to his native star, and would there have a blessed
existence; but, if he lived ill, he would pass into the nature of a
woman, and if he did not then alter his evil ways, into the likeness of
some animal, until the reason which was in him reasserted her sway over
the elements of fire, air, earth, water, which had engrossed her, and
he regained his first and better nature. Having given this law to his
creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed
them, some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other
planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them
and to make the necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all
but self-inflicted evil.

Having given these commands, the Creator remained in his own nature. And
his children, receiving from him the immortal principle, borrowed from
the world portions of earth, air, fire, water, hereafter to be returned,
which they fastened together, not with the adamantine bonds which bound
themselves, but by little invisible pegs, making each separate body out
of all the elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the
courses of the soul. These swelling and surging as in a river moved
irregularly and irrationally in all the six possible ways, forwards,
backwards, right, left, up and down. But violent as were the internal
and alimentary fluids, the tide became still more violent when the body
came into contact with flaming fire, or the solid earth, or gliding
waters, or the stormy wind; the motions produced by these impulses pass
through the body to the soul and have the name of sensations. Uniting
with the ever-flowing current, they shake the courses of the soul,
stopping the revolution of the same and twisting in all sorts of ways
the nature of the other, and the harmonical ratios of twos and threes
and the mean terms which connect them, until the circles are bent
and disordered and their motion becomes irregular. You may imagine a
position of the body in which the head is resting upon the ground, and
the legs are in the air, and the top is bottom and the left right. And
something similar happens when the disordered motions of the soul come
into contact with any external thing; they say the same or the other in
a manner which is the very opposite of the truth, and they are false
and foolish, and have no guiding principle in them. And when external
impressions enter in, they are really conquered, though they seem to
c