Chapter XVI. That it is a Natural Impossibility for the Parts of the Cosmos or the Divine Powers to Be Dragged Down by Magical Incantations and So to Give Oracular Predictions to the Inquirers

THE falsehood of the oracle is to be refuted in another way. For surely the sun did not come down to them from heaven, and then, after fully inspiring the recipient, utter the Phoebean oracle; since it is neither possible nor right that so great a luminary should be subjected to man’s compulsion: nay, not even if they should speak of the divine and intelligent power in the sun, because a human soul could never be capable of receiving even this.

In the case of the moon also there would be the same argument. For if they mean to assert that she is Hecate, how then can it be right that she should be dragged down by constraint of men, and prophesy through the recipient, and be taken to help in base and amatory services, herself being ruler of the evil daemons----how right, I say, that Hecate should do these things? This the writer himself acknowledges, as we shall fully prove in due time.

How again could Pluto and Sarapis be changed by physical theory into the sun, when the same author declares that Sarapis is the same with Pluto, and is the ruler of the evil daemons? Moreover, in recording oracles of Sarapis how could he say they were those of the sun?

But in fact from all these considerations it only remains to confess that the physical explanations which have been described have no truth, but are sophisms and subtleties of sophistic men.