The Demons Behind the Oracles

Still, you will say, it was that very superstition that gave the Romans their empire, enlarged it, and set it on its foundations — since they came out on top not so much by courage as by religion and piety. No doubt that famous, noble Roman fair dealing was there from the cradle of the growing kingdom. Were they not, at their beginning, a crowd collected by crime and founded on it, who then grew by the terror of their own savagery? The first population was gathered into a place of asylum. Men who were finished, criminal, incestuous, cutthroats, traitors, had come flooding in; and so that Romulus himself, their commander and ruler, might outdo his own people in guilt, he murdered his own brother. These are the first auspices of a religious state! [a]

Soon they carried off other men’s daughters, violated them and made sport of them — girls already engaged, already promised, and some of them taken out of their marriages — with no regard for custom at all. Then they went to war with those girls’ parents, that is, with their own fathers-in-law, and shed the blood of their own kin. What is more irreligious, what more brazen, what safer than sheer confidence in crime? And from then on: drive the neighbors off their land, level the nearest cities along with their temples and altars, herd the people into captivity, grow great on other people’s losses and your own crimes. That is the standard training, shared by Romulus with all the kings and every leader who came after him.

So everything the Romans hold, farm, and own is the plunder of their own nerve. Every one of their temples is built out of the spoils of a sack — that is, out of the ruins of cities, out of the loot stripped from the gods, out of the murder of priests. To be slaves to the religions you have beaten, to worship your prisoners once you have won: that is insult and mockery. Worshipping what you have captured is consecrating a sacrilege, not a god. As often as the Romans triumphed, that often they were defiled; and as many trophies as they took from the nations, that many spoils they took from the gods. The Romans, then, are not so great because they were religious, but because they got away with sacrilege.

They could hardly have had help in the wars themselves from the very gods they were taking up arms against; they only began to worship them after the triumph, having challenged them before it. And what good are such gods on Rome’s side, when they had no power on their own worshippers’ side against Roman arms? For we know the Romans’ homegrown gods: Romulus, Picus, Tiberinus, Consus, Pilumnus, Picumnus. Tatius both found Cloacina and worshipped her; Hostilius gave us Fear and Pallor. Later on, someone or other dedicated Fever. These are the city’s holy things, the food that fed its superstition — diseases and bouts of ill health. And of course Acca Larentia and Flora, brazen prostitutes, have to be counted in among the Romans’ diseases and their gods.

These, no doubt, are the ones who pushed Roman rule out against the gods the other nations worshipped. For Thracian Mars was no help to his own people, nor Cretan Jupiter, nor Juno — of Argos one day, of Samos the next, of Carthage after that — nor Diana of Tauris, nor the Mother of Mount Ida, nor those Egyptian things that are not gods but freaks. Unless perhaps the chastity of the virgins at Rome was greater, or the holiness of the priests more religious. Though a great many of the virgins have been punished for breaking the vow, having been rather careless with men — with Vesta, of course, knowing nothing about it. And the rest went unpunished not because their chastity was better guarded, but because their unchastity was luckier.

And where are affairs arranged, pimping negotiated, adultery planned, more than among the altars and shrines — and by the priests? In the end, burning lust is satisfied more often in the little rooms of the temple caretakers than in the brothels themselves. And still, long before the Romans, by God’s own arrangement, the Assyrians held empire, and the Medes, the Persians, the Greeks too, and the Egyptians. They had no Pontiffs, no Arval Brothers, no Salii, no Vestals, no Augurs, and no chickens shut in a coop whose eating or refusing to eat was supposed to steer the highest business of the state.

Now I come to those Roman auspices and auguries. You collected them with enormous effort, and testified that neglecting them brought disaster and observing them brought good fortune. Clodius, of course, and Flaminius and Junius lost their armies for this reason: they did not think it worth waiting for the solemn omen of the chickens pecking greedily. But what about Regulus? Did he not keep the auspices — and was he not captured? Mancinus kept his religious duty, and was sent under the yoke and handed over. Paulus had hungry chickens at Cannae too, and still he went down, and the greater part of the state with him. Gaius Caesar despised the auspices and auguries that were against his taking a fleet across to Africa before midwinter, and sailed and won all the more easily for it. [k]

And what am I to say about oracles, and how much? Amphiaraus answered questions about things to come after his own death — though while he was alive he did not know that his wife would betray him for a necklace. Blind Tiresias saw the future, though he could not see what was in front of him. Ennius made up the answers of Pythian Apollo about Pyrrhus, though Apollo had already stopped making verses; and that guarded, two-edged oracle of his fell silent exactly when men were becoming better educated and less easy to fool. And Demosthenes, who knew the answers were faked, complained that the Pythia was philippizing.

Sometimes, it is true, an auspice or an oracle has touched the truth. Even so, among so many lies, chance can look like design. Let me go instead at the source of the error and the crookedness itself, the place all that fog has flowed from, and dig into it deeper and lay it open more plainly. There are certain spirits, insincere and drifting, dragged down from their heavenly vigor by earthly filth and craving. Once these spirits had lost the simplicity of their own nature, weighed down and sunk in vices, they never stopped — as a comfort for their own disaster — ruining others now that they were ruined themselves; never stopped, warped as they are, pouring their own warped error into others; never stopped, cut off from God as they are, cutting others off from God by bringing in degraded superstitions.

The poets know these spirits are demons; the philosophers discuss them; Socrates knew it, who would drop a piece of business or take it up at the nod and decision of the demon sitting beside him. And the Magi not only know that demons exist — whatever miracle they put on, they do it by demons. It is by the demons breathing into them and pouring themselves in that they produce their tricks, making things that are not there appear, or things that are there not appear. The first of these Magi in both speech and practice, Hostanes, describes not only the true God with the majesty he deserves, but also the angels — that is, the servants and messengers of the true God — standing by to worship him, so much in awe of him that they tremble at their Lord’s very nod and glance. The same man also reported that the demons are earthly, wandering, and enemies of humankind.

And Plato, who thought finding God was hard work — does he not talk about angels and about demons too, without the least trouble? In his Symposium does he not set out to explain the nature of demons? He wants them to be a substance between mortal and immortal — halfway, that is, between body and spirit — put together by mixing earthly weight with heavenly lightness. And out of that substance, he warns us, comes Love as well, which slips into a person’s heart and settles there, stirs the senses, shapes the feelings, and breathes in the heat of lust.

So these impure spirits, the demons — as the Magi, the philosophers, and Plato have shown — hide under consecrated statues and images, and by breathing through them they take on the standing of a god actually present. Meanwhile they are breathed into prophets; they linger in shrines; sometimes they put life into the fibers of a liver, steer the flight of birds, direct the lots, and turn out oracles wrapped in a great many lies. For they are both deceived and deceiving: they do not know the plain truth, and what they do know they will not confess — to their own ruin. [r]

So they weigh men down away from heaven and call them off the true God to material things; they disturb life and break up sleep. And creeping secretly into people’s bodies, being thin spirits, they fake diseases, terrify minds, and twist limbs about, all to force people to worship them — so that, fattened on the smell of altars or on sacrificed cattle, they can untie what they tied and look as though they had cured it. Those raving men you see rushing about in public are prophets in their own right, without a temple; that is why they rage, why they go wild, why they spin. The demon’s prodding is the same in them; only the occasion of the madness is different. From the same source come the things you were bringing up a moment ago — that Jupiter demanded in a dream that his games be held again, that the Castors turned up with their horses, that a little ship followed the lead of a matron’s belt.

A great many people, some of your own among them, know everything the demons confess about themselves whenever we drive them out of bodies by the torture of our words and the fire of our prayers. Saturn himself, and Serapis, and Jupiter, and whatever demons you worship, are beaten down by the pain and say out loud what they are; and they certainly do not lie to their own disgrace, especially with some of you standing there. So believe them when they are their own witnesses and confess the truth about themselves. Put under oath by the one true God, the wretched things shudder in the bodies against their will, and either leap out at once or fade away by degrees, depending on how far the sufferer’s faith helps or the healer’s grace inspires.

That is why they run from Christians who are close at hand, when at a distance, in your assemblies, they were setting you on us. That is why they work into the minds of people who know no better and quietly sow a hatred of us there by way of fear. It is natural, after all, to hate what you are afraid of, and to hurt what you have dreaded, if you can. So they take over minds and block up hearts, to make people begin hating us before they know us — because if they knew us, they would either copy us, or find that they could not condemn us.

But how unfair it is to pass judgment on people you do not know and have never looked into — the way you do! Take our word for it, now that we have changed our minds; we used to be exactly what you are. Once, blind and dull, we thought about Christians what you think: that they worshipped monsters, ate babies, and mixed incest into their dinners. And we never noticed that men like that were always throwing those stories around, and that the stories were never investigated and never proved; that in all that time nobody had come forward to give the Christians away, though he would have got not only a pardon for his own crime but a reward for the disclosure; and that there was so little evil in it that an accused Christian neither blushed nor was afraid, and his only regret was that he had not been one sooner. [v]

And yet we would take on the defense of men guilty of sacrilege and incest, even of murdering their own kin, and think Christians should not be given a hearing at all. Sometimes we were even crueler out of a kind of pity: we tortured them when they confessed, to make them deny it — to keep them from dying, of course — running a perverse interrogation on them, not to dig out the truth but to force out a lie. And if one of them was weaker, broke under the pain and gave in, and denied that he was a Christian, we were pleased with him, as though by swearing off the name he had wiped out everything he had done with that one denial. Do you recognize that we had the same feelings and the same ideas as you? If reason and not a demon’s prodding were doing the judging, they should have been pressed the other way: not to deny that they were Christians, but to confess the incest, the outrages, the polluted rites, the babies killed.

With these stories and others like them the same demons filled the ears of the ignorant against us, to make them shudder and curse. No wonder: human rumor, which is always fed by a sprinkling of lies, wastes away as soon as the truth comes out. So this is the demons’ business — they are the ones who sow false reports and keep them alive. That is where the thing you say you have heard comes from: that among us an ass’s head is a sacred object. Who is fool enough to worship that? Who is a bigger fool, and believes anyone worships it? Unless it is you, who consecrate whole donkeys in your stables along with your Epona, and then piously eat those same donkeys in the rites of Isis.

You also sacrifice and worship the heads of oxen and rams; you dedicate gods mixed together out of a man and a goat, and gods with the faces of dogs and lions. Do you not worship and feed Apis the bull, along with the Egyptians? And you do not condemn their rites set up in honor of snakes and crocodiles and the rest of the beasts and birds and fish — where if a man kills one of these gods, he pays for it with his life. The same Egyptians, and a good many of you with them, are no more afraid of Isis than of the sharpness of an onion, and shudder no more at Serapis than at the noise a body makes at its lower end.

As for the man who tells stories about us worshipping our priest’s genitals, he is trying to load onto us what belongs to himself. Perhaps those are the sacred rites of his own indecency: people among whom every sex offers every part of itself for hire; among whom shamelessness, the whole of it, goes by the name of sophistication; who envy prostitutes their license; who put their mouths to men’s groins and cling there with a lustful mouth — men with a filthy tongue even when they are silent, who get tired of their own indecency sooner than they get ashamed of it. It is unspeakable: they consent to things done to themselves that no boy, however soft, could bear, and no slavery, however harsh, could force on a man.

These disgraces, and others like them, we are not even allowed to hear; it is shameful to spend any more words defending ourselves against such charges. You invent, about chaste and decent people, things we would not believe were done at all, if you had not proved them true of yourselves. And when you put down to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you have wandered a long way from the neighborhood of the truth, in supposing either that a criminal deserved to be believed God or that an earthly being could be. That man is wretched indeed whose whole hope leans on a mortal man, for all his help is finished the moment the man is dead. The Egyptians certainly pick out a man for themselves to worship: he alone is the one they appease, the one they consult about everything, the one they kill sacrifices for. And the man who is a god to everyone else is certainly a man to himself, like it or not, since he does not fool his own conscience even if he fools everyone else’s. [z]

Then there is the false flattery that fawns disgracefully on rulers and kings — calling them not great men and chosen men, which would be fair, but gods; when in fact honor is more truthfully paid to a distinguished man, and love more pleasantly given to a very good one. So they call on the divine power of these men, they pray to their images, they beg their genius — that is, their demon; and it is safer to swear a false oath by the genius of Jupiter than by the genius of a king.

Crosses, besides, we neither worship nor want. It is you, who consecrate wooden gods, who perhaps worship wooden crosses as parts of your gods. What are your standards, your banners, and the flags of your camp, but crosses gilded and decorated? Your victory trophies copy not only the shape of a plain cross, but the shape of a man fastened to it. We do see the sign of a cross in nature: in a ship, when it is carried along with its sails full, when it glides forward with the oar-blades spread; and when a military yoke is hoisted up, that is the sign of a cross; and so is a man worshipping God with a clear mind and his hands stretched out. So the sign of the cross either rests on a reason built into nature, or your own religion is shaped after it.