Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] And so we say there exist certain spiritual substances. Nor is the name new: the philosophers know demons, Socrates himself waiting on the judgment of his own private daimon. And why not? For they themselves say that a demon clung to him from boyhood, one that plainly dissuaded him from the good. [2] All the poets know it too; even the uneducated crowd uses the word constantly as a curse. Indeed, when it invokes Satan, prince of this evil race, by that same word of execration, it does so out of the soul's own inner conscience. Even Plato did not deny angels. As witnesses to both names, even the magicians stand ready. [3] But how, from certain angels who of their own accord became corrupt, an even more corrupt race of demons arose — condemned by God along with the authors of their kind and with the one we have called their prince — the order of it is known from the holy scriptures. [4] For now it will be enough to set out how they operate.
Their business is the overthrow of man; from the very beginning, spiritual malice took its start with a view to man's ruin. So on bodies they inflict both sicknesses and certain bitter accidents, while on the soul they inflict sudden and extraordinary fits of derangement. [5] Their own subtlety and fineness of texture give them access to both substances of man. Spiritual powers can do a great deal, being invisible and imperceptible, and showing themselves rather in their effect than in the act itself — as when some hidden flaw in the breeze cuts down fruit or crops in the blossom, kills them in the bud, blights them in their ripening, as though the air, tried by some blind agency, poured out its own pestilential draughts. [6] By that same obscure contagion, then, the breathing-upon of demons and angels also works corruptions of the mind, with foul or savage frenzies and madnesses, and with lusts accompanied by various delusions — the chief of which is this: that by it they commend those gods of yours to men's captured and hemmed-in minds, so as to secure for themselves their proper fare of smoke and blood offered to images and statues. [7] And what richer pasture is there for it than to turn a man away from thinking of the true divinity by false illusions? How it works these too, I will now explain.
[8] Every spirit is winged: this is true of both angels and demons. So in an instant they are everywhere. The whole world is a single place to them; what happens anywhere they know as easily as they report it. People mistake their swiftness for godhood, since what they truly are stays hidden. So too they sometimes wish to seem the authors of what they announce; and indeed they sometimes are the authors of evils, but never of goods. [9] They also snatch up God's dispositions, once from the mouths of prophets preaching, now from the readings that echo aloud. And from these, gathering up as it were certain allotments of the times, they ape divinity while they steal divination. [10] As for oracles, with what cleverness they temper their ambiguities to fit the outcome, the cases of Croesus and of Pyrrhus show. As for the rest, the Pythian god announced that a tortoise was being boiled together with the flesh of a sheep, in the manner we described above: in an instant he had been at Lydia. Because they inhabit the upper air, keep close to the heavenly bodies, and mingle with the clouds, they gain advance knowledge of the weather's coming preparations, they can promise rains they already feel approaching. [11] They are, plainly, beneficent too, and busy themselves about cures for sickness. For first they do harm, then they prescribe remedies, new or contrary to expectation, to work a marvel; after which they stop doing harm, and are believed to have cured.
[12] Why should I go on setting out the rest of their arts, or even the powers, of spiritual deception — the phantom apparitions of the Castors, water carried in a sieve, a ship towed by a girdle, a beard turned red at a touch — all so that stones might be believed gods, and the true God go unsought?