited, except as we have seen among Ethiopic and Slavonic Christians. Before 300 Origen in his Reply to Celsus[1519] accuses his opponent of quoting the Book of Enoch as a Christian authority concerning the fallen angels. Origen objects that “the books which bear the name Enoch do not at all circulate in the Churches as divine.” Augustine, in the City of God,[1520] written between 413 and 426, admits that Enoch “left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical epistle.” But he doubts if any of the writings current in his own day are genuine and thinks that they have been wisely excluded from the course of Scripture. Lods writes that after the ninth century in the east and from a much earlier date in the west, the Book of Enoch is not mentioned, “At the most some medieval rabbis seem still to know of it.”[1521] Yet Alexander Neckam, in the twelfth century, speaks as if Latin Christendom of that date had some acquaintance with the Enoch literature. We shall note some passages in Saint Hildegard which seem parallel to others in the Book of Enoch, while Vincent of Beauvais in his Speculum naturale in the thirteenth century, in justifying a certain discriminating use of the apocryphal books, points out that Jude quotes Enoch whose book is now called apocryphal.[1522]

[Sidenote: Angels governing the universe: stars and angels.]

The Enoch literature has much to say concerning angels, and implies their control of nature, man, and the future. We hear of Raphael, “who is set over all the diseases and wounds of the children of men”; Gabriel, “who is set over all the powers”; Phanuel, “who is set over the repentance and hope of those who inherit eternal life.”[1523] The revolution of the stars is described as “according to the number of the angels,” and in the Slavonic version the number of those angels is stated as two hundred.[1524] Indeed the stars themselves are often personified and we read “how they keep faith with each other” and even of “all the stars whose privy members are like those of horses.”[1525] The Ethiopic version also speaks of the angels or spirits of hoar-frost, dew, hail, snow and so forth.[1526] In the Slavonic version Enoch finds in the sixth heaven the angels who attend to the phases of the moon and the revolutions of stars and sun and who superintend the good or evil condition of the world. He finds angels set over the years and seasons, the rivers and sea, the fruits of the earth, and even an angel over every herb.[1527]

[Sidenote: The fallen angels teach men magic and other arts.]

The fallen angels in particular are mentioned in the Book of Enoch. Two hundred angels lusted after the comely daughters of men and bound themselves by oaths to marry them.[1528] After having thus taken unto themselves wives, they instructed the human race in the art of magic and the science of botany—or to be more exact, “charms and enchantments” and “the cutting of roots and of woods.” In another chapter various individual angels are named who taught respectively the enchanters and botanists, the breaking of charms, astrology, and various branches thereof.[1529] In the Greek fragment preserved by Syncellus there are further mentioned pharmacy, and what probably denote geomancy (“sign of the earth”) and aeromancy (aeroskopia). Through this revelation of mysteries which should have been kept hid we are told that men “know all the secrets of the angels, and all the violence of the Satans, and all their occult power, and all the power of those who practice sorcery, and the power of witchcraft, and the power of those who make molten images for the whole earth.”[1530] The revelation included, moreover, not only magic arts, witchcraft, divination, and astrology, but also natural sciences, such as botany and pharmacy—which, however, are apparently regarded as closely akin to magic—and useful arts such as mining metals, manufacturing armor and weapons, and “writing with ink and paper”—“and thereby many sinned from eternity to eternity and until this day.”[1531] As the preceding remark indicates, the author is decidedly of the opinion that men were not created to the end that they should write with pen and ink. “For man was created exactly like the angels to the intent that he should continue righteous and pure, ... but through this their knowledge men are perishing.”[1532] Perhaps the writer means to censure writing as magical and thinks of it only as mystic signs and characters. Magic is always regarded as evil in the Enoch literature, and witchcraft, enchantments, and “devilish magic” are given a prominent place in a list in the Slavonic version[1533] of evil deeds done upon earth.

[Sidenote: The stars as sinners.]

In connection with the fallen angels we find the stars regarded as capable of sin as well as personified. In the Ethiopic version there is more than one mention of seven stars that transgressed the command of God and are bound against the day of judgment or for the space of ten thousand years.[1534] One passage tells how “judgment was held first over the stars, and they were judged and found guilty, and went to the place of condemnation, and they were cast into an abyss.”[1535] A similar identification of the stars with the fallen angels is found in one of the visions of Saint Hildegard in the twelfth century. She writes, “I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling sparks which with the star followed southward. And they examined Him upon His throne almost as something hostile, and turning from Him, they sought rather the north. And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals ... and cast into the abyss that I could see them no more.”[1536] She then interprets the vision as signifying the fall of the angels.

[Sidenote: Effect of sin upon nature.]

An idea which we shall find a number of times in other ancient and medieval writers appears also in the Book of Enoch. It is that human sin upsets the world of nature, and in this particular case, even the period of the moon and the orbits of the stars.[1537] Hildegard again roughly parallels the Enoch literature by holding that the original harmony of the four elements upon this earth was changed into a confused and disorderly mixture after the fall of man.[1538]

[Sidenote: Celestial phenomena]

The natural world, although intimately associated with the spiritual world and hardly distinguished from it in the Enoch literature, receives considerable attention, and much of the discussion in both the Ethiopic and Slavonic versions is of a scientific rather than ethical or apocalyptic character. One section of the Ethiopic version is described by Charles[1539] as the Book of Celestial Physics and upholds a calendar based upon the lunar year. The Slavonic version, on the other hand, while mentioning the lunar year of 354 days and the solar year of 365 and ¼ days, seems to prefer the latter, since the years of Enoch’s life are given as 365, and he writes 366 books concerning what he has seen in his visions and voyages.[1540] The Book of Enoch supposes a plurality of heavens.[1541] In the Slavonic version Enoch is taken through the seven heavens, or ten heavens in one manuscript, with the signs of the zodiac in the eighth and ninth. An account is also given of the creation, and the waters above the firmament, which were to give the early Christian apologists and medieval clerical scientists so much difficulty, are described as follows: “And thus I made firm the waters, that is, the depths, and I surrounded the waters with light, and I created seven circles, and I fashioned them like crystal, moist and dry, that is to say, like glass and ice, and as for the waters and also the other elements I showed each of them their paths, (viz.) to the seven stars, each of them in their heaven, how they should go.”[1542] The order of the seven planets in their circles is given as follows: in the first and highest circle the star Kruno, then Aphrodite or Venus, Ares (Mars), the sun, Zeus (Jupiter), Hermes (Mercury), and the moon.[1543] God also tells Enoch that the duration of the world will be for a week of years, that is, seven thousand, after which “let there be at the beginning of the eighth thousand a time when there is no computation and no end; neither years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours.”[1544]

[Sidenote: Mountains and metals.]

Turning from celestial physics to terrestrial phenomena, we may note a few allusions to minerals, vegetation, and animals. “Seven mountains of magnificent stones” are more than once mentioned in the Ethiopic version and are described as each different from the other.[1545] Another passage speaks of “seven mountains full of choice nard and aromatic trees and cinnamon and pepper.”[1546] But whether these groups of seven mountains are to be astrologically related to the seven planets is not definitely stated. We are also left in doubt whether the following passage may have some astrological or even alchemical significance, or whether it is merely a figurative prophecy like that in the Book of Daniel concerning the image seen by Nebuchadnezzar in his dream. “There mine eyes saw all the hidden things of heaven that shall be, an iron mountain, and one of copper, and one of silver, and one of gold, and one of soft metal, and one of lead.”[1547] At any rate Enoch has come very near to listing the seven metals usually associated with the seven planets. In another passage we are informed that while silver and “soft metal” come from the earth, lead and tin are produced by a fountain in which an eminent angel stands.[1548]

[Sidenote: Strange animals.]

As for animals we are informed that Behemoth is male and Leviathan female.[1549] When Enoch went to the ends of the earth he saw there great beasts and birds who differed in appearance, beauty, and voice.[1550] In the Slavonic version we hear a good deal of phoenixes and chalkydri, who seem to be flying dragons. These creatures are described as “strange in appearance with the feet and tails of lions and the heads of crocodiles. Their appearance was of a purple color like the rainbow; their size, nine hundred measures. Their wings were like those of angels, each with twelve, and they attend the chariot of the sun, and go with him, bringing heat and dew as they are ordered by God.”[1551]

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XIV. PHILO JUDAEUS

Bibliographical note—Philo the mediator between Hellenistic and Jewish-Christian thought—His influence upon the middle ages was indirect—Good and bad magic—Stars not gods nor first causes—But rational and virtuous animals, and God’s viceroys over inferiors—They do not cause evil; but it is possible to predict the future from their motions—Jewish astrology—Perfection of the number seven—And of fifty—Also of four and six—Spirits of the air—Interpretation of dreams—Politics are akin to magic—A thought repeated by Moses Maimonides and Albertus Magnus.

“But since every city in which laws are properly established has a regular constitution, it became necessary for this citizen of the world to adopt the same constitution as that which prevailed in the universal world. And this constitution is the right reason of nature.” —On Creation, cap. 50.

[Sidenote: Philo the mediator between Hellenistic and Jewish-Christian thought.]

There probably is no other man who marks so well the fusion of Hellenic and Hebrew ideas and the transition from them to Christian thought as Philo Judaeus.[1552] He flourished at Alexandria in the first years of our era—the exact dates both of his birth and of his death are uncertain—and speaks of himself as an old man at the time of his participation in the embassy of Jews to the Emperor Gaius or Caligula in 40 A. D. He repeats the doctrines of the Greek philosophers and anticipates much that the church fathers discuss. Before the Neo-Platonists he regards matter as the source of all evil and feels the necessity of mediators, angels or demons, between God and man. Before the medieval revival of Aristotle and natural philosophy he tries to reconcile the Mosaic account of creation with belief in a world soul, and monotheism with astrology. Before the rise of Christian monasticism he describes in his treatise On the Contemplative Life an ascetic community of Therapeutae at Lake Maerotis.[1553] After Pythagoras he enlarges upon the mystic significance of numbers. After Plato he repeats the conception of an ideal city of God which was to gain such a hold upon Christian imagination.[1554] After the Stoics he proclaims the doctrine of the law of nature, holds that the institution of human slavery is absolutely contrary to it, and writes “a treatise to prove that every virtuous man is free” and that to be virtuous is to live in conformity to nature.[1555] He had previously written another treatise designed to show that “every wicked man was a slave,”[1556] and he held a theory which we met in the Enoch literature and shall meet again in a number of subsequent writers that sin was punished naturally by forces of nature such as floods and thunderbolts. He did not originate the practice of allegorical interpretation of the Bible but he is our first great extant example thereof. He even went so far as to regard the tree of life and the story of the serpent tempting Eve as purely symbolical, an attitude which found little favor with Christian writers.[1557] His effort by means of the allegorical method to find in the books of the Pentateuch all the attractive concepts and theories which he had learned from the Greeks became later in the Christian apologists an assertion that Plato and Pythagoras had borrowed their doctrines from Abraham and Moses. His doctrine of the logos had a powerful influence upon the writers of the New Testament and the theology of the early church.[1558] Yet Philo affirms that no more perfect good than philosophy exists in human life and in both literary style and erudition he is a Hellene to his very finger tips. The recent tendency, seen especially in German scholarship, to deny the writers of the Roman Empire any capacity for original thought and to trace back their ideas to unextant authors of a supposedly much more productive Hellenistic age has perhaps been carried too far. But if we may not regard Philo as a great originator, and it is evident that he borrowed many of his ideas, he was at any rate a great transmitter of thought, a mediator after his own heart between Jews and Greeks, and between them both and the Christian writers to come. Standing at the close of the Hellenistic age and at the opening of the Roman period, he occupies in the history of speculative and theological thought an analogous position to that of Pliny the Elder in the history of natural science, gathering up the lore of the past, perhaps improving it with some additions of his own, and exercising a profound influence upon the age to come.

[Sidenote: His influence upon the middle ages was indirect.]

Philo’s medieval influence, however, was probably more indirect than Pliny’s and passed itself on through yet other mediators to the more remote times. Comparatively speaking, the Natural History of Pliny probably was more important in the middle ages than in the early Roman Empire when other authorities prevailed in the Greek-speaking world. Philo’s influence on the other hand must soon be transmitted through Christian, and then again through Latin, mediums. This is indicated by the fact that to-day many of his works are wholly lost or extant only in fragments[1559] or in Armenian versions,[1560] and that we have no sure information as to the order in which they were composed.[1561] But his initial force is none the less of the greatest moment, and seems amply sufficient to justify us in selecting his writings as one of our starting points. The extent to which one is apt to find in the writings of Philo passages which are forerunners of the statements of subsequent writers, may be illustrated by the familiar story of King Canute and the tide. Philo in his work On Dreams[1562] speaks of the custom of the Germans of charging the incoming tide with their drawn swords. But what especially concern us are Philo’s statements concerning magic, astrology, the stars, the perfection and power of numbers, demons, and the interpretation of dreams.

[Sidenote: Good and bad magic.]

Philo draws a distinction between magic in the good and bad sense. The former and true magical art is the lore of learned Persians called Magi who investigate nature more minutely and deeply than is usual and explain divine virtues clearly.[1563] The latter magic is a spurious imitation of the other, practised by quacks and impostors, old-wives and slaves, who by means of incantations and the like procedure profess to change men from love to hatred or vice versa and who “deceive unsuspecting persons and waste whole families away by degrees and without making any noise.” It is to this adulterated and evil magic that Philo again refers when he likens political life to Joseph’s coat of many colors, stained with the blood of wars, and in which a very little truth is mixed up with a great deal of sophistry akin to that of the augurs, ventriloquists, sorcerers, jugglers and enchanters, “from whose treacherous arts it is very difficult to escape.”[1564] This distinction between a magic of the wise and of nature and that of vulgar impostors is one which we shall find in many subsequent writers, although it was not recognized by Pliny. Philo also antecedes numerous Christian commentators upon the Book of Numbers[1565] in considering the vexed question whether Balaam was an evil enchanter and diviner, or a divine prophet, or whether he combined magic and prophecy, and thus indicated that the former art is not evil but has divine approval. Philo’s conclusion is the more usual one that Balaam was a celebrated diviner and magician, and that it is impossible that “holy inspiration should be combined with magic,” but that in the particular case of his blessing Israel the spirit of divine prophecy took possession of him and “drove all his artificial system of cunning divination out of his soul.”[1566]

[Sidenote: Stars not gods nor first causes.]

Philo has considerably more to say upon the subject of astrology than upon that of magic. He was especially concerned to deny that the stars were first causes or independent gods. He chided the Chaldean adepts in genethlialogy for recognizing no other god than the universe and no other causes than those apparent to the senses, and for regarding fate and necessity as gods and the periodical revolutions of the heavenly bodies as the cause of all good and evil.[1567] Philo more than once exhorts the reader to follow Abraham’s example in leaving Chaldea and the science of genethlialogy and coming to Charran to a comprehension of the true nature of God.[1568] He agreed with Moses that the stars should not be worshiped and that they had been created by God, and more than that, not created until the fourth day, in order that it might be perfectly clear to men that they were not the primary causes of things.[1569]

[Sidenote: But rational and virtuous animals: and God’s viceroys over inferiors.]

Philo, nevertheless, despite his attack on the Chaldeans, believed in much which we should call astrological. The stars, although not independent gods, are nevertheless divine images of surpassing beauty and possess divine natures, although they are not incorporeal beings. Philo distinguishes between the stars, men, and other animals as follows. The beasts are capable of neither virtue nor vice; human beings are capable of both; the stars are intelligent animals, but incapable of any evil and wholly virtuous.[1570] They were native-born citizens of the world long before its first human citizen had been naturalized.[1571] God, moreover, did not postpone their creation until the fourth day because superiors are subject to inferiors. On the contrary they are the viceroys of the Father of all and in the vast city of this universe the ruling class is made up of the planets and fixed stars, and the subject class consists of all the natures beneath the moon.[1572] A relation of natural sympathy exists between the different parts of the universe, and all things upon the earth are dependent upon the stars.[1573]

[Sidenote: They do not cause evil: but it is possible to predict the future from their motions.]

Philo of course will not admit that evil is caused either by the virtuous stars or by God working through them. As has been said, he attributed evil to matter or to “the natural changes of the elements,”[1574] drawing a line between God and nature in much the fashion of the church fathers later. But he granted that “before now some men have conjecturally predicted disturbances and commotions of the earth from the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, and innumerable other events which have turned out most exactly true.”[1575] Philo’s interest in astronomy and astrology is further suggested by his interpretation of the eleven stars of Joseph’s dream as referring to the signs of the zodiac,[1576] Joseph himself making the twelfth; and by his interpreting the ladder in Jacob’s dream which stretched between earth and heaven as referring to the air,[1577] into which earth’s evaporations dissolve, while the moon is not pure ether like the other stars but itself contains some air. This accounts, Philo thinks, for the spots upon the moon—an explanation which I do not remember having met in subsequent writers.

[Sidenote: Jewish astrology.]

Josephus[1578] and the Jews in general of Philo’s time were equally devoted to astrology according to Münter, who says: “Only their astrology was subordinated to theism. The one God always appeared as the master of the host of heaven. But they regarded the stars as living divine beings and powers of heaven.”[1579] In the Talmud later we read that the hour of Abraham’s birth was announced by the stars and that he feared from his observations of the constellations that he would go childless. Münter also gives examples of the belief of the rabbis in the influence of the stars upon the destiny of the Jewish people and upon the fate of individual men, and of their belief that a star would announce the coming of the Messiah.[1580]

[Sidenote: Perfection of the number seven.]

From Philo’s astrology it is an easy step to his frequent reveries concerning the perfection and mystic significance of certain numbers,—a train of thought which was continued by many of the church fathers, and is also found in various pagan writers of the Roman Empire.[1581] Thomas Browne in his enquiry into “Vulgar Errors”[1582] was inclined to hold Philo even more responsible than Pythagoras or Plato for the dissemination of such doctrines. Philo himself recognizes the close connection between astrology and number mysticism, when, after affirming the dependence of all earthly things upon the heavenly bodies, he adds: “It is in heaven, too, that the ratio of the number seven began.”[1583] Philo doubts if it is possible to express adequately the glories of the number seven, but he feels that he ought at least to attempt it and devotes a dozen chapters of his treatise on the creation of the world to it,[1584] to say nothing of other passages. He notes that there are seven planets, seven circles of heaven, four quarters of the moon of seven days each, that such constellations as the Pleiades and Ursa Major consist of seven stars, and that children born at the end of seven months live, while those who see the light in the eighth month die. In diseases the seventh is a critical day. Also there are either seven ages of man’s life, as Hippocrates says, or, in accordance with Solon’s lines, man’s three-score years and ten may be subdivided into ten periods of seven years each. The lyre of seven strings corresponds to the seven planets, and in speech there are seven vowels. There are seven divisions of the head—eyes, ears, nostrils, and mouth, seven divisions of the body, seven kinds of motion, seven things seen, and even the senses are seven rather than five if we add the vocal and generative organs.[1585]

[Sidenote: And of fifty.]

Philo’s ideal sect, the Therapeutae, are wont to assemble as a prelude to their greatest feast at the end of seven weeks, “venerating not only the simple week of seven days but also its multiplied power,”[1586] but the chief festival itself occurs on the fiftieth day, “the most holy and natural of numbers, being compounded of the power of the right-angled triangle, which is the principle of the origination and condition of the whole.”[1587]

[Sidenote: Also of four and six.]

The numbers four and six, however, yield little to seven and fifty in the matter of perfection. It was the fourth day that God chose for the creation of the heavenly bodies, and He did not need six days for the entire work of creation, but it was fitting that that perfect work should be accomplished in a perfect number of days. Six is the product of the first female number, two, and the first male number, three. Indeed, the first three numbers, one, two, and three, whether added or multiplied, give six.[1588] As for four, there are that many elements and seasons; it is the only number produced by the same number—two—whether added to itself or multiplied by itself; it is the first square and as such the emblem of justice and equality; it also represents the cube or solid, as the number one stands for a point, two for a line, and three for a surface.[1589] Furthermore four is the source of “the all-perfect decade,” since one and two and three and four make ten. At this we begin to suspect, and with considerable justification, as the writings of other devotees of the philosophy of numbers would show, that the number of perfect numbers is legion. We may not, however, follow Philo much farther on this topic. Suffice it to add that he finds the fifth day fitting for the creation of animals possessed of five senses,[1590] while he divides the ten plagues of Egypt into three dealing with the more solid elements, earth and water, and performed by Aaron; three dealing with air and fire which were entrusted to Moses; the seventh was committed to both Aaron and Moses; while the other three God reserved for Himself.[1591]

[Sidenote: Spirits of the air.]

Philo believed in a world of spirits, both the angels of the Jews and the demons of the Greeks. When God said: “Let us make man,” Philo believed that He was addressing those assistant spirits who should be held responsible for the viciousness to which man alone of all creation is liable.[1592] Of the divine rational natures Philo regarded some as incorporeal, others like the stars as possessed of bodies.[1593] He also believed that there were spirits in the air as well as afar off in heaven. He could not see why the air should not be inhabited when there were stars in the ether and fish in the sea as well as other animals upon land.[1594] Indeed he argued that it would be absurd that the element which was essential for the vitality even of land and aquatic animals should have no living beings of its own. That these spirits of the air must be invisible did not trouble him, since the human soul is also invisible.

[Sidenote: Interpretation of dreams.]

Of Philo’s five books on dreams only two are extant. They suffice to show, however, that he accepted the art of divination from dreams. Of dreams he distinguished three varieties: those direct from God which require no interpretation; those in which the dreamer’s mind moves in unison with the world soul, and which are neither entirely clear nor yet very obscure—an instance is Jacob’s vision of the ladder; and third, those in which the mind is moved by a prophetic frenzy of its own, and which require the science of interpretation—such dreams were Joseph’s concerning his brothers, and those of the butler and the baker at Pharaoh’s court.[1595]

[Sidenote: Politics akin to magic.]

The recent war and its accompaniments and sequels have brought home to some the conviction that our modern civilization is after all not vastly superior to that of some preceding ages. To those who still imagine that because modern science has freed us from much past superstition concerning nature, we are therefore free from political fakirs, from social absurdities, and from fallacious procedure and reasoning in many departments of life, the reading may be recommended of a passage in Philo’s treatise on dreams,[1596] in which he classifies the art of politics along with that of magic. He compares Joseph’s coat of many colors to “the much-variegated web of political affairs” where along with “the smallest possible portion of truth” falsehoods of every shade of plausibility are interwoven; and he compares politicians and statesmen to augurs, ventriloquists, and sorcerers, “men skilful in juggling and in incantations and in tricks of all kinds, from whose treacherous arts it is very difficult to escape.” He adds that Moses very naturally represented Joseph’s coat as blood-stained, since all statecraft is tainted with wars and bloodshed.

[Sidenote: A thought repeated by Moses Maimonides and Albertus Magnus.]

Twelve centuries later we find Philo’s association of politicians with magicians repeated by his compatriot Moses Maimonides in the More Nevochim or Guide for the Perplexed,[1597] a work which appeared almost immediately in Latin translation and from which this very passage is cited by Albertus Magnus in his discussion of divination by dreams.[1598] There are some men, says Albert, in whom the intellect is abundant and active and clear. Such men are akin to the superior substances, that is, to the angels and stars, and therefore Moses of Egypt, i.e., Maimonides, calls them sages. But there are others who, according to Albert, confound true wisdom with sophistry and are content with mere probabilities and imaginations and are at home in “rhetorical and civil matters.” Maimonides, however, described this class a little differently, saying that in them the imaginative faculty is preponderant and the rational faculty imperfect. “Whence arises the sect of politicians, of legislators, of diviners, of enchanters, of dreamers, ... and of prestidigiteurs who work marvels by strange cunning and occult arts.”[1599]

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