their predictions are
followed by the event, unless the power of God, or that of the angels,
prevents the effect of their conjurations, and puts them to
silence.[164]

Footnotes:

[153] Homer, Iliad, IV.

[154] Acts xix. 19.

[155] Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8.

[156] Pind. Od. iv.

[157] Plin. I. 28.

[158] Cato de Rerustic. c. 160.

[159] Psalm lvii. Jer. vii. 17. Eccles. x. 11.

[160] Plin. lib. viii. c. 50.

[161] Job xl. 25.

[162] Ecclus. xii. 13.

"Frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis."--_Virgil_, Ecl. viii.

"Vipereas rumpo verbis et carmine fauces."--_Ovid._

[163] Plin. lib. xxviii.

[164] The fables of Jason and many others of the same class are said
by Fortuitus Comes to have a reference to alchemy.

CHAPTER XIII.

EXAMPLES WHICH PROVE THE REALITY OF MAGIC.

St. Augustine[165] remarks that not only the poets, but the historians
even, relate that Diomede, of whom the Greeks have made a divinity,
had not the happiness to return to his country with the other princes
who had been at the siege of Troy; that his companions were changed
into birds, and that these birds have their dwelling in the environs
of the Temple of Diomede, which is situated near Mount Garganos; that
these birds caress the Greeks who come to visit this temple, but fly
at and peck the strangers who arrive there.

Varro, the most learned of Romans, to render this more credible,
relates what everybody knows about Circe, who changed the companions
of Ulysses into beasts; and what is said of the Arcadians, who, after
having drawn lots, swam over a certain lake, after which they were
metamorphosed into wolves, and ran about in the forests like other
wolves. If during the time of their transmutation they did not eat
human flesh, at the end of nine years they repassed the same lake, and
resumed their former shape.

The same Varro relates of a certain Demenotas that, having tasted the
flesh of a child which the Arcadians had immolated to their god Lycaea,
he had also been changed into a wolf, and ten years after he had
resumed his natural form, had appeared at the Olympic games, and won
the prize for pugilism.

St. Augustine testifies that in his time many believed that these
transformations still took place, and some persons even affirmed that
they had experienced them in their own persons. He adds that, when in
Italy, he was told that certain women gave cheese to strangers who
lodged at their houses, when