e about to besiege a town, they
employed their priests to evoke the divinity who presided over it,
promising him a temple in Rome, either like the one dedicated to him
in the besieged place, or on a rather larger scale, and that the
proper worship should be paid to him. Pliny says that the memory of
these evocations is preserved among the priests.

If that which we have just related, and what we read in ancient and
modern writers, is at all real, and produces the effects attributed to
it, it cannot be doubted that there is something supernatural in it,
and that the devil has a great share in the matter.

The Abbot Trithemius speaks of a sorceress who, by means of certain
beverages, changed a young Burgundian into a beast.

Everybody knows the fable of Circe, who changed the soldiers or
companions of Ulysses into swine. We know also the fable of the Golden
Ass, by Apuleius, which contains the account of a man metamorphosed
into an ass. I bring forward these things merely as what they are,
that is to say, simply poetic fictions.

But it is very credible that these fictions are not destitute of some
foundation, like many other fables, which contain not only a hidden
and moral sense, but which have also some relation to an event really
historical: for instance, what is said of the Golden Fleece carried
away by Jason; of the Wooden Horse, made use of to surprise the city
of Troy; the Twelve Labors of Hercules; the metamorphoses related by
Ovid. All fabulous as those things appear in the poets, they have,
nevertheless, their historical truth. And thus the pagan poets and
historians have travestied and disguised the stories of the Old
Testament, and have attributed to Bacchus, Jupiter, Saturn, Apollo,
and Hercules, what is related of Noah, Moses, Aaron, Samson, and
Jonah, &c.

Origen, writing against Celsus, supposes the reality of magic, and
says that the Magi who came to adore Jesus Christ at Bethlehem,
wishing to perform their accustomed operations, not being able to
succeed, a superior power preventing the effect and imposing silence
on the demon, they sought out the cause, and beheld at the same time a
divine sign in the heavens, whence they concluded that it was the
Being spoken of by Balaam, and that the new King whose birth he had
predicted, was born in Judea, and immediately they resolved to go and
seek him. Origen believes that magicians, according to the rules of
their art, often foretell the future, and that