The Moon on the Ceiling

This is how they make a moon and stars appear on the ceiling. In the middle of the ceiling they fasten a mirror; on the floor, directly beneath it, they set a basin full of water; and in the middle they set a lamp giving a faint light from a point higher than the basin. The reflection then makes a moon appear in the mirror. Often, too, they hang a drum high up and at a distance, wrapped in a cloth and kept covered by the accomplice so that it will not show before its time. A lamp is set behind it, and when the magician gives the signal, the accomplice draws back just as much of the covering as will produce an imitation of the moon in the shape the moon has at that moment. The bright parts of the drum he smears with cinnabar and gum. He also takes a glass flask with the neck and the bottom cut away, kept ready out of sight, puts a lamp inside it, and fits round it whatever is needed to make the shape shine; one of the accomplices has hidden the apparatus high above, and at the signal he lets it down from overhead, so that the moon seems to be coming down out of the sky. [a]

The same thing is done with a cooking pot in wooded places; and it is by the pot that the trick is worked indoors. An altar is set up, and behind it stands the pot with a lamp burning in it — if there are several lamps, nothing of the kind shows. So when the enchanter has called on the moon, he orders all the lamps put out and one left burning faintly. Then the light streaming from the pot is thrown back onto the ceiling and gives those present the appearance of a moon, the mouth of the pot being kept covered to whatever extent the moment seems to require, so that what shows on the ceiling is a crescent.

Fish scales make the stars appear: the scales of shad, or of the dolphinfish, soaked in water mixed with gum and stuck to the ceiling at intervals. [f] They produce the sensation of an earthquake, so that everything seems to be moving, by burning on coals the dung of an ichneumon together with the stone that draws iron … [g] They exhibit a liver that appears to carry writing, like this. On his left hand the man writes whatever he wants, fitting it to the question that has been asked, and the letters are written with oak gall and sharp vinegar. Then he takes up the liver, rests it on that same left hand and lets time pass; the liver draws off the impression, and is taken to have writing on it. [h]

They set a skull on the ground and make it speak, this way. The skull itself is made out of the caul of an ox. Shaped with Etruscan wax and worked plaster, with the membrane laid over it, it gives the appearance of a skull, and it seems to everyone to speak when the device is working — in the same way we described in the case of the boys. The accomplice prepares the windpipe of a crane or of some other long-necked creature, attaches it to the skull unnoticed, and says whatever he pleases. And when he wants the skull to disappear, he heaps a quantity of coals in a circle round it, looking as though he were burning incense; the wax takes their heat and melts, and so the skull is thought to have vanished. [i]

These are the works of the magicians, and there are countless others of the kind, which persuade the senseless by the neat balance of the words and by the appearance of acts done convincingly. It was the leaders of the heresies who, astonished at this craft, imitated it — handing on what they hold partly in secret and in the dark, and partly rewording it as their own. For that reason, wanting to put the ordinary person on his guard, we have gone into more detail than we needed to, so as to leave no room for those who are willing to be led astray. We have been drawn, not unreasonably, into some of the magicians’ secrets. They were not strictly necessary for the subject in hand, but they were judged useful for guarding against the knavish and incoherent craft of these men. [k]

Since, then, we have set out the opinions of them all, so far as one can, and have taken great pains to expose what the leaders of the heresies bring in as though it were something new — things that, as far as reverence for God goes, are empty and counterfeit, and perhaps not even reckoned worth discussing among themselves — it seems right to recall in a short summary, point by point, what has already been said.

Among all who have investigated the question, philosophers and theologians throughout the world, there has been no agreement about God — what he is, or of what kind. Some say he is fire, some air, some water, others earth. But each of the elements falls short in something, and each is beaten by another. What happened to the wise men of this world is plain enough to anyone with sense: seeing the sheer size of creation, they were thrown into confusion about the substance of the things that exist, reckoning them too great to be capable of taking their origin from anything else, and reckoning at the same time that the universe as a whole is not itself God. For their account of God they picked out one cause among the things they could see, each man settling on whatever he judged most reasonable; and so, looking hard at things God had made — things that are very small measured against his overwhelming greatness — and unable to stretch their minds to the greatness of the God who really is, they made gods of these. [l]

The Persians, thinking they had got further inside the truth, said that God is luminous, a light held in air. The Babylonians said that God is dark — which itself looks like a consequence of the other, since day follows night and night follows day. As for the Egyptians, who think themselves older than everyone, the power of God … Working out these intervals of the degrees, they said, by a most divine inspiration, that God is an indivisible monad, generating itself, and that everything was constructed out of it.

For this monad, they say, being unbegotten, generates the numbers that come after it. The monad added to itself generates the dyad; added in the same way again, it generates the triad and the tetrad, up to the decad, which is the beginning and the end of the numbers — so that the monad turns out to be both first and tenth, because the decad has the same force and is counted as a monad. Multiplied by ten it becomes a hundred, and it is a monad again; the hundred multiplied by ten will make a thousand, and this will be a monad; and in the same way the thousand multiplied by ten completes a myriad, and it too will be a monad. By the comparison of indivisible quantities, the numbers akin to the monad are 3, 5, 7, and 9.

There is also a more natural kinship of another number to the monad, in the working of the six-circled spiral, and of the dyad in the even placing and division of the numbers; and its kindred numbers are 4 and 8. These, taking their number from the monad — a forethought of excellence — advanced as far as the four elements: air, I mean, and fire and water and earth. Out of these God made the world, and framed it male and female together. He assigned two elements to the upper hemisphere, air and fire, and this is called the hemisphere of the monad: beneficent, upward-tending, and masculine. For the monad, being made of fine particles, flies up into the finest and purest part of the upper air. The other two elements, being coarser, he gave to the dyad, earth and water, and this is called the downward-tending hemisphere, feminine and harmful. Again, the two upper elements, compared with each other, have male and female in themselves, for the fruitfulness and increase of the whole. Fire is male and air female; and again, water is male and earth female. So from the beginning fire has lived with air, and water with earth: for as fire is the power of air, so water is the power of earth …

And the elements themselves, when they are reckoned up and reduced by subtracting nines, come out properly — some in the masculine number, some in the feminine. Nines are subtracted for this reason: that the three hundred and sixty degrees of the whole circle are made up of nines, and that is why the four quarters of the world are marked off by ninety complete degrees. Light is assigned to the monad and darkness to the dyad; life belongs to light by nature, and death to the dyad; and to life belongs righteousness, and to death unrighteousness. So everything born among masculine numbers is beneficent, and what is born among feminine numbers is harmful. This is how they reckon it. “Monad” — to start from that — comes to 361, and this ends in a monad once the nines are taken away. Reckon the same way: “dyad” comes to 605; take away the nines, and it ends in a dyad. Each returns to its own.

So then, since the monad is beneficent, they say that names ending in the odd number are upward-tending and beneficent and masculine, and they watch this carefully; while names ending in the even number are held to be downward-tending, feminine, and harmful. For they say that nature is put together out of opposites, out of good and bad — as right and left, light and darkness, night and day, life and death. They say this as well: that the word “God”, reckoned up … comes down to a five by the subtraction of nines, and that this is an even number; and when it has been written out they tie it on the body and cure people with it. In the same way a particular plant whose name ends in this number, tied on in the same way, works by the same reckoning of the number. Even a doctor cures the sick by a similar reckoning, and if the reckoning is contrary, he does not cure easily. People who attend to these numbers reckon up everything of the same kind on this principle: some by the vowels alone, others by the whole number. Such is the wisdom of the Egyptians, and by it, as they boast, they suppose they know what God is. [u]

It seems, then, that we have set these things out sufficiently as well. And since I think I have left out no opinion belonging to this earthly, ground-hugging wisdom, I can see that the care we spent on it has not been useless. For we find that our account has been serviceable not only for refuting the heresies, but also with the men who hold these opinions. When they meet the great pains we have taken, they will even be struck with admiration at our seriousness; they will not despise the labor, and they will not declare Christians fools, once they have looked hard at what they themselves believe foolishly. And those who love learning and give their attention to the truth will be carried further by this account and made wiser — not only so that, having learned the first principles of the heresies, they may easily overturn men who have dared to lead them astray, but so that, having learned what passes for the opinions of the wise and being no strangers to them, they will neither be thrown into confusion by them as the untaught are, nor be led astray by certain people as though these were acting by some power. They will even keep watch on those who are going astray.

Having set these opinions out sufficiently, let us go on at last to the business before us, so that, by demonstrating what we laid down about the heresies, and by forcing them to give each of these speculators his own back, we may show the leaders of the heresies stripped bare; and so that, by charging with folly those who are persuaded by them, we may persuade them to run back to the calm harbor of the truth. But so that what is to be said may be clearer to the reader, it seems right to set out as well what Aratus worked out about the arrangement of the stars in the sky. For there are people who liken what the Scriptures say to these things and turn it into allegory, trying to shift the minds of those who listen to them, drawing them by plausible words toward whatever they want, and putting on show a strange marvel, as though the things they say had been set among the stars. And those who gaze at that odd marvel, easily amazed by small things, are caught like the bird called the owl — an example worth telling, because of what follows. [w]

The creature is not very different from an eagle, either in size or in shape, and it is caught this way. When the bird-hunter sees a flock of them settle somewhere, he beats his hands together at a distance and pretends to dance, and so comes near the birds little by little. They, struck senseless by the strange sight, take no notice of anything around them. Then others of the party, equipped for the hunt, come up from behind and easily take the birds while they are watching the dancer. So I ask that no one be struck senseless in the same way by the marvels of men who expound the sky, and be caught like an owl. What such men practice is dancing and nonsense, not truth. Aratus, then, puts it this way:

He says the stars in the sky are many — that is, turning ones — because they go round from east to west and from west to east without stopping, in a spherical figure. And he says that around the Bears themselves there winds, like the stream of some river, “the great wonder of the monstrous Dragon.” This, he says, is what the devil said to God in the book of Job: “I have walked about under heaven and gone around it” — that is, I have been turned around, and so have been able to survey what happens. For they suppose the Dragon, the Serpent, is stationed at the northern pole, looking down on everything from the highest point of the axis and watching it all, so that nothing being done may escape him. For though all the stars in the sky set, this pole alone never sets; it goes high above the horizon, surveys everything and looks down on it, and nothing that is done, he says, can escape it. [z]

There, he says, the head of this constellation is set. For the head of the Dragon lies toward the west and the east of the two hemispheres, so that — he says — nothing may escape him in that same quarter, neither what is in the west nor what is in the east, but the Beast may know everything at once. And right at the head of the Dragon there is the figure of a man, made out by the stars, which Aratus calls a worn-out image, like a man laboring under a load; and it is called the Kneeler. Aratus says he does not know who this is, what the labor is, or what this wonder is that turns in the sky. But the heretics, wanting to use the study of the stars to prop up their own teachings, and giving these matters more than ordinary attention, say that the Kneeler is Adam — by the command of God, as Moses said — guarding the head of the Dragon, and the Dragon guarding his heel. For this is how Aratus puts it: