Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/193

Rh gods, for there are within them certain invited spirits, of some avail for doing harm or for fulfilling certain desires of those who pay them divine honours and rites of worship. By a certain art to connect these invisible spirits with visible objects of corporeal matter, that such may be as it were animated bodies, effigies dedicate and subservient to the spirits — this is what he calls making gods, and men have received this great and wondrous power.' And further, this Trismegistus is made to speak of 'statues animated with sense and full of spirit, doing so great things; statues prescient of the future, and predicting it by lots, by priests, by dreams, and by many other ways.' This idea, as accepted by the early Christians themselves, with the qualification that the spiritual beings inhabiting the idols were not beneficent deities but devils, is explicitly stated by Minucius Felix, in a passage in the 'Octavius,' which gives an instructive account of the aministic philosophy of Christianity towards the beginning of the third century: 'Thus these impure spirits or demons, as shown by the magi, by the philosophers, and by Plato, are concealed by consecration in statues and images, and by their afflatus obtain the authority as of a present deity when at times they inspire priests, inhabit temples, occasionally animate the filaments of the entrails, govern the flight of birds, guide the falling of lots, give oracles enveloped in many falsehoods ... also secretly creeping into (men's) bodies as thin spirits, they feign diseases, terrify minds, distort limbs, in order to compel men to their worship; that fattening on the steam of altars or their offered victims from the flocks, they may seem to have cured the ailments which they had constrained. And these are the madmen whom ye see rush forth into