And so we say that there exist certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new. Philosophers know of demons, Socrates himself waiting on the decision of his daimonion. Why not? since a daimonion is said to have clung to him from boyhood, one that plainly dissuaded him from good. All the poets know of them; even the unlearned crowd uses the word often in cursing. For it also pronounces Satan, the prince of this evil race, with the same word of execration, from the soul's own awareness. Even Plato did not deny angels. The magicians too are at hand as witnesses to both names. But how from certain angels, corrupted of their own will, a more corrupt race of demons arose, condemned by God together with the authors of their race and with that prince we have named, is explained in sequence in the holy writings.⁠a For now it will be enough to set out their activity. Their activity is the ruin of man. So spiritual malice began from the first with the destruction of man. Therefore on bodies they inflict diseases and certain bitter mishaps, and on the soul sudden and extraordinary violent derangements. Their subtlety and fineness give them access to both parts of man's substance. Spiritual powers can do much, so that, being invisible and imperceptible, they appear in their effect rather than in their action: as when some hidden blight in the air casts down fruit or grain in flower, kills it in the bud, wounds it in its ripening, and as when the air, tainted by some unseen cause, pours out its pestilential breaths. With the same obscurity of contagion, then, the breath of demons and angels also works corruption of the mind, with frenzies and foul madness, or savage lusts together with various errors, the chief of which is the one by which it commends these gods to the captured and deceived minds of men, so as to procure for itself its own food of savor and blood offered to statues and images. And what more choice pasture is there for it than to turn man from the thought of the true divinity by false deceptions? How it works these too I will explain. Every spirit is winged: angels and demons are so. So in a moment they are everywhere; the whole world is one place to them; what is done where they know as easily as they report it. Their speed is believed to be divinity, because their substance is unknown. So they sometimes want to be thought the authors of what they report. And they plainly are sometimes the authors of evils, but never of goods. They even picked up the dispositions of God when the prophets preached them, and they glean them now as the readings resound. So, taking from here certain fortunes of the times, they imitate divinity while they steal divination. As for oracles, with what skill they adjust their ambiguities to the outcome the Croesuses know, the Pyrrhuses know. Besides, the Pythian reported that a tortoise was being boiled with the flesh of a sheep in the way we have described: in a moment he had been in Lydia. From living in the air, near the stars, and in contact with the clouds, they can know the preparations of the sky, so that they promise rains they already feel. They are plainly beneficent too in the care of health. For first they injure, then they prescribe remedies, new or contrary, to produce a miracle, after which they stop injuring and are believed to have cured. Why should I go on about the other tricks, or even the powers, of spiritual deceit? the apparitions of the Castors, water carried in a sieve, a ship drawn along by a girdle, a beard turned red by a touch, so that stones might be believed gods and the true God not be sought?