Origen calls demons wicked.
Origen’s reply to this question is that the demons are wicked spirits and concerned with magic and idolatry. He maintains that not only Christians “but almost all who acknowledge the existence of demons” regard them as evil spirits.[1962] His own attitude toward them is invariably one of hostility. The thirty-six spirits who, as the Egyptians believe, have charge of different parts of the human body, Origen spurns as “thirty-six barbarous demons whom the Egyptian Magi alone call upon in some unknown way.”[1963] Really we probably have here to do with the astrological decans or sub-divisions of the signs of the zodiac into sections of ten degrees each.
But believes in presiding angels.
Yet Origen’s notion of the spiritual world rather closely resembles that of Celsus, for he is ready to ascribe to angels or other good invisible beings much the same functions which Celsus attributed to demons. He does not, for example, dispute the theory that different parts of the earth and of nature are assigned to different spirits. Instead he “ventures to lay down some considerations of a profounder kind, conveying a mystical and secret view respecting the original distribution of the various quarters of the earth among different superintending spirits.”[1964] He quotes the Septuagint version of Deuteronomy, “When the most High divided the nations.... He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the angels of God.”[1965] He narrates how after Babel, men “were conducted by those angels who imprinted on each his native language to the different parts of the earth according to their deserts.”[1966] He concludes by saying, “These remarks are to be understood as being made by us with a concealed meaning,”[1967] but there seems little doubt as to his substantial agreement with the view of Celsus. Indeed, later when Celsus asserts that Christians cannot eat, drink, or breathe without being indebted to demons, Origen responds, “We indeed also maintain ... the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians; ... but we deny that those invisible agents are demons.”[1968]
In his fourteenth homily on Numbers, as extant in Rufinus’s translation,[1969] Origen again speaks of presiding angels in these words. “And what is so pleasant, what is so magnificent as the work of the sun or moon by whom the world is illuminated? Yet there is work in the world itself too for angels who are over beasts and for angels who preside over earthly armies. There is work for angels who preside over the nativity of animals, of seedlings, of plantations, and many other growths. And again there is work for angels who preside over holy works, who teach the comprehension of eternal light and the knowledge of God’s secrets and the science of divine things.” How this passage might be used to encourage a belief in magic is made evident by the paraphrase of it in The Occult Philosophy of Henry Cornelius Agrippa,[1970] written in 1510 at the close of the middle ages. He represents Origen as saying, “There is work in the world itself for angels who preside over earthly armies, kingdoms, provinces, men, beasts, the nativity and growth of animals, shoots, plants, and other things, giving that virtue which they say is in things from their occult property.”
In the treatise De Principiis,[1971] Origen states that particular offices are assigned to individual angels, as curing diseases to Raphael, and the conduct of wars to Gabriel. This notion he perhaps derived from the Book of Enoch which, however, he states in his Reply to Celsus is not accepted by the churches as divinely inspired.[1972] He further declares on the authority of passages in the New Testament that to one angel the Church of the Ephesians was entrusted; to another, that of Smyrna; that Peter had his angel and Paul his,—nay that “every one of the little ones of the Church” has his angel who daily beholds the face of God.[1973]
A law of spiritual gravitation.
Origen advances a further theory concerning spirits, which may be described as a sort of law of spiritual gravitation. It is that when souls are pure and “not weighted down with sin as with a weight of lead,” they ascend on high where other pure and ethereal bodies and spirits dwell, “leaving here below their grosser bodies along with their impurities.” Polluted souls, on the contrary, have to stay close to earth where they wander about sepulchers as ghosts and apparitions.[1974] Origen therefore infers that pagan gods “who are attached for entire ages to particular dwellings and places” on earth, are wicked and polluted spirits. Origen of course will not admit that Christians or Jews bow down even to angels; such worship they reserve for God alone.[1975]
Attitude of Celsus toward astrology.
Both Celsus and Origen closely associate with the world of invisible spirits, whether these be angels or demons, the visible heavenly bodies, and thus lead us from magic, which Origen makes so dependent upon demons, to the kindred subject of astrology, the pseudo-science of the stars. Celsus had censured the Jews and by implication the Christians for worshiping heaven and the angels, and even apparitions produced by sorcery and enchantment, and yet at the same time neglecting what in his opinion formed the holiest and most powerful part of the heaven, namely, the fixed stars and the planets, “who prophesy to everyone so distinctly, through whom all productiveness results, the most conspicuous of supernal heralds, real heavenly angels.”[1976] This shows that Celsus was much more favorably inclined toward astrology than toward magic and less sceptical concerning its validity. Origen also represents Celsus—and furthermore the Stoics, Platonists, and Pythagoreans—as believing in the theory of the magnus annus, according to which, when the celestial bodies all return to their original positions after the lapse of some thousands of years, history will begin to repeat itself and the same events will occur and the same persons live over again.[1977] Origen also complains that Celsus regards as a divinely-inspired nation the Chaldeans, who were the founders of “deceitful genethlialogy,”[1978] as well as the Magi whom Celsus elsewhere identified with the Chaldeans or astrologers, but whom Origen as we have seen regards rather as the founders of magic.