Dissertation on the Natural Knowledge of Angelic Existence

exceed, while we deny them the power of moving bodies in a foreign manner according to the more approved opinion, there will be an occasion to declare a little later. Although there is no doubt that many things which are said or written about magicians are fictitious and false—the cause of which thing is the excessive credulity and superstition of men, who are easily captured by admirable things, in whose number there are also those who wish to be thought wiser than the vulgar—it nevertheless cannot be denied that many things worthy of wonder have truly been done by magicians, as it was necessary for others, and also Bened. Pererius, to admit (δ).

It is not an obstacle that many who have sought this association with the Devil with great study have not been able to arrive at it. For, as Vossius speaks (ε), where God does not permit, which is especially [the case] among the powerful, so as not to trouble the world too much. For not all are equally useful to him: but hardly any others than the simple and credulous, of which sort women almost are, or those enslaved by affections, such as those who boil with lust or a desire for revenge, whom he deceives and abuses more easily. Regarding familiar spirits, the matter is again open. For such things are given, and have been found among many who have used the worst attempts, examples do not allow one to doubt. For evil spirits original: "Cacodæmones", just as they strive to arrogate to themselves the worship owed to God alone in other ways, so also in this way they search out every secret which far exceeds human grasp, so that they may be adored as the authors of occult warnings, and thus push humans into the ruin of body and soul. How humans find wonders by the help of these, perform wonders, attain sudden knowledge of languages which they had never learned, [and] make sudden progress in letters, is sufficiently shown by Joh. Trithemius, Aureolus Paracelsus, and Cornelius Agrippa in their books On Occult Philosophy. These familiar spirits, however, are none other than the demons themselves, as can be gathered from that manner by which they are acquired, which is plainly idolatrous and blasphemous, as Sperling describes it (ζ), and not least from the truculent and miserable exit which pacts of this kind usually suffer; while, as the Author just named speaks, with a groan and roaring, when the time of the pact has elapsed, Satan calls those magicians away, or sometimes even kills them on the spot for a light error. Indeed, there