Euripides vs birds; no charms; Lord Sabaoth misuse

Neither oath, nor faith, nor prophets’ Sayings having tested, you cast me out of land unjudged. Theseus toward this said: This tablet not having received a lot Accuses you faithfully; yet the birds going above the head, I say farewell much. And indeed God’s voice would become trustworthy, and the faith better than the writing in a tablet, if somehow it is also not unlikely for us to speak false; yet to sin nothing is God’s, and the true is most especially dear. Yet Theseus somehow knew altogether that the birds going above the head are nothing completely. Therefore one must not yet ascribe the knowledge of the things about to be to demons, yet rather we will distribute it to God as exceptional. And trickery will be hereafter—the birds’ prophecies—and a clear proof of an unsafe understanding—the faith upon this. And somewhere also the law itself says: ‘You will not use bird-omens,’ knowing the matter abominable, and most especially abominated beside the God ruling all.

Palladius: Thus these things seem to me myself also to hold.

Cyril: And since again this secret and old-wives’ whispering would also be a portion and manner of sorcery. Therefore also the divine Moses clarified the laws from above for us, always joining the stumblings, and somehow as it were setting the charm in brotherhood and same-nature with the drug-working. ‘For there will not be,’ he was saying, ‘in you one prophesying a prophecy, using bird-omens and omen-taking, a drug-worker, a charmer, a wonder-watcher, and a ventriloquist, and one asking the dead.’ Yet the charm is sick with the all-shameful altogether, and with lying very much in evil, yet somehow some have been fluttered unto this, saying that—Lord Sabaoth they name while charming over the sick, the caretakers of such things. In this way then they also hurry to confirm that the practice would not be shameful hereafter. Yet they seem to be carried off by a cold and inactive reasoning unto deceit and mind-harm; therefore this very thing is that the matter is most hard to bear. For we cry out the ‘Lord Sabaoth’ to the God of the wholes, wishing to doxologize; yet to no other of the things that are do we grant to have such a calling. For one and alone is the Lord of the powers. Yet they easily cast aside the thus supernatural and most glorious surname—or then doxology—to whichever of the demons playing together with them they should choose, and to the actors of their wonder-working they gift the glory most fitting for God and him alone, both flattering and being flattered, and distributing the excess of such terrible impiety of the running-together upon whatever they should choose unto a counter-payment. For always God-fighting and most glory-loving is the band of the demons. Therefore we must not be carried off together with those ones’ bad counsels, yet rather stand off as farthest, and not pay attention to wicked healers or wonder-workers—the demons—asking as some wage of the playthings unto us the blasphe