The Two Kinds of Demons

So when the number of human beings had begun to grow, God looked ahead. From the beginning he had given the devil power over the earth, and he did not want him to corrupt or destroy people by his cunning, as he had done at the start; so he sent angels to look after the human race and bring it on. Since he had given these angels a free will, he ordered them above everything else not to defile themselves with the contamination of the earth, and so lose the dignity of their heavenly being. He plainly forbade them the thing he knew they would do, so that they could hold on to no hope of pardon. And so, while they were living among men, that most deceitful ruler of the earth, simply by keeping company with them, drew them little by little into vices and defiled them through sex with women. Then, shut out of heaven because of the sins they had thrown themselves into, they fell to the earth. That is how the devil turns angels into his own hangers-on and attendants. [a]

But the ones born from them were neither angels nor men. They carried a kind of nature in between, and they were not let into hell, just as their fathers were not let into heaven. So there came to be two kinds of demons: one of heaven, the other of the earth. The earthly ones are the unclean spirits, the authors of every evil that is done, and the devil himself is their prince. That is why Trismegistus calls him the ruler of the demons.

The grammarians say they are called demons as if from daemones, that is, skilled and knowing about things — for they take them to be gods. They do in fact know many things that are still to come, but not all of them, since they are not allowed to know the whole plan of God; and so they are in the habit of fitting their answers to results that can be read either way. The poets know them for demons too, and describe them so. Hesiod puts it like this:

And it is said for this reason: God had sent them as guardians to the human race. But the demons, though they are the destroyers of men, want to look like their guardians all the same — so that they themselves may be worshipped, and God may not be.

The philosophers discuss these beings as well. Plato even tried to give an account of their natures in his Banquet, and Socrates said there was a demon always about him, attached to him since he was a boy, by whose will and direction his life was steered. The whole art and power of the Magi consists in what these beings breathe into them; called on by the Magi, they cheat men’s eyes with tricks that blind them, so that people do not see what is there and think they see what is not.

These polluted and abandoned spirits, as I say, wander over the whole earth and console themselves for their own ruin by ruining people. They fill every place with traps, deceptions, frauds and errors. They fasten on individuals; they take over whole houses from the front door in; and they take the name of genii for themselves, since that is the word by which demons are put into Latin. People consecrate them in their houses; they pour out libations of wine to them lavishly, day after day; and they worship these knowing demons as gods of the earth and as the ones who ward off the very evils that the demons themselves cause and inflict. And since spirits are thin and cannot be laid hold of, they slip into people’s bodies, and, working secretly inside them, they damage their health, hurry on diseases, terrify their souls with dreams and drive their minds into frenzies — so that by these evils they may force people to run to them for help.

The nature of all these deceptions is hidden from those who are outside the truth. They think the demons are doing them good when they stop doing them harm, whereas harm is the only thing they have the power to do. [m]

Someone may say that they must therefore be worshipped, so that they will not do harm, since harm is in their power. They do harm, yes, but only to those who are afraid of them — those whom the strong and lifted hand of God does not protect, who have not been sworn into the truth. But they are afraid of the righteous, that is, of the worshippers of God: adjured by his name, they come out of the bodies of the possessed. Lashed by those words as though by whips, they not only admit that they are demons, they even say their own names — the names that are adored in the temples — and they generally do it in front of their own worshippers. Not, plainly, to the disgrace of religion, but to the disgrace of their own honor, since they cannot lie either to God, by whom they are adjured, or to the righteous, by whose voice they are tortured. So again and again, after howling as loudly as they can, they cry out that they are being beaten and burned and are just about to come out. Such is the power of the knowledge of God, and of righteousness!

Whom, then, can they harm, except the people they already have in their own power? In short, Hermes states that those who have come to know God are not only safe from attacks by demons; they are not even bound by fate. “The only protection is piety. Over a pious man neither an evil demon nor fate has any power, for God rescues a pious man out of every evil; the one and only good thing among men is piety.” And in another place he says what piety is: “Piety is the knowledge of God.” Asclepius, his pupil, put the same thing more fully in that finished discourse he wrote to the king. Both of them say plainly that the demons are the enemies and tormentors of men; and Trismegistus for that reason calls them wicked angels — so far was he from being ignorant that they had been corrupted out of heavenly beings and had begun to be earthly.

These were the inventors of astrology, and of soothsaying, and of divination, and of the utterances called oracles, and of necromancy, and of the art of magic — and of every other evil practice men carry on, openly or in secret. All of it is false in itself, as the Erythraean Sibyl testifies: [q]

But these same powers, by being there themselves, make people believe the arts are true. So they play on human credulity with lying divination, because laying the truth open does not suit them.

These are the ones who taught men to make images and statues. To turn men’s minds away from the worship of the true God, they had the faces of dead kings modeled and finished with exquisite beauty, and set up and consecrated, and they took the kings’ names for themselves, the way an actor takes a part. But the magicians, and the men the common people rightly call evildoers, when they are at their detestable arts, call on the demons by their true names, the heavenly names that are read in the sacred writings.

What is more, these unclean and wandering spirits interweave false things with true and mix the two together, so as to throw everything into confusion and spread errors over men’s minds. It was they who invented many heavenly beings and one king over them all, Jupiter — because there are in fact many spirits of angels in heaven, and one Parent and Lord of all, God. They have hidden the truth under false names and drawn it out of sight.

For God, as I showed at the beginning, has no need of a name, since he is alone; and the angels, being immortal, neither allow nor wish to be called gods, since their one and only duty is to submit to the will of God and to do nothing at all except at his command. We say that the world is governed by God as a province is governed by its ruler, and no one would say that the ruler’s staff are his partners in running the province, though the business is transacted through their service. And they, at least, can do something contrary to their ruler’s orders without his knowing it, which is what comes of being human. But that guardian of the world and ruler of the universe, who knows everything, from whose divine eyes nothing is shut away, has power over all things, alone with his Son; and there is nothing in the angels except the duty of obedience. So they want no honor paid to them, since all their honor is in God.

But those who deserted the service of God — being enemies of the truth, and traitors to God — try to claim for themselves the name and the worship of gods. Not that they want any honor: what honor is there for the lost? And not that they can injure God, who cannot be injured. It is so that they can injure men, whom they are working to turn away from the worship and knowledge of the true Majesty, so that they will not be able to obtain the immortality that the demons themselves lost through their wickedness. So they draw darkness over things and spread obscurity over the truth, so that men will not know their Lord and Father. And to lure them in easily, they hide themselves in the temples and are on hand at every sacrifice; and they often produce wonders, so that men, astonished by them, will attach a belief in divine power and influence to the images.

That is where these things come from: the augur cut the whetstone through with a razor; Juno of Veii answered that she wished to move to Rome; Fortune of the Women announced the danger that was coming; the ship followed Claudia’s hand; Juno when she was plundered, and Proserpine of Locri, and Ceres of Miletus, punished the men who robbed them; Hercules exacted vengeance from Appius, and Jupiter from Atinius, and Minerva from Caesar. That is where it came from that the serpent sent for from Epidaurus freed the city of Rome from a plague — for the chief of the demons was himself carried there in his own shape, with no disguise at all, if the ambassadors sent for that purpose really did bring back a serpent of enormous size.

But it is over oracles above all that they deceive, and outsiders cannot tell the conjuring from the truth. So people imagine that commands, and victories, and wealth, and successful outcomes are handed out by the oracles — that the state has often been freed from imminent dangers by their intervention, dangers which the oracles both announced and then, once they had been appeased with sacrifices, turned aside. All of it is fraud. Since they have some foreknowledge of God’s arrangements, having once been his servants, they insert themselves into these matters, so that whatever has been done or is being done by God may look above all like their own doing. As often as some advantage is hanging over a people or a city by God’s purpose, they promise — by wonders, or dreams, or oracles — that they will bring it about, if temples and honors and sacrifices are given to them. And when those are offered, and the thing that had to happen happens, they win the greatest reverence for themselves. So temples are vowed and new images consecrated; herds of victims are slaughtered; and when all of it has been done, the lives and safety of the men who did it are sacrificed just the same.

But whenever dangers threaten, they claim to be angry over some slight and trivial thing. Juno, for instance, was angry with Varro, because he had put a good-looking boy on the carriage of Jupiter to look after the vestments; and for that the Roman name was almost wiped out at Cannae. But if Juno was afraid of a second Ganymede, why did the young men of Rome pay for it? Or if the gods watch the leaders only and take no notice of the rest of the crowd, why was Varro, who did the thing, the one man to escape — and why was Paulus killed, who deserved nothing? Certainly nothing happened to the Romans then “by the fates of hostile Juno” when Hannibal, by cunning and courage, finished off two Roman armies. Juno did not dare either to defend Carthage, where her weapons and her chariot were, or to injure the Romans; for

But these are the delusions of beings who hide behind the names of the dead and set traps for the living. So if the danger hanging over people can be avoided, they want it to look as though they turned it aside once they had been appeased; and if it cannot be avoided, they arrange for it to look as though it happened because they had been treated with contempt. That is how they get authority and fear out of people who do not know what they are. By this cunning and by these arts they have let the knowledge of the true and only God grow old and die out among every nation. Ruined by their own vices, they rage and use violence in order to ruin others. That is why these enemies of the human race even devised human sacrifice, to devour as many lives as they could.

Someone will say: why then does God allow these things to be done, and not apply a remedy to errors so ruinous? So that evils may stand over against goods, and vices be set against virtues; so that he may have some to punish and others to honor. For he has fixed the last times for passing judgment on the living and the dead, and I will speak about that judgment in the last book. So he holds back until the end of the ages comes, when he will pour out his anger with heavenly power and force, as [ad]

But for now he lets men go wrong, and even be irreverent toward himself — just and mild and patient as he is. It is impossible that the one in whom excellence is complete should not also be complete in patience. Which is why some people suppose that God is altogether free of anger, on the ground that he is not subject to the affections, which are disturbances of the mind; for every living thing that is open to affections and emotions is frail. But that conviction takes away truth and religion altogether. Let the discussion of the anger of God be set aside for the present, though, because the subject is very large and is to be handled more fully in a work of its own. Whoever has worshipped and followed these utterly wicked spirits will enjoy neither the heaven nor the light that belong to God, but will fall into the things we have described as being allotted to the prince of the evil ones himself: darkness, and hell, and everlasting punishment.

I have shown that the religious rites of the gods are empty, in three ways.

First, because the images that are worshipped are likenesses of men who are dead — and it is a wrong and inconsistent thing that the image of a man should be worshipped by the image of God, since what worships is lower and weaker than what is worshipped. Then, that it is a crime past atoning for to abandon the living in order to serve memorials of the dead, which can give neither life nor light to anyone, having neither themselves. And that there is no God but one, to whose judgment and power every soul is subject.

Second, that the sacred images themselves, which men with no sense at all wait upon, have no perception whatever, since they are earth. Who cannot see that it is not right for an upright animal to bend itself down to adore the earth — earth that was put under our feet for this very purpose, that it should be trodden on and not adored by us, who were raised up out of it and given a standing above the other living creatures, so that we should not turn ourselves downward again, or throw this heavenly face of ours to the ground, but should direct our eyes to the quarter that the terms of our own nature have pointed them to, and adore and worship nothing except the single divinity of our one Maker and Father, who made man with an erect figure so that we would know we are called out to high and heavenly things?

Third, because the spirits that preside over these rites are condemned and cast off by God, and roll about over the earth. Not only are they unable to give their worshippers any advantage, since the power over all things is in the hands of one alone; they even destroy them with deadly enticements and errors, since this is their daily business — to wrap men in darkness so that the true God will not be sought by them. They are not to be worshipped, then, because they lie under God’s sentence. It is a very great crime to make yourself over to the power of beings whom, if you follow righteousness, you are able to outmatch in power, and to drive out and put to flight by adjuring the divine name.

But if these rites are shown to be empty in as many ways as I have shown, then it is clear that those who either pray to the dead, or venerate the earth, or sign their souls over to unclean spirits are not behaving as men should — and that they will suffer punishment for their irreverence and their guilt, having rebelled against God, the Father of the human race, and taken up rites past atoning for, and violated every sacred law.