The great and powerful nations that enslaved the universe allowed themselves to be enslaved by the ministers of the most ridiculous superstitions. Isaiah counts by the thousands the enchanters and magicians of Babylon.
Daniel mentions, in passing, four kinds of diviners held in great credit at the court of Nebuchadnezzar during the captivity:
- The Chartumim, enchanters;
- The Asaphim, interpreters of dreams;
- The Meciaspim, magicians;
- The Chasdim, Chaldeans or astrologers.
And astrology reigned not only at the court of Persia or Assyria, but from one end of the universe to the other.
However, among the Romans, the augural art predominated over all superstitions: the augur was the great regulator of affairs, both private and public, from the marriage of the least citizen to the assemblies of the people, the choice of magistrates, the movements of armies, peace treaties, and declarations of war.
The Law of the Twelve Tables pronounced the death penalty against those who did not obey the decision of the augur. The greatest families of Rome felt greatly honored when one of their members was elevated to the dignity of augur or to the guardianship of the Sibylline verses.
The pontiffs themselves, of the most eminent rank, flamens and archflamens, were but poor diviners, charged with recognizing the will of the gods in the minutest details of a sacrifice: how the victim had suffered death, how its still-palpitating entrails appeared, how the pyre's fire had flared, how the smoke had directed itself, how the embers had extinguished, how the ashes had arranged themselves.
And all these observations formed various branches of the sacred science of the pontiffs, such as thymatics, extispicy, pyroscopy, capnomancy, spodomancy.
Cultivated minds freed themselves, it is true, from some of these superstitions, but not from all. They even permitted themselves to mock them and yet remained enslaved by them in one way or another. Cicero, while having little respect for the gods and saying that he did not understand how two augurs could look at each other without laughing, had a dream in his house at Atina that he considered divine, and to which he attached great importance.
Cato the Censor responded to a senator friend who came to consult him about a threatening prodigy that had occurred in his house:
"There is nothing prodigious about rats having gnawed your shoes; it would be different if your shoes had eaten the rats."
Yet, he would not have been too reassured if such a thing had happened to him, he who dared not pass if a mouse happened to cross his path. He believed that dislocated bones could be mended thanks to magical words; here is his recipe: to sing forcefully "G.F. Motas danata dardaries astolaries".
Caesar, who had dared to cross the Rubicon, dared not mount his chariot without pronouncing a certain magical formula. Senator Servilius Nonnius wore amulets to cure his eye ailment; Pericles and Bion, so renowned for their wisdom among the Greeks, wore them to protect themselves from the plague.
If from these men who held an eminent rank among their contemporaries we descend to the lower classes of society, we will find all kinds of divination practiced and in credit: rhabdomancy, the art of divining by means of hazel rods thrown at random onto an area prepared for this purpose, the origin of runic writing; belomancy, the art of divining with arrowheads, the origin of cuneiform writing; aleuromancy, the art of divining with dough, for which Apollo received the surname Aleuromancer; astragalomancy, the art of divining with dice; catoptromancy, with a mirror; hydromancy, with water; axinomancy, with an axe; cosquinomancy, with a sieve; alectromancy, by means of a rooster asleep with its head under its wing; agatomancy, by means of powdered agate; alphitomancy, by means of small loaves containing laurel leaves.
But who could count them all?
And the lots! Those of Dodona, which one day the king of the Molossians' monkey overturned with such irreverence; those of Praeneste, found in a rock by a certain Numerius Suffucius; those of Euripides, Musaeus, Homer, Virgil, which the agyrtes, priests of Cybele, alone had the right to interpret!
Sorcery was everywhere, magic everywhere, and the people trembled before the magicians, for they attributed to them boundless power. They imagined that they could, by the virtue of enchantments, bring down the stars from the firmament, force river water to flow back to its source, shatter the hardest rocks, restore life to the dead, pile up storms, invert the order of the seasons, travel within the clouds, excite tempests, suddenly stop horses launched at a gallop, change themselves into wolves.
They accused them of causing the sterility of fields, distributing disease and death at their will, sowing discord and hatred within families, divulging the best-kept secrets, opening without a key the most carefully locked doors, casting upon their enemies, like a fatal spell, frenzies and insane loves. Tibullus, Ovid, Virgil, eloquent echoes of these sad beliefs, contributed to propagating them; but, moreover, they were not absolutely vain.
It is to the belief held by the ancients, that sorcerers went to weigh heavily on tombs to squeeze out the soul of the dead, that we must attribute this farewell formula they addressed to their friends and relatives, and which has passed even into our language:
"May the earth be light upon you!"
According to the account of Pausanias, the priest of Lycian Jupiter could, in times of drought, make rain fall on the countryside near Mount Lycaeus. To do this, it sufficed for him to strike with an oak staff the surface of a spring that flowed from the summit of the mountain. Many other ministers of the gods were reputed to be depositaries of equally great powers, and from this came, on the part of the people, so much respect and servility towards them.
These sorts of people were not excusable when they deceived the people, but they were even less so when they prepared for the use of thieves the hand of the executed, that famous "hand of glory" that we will see reappear in the Middle Ages; or when, becoming accomplices of a homicidal hatred, they fashioned those wax statues into whose chests the weak and cowardly, animated by the impotent desire to harm, were to thrust needles in the hope of wounding their victim with the same blow.
It was worthy of Nero to try these dark means of doing evil; he promptly recognized their ineffectiveness; but the experiment he made should not have made his like wiser in the following centuries.
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This last usage was not foreign to Greece, for Plato mentions it in several passages of his treatise on laws; he wants magistrates to severely repress such attempts, although they are without danger:
"These are, he says, things difficult to understand and difficult to believe; so few people deign to give them credence."
At the moment when Christianity appeared, these means of seduction were already considerably discredited in Greece. A frivolous and fickle people, but endowed with exquisite common sense, the Greeks used everything, even oracles, without attaching great importance to them. Already, in a passage from Hesiod reported by Clement of Alexandria, we read:
"No diviner could penetrate the secrets of the master of the universe."
Later, Pindar will say in his twelfth Olympian:
"No man has ever obtained from the gods an indubitable sign that reveals the future to him."
Sophocles, in the chorus of Oedipus Rex, proclaims that diviners are deceivers, and Euripides has the chorus of his Iphigenia at Aulis say that the tablets of the Muses were invented to accredit lies. He adds:
"If sometimes chance opportunely serves a diviner, there are always, however, more impostures than truths in his oracles."
The counsels of the gods travel towards the unknown, he says elsewhere.
Thus, Greece had retained in the end only the literary and poetic side of its ancient traditions; faith had flown far from the sanctuaries, and the temples, fallen from the respect that the beliefs of their ancestors had once earned them, had been lowered, in popular thought, to the level of artistic museums.
But nothing came to take the place of faith.
Source: Histoire de Satan – Abbé Lecanu – 1861