there to begin with, or are they introduced already formed and then perceived by
490 The Literal Meaning of Genesis dancing39 before dinner, that if any youngsters wanted to play about in that way after dinner, none of them would be forbidden.
So then this fellow, having called for silence in an interval between dances and surrounded by a laughing crowd, jokingly foretold that during the very night which was coming on, in that very wood nearby, a man was going to be slain by a lion, and that with the dawning of the day the crowd was going to pour out to gape at the corpse, leaving the place of that festival quite deserted. And so it happened, though to everyone present it was evident enough from all his gestures that he said this as ajoke and part of the game, his mind being in no way disturbed or alienated. He himself was more astonished than anybody, since he knew better than anybody else in what spirit and tone of voice he had spoken.
48. How, we ask, do these visions come to a person's spirit? Are they formed there to begin with, or are they introduced already formed and then perceived by a kind ofjoint action, with angels showing human beings their own thoughts in this way, and the likenesses of bodily things which they preform in their own spirit through their knowledge of future events? They indeed can also see our thoughts, not of course with eyes, because it is not with the body but with the spirit that they see them. This though is the difference, that they know our thoughts even if we do not want them to, while we cannot know theirs unless they are shown to us. This in my opinion is because they have it in their power to conceal their thoughts by spiritual means, just as we, by putting things in the way, can hide our bodies from being seen by other people's eyes.
And then, what is it that happens in our spirit, so that sometimes we observe only significant images, but do not know whether they signify anything? Some times they are perceived to signify something but we are left in ignorance of what it is, while at yet other times the human soul is vouchsafed something like a full demonstration and both sees them in spirit and sees with the mind what they signify. To know the answers to these questions is extremely difficult, and if we should already happen to know them, to analyze and explain them would be a task unimaginably laborious.
Summing up about the spiritual element in us. the locus ofspiritual vision
23, 49. The one thing certain, which I think it is enough to insist on for the time being, is that there is a kind of spiritual element in us where the likenesses of bodily things are formed. This can be when we make contact with a body through a sense of the body, and its likeness is straightaway formed in the spirit and stored away in the memory. Or it can be when we think about absent bodies already known to us, so that a kind of actual spiritual seeing is formed out of
39. A rather free rendering of agitatisque fanaticis, "and the fanatics having been agitated"—which would not, 1 think, be a more acceptable translation.