Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul 57

It is best to stay here, according to the *aoroi*; or worst, according to the *biaeothanatoi* — borrowing the very terms by which the *magia* that authored these opinions makes its noise: Hostanes, Typhon, Dardanus, Damigeron, Nectabis, Berenice. Public literature now promises to evoke souls from the infernal dwelling — souls settled at a just age, severed by a good death, dispatched with prompt burial. So what shall we call *magia*? What almost everyone does: a fraud. But the logic of the fraud escapes only Christians. We know the spiritual wickedness not as a conscience's companion but as knowledge's enemy, and we engage it not with inviting operation but with storming domination: the multiform plague of the human mind, the artisan of all error, the devastator alike of salvation and soul — the knowledge of *magia*, that is, second idolatry, in which demons feign themselves dead just as in the first they feigned themselves gods. Why not? Since the gods themselves are dead.

Hence *aoroi* and *biaeothanatoi* are invoked on the credible-sounding argument that souls wrenched by violent, savage, immature ends are especially forced to violence and injury — as if in revenge for the offense. But demons operate under cover of those souls; above all the demons who already dwelt in them while they lived and who drove them to such exits. For we have shown that almost no human lacks a demon, and many know that demonic operations also produce immature and atrocious deaths, which get blamed on attacks. We prove, too, this fraud of the evil spirit hiding under the persons of the dead: in exorcisms a demon sometimes claims to be a man from his parents, sometimes a gladiator or a *bestiarius*, elsewhere a god — caring nothing more than to exclude the very thing we preach, so that we will not easily believe all souls are dragged to the infernal regions and so disturb the faith of the judgment and the resurrection. Yet that demon, after trying to deceive the bystanders, was conquered by the instance of divine grace and confessed the truth against its will.

So also in that other species of *magia*, which claims to evoke resting souls from the infernos and exhibit them to sight, no different force of fraud is at work. Plainly: a phantasm is supplied, a body feigned; and it is no great feat to deceive external eyes for one to whom blinding the mind's inner aim is effortless. Finally, Pharaoh and the Egyptians saw the bodies of the magical wands' dragons, but Moses' truth devoured the lie. Simon and the magician Elymas also threw much against the Apostles; but the plague of blindness was no sleight of hand. What is new about the unclean spirit's emulation of truth? Behold, today the heretics of that same Simon are lifted by so great a presumption of art that they even promise to move the souls of the prophets from the infernos. And I believe they can do it by a lie; for the pythonic spirit was no less permitted to feign Samuel's soul when Saul consulted the dead after God (Luke 16:19-31). Far be it otherwise that we believe any saint's soul, let alone a prophet's, extracted by a demon — taught that Satan himself transforms into an angel of light, nay, into a man of light, and will even assert himself a god and produce portentous signs to subvert, if possible, the elect.

Did he perhaps doubt then to assert himself a prophet of God, and certainly to Saul, in whom he was already dwelling? Do not suppose one spirit administered the phantasm and another commended it; it was the same spirit, lying easily both in the pseudoprophetess and in the apostate, making believed what he had caused to be believed — he through whom Saul's treasure was where his heart was, where God certainly was not. And therefore through whom he believed he would see, he saw; because through whom he saw, he also believed. If nocturnal images are also opposed: the dead are often seen in dreams not in vain (for the Nasammones, as Heraclides writes, or Nymphodorus, or Herodotus, stayed by their parents' tombs capturing oracles; and the Celts, as Nicander affirms, kept vigil by the tombs of strong men for the same reason). We do not experience the dead in dreams any more truly than the living, but by the same reason the dead as the living, and all things that appear. For they are not true because they are seen, but because they are fulfilled. The faith of dreams is declared from the effect, not from the sight.

But no soul at all has the infernos open to it: the Lord sanctioned this in that parable of the resting poor man and the groaning rich man, from the person of Abraham, declaring it impossible for a renouncer of the infernal disposition to be sent back from there — which would have been possible even then, so that they might believe Moses and the Prophets (Luke 16:19-31). Even if God's power has recalled some into bodies as documents of his law, that will not be conceded to the faith, the audacity of magicians, the fraud of dreams, or the license of poets. But in the resurrection examples, when God's power — whether through Prophets, or through Christ, or through Apostles — represents souls in bodies solid, tangible, and satisfied with truth, it is prejudged that this is the form of truth, so that every incorporeal exhibition of the dead is judged mere prestidigitation.