Teaching Christianity (continued)
nor did they try to deter the soul from it by saying that the reason such things should not be indulged in was that their practitioners always uttered falsehoods; but even if what they say to you, it says, comes to pass, do not trust them (Dt 13:2– 3). Just because the shade of the dead Samuel, after all, foretold the truth to King Saul, that does not mean that such sacrilegious rites as were used to conjure up his shade are to be any the less abominated; or just because the ventriloquist woman in Acts bore witness to the Lord's apostles, that was no reason for the apostle Paul to spare that spirit, and not rather purge the woman by rebuking and expelling the demon.[82]
36. All such superstitious arts, therefore, whether of a trifling or harmful nature, which have been instituted through a pestilential association of human beings with demons, in a kind of pact of faithless and fickle friendship, are to be utterly repudiated and shunned by the Christian. Not that an idol is anything, says the apostle, but because what they sacrifice they sacrifice to demons and not to God; I do not wish you to become the associates of demons (1 Cor 10:19– 20). And what the apostle said about idols and about the sacrifices which are offered in their honor is to be taken as applying to all the imaginary signs that either draw people to the worship of idols or of creation and its parts as though they were gods, or that have to do with remedial charms and other observances which have not been, so to say, publicly promulgated by God to promote love of God and neighbor, but which instead distract the hearts of wretched people in pursuit of their own private appetites for temporal goods.
So in all these teachings the close association of demons is to be dreaded and avoided, because with their prince the Devil they direct all their efforts to no other end than that of bolting and barring the way to our return.[83] But just as humanity has systematized its erroneous guesses about the stars, which God created and set in their places, so too in the same sort of way many people have committed many things to writing about certain monstrous births or any strange events that occur by decree of divine providence, giving mere human guesswork about their meaning the apparent force of logical conclusions, as when unusual things happen, like a mule giving birth, or something being struck by a thunderbolt.
24, 37. All such things only have the value that has been agreed upon by presumptuous spirits as forming a kind of common language with demons. Yet they are all fraught with pestilential curiosity, with agonizing anxiety, with deadly slavery. They have not, in fact, been noted down because they had any value, but they have been given a certain value by being noted down and treated as signs. And so it is that they signify different things to different people according to their assumptions and ways of thinking. For these evil spirits, whose sole desire is to deceive, procure for any particular person such things as they see his guesses and his cultural conventions have already ensnared him into expecting.
Take for example the single shape of the letter which indicates ten;[84] it has one value in Greek, another in Latin; and this not because of its nature, but because of some kind of decision and agreement about what it should signify. And that is why someone who knows both languages, if he wants to write to a Greek speaker, will not use this letter to mean what he uses it to mean when writing to a Latin speaker; and the word beta, with one and the same sound, is the name of a letter for the Greeks, and of a vegetable for the Latins;[85] and when I say "lege," a Greek understands one thing by these two syllables, a Latin speaker another.[86] So all these various meanings strike people's minds according to what has been agreed by the language group each of them belongs to; and because each group has a different agreement they will strike each person differently. And people have not agreed about their meanings because they already had in themselves any particular signifying value; but the reason they have such value is that people have come to an agreement about them.
In the same sort of way, then, those signs by which a baleful association with demons is established are only effective according to the value attributed to them by anyone's pet observations. This is made abundantly clear by the rites of the augurs, who both before they make their observations and after they have recorded the signs they have observed take great care neither to look at the flights of birds nor to listen to their cries, because none of these things are signs except by the consensus of those who observe them.[87]
The value, or otherwise, of non-superstitious human arts
25, 38. Having pruned off and rooted out this kind of signs from the Christian mind, we must next take a look at those human institutions that are not superstitious, those that is which have not been established together with demons, but just among human beings. Because all those things that people regard as having some significant value, just because it has been agreed among them that they should have such a value, are human institutions; and some of them have been instituted as superfluous and extravagant luxuries, others as convenient and necessary adjuncts of life.
Thus if the signs which ballet dancers make in their dancing had their value from nature and not from human convention and agreement, there would have been no need in earlier times, when the ballet first came to Carthage, for an announcer to inform the people of the city what the dancer wished them to understand by his performance. Many senior citizens still remember this, as we have often heard them tell. And it is all the easier to believe, because even now when somebody unfamiliar with such trifles enters a theater, his attention to the performance will all be wasted unless someone else tells him what those movements mean. It is true, of course, that when people wish to signify something,