Tertullian — A Treatise on the Soul 57

It is either a very fine thing to be detained in these infernal regions with the Aori , or souls which were prematurely hurried away; or else a very bad thing indeed to be there associated with the Biaeothanati , who suffered violent deaths. I may be permitted to use the actual words and terms with which magic rings again, that inventor of all these odd opinions — with its Ostanes, and Typhon, and Dardanus, and Damigeron, and Nectabis, and Berenice. There is a well-known popular bit of writing, which undertakes to summon up from the abode of Hades the souls which have actually slept out their full age, and had passed away by an honourable death, and had even been buried with full rites and proper ceremony. What after this shall we say about magic? Say, to be sure, what almost everybody says of it — that it is an imposture.

But it is not we Christians only whose notice this system of imposture does not escape. We, it is true , have discovered these spirits of evil , not, to be sure, by a complicity with them, but by a certain knowledge which is hostile to them; nor is it by any procedure which is attractive to them, but by a power which subjugates them that we handle (their wretched system)— that manifold pest of the mind of man , that artificer of all error , that destroyer of our salvation and our soul at one swoop. In this way, even by magic, which is indeed only a second idolatry , wherein they pretend that after death they become demons , just as they were supposed in the first and literal idolatry to become gods (and why not?

Since the gods are but dead things), the before-mentioned Aori Biaeothanati are actually invoked — and not unfairly, if one grounds his faith on this principle, that it is clearly credible for those souls to be beyond all others addicted to violence and wrong, which with violence and wrong have been hurried away by a cruel and premature death and which would have a keen appetite for reprisals. Under cover, however, of these souls , demons operate, especially such as used to dwell in them when they were in life, and who had driven them, in fact, to the fate which had at last carried them off. For, as we have already suggested, there is hardly a human being who is unattended by a demon ; and it is well known to many, that premature and violent deaths, which men ascribe to accidents, are in fact brought about by demons .

This imposture of the evil spirit lying concealed in the persons of the dead, we are able, if I mistake not, to prove by actual facts, when in cases of exorcism (the evil spirit) affirms himself sometimes to be one of the relatives of the person possessed by him, sometimes a gladiator or a bestiarius , and sometimes even a god; always making it one of his chief cares to extinguish the very truth which we are proclaiming, that men may not readily believe that all souls remove to Hades, and that they may overthrow faith in the resurrection and the judgment. And yet for all that, the demon , after trying to circumvent the bystanders, is vanquished by the pressure of divine grace , and sorely against his will confesses all the truth .