Demons Behind the Statues

But you, who surpass everyone in understanding, may say: then how is it that some of the idols show power, if the beings whose statues we set up are not gods? For it is not likely that images with no life and no motion can do anything by themselves, with nothing to move them. That in various places and cities and nations certain effects are produced in the name of idols — that we are far from denying. But it does not follow, because some people have been helped and others harmed, that we should count whoever produced the effects, either way, as gods. I have made careful inquiry into both questions: why you think the idols have this power, and who they really are that borrow the idols’ names and produce the effects. To show who they are that produce what is credited to the idols, and that they are not gods, I have to call on a few witnesses from among the philosophers. [a]

First Thales. Those who have examined his opinions closely report that he makes three kinds: God, demons, and heroes. God he takes to be the Mind of the world; by demons he means beings that have soul; and by heroes the separated souls of men — the good heroes being the good souls, the bad the worthless ones. Plato, again, holds back his agreement on other points, but he too makes his divisions: the uncreated God; those the uncreated One produced to adorn the heaven, the planets and the fixed stars; and demons. About the demons he does not think it right to speak for himself. He thinks we ought to listen to those who have spoken about them before him:

“To speak about the other demons, and to know where they came from, is beyond us. We ought to believe those who have spoken before, since they were, as they say, descendants of gods — and surely they must be well acquainted with their own ancestors. It is impossible, then, to disbelieve the sons of gods, even when they speak without likely or convincing proofs; since they claim to be telling us their own family affairs, custom binds us to believe them. So let us hold and speak as they do about where the gods themselves came from. Of Gaia and Ouranos were born Oceanus and Tethys; and of these, Phorcys, Kronos, Rhea, and the rest; and of Kronos and Rhea, Zeus, Hera, and all the others we know are called their brothers and sisters; and from these, other descendants again.”

Now this is the man who had contemplated the eternal Mind, the God who is grasped by reason, and had set out what he is: that he really exists, that his nature is simple, that the good which flows from him is truth. He had discoursed on primal power, and on how “all things are about the King of all, and all things exist for his sake, and he is the cause of all,” and about two and three, that he is “the second moving about the seconds, and the third about the thirds.” Did such a man really think that learning the truth about beings said to have come from things you can see and touch — from earth and heaven — was a task beyond his powers? Not for a moment. He said it because he thought two things impossible: to believe that gods beget and are begotten, since whatever begins to be has an end waiting for it; and — far harder — to change the mind of the crowd, who take the old stories without examining them. That is why he declared it beyond him to know or to say where the other demons came from. He could neither grant nor teach that gods were begotten.

And as for that saying of his —

— this does not refer to the Zeus said to have sprung from Kronos. Here the name is given to the Maker of the universe. Plato shows it himself. He could find no other title that would suit, so he used the popular name — not as belonging to God properly, but for the sake of being clear, since it is not possible to talk about God to everyone as fully as one might. And he adds the word “Great” at the same time, to mark off the heavenly from the earthly, the uncreated from the created — the one who is younger than heaven and earth, and younger than the Cretans, who stole him away so his father would not kill him.

What need is there — speaking to you, who have searched into every branch of learning — to bring in the poets, or to go through opinions of another kind? Let this much be enough. If the poets and the philosophers had not acknowledged that there is one God, and if they had not held about these gods that some are demons, others matter, and others men who once lived, then there might be some show of reason in our being driven out as aliens, the way we are, since the language we use distinguishes God from matter and marks off the two natures. For as we speak of God, and of a Son who is his Word, and of a Holy Spirit, united in power — the Father, the Son, the Spirit; because the Son is the Father’s Mind and Word and Wisdom, and the Spirit an outflowing, as light is from fire — so also we understand that there are other powers which hold sway over matter and by means of it, and one in particular that is hostile to God. [f]

Not that anything is really set against God, as strife is set against friendship in Empedocles, or night against day in the rising and setting of the stars. If anything really had placed itself against God, it would have ceased to exist, its whole structure broken by God’s power and might. It is rather the good that is in God — the good that belongs to him of necessity and exists along with him, as color does with a body, apart from which color has no existence at all (not as a part of the body, but as an attendant property existing along with it, joined and blended with it, just as it is natural for fire to be yellow and the ether dark blue) — it is that good, I say, that is opposed by the spirit which is about matter, who was created by God, just as the other angels were created by him, and entrusted with the control of matter and of matter’s forms. For this is the work of the angels: to exercise providence on God’s behalf over the things he has created and set in order, so that God may have the universal and general providence of the whole, while the particular parts are looked after by the angels appointed over them.

And it is with the angels as it is with men. Men have freedom of choice toward both virtue and vice — you would not honor the good or punish the bad unless vice and virtue were in their own power, and some men are diligent in what you entrust to them while others are unfaithful. So it is among the angels. Some of them, free agents as God made them, remained in the things for which God had made them and over which he had appointed them. But some outraged both the constitution of their own nature and the charge entrusted to them: this ruler of matter and its various forms, and others of those stationed about the first firmament. (You know that we say nothing without witnesses; we state what the prophets have declared.) These fell into craving for virgins and were mastered by the flesh, and he became careless and wicked in managing what had been entrusted to him. From these lovers of virgins, then, were born those who are called giants. And if the poets too have said something about giants, do not be surprised at it. Worldly wisdom and divine wisdom differ from each other as much as truth differs from what merely sounds likely: the one is from heaven, the other from earth. And indeed, in the words of the prince of matter —

So these angels, who fell from heaven and now haunt the air and the earth and can no longer rise to heavenly things, and the souls of the giants, which are the demons that wander about the world — both act in ways that match what they are: the demons according to the natures they received, the angels according to the cravings they gave in to. But the prince of matter, as anyone can see simply from what happens, exercises a rule and a management that runs against the good that is in God: [m]

Good fortune and hardship handed out against hope and against justice made it impossible for Euripides to say whose business it is to administer the affairs of earth — an administration of such a kind that a man might say of it:

The same thing led Aristotle to say that the things below the heaven are not under the care of providence — though God’s eternal providence concerns itself with us down here just as much:

It also addresses itself to each deserving person individually, according to truth and not according to opinion, while everything else is provided for by the law of reason, according to the general constitution of nature. But the movements and workings of the demons, which come from the hostile spirit, produce these disorderly outbursts. They also move men — some one way and some another, as individuals and as whole nations, separately and together — in line with the pull of matter on one side and the kinship with divine things on the other, from within and from without. That is why some people of no small reputation have concluded that this universe is put together with no fixed order at all, and is driven this way and that by irrational chance. What they do not understand is that among the things belonging to the constitution of the world as a whole, nothing is out of order and nothing is neglected. Each of them has been produced by reason, and so none of them steps outside the order laid down for it. Man too, so far as his Maker is concerned, is well ordered: by the nature he was originally given, which is one and the same in all; by the constitution of his body, which does not overstep the law laid on it; and by the ending of his life, which stays equal and common to everyone alike. But according to the character that is his own, and according to the working of the ruling prince and of the demons who follow him, he is pushed and moved in one direction or another — even though all men possess in common the same original make-up of mind.

So the ones who draw men to idols are the demons I have described, who are hungry for the blood of the sacrifices and lick it up. The gods who please the crowd, whose names are given to the images, were men; their own history shows it. And that it is the demons who act under their names is proved by the character of what they do. Some castrate — the ones who go under Rhea’s name; others gash and cut — the ones under Artemis; and the goddess in Tauris puts every stranger to death. I pass over the ones who slash themselves with knives and with whips of knucklebones, and I will not try to describe every kind of demon. It is not a god’s work to drive people to things against nature. [q]

God, on the other hand, being perfectly good, is eternally doing good. And that those who exert the power are not the same as those whose statues are set up — Troas and Parium give very strong evidence for it. The one city has statues of Neryllinus, a man of our own day; Parium has statues of Alexander and of Proteus, and Alexander’s tomb and his statue are both still standing in the public square. The rest of the statues of Neryllinus are civic decoration, if a city can be decorated with such things; but one of them is supposed to deliver oracles and to heal the sick, and for that reason the people of the Troad sacrifice to this statue, overlay it with gold, and hang wreaths on it. As for the statues of Alexander and Proteus — Proteus, as you are aware, threw himself into the fire near Olympia — the one of Proteus is likewise said to deliver oracles; and to the one of Alexander,

— to that one, sacrifices are offered and festivals are kept at public expense, as though to a god who can hear. So is it Neryllinus and Proteus and Alexander who work these effects in connection with the statues, or is it the nature of the material itself? But the material is bronze. And what can bronze do by itself, when it can be melted down and made over into some other shape — the way Amasis dealt with the footbath, as Herodotus tells it? And Neryllinus and Proteus and Alexander, what good are they to sick people? What the image is said to do now, it was doing while Neryllinus was still alive and lying ill.

What follows from this? First of all, the soul’s irrational, image-breeding movements around its opinions throw up one image after another. Some of these images it takes from matter; others it shapes and brings to birth for itself. This happens to a soul above all when it takes on the spirit that belongs to matter and gets mixed in with it — when it is not looking at heavenly things and their Maker, but downward at earthly things, wholly at the earth, being now mere flesh and blood and no longer pure spirit. These irrational, image-breeding movements of the soul, then, give birth to empty visions in the mind, and by them the mind becomes madly set on idols. And when a soul that is soft and impressionable, that has no knowledge or experience of sounder teaching, that is not used to contemplating the truth or thinking carefully about the Father and Maker of all, gets stamped with false opinions about itself — then the demons who hover about matter, greedy for the smell of the sacrifices and the blood of the victims, always ready to lead men into error, seize on these deceptive movements in the souls of the crowd. They take possession of people’s thoughts and pour empty visions into their minds, as though the visions came from the idols and the statues. And when the soul, being immortal, moves on its own in line with reason — foretelling something to come, or healing something present — the demons claim the credit for themselves. [v]

It is probably necessary, following what I have already brought forward, to say a little about their names. Herodotus, then, and Alexander the son of Philip in his letter to his mother — and each of them is said to have talked with the priests at Heliopolis, Memphis, and Thebes — both state that they learned from those priests that the gods had been men. Herodotus puts it this way: “Such was the nature of the beings these images represented, they said, and they were very far indeed from being gods. But in the times before them it was otherwise: then Egypt had gods for its rulers, who lived on earth among men, one of them always supreme above the rest. The last of these was Horus the son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo. He deposed Typhon and ruled over Egypt as its last god-king. Osiris the Greeks name Dionysus.” And again: “Almost all the names of the gods came into Greece from Egypt.” [x]

Apollo was the son of Dionysus and Isis, as Herodotus likewise states: “According to the Egyptians, Apollo and Artemis are the children of Dionysus and Isis, and Leto is their nurse and their rescuer.” These beings of heavenly origin were the Egyptians’ first kings. Partly out of ignorance of the true worship of God, partly out of gratitude for their government, they reckoned them gods, along with their wives. “Male cattle, if clean, and male calves are used for sacrifice by the Egyptians everywhere; but the females they are not allowed to sacrifice, since they are sacred to Isis. The statue of this goddess has the form of a woman, but with horns like a cow, resembling the Greek images of Io.”

And who could deserve more credit in making such statements than men who, son from father in family succession, received not only the priesthood but the history along with it? For it is not likely that priests, whose business it is to commend the idols to people’s reverence, would falsely claim that they had been men. If Herodotus alone had said that the Egyptians spoke of the gods in their histories as men, where he says, “What they told me concerning their religion it is not my intention to repeat, except only the names of their gods, matters of very slight importance,” then it would be right for us not to trust even Herodotus, as a teller of tales. But Alexander and Hermes surnamed Trismegistus attached an everlasting ancestry to them, and countless others did the same, whom I will not name one by one. So there is no room left even for doubt that these men, being kings, were reckoned gods. That they were men, the most learned of the Egyptians also testify. They say that ether, earth, sun, and moon are gods, but they count the rest as mortal men and the temples as their tombs. Apollodorus asserts the same thing in his treatise on the gods.

Herodotus even calls their sufferings mysteries: “The ceremonies at the feast of Isis in the city of Busiris have been already spoken of. It is there that the whole multitude, both of men and women, many thousands in number, beat themselves at the close of the sacrifice in honor of a god whose name a religious scruple forbids me to mention.” If they are gods, they are also immortal. But if people are beaten for them, and their sufferings are mysteries, then they are men — as Herodotus himself says: “Here too, in this same precinct of Athena at Saïs, is the burial-place of one whom I think it not right to mention in such a connection. It stands behind the temple, against the back wall, which it entirely covers. There are also some large stone obelisks in the enclosure, and there is a lake near them, adorned with an edging of stone. In form it is circular, and in size, as it seemed to me, about equal to the lake at Delos called the Hoop. On this lake the Egyptians represent by night the sufferings of him whose name I refrain from mentioning, and this representation they call their mysteries.” And it is not only the tomb of Osiris that is shown, but his embalming as well: “When a body is brought to them, they show the bearer various models of corpses made in wood and painted so as to resemble nature. The most perfect is said to be after the manner of him whom I do not think it religious to name in connection with such a matter.”