Chapter II. The Manner of the Daemoniacal Operation

THESE then, being certain daemons who dwell about the earth and underground, and haunt the heavy and cloudy atmosphere over the earth, and have been condemned, for causes which we shall afterwards allege, to inhabit this dark and earthly abode, love to dwell in graves and monuments of the dead and in all loathsome and impure matter, and delight in bloodshed and gore and the bodies of animals of all kinds, and in the exhalation from the fumes of incense and of vapours rising out of the earth. These and their rulers, who are certain powers of the air, or of the nether world, having observed that the human race was grovelling low about the deification of dead men, and spending its labour very zealously upon sacrifices and savours which were to them most grateful, were ready at hand as supporters and helpers of this delusion; and gloating over the miseries of mankind, they easily deceived silly souls by certain movements of the carved images, which had been consecrated by them of old in honour of the departed, and by the illusions produced by oracles, and by the cures of bodies, which these same daemons were secretly ravaging by their own operation, and then again releasing the men and letting them go free from suffering.

Hereby they the more drove the superstitious headlong into supposing sometimes that they were heavenly powers and certain real gods, and at other times that they were the souls of the deified heroes.

From this cause the belief in the polytheistic error began now to be regarded by the multitude as something greater and more venerable, as their thought passed from what was visible to the invisible nature of those who were hidden in the statues, and so confirmed the delusion more strongly.

Thus then at length the terrestrial daemons, and ‘the world-rulers’ that haunt the air, and the ‘spiritual hosts of wickedness,’ [1]and the leader of them all in malice, were regarded among all men as the greatest of gods; the memory also of those long dead came to be thought worthy of greater worship.

For the shapes of the consecrated images in the various cities were thought to wear the semblance of dead men’s bodies, but of their souls and their divine and incorporeal powers the evil daemons made counterfeit presentations by abundance of fictitious miracles; until at length their consecrated ministers themselves used continually to exaggerate the folly of the illusion, and prepare most of their contrivances by evil arts of jugglery, while the evil daemons again took the lead themselves in teaching these tricks to their ministers. These daemons at all events were the authors of the imposture which was the beginning of the mischief to all human life, as was in fact proved in the preceding book.