Chapter 24
37. And all these omens are of force just so far as has been arranged with the
devils by that previous understanding in the mind which is, as it were, the
common language, but they are all full of hurtful curiosity, torturing
anxiety, and deadly slavery. For it was not because they had meaning that they
were attended to, but it was by attending to and marking them that they came
to have meaning. And so they are made different for different people,
according to their several notions and prejudices. For those spirits which are
bent upon deceiving, take care to provide for each person the same sort of
omens as they see his own conjectures and preconceptions have already
entangled him in. For, to take an illustration, the same figure of the letter
X, which is made in the shape of a cross, means one thing among the Greeks and
another among the Latins, not by nature, but by agreement and prearrangement
as to its signification; and so, any one who knows both languages uses this
letter in a different sense when writing to a Greek from that in which he uses
it when writing to a Latin. And the same sound, beta, which is the name of a
letter among the Greeks, is the name of a vegetable among the Latins; and when
I say, lege, these two syllables mean one thing to a Greek and another to a
Latin. Now, just as all these signs affect the mind according to the
arrangements of the community in which each man lives, and affect different
men's minds differently, because these arrangements are different; and as,
further, men did not agree upon them as signs because they were already
significant, but on the contrary they are now significant because men have
agreed upon them; in the same way also, those signs by which the ruinous
intercourse with devils is maintained have meaning just in proportion to each
man's observations. And this appears quite plainly in the rites of the augurs;
for they, both before they observe the omens and after they have completed
their observations, take pains not to see the flight or hear the cries of
birds, because these omens are of no significance apart from the previous
arrangement in the mind of the observer.
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