Where that that strikes is struck, blows follow blows,
There doth the Earth Orestes Bones enclose.
Which obscure reply the wisest of Sparta could not make out, and was casually unriddled by one talking with a Smith who had found large Bones of a Man buried about his House; the Oracle importing no more than a Smith’s Forge, expressed by a Double Bellows, the Hammer and Anvil therein.
Now, why the Oracle should place such consideration upon the Bones of Orestes the Son of Agamemnon, a mad man and a murtherer, if not to promote the idolatry of the Heathens, and maintain a superstitious veneration of things of no activity, it may leave no small obscurity.
Or why, in a business so clear in his knowledge, he should affect so obscure expressions it may also be wondred; if it were not to maintain the wary and evasive method in his answers: for, speaking obscurely in things beyond doubt within his knowledge, he might be more tolerably dark in matters beyond his prescience.
Though EI were inscribed over the Gate of Delphos, yet was there no uniformity in his deliveries. Sometimes with that obscurity as argued a fearfull prophecy; sometimes so plainly as might confirm a spirit of divinity; sometimes morally, deterring from vice and villany; another time vitiously, and in the spirit of bloud and cruelty: observably modest in his civil enigma and periphrasis of that part which old Numa would plainly name,[280] and Medea would not understand, when he advised Ægeus not to draw out his foot before, untill he arriv’d upon the Athenian ground; whereas another time he seemed too literal in that unseemly epithet unto Cyanus King of Cyprus,[281] and put a beastly trouble upon all Ægypt to find out the Urine of a true Virgin. Sometimes, more beholding unto memory than invention, he delighted to express himself in the bare Verses of Homer. But that he principally affected Poetry, and that the Priest not onely or always composed his prosal raptures into Verse, seems plain from his necromantical Prophecies, whilst the dead Head in Phlegon delivers a long Prediction in Verse; and at the raising of the Ghost of Commodus unto Caracalla, when none of his Ancestours would speak, the divining Spirit versified his infelicities; corresponding herein to the apprehensions of elder times, who conceived not onely a Majesty but something of Divinity in Poetry, and as in ancient times the old Theologians delivered their inventions.
Some critical Readers might expect in his oraculous Poems a more than ordinary strain and true spirit of Apollo; not contented to find that Spirits make Verses like Men, beating upon the filling Epithet, and taking the licence of dialects and lower helps, common to humane Poetry; wherein, since Scaliger, who hath spared none of the Greeks, hath thought it wisedom to be silent, we shall make no excursion.
Others may wonder how the curiosity of elder times, having this opportunity of his Answers, omitted Natural Questions; or how the old Magicians discovered no more Philosophy; and if they had the assistance of Spirits, could rest content with the bare assertions of things, without the knowledge of their causes; whereby they had made their Acts iterable by sober hands, and a standing part of Philosophy. Many wise Divines hold a reality in the wonders of the Ægyptian Magicians, and that those magnalia which they performed before Pharaoh were not mere delusions of Sense. Rightly to understand how they made Serpents out of Rods; Froggs and Bloud of Water, were worth half Porta’s Magick.
Hermolaus Barbarus was scarce in his wits, when, upon conference with a Spirit, he would demand no other question than the explication of Aristotle’s Entelecheia. Appion the Grammarian, that would raise the Ghost of Homer to decide the Controversie of his Country, made a frivolous and pedantick use of Necromancy. Philostratus did as little, that call’d up the Ghost of Achilles for a particular of the Story of Troy. Smarter curiosities would have been at the great Elixir, the Flux and Reflux of the Sea, with other noble obscurities in Nature; but probably all in vain: in matters cognoscible and framed for our disquisition, our Industry must be our Oracle, and Reason our Apollo.
Not to know things without the Arch of our intellectuals, or what Spirits apprehend, is the imperfection of our nature not our knowledge, and rather inscience than ignorance in man. Revelation might render a great part of the Creation easie which now seems beyond the stretch of humane indagation, and welcome no doubt from good hands might be a true Almagest, and great celestial construction: a clear Systeme of the planetical Bodies of the invisible and seeming useless Stars unto us, of the many Suns in the eighth Sphere, what they are, what they contain and to what more immediately those Stupendous Bodies are serviceable. But being not hinted in the authentick Revelation of God, nor known how far their discoveries are stinted; if they should come unto us from the mouth of evil Spirits, the belief thereof might be as unsafe as the enquiry.