Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/597

 of Idolatry, and the basest abasement: to which crimes if the former are not obnoxious, yet they expose themselves to manifest dangers. For even compelled divels alwaies deceive us whithersoever we go. Now from the sect of the Goetians have proceeded all those books of darkness, which Vulpianus the Lawyer calls books disallowed to be read, and forthwith appointed them to be destroyed, of which sort the first is Zabulus reported to invent, who was given to unlawfull arts, then Barnabas a certain Cyprian; and now in these dayes there are carryed about books with feigned titles, under the names of Adam, Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Solomon, also Paul, Honorius, Cyprianus, Albertus, Thomas, Hierome, and of a certain man of Yorke, whose toies Alphonsus King of Castile, Robert an English man, Bacon, and Apponus, and many other men of a deplored wit have foolishly followed. Moreover they have not made men only and Saints, and Patriarkes, and the angels of God, the authors of such execrable opinions, but they boast also that those books were dilivered by Raziel, and Raphael the Angels of Adam and Tobias; Which books openly betray themselves to him that looks narrowly into them, to be a rule, rite, and custome of their precepts, and a kind of words, and characters, an order of extruction, an empty phrase, and to contain nothing but meer toyes, and impostures, and to be made in latter times by men ignorant of all ancient Magick, and forlorn artists of pernitious art, of prophane observations mixed with the ceremonies of our religion, with many unknown names, and seals intermixed, that thereby they may terrifie and astonish the simple, and ignorant. Moreover it doth not yet appear that these arts are fables: for unless there were such indeed, and by them many wonderfull and hurtfull things done, there would not be such strict divine, and humane lawes made concerning them, for the utter exterminating of them. And why do the Goetians use those evill spirits only, but because good Angels will hardly appear, expecting the command of God, and come not but to men pure in heart, and holy in life: but the evill are easily called up, favouring him that