Imposture
Now curls the smoke, the vapour dense ascends,
Within the mist the wily priest pretends
Great Phoebus with the metamorphos’d speaks
And hastes to note th’ intelligible shrieks,
Which he to dupes will speedily unfold,
When they have paid the Deity in gold!
—Maurice Swabey, ‘The Oracle at Delphi’1
IN 1616, THREE YEARS BEFORE he was executed for heresy—strangled, with his tongue symbolically cut out—the itinerant ex-friar Giulio Cesare Vanini published his second and last treatise, a series of philosophical dialogues, De admirandis naturae arcanis deae reginaeque mortalium.2 In book IV, widely regarded as the boldest in the work, Vanini interprets a variety of marvels and religious phenomena, many from Pomponazzi, ‘magister meus’, in each case rejecting a supernatural explanation.3 One chapter concerns the pagan oracles; here Vanini rehearses Pomponazzi’s scholastic arguments against the existence and activity of demons, and for the horoscope of religions. But after thirteen pages comes this exchange:
VANINI. … The very subtle rudiments of our philosophy give rise to these obvious outrages—but in obedience to the Christian faith I willingly detest them, and in truth I silently detested them even before I contrived them as a joke.
ALEXANDER. So what do you think about the oracles?
VANINI. They were the impostures of priests.4
No justification is given, no further argument. The suddenness of this riposte is almost shocking: reams of reheated analysis are swept away at a stroke. Pomponazzi now appears a thinker of the scholastic past—essentially mediaeval. Vanini, by contrast, seems to cut straight to the marrow, replacing logical subtlety with the cynical common sense of modernity. Those who favour abrupt shifts and discontinuities in the history of ideas will find easy vindication here.
We will recognise in this line an early statement of what Frank Manuel called the ‘imposture thesis’—that pagan religions were built on an edifice of priestly fraud, maintained by the laity’s fear of divine authority.5 This thesis has been widely studied as an element of the Enlightenment and its immediate precursors, especially French libertinisme érudit and English Deism. Many of the thinkers associated with these movements applied the imposture thesis to the pagan oracles, and indeed, the oracles slotted into their narratives as neatly as they had into those of Catholic theologians. Vanini, furthermore, is commonly situated in the historiography of radical thought as an important forerunner, progenitor, or retrospective hero of these later movements—a transitional figure between sixteenth-century Italy and seventeenth-century France, thanks to his publication in Paris and his execution in Toulouse.6 Certainly, he enjoyed considerable posthumous notoriety as the great martyr to atheism.7 For these reasons it is tempting for the historian to read back into Vanini a clear-cut heterodoxy found in later writers. But pressing the passage quoted here for its own subtlety, and its own backstory, will give us a richer picture of the historical underpinnings of the later imposture thesis.
The effect of sudden transition is, in reality, misleading. Not only is Vanini’s idea not new, it had been explicitly rejected by Pomponazzi himself, on evidential grounds:
It seems neither safe nor respectful to say, as is often said by many who deny these phenomena, that they have been invented by men, like the fables of Aesop, for the instruction of the people, or that they are the ruses of priests for acquiring money or honour.… I myself do not approve this opinion, seeing that men of very serious morals, very eminent in learning, ancient and venerable, both Greek and Latin, and even barbarians, affirm these things to be absolutely true.8
Pomponazzi admitted that some marvels, such as the magic mirror, could be explained only as tricks,9 but those who claimed that all were invented were guilty of reasoning from the particular to the universal, a serious logical error:
Such men, however, are deceived; since sometimes these things were proved fabulous, and sometimes they were seen to be illusions, from this they inferred a universal from the particular, which clearly derives from an ignorance of logic.10
These would remain the basic arguments against the imposture thesis for two centuries, still at the heart of Jean-François Baltus’s great work of 1707.11 It is ironic that Pomponazzi, revered by the libertines and condemned by orthodox theologians, should have provided an argumentative template for the latter against the former. And Vanini was well aware of these objections, since he had used them himself in his first work, the Amphitheatrum aeternae providentiae (1615):
We should have no faith in this [i.e., the fraud thesis], since all books, the words of all wise men, all the records of antiquity, both Greek and Latin, are full of things which tell us of the very true and indubitable responses of the oracles. The wretched atheist is deceived: just because he could find some miracles of the idols which were fictitious, so he inferred from the particular case, against the universal rule of the logicians, that all were false—a proposition which does not follow according to its form, for one cannot draw a necessary conclusion from one thing to all things.12
To complicate the matter further, we may compare the chapter in De admirandis arcanis on the Sibyls. The reasoning here is precisely that of De incantationibus: historical exempla are amassed to argue that they received their knowledge of the future from celestial intelligences, with the operation of melancholy as an individual material cause.13
Why, then, should Vanini settle for recycled Pomponazzi on the pagan Sibyls, but reject him so dramatically on the pagan oracles? And why should he ignore the two objections to the fraud thesis? First, it seems that wherever imposture is possible, it has explanatory priority. The oracles were administered by priests, and the same can be said of Roman augury; both, then, may be dismissed as fraud.14 But the Sibyls were independent of such structures, and so their predictions could not have been the product of priestly imposture. We can easily imagine scope for fable and invention elsewhere in the transmission of sibylline prophecy, but Vanini does not.
A more unexpected factor, given Vanini’s place in the history of atheism and free thought, is the Christian perspective. Consider his conclusion on the oracles again. He rejects, or claims to reject, Pomponazzi’s view not for its philosophical shortcomings but ‘in Christianae fidei obsequium’; the implication is that his own solution—the imposture thesis—will be more acceptable to Church orthodoxy. Given the nature of this kind of text, and the lack of good external evidence, it is impossible to be certain of Vanini’s ‘true’ beliefs, but the surface narrative, at least, is a Christian one. This explains the distinction between oracles and Sibyls: among theologians the latter were to be saved, for they famously predicted the birth of Christ, and thus were to be counted as divine revelation to the heathens.15 Vanini, in line with this, adduces the sibylline prophecy of Christ as a proof of the soul’s ability to predict changes in religion by the stars. The oracles, by contrast, ran strictly counter to Christianity—hence their cessation—and so Vanini must reject them as false, even if he discards the notion that they were diabolic.
With our knowledge of the imposture thesis as a subversive trope later in the century, we may be surprised to think of it as a Christian idea. Some historians have pointed to its confessional origins, as part of the Lutheran critique of Catholic priestcraft in the sixteenth century, and noted parallels to contemporary themes of political simulation and dissimulation.16 But if we examine the history of the thesis in an oracular context, we will discover many competing narratives in the hundred years before Vanini. It is the coexistence of these narratives, as we shall see, that makes his genuine purport on the subject so difficult to decipher.
• • •
Even among proponents of the demon thesis in the sixteenth century, the suggestion of human imposture was frequently at hand. There was narrative precedent, of course, in pagan histories, as well as in the Bible itself, most notably in the deuterocanonical tale of the idol Bel, whose priests furtively consumed sacrificial offerings supposedly laid out for the god, until their ruse was discovered by the prophet Daniel.17 One of the most commonly repeated classical sound bites on the oracles was Cicero’s excerpt of Demosthenes, that the Pythia ‘philippized’: this appears in the works of both Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Peucer, the two early exemplars of orthodoxy on the subject.18 Neither makes clear how Demosthenes’ line, implying deliberate deceit at a human level, can be squared with the diabolic nature of the oracles. The same can be said of the brief remarks on the oracles in Alessandro Sardi’s De rerum inventoribus.19 A muddy association of the two crimes—demonic divination and human imposture—recurred throughout the Christian critique of the pagan oracles in the sixteenth century. We noted in chapter one the ambiguous presence of Eusebius in the account of the humanist compiler Caelius Rhodiginus, containing both the demon thesis and the imposture thesis of Oenomaus.20 Eusebius, and his paraphrases of that Cynic, would be quoted by scores of demonologists, from the Manceau lawyer Pierre Massé to Benedict Pereira and the Coimbra commentaries on Aristotle, with little sense that the two theses were in conflict.21 As with Eusebius himself, the main point to be made was the vanity of pagan religion and its oracles, not the relative rôles of men or demons in their deceits.
Rhodiginus paraphrased Eusebius’s list of fraudulent devices, elaborating on the idea that spies travelled about the towns to elicit information on those who consulted the oracles.22 This interest in the mechanism of imposture was shared by his fellow humanist Celio Calcagnini, an associate of Erasmus. Calcagnini bequeathed to posterity, in his posthumous Opera aliquot (1544), a short dialogue of unknown date, the ‘Oraculorum liber’.23 It is with this piece that we first encounter, in a modern work, the spirit of Lucian applied to the oracles, a splash of colour.24
The two speakers in Calcagnini’s dialogue are ‘Aed’ (i.e., Aedituus), a priest of Apollo—presumably at Delphi—and ‘A’ (i.e., Auditor), an eager would-be initiate. Aedituus begins by explaining that Apollo, the sun, does not know the future: this is reserved for Jupiter, ‘the supreme creator of mortal things, and judge of immortal things’.25 Apollo has even admitted to his consultants that ‘What you seek is in vain, for the future is not ours to know.’26 But because men continued to petition the god for predictions, Aedituus and his fellow priests began to invent oracles, lest they grow hungry for want of clients: ‘by means of a certain well-adorned trickster from among our colleagues, we delivered spurious and counterfeit responses’.27 For the remainder of the dialogue, Aedituus recounts the petitions of a series of figures and the priests’ comically ambiguous responses to each.
We may describe the ‘Oraculorum liber’ as Lucianic in tone, that is, light and mocking. Calcagnini was clearly well versed in Lucian’s style—he translated the satirist’s Iudicium vocalium, which he published in 1510, and again in 1539 with an original companion piece written in imitation.28 The debt to Lucian is made explicit at the end of the dialogue on oracles, when Auditor, now keen to be initiated into this lucrative business, asks his interlocutor how the priests manage to read the oracular petitions when they are delivered in sealed letters. Aedituus replies:
This is very easy for us, since Alexander, who practised this art with much authority in Pontus at Abonuteichus, bequeathed three tricks above all to be copied by his followers. The first was to use a heated needle to loosen that molten part of the wax which adhered under the seal; after reading, he could with the needle easily rejoin the hot wax behind the string to that remaining on the seal. The second made use of a particular substance called collyrium, which consisted of Bruttian pitch, bitumen, ground glass, wax and mastic. After heating this mixture, moistened with hogfat, in the fire, he applied it to the signet, and drew off the image of the seal. He copied this and left it to dry—which happened immediately—then neatly resealed the letters when he had read them, and impressed the same seal from a stone onto the new wax, marvellously similar to the original. Finally, he mixed bookbinders’ glue with gypsum to make a sort of wax, and applied this to the seal while it was still soft, immediately drawing it away again. It dried at once, becoming more solid than horn or even iron.29
The passage is a close translation of a description Lucian puts into the mouth of his false prophet Alexander, as Calcagnini acknowledges at the start.30 For the first time, but not the last, the ruses outlined by the Greek satirist would be relocated to the oracles—precedent had been set.
Calcagnini, a diplomat and a professor of rhetoric, was also a canon at Ferrara and later a protonotary apostolic. His ‘Oraculorum liber’ had nothing subversive about it. It was not a treatise, of course, but, like its model, a work of the literary imagination, resting on no great scholarship, and having more in common with the gentle satires of his friend Erasmus than with the calculated attacks of later libertines. The work makes no reference to Christian ideas, such as demons, or to Christian history, and yet was perfectly acceptable to Christian orthodoxy. For this reason we should not be surprised to find it cited approvingly by several authors of impeccable religion, both Catholic and Protestant. The kind of human fraud that Calcagnini painted ‘nec invenuste’, to quote Gerard Vossius, was easily compatible with the demon thesis.31
In modern pagan contexts, meanwhile, where Christian tradition and patristic testimony were not at stake, devout observers were happy to uncover religious fraud, as two cases will illustrate. In late 1543, three years after he had left Portugal, the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier wrote to Ignatius Loyola from Comorin (Kanyakumari), on the southernmost tip of India.32 He was then in the process of bringing the Gospel to the aristocratic caste of the Paravas, whose religion had been governed, as elsewhere, by Brahmin priests. In his letter Xavier recounts his horror at learning the ruses by which the Brahmins kept the superstitious populace in servitude with their lies about the local idols: ‘They are always deliberating how to deceive most cunningly the simple and ignorant poor.’33 According to Xavier, the priests offered him a bribe to participate, but he refused, instead disclosing their imposture to the common folk. Nowhere in his story is the Devil mentioned—the entire deceit is the work of human priests alone.
Over sixty years later, in 1609, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain found himself among the Huron of Québec, where he discovered diviners of the enthusiastic type, called ‘Pilotois, or Ostemoy’.34 When called on to serve as oracles, the Pilotois would construct a little shelter of wood, which he then covered with his robe; crawling inside, he would shake the posts of the shelter and claim to receive answers from the Devil, before rising in a frenzy of tongues. As with the Pythia, Champlain notes a deliberate distortion of the voice; as he sees it, there is nothing diabolic in the whole practice, only trickery and folly.35 Other Catholic witnesses drew their own conclusions. The lawyer Marc Lescarbot thought that devils were present, although he noted both the vain ambiguity of the oracular answers and the need for financial remuneration; the Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune, on the other hand, denied any diabolic presence at the ‘beaux Oracles’ of the Huron, which he contrasted to known Mesoamerican cases, where the Devil had revealed himself in the flesh.36 It was quite possible, then, for good Catholics with a staunch belief in demons to entertain various notions of pagan worship—including that it was grounded in human imposture—without the faintest whiff of impiety.
As we have already seen, among the Italian scholars who debated the nature of the oracles in the sixty-odd years before Vanini, the possibility of fraud played a recurrent rôle, and especially for his contemporary Raguseo, who cited Demosthenes, Pausanias, Eusebius, and Rhodiginus.37 For these writers, the involvement of demons did not preclude human deceit, and the two were not always distinct: the notion of imposture, after all, could apply equally to demons and to men. In the sixteenth century, then, the view that the oracles had involved human imposture was not inherently subversive or impious, even without the further mention of demons. It was acceptable because it preserved the old antithesis between true and false religion, so fundamental to the learned construction of Christian identity.
But it cannot be denied that the thesis had been associated with heterodox ends before 1600. One example above all was certainly known to Vanini, as to everyone else—Niccolò Machiavelli. In his Discorsi on Livy, Machiavelli had argued that a ruler, to control his people, must maintain the state religion, citing as an example the use of oracles and augurs in Roman politics:
The life of the heathen religion was founded on the responses of the oracles and the sects of augurs and haruspices. All their other ceremonies, sacrifices and rites depended on these, for they easily believed that the god who could predict your future, whether good or bad, should also be able to grant it to you. From this arose the temples, the sacrifices, the supplications, and every other ceremony venerating him; thus the oracle of Delos, the temple of Jupiter Ammon and other famous oracles, which filled the world with admiration and devotion. When these began to speak in the manner of the powerful, and this falsity was discovered among the people, men became incredulous and disposed to disturb all good order.38
The oracles, or at least the later oracles, by this interpretation, were the product not so much of priestcraft as of princecraft; religion, more generally, is understood as a civic and political tool, and Machiavelli notoriously counsels the Christian prince to treat religion in the same way.39 The sources and precedents of this view—Plato, Scaevola, Averroes—are well known,40 and their influence can be seen, to name one contemporary thinker, in Pomponazzi’s description of demons as a ‘noble lie’. The parallels between the Florentine and the Mantuan do not stop there. Both demand caution in our appraisal of their views on pagan religion; as Anthony Parel has argued, Machiavelli’s ideas on this subject, like those of Pomponazzi, are shaped by a cosmology determined by the motions of the stars. For Parel’s Machiavelli,
religion is part of the cosmic phenomena unfolding in time and place in the sublunar world. In this unfolding, the heavens play an indispensable role: they ‘inspire’ humans to establish religion and to use it exclusively for political ends.41
The political manipulation of religion, in other words, is ontologically subordinate to the fatalistic laws of astrology. Machiavelli was not an ‘enlightenment philosophe, who allegedly believes that religion is only a human invention’,42 but, as with his Mantuan contemporary, his cosmology was interpreted, even by his early modern readers, as proof of his atheism.43 Although most of these readers had little interest in the oracles, Machiavelli’s first and most influential critic, the Huguenot lawyer Innocent Gentillet, devoted seven pages of his 1576 Anti-Machiavel to refuting his target’s brief remarks on the subject.44 This passage is of note to us as the first critique of the imposture thesis in favour of the demon thesis. Gentillet begins:
And as for what Machiavelli presupposes—that the oracles were responses invented by the priests of Apollo, Jupiter Ammon, and other pagan gods—he clearly shows himself to be a beast who has read little. I will not deny that the priests sometimes mixed themselves up a little in the oracles, but as for the rest, it is certain that these oracles were diabolic responses, which the Devil gave himself, or had some priest or priestess give, whom he had made ecstatic and outside of their senses. Now, these priests and priestesses commonly knew little or nothing, so they had to be able to respond in verse. Moreover, it was impossible for them to have any knowledge of places as far away as those from which the consultants had come, let alone the specific details which were usually demanded of the oracular responses, so as to make those responses relevant. I will not stop to prove this point at greater length, since those who have read a few of the works of antiquity know well that these oracles were certainly voices which came from the devils, whom the pagans worshipped under the names of Apollo or Jupiter or other similar gods.45
As with the attacks on Pomponazzi over the oracles, Gentillet is quick to emphasise Machiavelli’s impiety and ignorance. Human fraud, at least as a primary explanation, is here ruled out on two grounds: it cannot account for the specificity of oracular responses, and it is not supported by ancient testimony. The first point resembles the complaints of this period against the naturalist explanation of the oracles. The argument from testimony or authority, however, is characteristic of the critique of imposture: it is the same as that presented by Pomponazzi. Several pages on the cessation follow, with some discussion of Plutarch, but taken mostly from Eusebius’s reading of the death of Pan.
At the end of this section, the issue of the oracles gives way to a broader, more important point of contention—and one highly revealing for our story. For Machiavelli had suggested not only that the pagan oracles were a political fiction, but also that they ceased only when men became incredulous and ‘disposed to disturb every good institution’. Gentillet, who read the Discourses in Jacques Gohory’s embellished French version,46 found himself responding to a stronger form of the last expression:
Why should this rotten Machiavelli dare to say that men became wicked, like unchained slaves, when the oracles ceased? Where has he found this? Where has he read that men were worse and of a more evil complexion after the oracles ceased than before? On the contrary, we read that when the oracles ceased (which was in the time of the primitive Church), those who gave themselves to the Christian religion were men of holy living and conduct.47
Machiavelli’s remarks on the oracles, as embroidered by Gohory, were dangerous because of their implication for Christian history: they suggest that the transition from paganism to Christianity involved a moral degeneracy, and moreover that the teaching of Christ had no miraculous effect on the pagan world. As with the critics of Pomponazzi during this period, Gentillet understands Machiavelli to be treating paganism and Christianity as historiographically equal.48
Vanini was well aware of Machiavelli’s thoughts on the oracles: when he attacked the imposture thesis in his Amphitheatrum, the Discorsi were his explicit target, along with Machiavelli’s more general idea of religion as a political tool.49 Vanini’s critique is much shorter than Gentillet’s and ignores the cessation, but it has much the same thrust: the Florentine is labelled ‘the prince of atheists’ and his Prince ‘very pernicious’, and the argument from ancient testimony appears here as it had in the Anti-Machiavel.50 In the same chapter, Vanini denies that the pagan oracles could have been effected by natural means, given the accuracy of their responses; he also rejects the specific accounts of divination given by Pomponazzi, and later Cardano, but here his arguments take him away from the oracles themselves, and into astrological theory.51
From a Christian perspective, Vanini appears to be making all the right moves: Machiavelli, Pomponazzi, and Cardano were three of the most dangerous thinkers of the previous century, and a critique of their ideas could hardly be more orthodox. Furthermore, this chapter, like much of the Amphitheatrum, is framed as a defence of divine providence against atheists and sceptics—again, an ostensibly pious object. But the fact that Vanini finds support for providence in the accuracy of pagan predictions sounds a quietly discordant note, and while he acknowledges that the Christian explanation of the oracles is demonic,52 he never properly endorses it. His complaints against both Pomponazzi and Machiavelli are only repetitions of abstract arguments made conventional in the previous century; no clear positive view emerges from the negatives.
One contemporary reader had no doubts about Vanini’s position. Marin Mersenne, whose enormous volume of Quaestiones on Genesis, published in 1622, devotes many pages to denouncing and refuting naturalistic impiety, reads the Amphitheatrum as espousing the heterodox astrological theory of Pomponazzi and Cardano, even though it is this very theory that is ostensibly the subject of Vanini’s critique.53 Such a system of occult natural and astral correspondences, asserts Mersenne, amounted only to a body of superstition sown in the minds of men by the Devil.54 He raises the imposture thesis when, on two separate occasions, he mentions the view of Machiavelli, in words taken verbatim from the Amphitheatrum.55 But this thesis, curiously, receives no rebuttal, and is instead lumped in with Pomponazzi and the others. For Mersenne, who wanted to defend legitimate astronomical science from the charge of heterodoxy, it was the astrological theory of divination, most of all that of Vanini, which posed the greatest threat to Christian piety. His own view of the heathen oracles—one in full accordance with Catholic tradition—was never in doubt.56
Later readings vary considerably. A 1632 treatise on divination by the Veronese physician Girolamo Franzosi, after listing possible causes of the oracles, recycles the Vaninian analysis of Pomponazzi, without reaching a definite conclusion.57 Henry More, who had much in common with Mersenne on a philosophical level, would reach a like estimation of Vanini’s views, which he attacked across a number of works of the 1650s.58 Charles Blount, by contrast, would express approval of Vanini’s imposture thesis in his edition of Philostratus, published in 1680.59
Vanini would also be a key reference for the Theophrastus redivivus, a clandestine treatise on religion written around 1659 in unknown circumstances, and circulating widely in manuscript.60 In its chapter on oracles, the Theophrastus reenacts the conclusion of Vanini’s dialogue; that is, it rejects the naturalistic explanations of Pomponazzi and Cardano in favour of the imposture thesis. This turn, unlike that in De admirandis arcanis, is made without any ambiguity, and, surprisingly, rests on little more than the authority of Lucian, Cicero, and Boethus in Plutarch, each of whom is quoted or paraphrased at length.61 Only on the cessation is a new argument adduced:
Just as they say that, long ago, the oracles of the Greeks and others ceased before and on the coming of Christ, certainly after his arrival they should also have ceased in other parts of the world: for his force and power did not proceed gradually … but flowed in torrents everywhere with great impetus.62
Here the imposture thesis of the oracles, in the context of a broader clandestine attack on religious truth and authority, assuredly has the radical connotations so often ascribed to it. This would be typical of its tradition, and we find much the same thesis and connotation in the most infamous of the clandestine treatises to emerge from early modernity, the Traité des trois imposteurs.63
But it is a mistake to assimilate the Theophrastus with Vanini, whose thought—to the extent that we can interpret it—stands in a more ambivalent relation to the Aristotelian naturalism from which it grew. It is impossible, ultimately, to know the subtext of Vanini’s two works: along with the concepts borrowed from Machiavelli, Pomponazzi, and Cardano, and the ostensibly Christian arguments against them, are knotted layers of irony and self-reference, muddying the textual stream still further. In De admirandis arcanis, he notoriously remarks of the Amphitheatrum: ‘There are many things written in that book which I do not believe. C’est la vie.’ This is smirked in response to a supposed marvel—a child who spoke, and prophesied, on the day of his birth—that Vanini had adduced in the Amphitheatrum, but here dismisses as a fable.64 An obvious conclusion, although not necessarily a correct one, is that the imposture thesis of the oracles, attacked in the first book and adopted in the second, is a similar item. If so, the author may have really seen it as heterodox. But Vanini does not say that he included spurious opinions in the Amphitheatrum for reasons of orthodoxy—and if he had, why abandon these fictions in De admirandis arcanis? The latter work, indeed, like the former, was issued with the Sorbonne’s seal of approval.65
When Vanini writes with such brutal simplicity in De admirandis arcanis that the pagan oracles were nothing more than the impostures of priests, he draws on two overlapping traditions: the respectable Christian view that fraud existed at the human as well as the demonic level, and Machiavelli’s position, already denounced by Gentillet, that the oracles, and pagan religion in general, were a political fiction. Given both these currents, and given the ambiguous argumentative patterns of the work itself, we cannot be sure of the intended connotations of the imposture thesis as it is presented here. For instance, the Pomponatian account, outlined at such length, may in fact be the true, radical view from which Vanini piously but disingenuously withdraws, or it may be merely the old, entertained but discarded for the new. Vanini does not even deny, in this chapter, that demons were involved in the oracles: he merely shows that Pomponazzi denied such a thing. The heterodoxy, then, if indeed it is present, is impossible to locate. Although one’s reading of the text labours under the weight of external evidence—Vanini’s reception and martyrdom, as well as certain future developments of his thesis—we must in the end, in good conscience, remain agnostic about the meaning of this chapter in and of itself.
We see the hint of a smile, perhaps, at the end of the chapter, when Vanini recommends to his disciple the works of Lucian for information on the ruses employed in oracular frauds. No other authority is adduced. But then, Lucian was an appropriate kind of authority for the imposture thesis. This was unlike the other positions on the oracles, which rested on claims about the universe itself—those who found demons in the oracles believed, a fortiori, in the operation of demons in the world, and especially in possession and divinatory practices, while those who denied the existence or activity of demons were forced to posit natural causes. For Pomponazzi, the stars regulated the oracles, just as they regulated everything else; for Leonico Tomeo, the oracles were just part of the universal operation of the anima mundi. Similarly, those who believed Delphi to have been diabolical were sure that the Devil continued to afflict witches and engastrimyths, and to deliver oracles among the heathen of India and America. These positions collapsed the past into the present: they were essentially ahistorical. The imposture thesis, by contrast, rested on no such claims about the world. To say that the Pythia or her priests were charlatans was not necessarily to say that demons had no involvement with the world, or that divination was impossible. As Pierre Gassendi put it,
The difficulty is only in discerning when the prediction was made by the intervention of a demon, and when by the cunning of priests or the credulity of the inquirers.66
The Marthe Brossier case, again, is telling: Marescot accepted the reality of demonic possession in general, denying only that his patient was an example of such possession. Paul Le Jeune, similarly, denied the demonic reality of divination among the Huron because, unlike in other American tribes, he could find no good evidence for it, but only hearsay.67 Vanini himself, as we have just seen, found fraud at the ancient oracles, but astral causes for sibylline prophecy. It was virtually impossible, in fact, to deny that there had been some chicanery at Delphi, in the way that one could categorically deny demons or natural causes. Even those writing against the imposture thesis—Gentillet, for instance, or later Baltus—admitted this.
The imposture thesis, more than its alternatives, lent itself to judgements about the particularities of individual cases—to historical thinking. To put it another way, the thesis is probabilistic and rhetorical in character, rather than apodictic or scientific. Lucian, whose portrait of Alexander makes no absolute claims about divination, but simply paints a suggestive picture, is therefore the ideal point of classical reference. In the words of one later sceptic, Alexander ‘was an impostor, and his imposture revealed an infinity of others’.68 Similarly, the stories of oracular fraud from Herodotus, or the remark Cicero quotes from Demosthenes, serve only as inductive examples of deceit, rather than deductive proof—in legal terms, circumstantial evidence.
This problem lay behind Pomponazzi’s rejection of the imposture thesis: one cannot reason from a few cases, however compelling, to all. The ancient testimony supporting the reality of oracular divination is far stronger than the testimony against. But, as Vanini argues, authorities are not equal. In the later dialogue on augury, he says that he will follow the testimony not of the ‘imaginary’ Hermes Trismegistus—also a priest, and therefore biased—but instead of Cicero, who scorned the practice as a fable, and ‘whom the Republic of Letters worships above a thousand Trismegistuses’.69 As for the oracles, a voice like Lucian’s seeks to explain the problem of ancient testimony by vividly describing the way impostors appear genuine to the common man: by this means he accounts for—explains away—the testimony in favour of oracles. Vanini, too, adds the pregnant comment that the fraud was not detected because ‘the philosophers dared not rail against the oracles, for fear of the people’s power’.70 From this perspective, testimony on the oracles was not of equal merit: a few known bad cases told against the rest. We reason like this all the time, rejecting a punnet at market for only two or three bad fruit; in a scholarly context, this marks a point of transition between the naturalism of Pomponazzi, which seeks to explain everything, and the critical scepticism of the early Enlightenment, which denounced much as simply untrue, and so inexplicable. Such an idea, implicit in Vanini, would become pivotal to Antonie van Dale when he came to argue on this subject. The one, in the long view, made possible the other.
• • •
Van Dale insisted that we examine the truth of a matter before we investigate its causes. The distinction between the what (or whether) and the why of a phenomenon had been scholastic, with its roots in Aristotle’s demarcation of τό ὅτι and τό διότι.71 As Cardano himself had specified, in his early treatment of Pomponazzi’s system, ‘What something is, and why it is, presuppose the question of whether it is.’72 Van Dale quoted instead another physician, Daniel Sennert: ‘All examiners of nature should heed this story, lest they seek the causes and διότι of a matter before the ὅτι is manifest, and the matter itself clearly agreed upon.’73
The story in question was that of the Golden Tooth—the Silesian boy who, in 1592, had been hustled around Germany by his father, while learned divines and alchemists debated the reasons why one of his teeth was made of gold. It was finally discovered that the gold had been merely painted on; natural and theological arguments, as with Marthe Brossier, gave way to a realization of imposture.74 At the turn of the seventeenth century, the problem of fraud was keenly felt among the learned; the pagan oracles, despite being a historical phenomenon, invited the same doubt. A century later, most agreed that there was simply no point squabbling about whether demons, stars, or vapours produced heathen prophecy, because there was no such thing—no ὅτι. By this time, the question was being broached in different contexts: treatises on pagan religion, and critiques of magic or witchcraft as cultural phenomena, rather than works of Aristotelian philosophy. The discussion had moved from Italy to northern Europe. But Vanini was not the last in the Italian Peripatetic tradition, conversant with ὅτι and διότι, to reject natural causes in favour of imposture as the explanation of the pagan oracles best representing Aristotle.
In 1624, the Venetian nobleman Giovanni Antonio Venier published a little treatise, De oraculis et divinationibus antiquorum, now almost forgotten.75 It was the first treatise devoted solely to the oracles, discussing the subject from a philosophical perspective and amassing the relevant ancient and mediaeval authorities; the most recent name, pregnantly, is that of Pomponazzi. It is clear and succinct, and written in a straightforward Latin prose—even after Van Dale, an early modern scholar who wanted a guide to this aspect of the oracles would have found no better source. This may account for the fact that it was reprinted at Basel in 1628, and anthologised in two major scholarly compendiums at the end of the century.76 If he was rarely cited it was probably because subsequent writers on the oracles, at least before Van Dale, tended to refer only to primary sources. We should not let this mislead us into overlooking its importance.
De oraculis is the final significant work in the Italian controversy on the oracles that had begun with De incantationibus. It is still essentially scholastic—one of the last texts of its kind to deal seriously with Pomponazzi, and to talk in terms of species and agens intellectus.77 Venier makes no reference to the ambiguity and immorality of the oracles, and frequently reverts, like his Italian predecessors, to a metaphysical analysis of divination in general. He is in no doubt about the nature of the oracles: at the start and conclusion of his work he clearly states that they were given by demons, and ceased on the birth of Christ and the diffusion of the Gospel.78 But in the body of the text he explores the subject from a non-Christian perspective, addressing in turn the theories of two groups—the ‘theologi’, by which he means the Platonists, and the ‘philosophi’, that is, Aristotle and his followers.79 The first part, by far the longer of the two, and covering Hermes Trismegistus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plato, Proclus, and Plutarch,80 ends with a discussion of Euhemerism. But despite its relative brevity, it is Venier’s treatment of the Peripatetic tradition that interests us here. His method is to assess Aristotle’s commentators—principally Averroes and Pomponazzi—refuting each before giving his own, ‘true’ interpretation of Aristotle; in this respect, again, he follows the systematic method of his forebears:
Some attribute our foreknowledge of the future to the light of the agent intellect. Others say that it is communicated by God through the celestial intelligences. Still others assert that it is produced by the celestial intelligences, via the motion of the sky, which excites phantasms in us. All of these philosophise falsely from natural principles.81
As Venier argues, neither the agent intellect, nor any other separate substances, can give us knowledge of the future, since they have no knowledge of particulars.82 This critique was now very familiar. He next summarises the view of Pomponazzi, which he interprets as a misreading of Averroes that
God and the celestial intelligences concern themselves with these earthly matters, and have a particular concern for man, since he is the end for whose benefit all things are made; moreover, they greatly affect the maintenance of leges and religions, because these pertain to the governance of men.83
Pomponazzi’s mistake, for Venier, is to conceptualise the Aristotelian God as an efficient cause, an effector rerum. Rather, that God is the final cause of the universe, one that makes no distinction between understanding, being, and operating—a principle that, in a rare nod to Christianity, is claimed to be known through faith by ‘our theologians’.84 There is, in fact, no way at all, according to the principles of Aristotle—that is, natural philosophy—by which men can know future contingents.85
This is essentially the same conclusion reached by Boccadiferro—that there is no such thing as natural divination.86 But Venier, eighty years later, goes one further: he devotes the final chapter of his treatise to a detailed analysis of the oracles from a ‘true’ Aristotelian perspective. The oracles, here, have finally been separated from divination. There is no ὅτι: ‘according to the teaching of Aristotle, we say that a cause cannot be assigned to every marvel which is discussed’.87 Some things are inexplicable because they are not true. In the case of the oracles, deprived of their divinatory aspect, only two factors remain: frenzy and imposture. The first, explained via the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata as a melancholic disorder, goes back to Boccadiferro, who concluded only that oracular predictions had been a matter of chance. It is the second factor that marks the era of Venier’s treatise. The ‘Peripatetic’, he writes, specifying no names, believes that ancient marvels and oracles were
devised either by evil priests of the idolatrous religion, for the sake of profit, or by the generals of armies, so as to rouse their soldiers, or by legislators, to secure the people’s obedience to their laws.88
Machiavelli, and possibly Vanini, are the obvious points of reference. But Venier goes further than both in explaining the appearance of prognostication. He begins with a reminiscence of Rhetoric III.5, adding to it a portrait of the Delphic oracle derived from classical sources:
Aristotle would say that, by the force of that religion, it happened that the consultants accommodated the responses of the fanatics to a prediction of the future, by interpreting their words and adapting them to the situation as seemed suitable. But we should note that at Delphi and the other principal oracles, not just anybody could address the prophetess, for the woman of Delphi was hidden by the cortina, and this was the custom only with priests. And those who would consult the oracles entered the temple and explained what they wanted before images of the god; this was heard by the woman and priests lying by the altar. Then the woman ascended the tripod, and, full of frenzy, uttered whatever came into her mouth; but she spoke of those things which had been sought, because fanatics, when they rave, always discourse on what they have fixed in their mind before the delirium. Afterwards, the priests arranged the woman’s words as best they could into two or three verses, accommodated to the consultants’ request; but composed using that kind of verbal trickery so that they could not be mistaken.89
This is the fleshiest modern analysis of Delphic imposture to date, and one that would become very familiar later in the century. Likewise, the oracles ceased because, when paganism yielded to Christianity, melancholic frenzy was thought no longer divine but only foolish, and because the people discovered the imposture of the princes and priests. Venier offers plenty of ancient testimony, and especially the story of Bel. Oracular statues, for their part, never spoke. So, thinks Venier, thinks Aristotle. But, in a final flourish, Aristotle is shown to be wrong, outweighed by the sheer force of ancient testimony, the old resort: ‘all the theologians and historians of the idolatrous religion agree with us in affirming that the statues did speak’.90 The oracles were demonic, and defeated by Christ. The Catholic traditions are true after all.
Venier’s De oraculis is at once a natural progression from Raguseo’s letter on the subject and a point of transition. For both, fraud was an important factor in the operation of the oracles. Both insist on a limited place for natural causes—those of Plutarch, not those of Pomponazzi. And both place Aristotle centre-stage, before rejecting him for orthodoxy at the last moment. But Venier has a clearer grasp of the oracles as a historical phenomenon, and, on a stylistic level, gives greater prominence to the role of imposture, distinct from the interference of demons.
It is this exposition of fraud, both political and sacerdotal, that has led modern scholars—the few that have glanced at De oraculis—to label Venier an ‘authentic libertine’, or even a possible atheist.91 But such a judgement is insensitive to the context within which Venier wrote. His thought belongs to the sixteenth century, even if it is beginning to resemble the historicist scepticism of the seventeenth. This transition is represented by the movement from the exposition of Platonists and Peripatetics, for whom the oracles are merely one example of divination, to the last chapter, in which they have their own historical contours. Such a shift is a variant of that found at the end of Vanini’s dialogue—but Venier’s chapter is more closely reasoned, more legible, because more firmly rooted in philosophical tradition, and so, perhaps, of greater importance. Vanini remained largely a name with which to scare the children, his remarks on religion attacked by the orthodox and savoured by the radical. Venier, by contrast, was reprinted and anthologised by antiquarians, and ranked with the treatises of Georg Moebius and Daniel Clasen for its scholarly value and philosophical coherence. Moebius, for one, cites him.92
Venier demonstrated how the imposture thesis, without the addition of demons, could grow within an Aristotelian soil, even if, like Boccadiferro, he accepts demons as a Christian. In doing so, he severed the Peripatetic tradition from its focus on natural causes. This shift mirrored wider transitions in philosophical views on prophecy and sorcery, but the oracles were of special significance, for they, unlike modern practices, had been the subject of Aristotle’s own analysis. The oracles thus constituted an important site of change in early modern secular thought, as it moved away from the analysis of divination sub specie aeternitatis, and toward the historically grounded assessment of pagan religious practices. In doing so, it posed a threat to another historical tradition, that of Christian apologetics, which took both its own position on the oracles and its own authorities for granted. That threat remained unanswered until the responses to Van Dale in the 1680s. Even then, the debate was as much about good scholarship as about the demands of piety. One’s interpretation of the Fathers depended on both.
THE IMPOSTURE THESIS AFTER VENIER
In the period between Venier and Van Dale, the Aristotelian tradition of the Italian universities declined, and scholastic treatises on divination took less and less interest in the ancient oracles. The subject would appear elsewhere—in historiography, religious scholarship, philology, apologetics. Indeed, this had already begun to occur. Only a year after Vanini’s De admirandis arcanis, the Dutch scholar Petrus Cunaeus, an orthodox Calvinist, published his seminal treatise, De republica Hebraeorum. In his chapter on Old Testament prophecy, he admits that some false prophets have been possessed by an evil spirit, but asserts that most were frauds; he names the Delphic priestesses, and repeats the Eusebian idea of oracular spies, as well as Cicero’s account of the cessation.93 At mid-century, many pious voices blurred the distinction between human and diabolical fraud at the oracles: Gerard Vossius among the Protestants, for instance, or Giuseppe Maria Maraviglia, bishop of Novara, among the Catholics.94
But that the imposture thesis, even in its strict form, bore no threat to the Christian narrative—to the construction, that is, of Christian identity—is most clearly manifest in another work. In 1671 Christoph Wittich (1625–87), best known for his defence of Cartesian philosophy, was elected to the chair of theology at the University of Leiden. For the topic of his inaugural oration he chose ‘The Truth of the Divine Oracles and the Falsehood of the Pagan’.95 The title alone shows the importance for Wittich of the old duality between true and false religion, a duality that still underpinned expositions of the demon thesis—only a decade earlier, Georg Moebius had devoted a chapter to the differences between the oracles of God and those of the Devil.96 Moebius had listed above all the irrationality of heathen diviners when possessed, the ambiguity of their answers, and the uselessness of their predictions: all in polar opposition to the character of divine prophecy. Wittich observes the same points of contrast. But unlike Moebius, he makes no mention of the Devil, nor demons. After listing the various oracles, he states:
We see that all these belong to avaricious priests, who increased their wealth from the credulous and superstitious multitude of their clients.… Hope and fear, along with the superstition of society, easily allowed the impostors to take hold of their clients’ minds.97
Cicero and Eusebius, to this end, are the chief authorities. The prophecies of the Bible, on the other hand, were straightforward, lacking any serious ambiguity; pertained to things beyond human reason; and were put forward without any eye to profit. As before, the virtues of Christianity are highlighted by their mirror image, paganism. Few members of Wittich’s audience would have noticed anything amiss; it contained no challenge to any important opinion.
But if official theology could tolerate the imposture thesis, its most serious proponents, Van Dale and Fontenelle, had different antecedents: the currents of free thought in France, England, and the Low Countries. The French tradition, which produced Fontenelle, was quite distinct from the Anglo-Dutch traditions from which Van Dale came, and, while equally opposed to popular superstition, it was less strict in its range of views on pagan religion; we shall address it here first.
The oracles appear now and then as suitable targets of the humanist scepticism inherited by the libertins.98 The circle of Erasmus knew Diogenes’ scorn for divination, included among the Apophthegmata.99 We have already noted Calcagnini’s take on the subject, and the oracles in various guises are a frequent topic of fun for Rabelais.100 The imposture thesis thus developed in France as a trope of satire. This was evident in an erudite setting—Marin Mersenne happily cited Calcagnini on the subject—as well as a vernacular one. If Calcagnini and Rabelais had, following Lucian, depicted phoney oracles, characters in satirical fiction began to voice the thesis as a matter of fact, and commonsense fact at that. In 1565, Jacques Tahureau’s mouthpiece Democritic alludes to those ‘wretches’ who, in antiquity, ‘pretended to be diviners, in this way tricking and abusing the simple people, so as to be revered by them, and to bridle them with fear, under the shadowy pretext of their vain and superstitious religion’.101 A hundred years later, little had changed: a character in L’Histoire du poète Sibus (1661), a satirical dialogue of unknown authorship, remarks that ‘all men of esprit know that the oracles were only the trickeries of ancient priests, for the purpose of gaining their temples greater renown, and that, if they occasionally succeeded, it was only by chance’.102 By this light, the imposture thesis required no elaborate justification, the oracular fourberie being self-evident to any homme d’esprit.
It has been observed that Tahureau’s Dialogues contained ‘more esprit than philosophy’, and this is true of the imposture thesis as a whole, especially before Fontenelle.103 Even Fontenelle, while he greatly developed the argument, would adopt the same language as Sibus, and the same satirical tone; one Enlightenment historian, indeed, would say of his Histoire des oracles that it had ‘more esprit than genius’.104 It was this esprit, this spirit, that united the two, and indeed the greater body of libertin views on the subject. Such a spirit, unfettered by any particular historical or philosophical reasoning, could be worked into a variety of argumentative contexts.
Like a musical theme, it could be given either a comic or a melancholic aspect. Molière’s Tartuffe, and later Thomas Corneille’s La Devineresse, put the frauds of modern oracles on the comic stage in Paris, to popular delight.105 A gloomier model could be found in Montaigne’s essay on the vanity of prognostication, borrowing much from Cicero—the oracles, here, ‘began to lose their credit’ before the birth of Christ, while divination in general is branded ‘the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastic chatter of prophetic jargon’.106 Another element of Montaigne’s essay is essentially Christian, namely, his remark that divination is born from the ‘furious curiosity of our nature’. Although curiosity is here a pitiable human foible, rather than, as for his scholastic predecessors, a damnable sin, the cultural heritage is clear.107
Like Montaigne, the libertins of the seventeenth century predictably doubted the validity of prognostication, drawing on precepts about human credulity deriving from Cicero and perhaps Aristotle. Few had much interest in the pagan oracles; when they brushed against the subject they shared a general scepticism, rather than any specific view of the oracles’ nature. Their notion of imposture, of fourberie, could tolerate both a diabolic and a human explanation.
Gabriel Naudé, for instance, seems to have accepted the possibility that oracular statues among the pagans were demonic, although, given his dismissal of modern speaking idols, this apparent acceptance is dubious—at any rate, his tone is vague.108 Cyrano de Bergerac rejected modern possession but allowed the ancient, on scriptural authority, duly noting that the Devil’s oracles ceased with the birth of Christ.109 Samuel de Sorbière, the translator of Hobbes, contrasted oracles and other pagan revelations, as mere ‘human authority’, mixed with fables, to the divine authority of scripture.110
Especially instructive is the case of Pierre Bayle, inheritor of libertin scepticism, who glances at the oracles in his first work, Pensées diverses sur la comète (1680), a sprawling but powerful assault on popular superstition. The Pensées exerted a decisive influence on the young Fontenelle; the book’s tone, nonetheless, more closely resembles the melancholy of Montaigne than the good humour of the Histoire des oracles. Bayle dismisses contemporary astrology and other forms of divination as obvious frauds—empty, reliant on ambiguity and on the curiosity and credulity of those who count a single correct prediction and forget a thousand false. The oracle of Delphi was no exception to this general picture, and its answers were subject also to political manipulation, as noted by Demosthenes.111 But despite the impressive extent and sophistication of his scepticism, Bayle insists that the oracles, like the rest of heathen idolatry, were the work of the Devil. Not only does he state this point, he reasons from it. In this respect he is a good Calvinist, and his moderate scepticism about Delphi most closely resembles that of Marc Lescarbot about the Canadian oracles seventy years earlier, similarly keen to preserve a diabolic presence.112
If Bayle, with an array of methods and principles so similar to that of Fontenelle, could propound the very opinion ridiculed in the Histoire only three years later, we may conclude that the pagan oracles, and pagan religion more generally, were subjects without an absolute rôle in the libertin project. What Delphi possessed instead was a recurrent function, that is, a relative place within a structural dichotomy: the superstitious against the rational, curiosity against self-knowledge, the earthly, whether human or demonic, against the divine. In other words, the oracles played a small but consistent part—a negative one—in the construction of value. From this perspective, the writers described here had much in common with the orthodox Catholics we examined in chapter two. Rarely, indeed, is there any suggestion of heterodoxy. Mersenne, for one, could smell impiety in the naturalist view of the oracles, but ignored the imposture thesis.113
Two mid-century libertins, friends of Mersenne, and of each other, though rather different in their intellectual character, expressed a more substantial interest in the pagan oracles—Pierre Gassendi and François de La Mothe Le Vayer. Gassendi demonstrated a broad scepticism toward astrology and divination in general, but his discussion of the pagan oracles, in a considerable chapter of his Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, is more complex.114 The oracles, he argues, had been given partly by demons; they ceased with the birth of Christ, although, by Cicero’s witness, they had already been in decline before.115 They were also the work of cunning men, and it is this aspect that claims the lion’s share of Gassendi’s attention. He argues this case on the authority of Lucian and Eusebius, both of whom had noted the hostility of the Epicureans to the oracles. He notes also their ambiguity, and the poor standard of their verse, ill befitting a genuine deity.116 Like Vanini, he presents imposture as a Christian explanation: Lucian, as Gassendi observes, had united the Christians and the Epicureans as enemies of Alexander.117
The dichotomy between scriptural prophecy and pagan divination, the true and the false, which remained in force from Montaigne to Bayle, would start to blur in the one libertin treatise devoted entirely to the pagan oracles. François de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672), a Parisian courtier and, from 1649, tutor to the young Louis XIV, penned a huge variety of works large and small, at first on history, rhetoric, and pedagogy, and then on a number of miscellaneous subjects, in the manner of Montaigne. That great sceptic was a prominent influence on Le Vayer, who inherited a large portion of his library, and took up again his programme of Pyrrhonic meditations on history, ethics, and religion.118 In 1659 Le Vayer published his second collection of Traittez en forme de lettres, written over the past decade; among these was a letter Des oracles.119
The character of this ‘letter’ is both humanistic—with its witty, rhetorical exordium and rich classical arsenal—and sceptical, arguing in favour of a strict imposture thesis. But the learning of Des oracles disguises the weakness of its conclusion, which rests on little more than ancient authority and blank assertion. Just as Cicero had provided the stylobate of Montaigne’s essay, so he is repeatedly invoked by Le Vayer, for his etymology of oraculum, for his testimony of oracular decline fifty years before Christ, and, especially, for his quips against the theory of natural causation. Le Vayer can recite all the ancient stories of fraud at Delphi, but he is more impressed by the authority of Aristotle, to whom he, like Venier before him, attributes the imposture thesis. That thesis, finally, is described as ‘the most probable, speaking humainement’, that is, without theological constraints.120 Why? Because we see it around us all the time:
Prognostication was an art of charlatanism among the pagans, as it is still today in all the provinces of America, and among us ourselves in the case of many credulous people.… So many false possessions of individuals whom we exorcise, and by whom we see not only common folk, but foolish men of every rank, shamelessly duped all the time, must make us suspicious of all that has been written of the Sibyls and of the mysterious oracles among the ancients.121
La Mothe Le Vayer is probably thinking of Marthe Brossier, and he was certainly familiar with Champlain, Le Jeune, and other sceptical French accounts of the New World. He also knew, of course, the suggestive fiction of Tartuffe, on which he wrote a short pamphlet.122 The present argument is rhetorical, not rigorous, appealing to common sense: traditional theology, of course, was easily capable of saving the phenomena touted by Le Vayer as solid evidence for deceit. We are listening again to satire, to ‘Democritic’ after a week in the library.
As with Raguseo, Venier, and others, La Mothe Le Vayer accepts natural causes—melancholy and exhalations—as the occasion of frenzy, but denies that frenzy any divinatory power. Also conventional is his rejection of astral influence: the theory is introduced, but swept quickly away, along with the fabulous Arabic stories that allegedly support it.123
Neither Pomponazzi nor Cardano is mentioned in connection with the astral theory. But both names, rare in Le Vayer’s corpus, occur here in another context, namely that of biblical prophecy, adduced as a parallel to pagan divination.124 Pomponazzi had noted that Elisha, despite his natural disposition for prophecy, required also the immediate condition of a ready psalter; Le Vayer quotes a salty analogy to the foreplay required for lovemaking—an analogy ‘too free to be translated’. Cardano, likewise, is cited on the intermittent character of the Judaeo-Christian prophetic spirit, a point of comparison for the waning of divination at Delphi.125 The satirical note is heard more clearly when Le Vayer admits that the ambiguity of the Pythian responses does not convict them of fraud, since even the holy prophets ‘had their obscurities’.126
For this reason, modern critics have seen in Des oracles a dangerous levelling of Christianity and paganism. Furthermore, the general principle of human credulity that informs Le Vayer’s imposture thesis threatens to reduce both religions to the status of anthropological specimens.127 On this point, scholarship has recognised the relevance of another ‘letter’, Parallèles historiques, while ignoring an earlier piece, Rapports de l’histoire profane à la sainte.128 In the Parallèles, and especially in the Rapports, Le Vayer summons the old theological device of the Devil as simia Dei to explain the similarities between paganism and Christianity:
What we note in the false religion as very similar to the good is that which makes it more derisory and criminal, just as there is nothing so ugly and ridiculous in the ape as the fact that it approaches the human form without attaining it.… They are wrong, I say, to be outraged by the parallels which you have innocently drawn between certain actions of our holy patriarchs and those of the profane heroes of paganism.129
This device has been interpreted as a cover for impiety, but there is no good evidence for such an assumption.130 More unstable was Le Vayer’s canny reading of the Church Fathers: he frequently suggests that their arguments owed less to a love of truth than to a rhetoric of persuasion. In the Rapports, for instance, he concludes that they often made use of cultural parallels ‘for the good of religion’, that is, for the ends of conversion.131 Des oracles contains a similar claim, that ‘the wickedness of the pagan oracles did not prevent the first Church Fathers from making use of them to establish Christian truths against the infidels’.132
The sibylline prophecies, argues Le Vayer, with Casaubon contra Baronio in mind, were mobilised against the pagans not for their intrinsic value but on account of the ‘grand credit’ they enjoyed. This attitude toward the Fathers—a satirical one—would later be sharpened into a razor-keen critique of patristic authority in the hands of Van Dale and Fontenelle. When Jean-François Baltus came to attack Fontenelle on the oracles, it was this critique that most aroused his anger, as we shall see in the next chapter. It is not known whether Fontenelle read Le Vayer’s Des oracles, although it seems likely. At any rate, the letter has much in common with the Histoire: its esprit, of course, but also its statements on testimony, its view of human nature, the implications of its argument for Christian history. Just as clearly, however, Des oracles had developed from a cloud of views about the oracles, and about paganism, that were perfectly conventional among the learned. This common opinion, sceptical but not radical, is perhaps better illustrated by Gassendi than Le Vayer. Gassendi, crucially, had accepted patristic and Catholic testimony:
The holy Fathers and Doctors condemned the heathens for allowing themselves to be persuaded and deceived by demons; and there are both histories and poems to the effect that the demons were compelled to fall silent both at the birth of the Lord our Saviour, as well as in the presence, and at the order of men famous for holiness.133
Still more obviously orthodox was the Oratorian Louis Thomassin, who discussed the oracles in a 1681 treatise on the study of pagan literature. As Thomassin saw it, most of the oracles were ‘only impostures, where men deceived each other by obscure words with a double sense’.134 Their cessation, however, was clearly miraculous: ‘by the incarnation of the divine Word, truth lit up the world and spread over it an abundance of light utterly different from what had come before.’135 For Thomassin, of course, patristic testimony was never in doubt.
Both Gassendi and Thomassin could propound versions of the imposture thesis that posed no threat to the Christian narrative. Le Vayer’s version was different. With his notion of ancient witnesses, especially the Fathers, as historical figures with their own biases, acting in response to specific situations—a notion bordering on distrust—he could deny the involvement of demons altogether. Even so, he had to excuse this denial as merely ‘probable’, that is, as the product of philosophical reasoning, not revealed truth. Since Pomponazzi, the activity of demons could hardly be rejected without such a concession. The imposture thesis itself was uncontroversial, until its corollary, the diminution of patristic authority, was pushed to the fore.
• • •
Among the French libertins, the imposture thesis was elaborated from a trope of satire, and shaded into the belief that the oracular fraud had been diabolic. In England, by contrast, the thesis grew out of a more righteous tradition—the critique of witchcraft trials initiated by Reginald Scot.136 In the seventeenth century this critique would be absorbed by both lay sceptics and the learned forerunners of Deism: Herbert, Hobbes, Blount. In most cases, pagan fraud would be mounted as a regular parallel in attacks on Catholic priestcraft—the word popularised, though not coined, by Dryden.137 But it should not be assumed that antipapism necessarily entailed a belief in heathen imposture: the conservative reponse to Scot and his epigones, while insisting that demons inhabited the oracles, was no less critical of contemporary priestcraft. As we saw in the previous chapter, it was perfectly possible to see diabolic activity at both Delphi and Rome.
The Kentish squire and magistrate Reginald Scot (1538–1599) published his famous Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, in response to the witchcraft tracts of Johann Weyer and Jean Bodin.138 The Discoverie, an enormously learned work, opens with an extensive list of theological, medical, and philosophical authorities. One of these is ‘Pompanatius’, whose De incantationibus is quoted or cited individually on three separate occasions; another is ‘Cardanus’.139 Here, then, we have a nexus of two traditions: orthodox demonology and the Italian naturalism of the late Renaissance. Scot rejects both: where Bodin saw devils, and Pomponazzi natural causes, Scot sees chicanery. His aim is to prove that those accused of witchcraft are harmless and delusional, and that the witch craze itself is an immoral superstition propagated by charlatans, and above all by the Catholic priesthood. The Discoverie thus constitutes the first book-length exposition of the imposture thesis applied to witchcraft, and, by extension, to the pagan oracles.
Following previous witchcraft writers, Scot brings up the oracles with reference to the engastrimyth, and specifically the Witch of Endor. But whereas before they were mentioned only in passing, Scot devotes seven short chapters to the subject.140 For Scot, ventriloquism is not demonic or physiological but just a human trick, analysed in a range of contexts over two books of the Discoverie, from Endor to modern Kent. As elsewhere, he draws on local cases of supposed possession and exorcism, and can rely on confessions of ‘cousenage’, which indicate in turn the probable methods of deceit in both biblical and classical antiquity. As with Rhodiginus and Bodin, though with very different results, eyewitness experience supports Scot’s historical conclusions. The pagan oracles, as the frauds of both priests and princes, were no different. Beyond the devices of engastrimythy and ‘counterfaited furie’, they achieved their ends
partlie with their doubtfull answers … partlie through confederacie, whereby they knew mens errands yer they came, and partlie by cunning, as promising victorie upon the sacrificing of some person of such account, as victorie should rather be neglected, than the murther accomplished.141
Alternative explanations, including demonic inspiration and astral influence, are rejected, and old stories, such as the death of Pan, are reinterpreted from the perspective of imposture.142 The cessation, meanwhile, is rejected, for the frauds of the oracles are still alive in the Catholic Church. Here Scot’s prose acquires the sermonising vigour appropriate to anticlerical polemic, charging into the conclusion of a section with nothing more than an ‘&c’:
For the ceasing of the knaveries and cousening devises of priests, I see no authoritie of scripture, or ancient father, but rather the contrarie, to wit, that there shall be strange illusions shewed by them, even till the end. And truelie, whosoever knoweth and noteth the order and devices of and in popish pilgrimages, shall see both the oracles and their conclusions remaining, and as it were transferred from Delphos to Rome, where that adulterous generation continuallie seeketh a signe, though they have Moses and the prophets, yea even Christ and his apostles also, &c.143
The cessation is rather to be understood as a bewraying of superstition, that is, a Christian version of the Ciceronian view: ‘the gospell of Christ hath so laid open their knaverie, &c: that since the preaching thereof, their combes are cut, and few that are wise regard them’.144 The analogy with the English Reformation is later made brutally explicit.145 The religious angle is paramount throughout; with the exception of Plutarch, Scot’s references are all to biblical and patristic sources. Against the prophetic efficacy of idols, for instance, he cites Psalms 115:5–6, ‘they have eyes and see not’. Scot belongs to the same deeply religious world as those who compared Delphi to Rome (or Geneva) as diabolical innovations. In each case, pagan religion serves the Christian as the mirror for a more timely enemy.
Unsurprisingly, Scot’s treatise aroused a great controversy in England, and the witchcraft literature of the following century, on both sides, remained strongly indebted to his themes and arguments, a debt that included his remarks on the pagan oracles. In the first work to attack the Discoverie we find a striking illustration of the same evidence, and the same confessional bias, being used to reach opposite conclusions on a point of history. The Cambridgeshire vicar Henry Holland, in his dialogue of 1590, A Treatise against Witchcraft, replied directly to Scot’s position. Mysodaemon, the figure standing for Scot, asserts that the oracles were ‘meere coosenage’, to which Holland’s own mouthpiece Theophilus replies:
And as for this oracle of Apollo, if it were but cousenage, wherefore did this cousenage cease when the gospell shined, for cousening hypocrites are in the Church, and will bee forever where the gospell is preached.146
Scot interpreted the frauds of Rome as evidence of a continuity with Delphi; Holland reads them as a control, against which the cessation is proven to be miraculous. Not imposture, but only the Devil’s work, could be silenced by Christ, and when the ‘rotten mist of popery’ crept back into the Church, it brought with it ‘diabolicall delusions’.147 Antipapism could thus employ the oracles both ways in an analogy. Scot’s later critics followed Holland: even if they did not directly address the imposture thesis, George Gifford, James I, William Perkins, John Cotta, and Robert Filmer all denounced the oracles as demonic.148 A defence of Scot would be mounted only after 1650, and then only by a few—first Thomas Ady, then John Wagstaffe and John Webster. Each, as we would expect, is confident of fraud at the oracles; none is original.149
In the first half of the seventeenth century, laymen were starting to see fraud everywhere, and the oracles were no exception. In the summer of 1634, the bon vivant and ‘great shammer’,150 Sir Henry Blount, travelling in the Levant, found himself in Egypt, where, in a land ‘held to have beene the fountaine of all science’, he had hoped ‘to finde some sparke of those cinders not yet put out’. Blount was determined to see the wonders of the East for himself, distrusting travellers’ tales because they were ‘in great part false’, and because, even when true, ‘their choice, and frame agrees more naturally with his judgement, whose issue they are, then with his readers’.151 Indeed, we may apply this scepticism—Baconian, empiricist—to his own narration, published two years after his voyage. The sceptic is bound to see imposture in the marvellous, and so he does. Faced with the Great Sphinx, Blount remarks that
the Egyptians, and Jewes with us, told us it gave Oracles of old, and also that it was hollow at the top; wherein they had seene some enter, and come out at the Pyramide: then I soone believed the Oracle; and esteeme all the rest to have been such, rather then either by vapor, though not impossible; or Demoniacke, which require too much credulitie, for me.152
He goes on to outline, with the Egyptians as originary example, a theory of hieratic imposture among the heathens, already familiar from anti-Catholic polemics.153 A few years later, Blount’s opinion on the Sphinx would appear in a commentary on Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, written in manuscript by a trainee barrister named Thomas Keck. In a long note on the oracles, mentioned only briefly in the Religio, Keck outlines the various theories on the matter: exhalations, celestial influence, the Devil, and fraud.154 The first is merely ‘far-fetcht’, while the second is rejected because astrological knowledge has increased over time, and yet the oracles ceased. As for the Devil, Keck repeats the traditional Peripatetic criticism that separate substances cannot know particulars. As with Venier, the imposture thesis remains from a process of elimination. Keck adds that ‘learned men, for fear of their Princes, durst not speak against’ the oracles, and, like Vanini, cites Lucian.155 But beyond this he names only Blount, Augustine, and Minucius Felix—that is, Cicero from a Christian pen156—respectable authorities all.
Keck’s commentary, with its frequent quotations from Montaigne, demonstrates the variety of ‘received’ scepticism available to a nonprofessional scholar of the 1640s. Given the form, his observations cannot rise above the fragmentary. This is true also of John Selden’s Table-Talk, collected around this period, and containing the remark that the oracles, not ‘wrought by the Devil’, ‘ceas’d presently after Christ, as soon as no body believ’d them’.157 In the same decade, sacerdotal imposture would constitute one of the central themes in Lord Edward Herbert’s works on religion, distinguishing the true common notions of the individual conscience from the corruptions of ritual superstition, imposed on the laity by priesthoods both ancient and modern. A work attributed to Herbert, published in 1768, applies these themes to the pagan oracles, but the oracles do not appear elsewhere in his corpus.158 They do appear, however, at the beginning of the 1650s, in the sustained polemic against priestcraft so central to the second half of Hobbes’s Leviathan.159 Hobbes presents divination as a superstitious inversion of both natural forecasting and true prophecy: where these latter are founded respectively on experience and revelation, pagan divination rests ‘partly upon pretended Experience, partly upon pretended Revelation’, that old system of parallel and inversion, common in confessional polemics as we have seen, still in place.160 But Hobbes presses further:
So easie are men to be drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have gotten credit with them; and can with gentlenesse, and dexterity, take hold of their fear, and ignorance.161
Superstition, by this light, is a failure of the critical judgement, that is, an excessive deference to authority. The key word is ‘credit’. For earlier theologians, the oracles were a means by which the Devil enhanced his credit among men; here the word applies instead to the currency of human manipulation. As a statement about trust, it anticipates the methodological points put forward by Van Dale and Fontenelle in their own attack on superstition thirty years later.162 Likewise, the pagan legislators kept their subjects in check by falsely assuming the mantle of divine authority; by the time the apostles preached Christ’s gospel, the priesthood had already brought themselves into disrepute ‘by their uncleannesse, avarice, and jugling between Princes’. Like Machiavelli, Hobbes thus nods to the reason Cicero assigns to the cessation of oracles, although the decline of superstition is here attached to the diffusion of Christian light, and the parallel of the Reformation is again explicit.163 As with Venier and others before him, Hobbes concedes natural causes at Delphi only insofar as the terrestrial exhalations provoked frenzy.164
By mid-century, then, the imposture thesis of pagan religion in general, and of the oracles in particular, was common property in England, among both the philosophical élite and amateur intellectuals such as Blount and Keck. Two skirmishes of around 1670 demonstrate the essence of the dispute on the oracles in relation to more fundamental patterns in historical thinking. It was in this year that the jobbing theologian Thomas Tenison, later to be archbishop of Canterbury, produced a reply to Hobbes’s Leviathan. On the matter of the oracles, he resorts to the consensus of pagan historians that they produced genuine predictions, and therefore must have been the work of demons.165 In this respect Tenison offers nothing new; just as for Gentillet a century earlier, the Christian view of the oracles is made to rest on the strength of testimony. His close associate Ralph Cudworth, later reiterating, against Hobbes and other unnamed ‘atheists’, that the oracles provided evidence for the existence of spiritual beings, shared his historical angle.166 More surprising is Tenison’s reproof of Hobbes for claiming a quick cessation:
I could, if you requir’d it, produce strange Instances, in times not so remote from our own; a good while after the coming of our Lord; notwithstanding that you have asserted, that in the planting of the Christian Religion, the Oracles ceased in all parts of the Roman Empire.167
That Tenison later trotted out the standard line on the cessation suggests not so much a change of heart, one suspects, as the adaptation of argument to circumstance: conservative theology, in 1670, could be finessed for the sake of effective polemics.168
The second confrontation occurred between the obscure witchcraft writer John Wagstaffe, who defended the radical positions of Reginald Scot in his 1669 The Question of Witchcraft Debated, and a still more obscure author, signing himself only ‘R. T.’, who attacked Wagstaffe point by point in a pamphlet entitled The Opinion of Witchcraft Vindicated (1670).169 Wagstaffe, like Scot and Ady, believed the pagan oracles to have been ‘nothing but the impostures of men’; but now, importantly, the point is simply a matter of course, not of argument. In a bon mot, he remarks that, just as the Pythia is known to have philippized, so all the oracles ‘one way or other did Ἀνθρωπὶζειν’—this, at least, ‘if History be true’.170
Wagstaffe doubtless thought little of this aside, but R. T. had different ideas. As with Gentillet on Machiavelli, a few lines would be attacked over several pages. At the heart of R. T.’s critique are the same old arguments from testimony and logic:
I do not deny but some cheats of this Nature have been, and yet are in the World, but he that from hence concludes that all are so, is but a bad Logician. For my part, I cannot be convinc’d by such an Argument, when I find (as I shall endeavour to prove) both the testimonies of Scripture and History against it.171
Like Holland against Scot, R. T. finds in the cessation—which he takes to be miraculous, already complete by the time of Juvenal, and supported by the ‘Hebrew boy’ oracle—evidence against the imposture thesis; his reasoning is identical.172 This is no coincidence. To argue that the oracles, or other marvellous phenomena of antiquity, were frauds, early modern thinkers had to rely, whether explicitly or not, on a notion of ‘reading between the lines’. It was not enough to cite Lucian or Demosthenes: they had also to be able to account for the testimony in favour of the marvellous, and this they did, in one way or another, by arguing, or implying, that testimonies were not all of equal value. The subtext is that, to reach the truth, one must get beyond the surface of what ancient writers said, to the reasons why they said them. This attempt necessarily relies on the use of one’s private judgement, external to the sources themselves. Against such an attempt, it was only logical that orthodox theologians, accustomed to traditional practices of erudition, should appeal to the sheer weight of sources in their favour, and their opponents’ lack of syllogistic rigour. We shall see this dialectic exposed most fully in the Fontenelle-Baltus debate, to be analysed in the next chapter.
To a critic like Hobbes, historical testimony, like the ‘credit’ acquired by spurious ecclesiastical authorities, is deeply suspicious. On the oracles he cites none, because it is not the sources that matter, only what lies behind them—and this, to Hobbes, is self-evident. The evidence comes not from sources, so to speak, but through them. Except for his nod to the Ciceronian maxim, Wagstaffe is much the same. But R. T. takes the opposite view. Testimony, even that of ancient fables such as the death of Pan and the Hebrew boy oracles, is to be honoured, and crucially, so also is the credit of the pagan priests themselves:
Nor indeed, is there any probability, that the Heathen Priests could so readily give answers to all questions (put to them on the sudden, and ex improviso) as to keep up the credit of their Oracles to that height they were at for many Ages together: neither may we easily suppose that this miraculous Art of cheating could be conveyed from one Priest to another, and not one of so many thousands discover the deceit to the World; and that of so great a number, all should be so ready witted, as to give their answers at a venture, and yet with so much cunning, as that whatever happen’d, the Oracles should not be taxed with falshood, which I believe our Author, if he were put to it, would find something harder to perform than he seems to think it.173
In this passage there is nothing suspicious in the high credit of the oracles, as there was for Hobbes. Conversely, R. T. is sceptical, where Hobbes and Wagstaffe are not, of the ‘miraculous’ power of fraud. This is a striking development, in that it translates the ‘plausibility’ argument used by writers from Peucer to Vossius against natural causes—that vapours or melancholy simply could not explain the phenomenon of divination—into a historical context. The key point is not that the oracles worked but that they were accepted: a fact not of physics or theology but of human history, and moreover, unlike the cessation so dear to Christian apologetics, of secular history—the same ‘History’ invoked by Wagstaffe to support the imposture thesis, if now interpreted very differently.
R. T.’s argument has a great deal of historical evidence in its favour, and the same basic line would form one of Baltus’s key weapons against Fontenelle.174 It is telling that, when Wagstaffe replied to R. T.’s objections in the second edition (1671) of his Question of Witchcraft, he ignored this point, focusing instead on easier targets. The miraculous cessation is easily dismissed as a ‘meer fancy’ on the evidence of Cicero before and Plutarch after,175 while the speculative nature of the imposture thesis is demonstrated by a further argument:
I suppose Lysander the Lacedaemonean thought he had to do with humane creatures, when he attempted to bribe, first the Priestesse at Delphos, then her at Dodona, afterwards the Priests of Jupiter Hammon.176
It is unlikely that R. T. would be impressed by this, since it deals only with an individual case: he could rely again on the old objection against reasoning from particulars to universals. The terms of the debate were now established. When universals were not at stake, there was no problem at all with the notion of priestly fraud, especially to antipapists.177
In Charles Blount, the fourth son of Henry Blount, the sceptic at the Sphinx, we find an English proponent of the imposture thesis on the cusp of Van Dale. Blount was a follower both of Herbert and of Hobbes, to whom he once addressed a letter, and wrote extensively on pagan religion from a Deistic perspective. He discusses the oracles in three works, of which two are straightforward: a pamphlet on the origin of idolatry, entitled Great is Diana of the Ephesians, and an annotated translation of Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana, both published in 1680. The latter has the distinction of being the first English work to cite Vanini with approval, in this case that ‘the Soothsayings of the Ancients are the fables and illusions of Priests, to get money and praise’.178 Both works include the oracles of the pagans, ‘devised and forged by their Priests’, among the frauds of ancient religion, now a familiar theme among English anti-papists and freethinkers.179 The author’s brother, Thomas Pope Blount, would later express the same opinion.180
The third work is of greater originality and interest, but also of difficult provenance, appearing in fragments among Blount’s works, before full publication in 1768 under the title A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil, and now attributed to Herbert.181 It was certainly produced before Fontenelle’s Histoire des oracles, but not necessarily before Van Dale.182 The Dialogue shares its message with Blount’s other works on pagan religion, and even shares a passage on the responses of pagan priests with Great is Diana,183 but dwells on the oracles at greater length, and, more importantly, with greater methodological sophistication. Specific modes of fraud are enumerated: the rustling of leaves at Dodona, which the priests pretended to interpret; the goat-headed idol of Jupiter Ammon, with ‘engines’ in its trunk to make it nod and move; and the vapours at Delphi.184 In each case the temple priests began with a noise, ‘and so delivered oracles according to their own sense, sometimes, and sometimes according to that of the magistrate’.185 The oracles ‘ceased’ only with the dominance of Christianity after the death of Julian the Apostate; the Tutor discounts any more elaborate explanation, although he cheekily suggests that, if they owed anything to the power of the earth, perhaps the vaporous chasms were filled up, ‘either by some earthquake or accident, or otherwise, by the industry of Christians … so they might discredit heathen oracles’.186
But the chief novelty of the Dialogue is to be found in a section that first surfaced as ‘A Dialogue Concerning Revelations’ in Blount’s Religio Laici of 1683.187 This passage applies the problem of credit and testimony to the oracular experience itself. Without the certainty of scriptural authority, with what assurance could the consultants of oracles know that the answers they received were genuine? And again, how could pagan priests themselves know that it was God who spoke to them?
PUPIL. I should … take the boldness to ask them [the priests], (supposing they heard such words) how they could know yet, that God spake to them, and whether they were so familiar with the person of that God, that they knew him by his voice, and could distinguish him from all others, and how they could assure themselves firmly, that it was no inferior spirit, that gave them this revelation, there being spirits of both sorts either good or bad, who use to give oracles and revelations.…188
From this perspective, oracular divination constitutes a problem not of Aristotelian metaphysics, as it had been for earlier philosophers, but rather of Cartesian epistemology—the difficulty, that is, lies not in the generation or transmission of knowledge but in the private certainty of it as knowledge.189 Similarly, the Tutor emphasises caution in accepting accounts of miracles: they must be ‘strongly attested by grave and wise witnesses, that there could be no confederacy, fraud, illusion or forgery in them’, before they are to be given ‘credit’.190 Against such a foundationalist scepticism are set the demands of blind faith in authority:
TUTOR. They [the priests] would answer you, that neither himself, nor any else, could come to the knowledge of God’s will, but by their means and conveyance; and for the rest, would again require obedience, on peril of your being condemned as an infidel; would not this awe you at least?191
The Dialogue represents a fusion of two elements: the Protestant attack on priestcraft, and a more formal scepticism of the Cartesian type. This was already implicit in Herbert’s accepted works, but here is attained a superior cross-pollination of historical and philosophical elements. Although still in manuscript for almost a century, here, before Fontenelle, was a definitive statement on the oracles, and other aspects of pagan religion, from a position at once rigorous and heterodox, and expressed, like the famous Histoire des oracles, in a clear and pungent vernacular.
• • •
The Dutch tradition that culminated in Van Dale’s De oraculis ethnicorum was largely a continuation of the English. In the Netherlands, Van Dale’s most significant predecessors were the lay sceptic Abraham Palingh and the Koerbagh brothers. Palingh (1588–1682), a Haarlem Mennonite like Van Dale—the two probably met in the 1660s—may be counted the Dutch equivalent of a Thomas Ady, his close contemporary.192 Although unable to read English, he was familiar with the witchcraft pamphlets of figures such as Reginald Scot and William Perkins, which had been translated into Dutch earlier in the century.193 Palingh, like Ady and his successors, sided with Scot against Perkins, and, by extension, against the Dutch Puritans so influenced by Perkins’s treatises. He denounced witchcraft trials, and, in this context, following the tradition initiated by Scot, it was only natural to dismiss the Witch of Endor, and with her the Pythia, as frauds. This attack appeared in Palingh’s only work, the 1659 dialogue, ’t Afgerukt mom-aansight der tooverye. Here a moderate position, allowing both devilry and human involvement in the oracles, is rejected in favour of a strict imposture thesis:
TYMON. It is obvious that the priests and priestesses of Delphi acted deceitfully, since the heathen gods were only lifeless bodies, fashioned after wicked men or, worse still, irrational animals or other creatures. As we well know, the Sun and Moon will give no answers to our questions; and so many sorcerers had their answers from the Devil.
EUSEBIUS. Poor show, Tymon! The opinion that the Devil answered is quite false—no Devil was needed for this sort of swindling, they [i.e., the priests] could do it all on their own.194
Eusebius, the character standing in for Palingh, is unequivocal:
I would say that all prognostication and divination by signs, as practised by the lying Jews, and by the heathens in all ages, and accepted and valued by so many people, is nothing more than a deception, frequently under the pretext of religion, tricked up by wicked priests for their own profit, as the chronicles show.195
If Palingh represented a lay sceptical tradition, strongly influenced by English witchcraft literature, Adriaan Koerbagh (1632–69), and his younger brother Johannes (1634–72), were of a rather different stripe. These were university men, studying at Utrecht and Leiden in the 1650s, and part of Spinoza’s radical circle, along with Lodewijk Meyer and Franciscus van den Enden.196 Their printed tracts, published under the name Vrederick Waarmond, and claimed during legal proceedings to be the work of Adriaan alone, may have been jointly authored. Johannes had already publicly subscribed to the views that later rankled in print—a rejection of revealed Christianity, especially of the Trinity and of ecclesiastical practices, in favour of a Spinozistic natural religion.197 He would narrowly escape an extended prison sentence for his ideas; Adriaan was not so lucky, and died behind bars at the age of 37.
The persecution of the Koerbaghs echoes the infamous story of Vanini half a century earlier, and this is no coincidence, for their work had much in common with his. The first of their tracts, Een bloemhof van allerley lieflijkheyd sonder verdriet (1668), ostensibly a dictionary of loan words in Dutch, conceals an arsenal of attacks on ecclesiastical and popular superstitions and imposture. Miracles are denied, since nothing ‘can occur against or above nature’; possession is explained away in medical terms.198 The entry on oracles, likewise, contains exactly what we would expect:
The heathen oracles ceased when the common people realised that they were deceptions of the priests, who produced them for profit.199
The second Koerbagh treatise, Een ligt schijnende in duystere plaatsen, published later the same year, was more substantial.200 This work, like Vanini’s De admirandis arcanis and the Theophrastus redivivus, contains a sequence of critical chapters on many aspects of religious and theological doctrine, undergirded by the principles of natural religion and rationalist philosophy. As with its predecessors, one chapter is devoted to the oracles, both heathen and Jewish. The view expressed here is the same as that of Bloemhof, but elaborated with snippets of historical reference and rationalist metaphyiscs. We thus find traditional examples of oracular ambiguity from Cicero, as well as remarks on the impossibility of interacting with immaterial spirits.201 Indeed, Koerbagh’s expanded position on the pagan oracles is wholly conventional in detail: hollow statues, the trickery of ventriloquism, priestly avarice, the parallels to Rome. Even the cessation is framed, as it had been since Scot, as a Christian demystification, with the Gospel acting as a primary cause of enlightened popular revolt against sacerdotal authority, à la Machiavelli:
We might also say that the promulgation of the true teaching of Jesus, by which men came to open their eyes, was the reason and cause of the cessation of the oracles.202
If Koerbagh elsewhere rejected even Christ’s divinity and Christian revelation, in this chapter he preserves the distinction between the true religion and the false, and so we are faced with a problem of orthodoxy comparable to the difficulty of Vanini. Not much has changed in half a century: the body of work addressed in this chapter, and inherited by Van Dale in 1683, amounts to a conditioned contempt, grounded on a distrust of priestcraft and princecraft—the ancient only an extension of the modern—and the dismissal of demonic influence. With the exception of La Mothe Le Vayer and the Herbertian Dialogue, arguments for the imposture thesis are remarkably stereotyped and unsophisticated, relying routinely on the strength of a broader critique, or series of critiques, of popular superstition, ecclesiastical authority, or both.
The reverse is true of Antonie van Dale (1638–1708); in his work on the oracles, the critique of heathen superstition and priestcraft, undeniably powerful, relies on a long and methodical exposition of the imposture thesis in its strictest form. That thesis, in fact, did not evolve beyond his formulation: later proponents could only repeat and, in most cases, dilute.
We need not dwell at length on Van Dale’s life and personal connections, as these have been covered elsewhere.203 It will be enough to say that he served as both physician and Mennonite preacher in his native Haarlem, and corresponded with many of the leading scholars of his age. Before his work on the oracles he had written about hysteria and, controversially, about Christian pacifism, but the themes raised in his magnum opus remained with him for the rest of his life.
Scot and Palingh, rather than Spinoza and Koerbagh, were Van Dale’s primary models, and he acknowledged their influence.204 His own contribution was to reframe the imposture thesis, common in vernacular polemics, within the context of a scholarly Latin monograph, comparable to those of Moebius and Clasen. This appeared in 1683 under the title Dissertationes duae de oraculis ethnicorum, adapted and translated by Fontenelle in 1686. The first dissertation, chiefly critical, argues that the oracles did not cease with the coming of Christ but lasted well into the fourth century; the second, chiefly reconstructive, analyses the modes of fraud employed both in the oracles and in other magical and divinatory practices. In 1687 Van Dale published a Dutch version for a wider audience, the Verhandeling van de oude orakelen der heydenen; this had certain additions and omissions, as well as a set of lavish illustrative etchings. The second Latin edition (1700)—its two dissertations now in reverse order, under Fontenelle’s influence—retained the etchings and expanded still further on the Verhandeling, although some of the Dutch material had been diverted instead into another large treatise of 1696, the Dissertationes de origine ac progressu idololatriae.205 Thanks to this restless spirit of expansion, all four works must be considered for a full picture of Van Dale’s views on the oracles.
• • •
The imposture thesis was, at least in part, a scepticism about the divining voice. Reginald Scot, we recall, redescribed ventriloquy as a trick of the larynx, while Samuel Champlain insisted that the Huron Pilotois counterfeited his utterances. When Van Dale came to think about oracular voices, there was no doubt in his mind that they too were counterfeit. Ventriloquy was a common enough feat, not requiring demons, even if he could not quite explain how it worked. He knew the modern loci as well as the ancient, quoting Rhodiginus on Jacoba; but he also used his own experience, describing the case of Barbetje Jacobs, who in 1685 drew crowds with her spirit-talking routine.206 This heaping up of parallels is one of Van Dale’s chief rhetorical strategies, artfully deployed in the reconstruction of antiquity where direct evidence was wanting.
The Pythia, meanwhile, was no engastrimyth; Van Dale compares her not to Jacoba and Barbetje but to Marthe Brossier.207 To account for the ‘superhuman’ character of her voice, some mechanical contrivance was necessary, and to this end he recalled the tubae locutoriae or speaking-trumpets of Athanasius Kircher—an early megaphone for projecting the voice across space.208 By 1687 he had procured a specimen of such a trumpet from the Dutch merchant Pieter de Wolf.209 The conceit appears in an etching (Plate One) for the Verhandeling: here the trumpets poke out beneath the Pythia’s feet as she raves senselessly on her tripod.
One of Van Dale’s contributions, then, was to incorporate the early modern interest in technology into the discussion of oracular fraud. His great model was Lucian’s Alexander, who had also employed speaking tubes, among other ruses.210 A still more resonant example can be found in Van Dale’s analysis of speaking statues. He remembered another item from Kircher:
I was forced to transfer my private Museum to a more suitable and spacious place in the Collegium Romanum, which they call the Gallery. Here the aforementioned trumpet, the ‘Delphic Oracle’, is still seen and heard by all visitors. But with this difference: whereas before it broadcast words spoken in a louder voice into a remote, diffuse space, now it brings them to visitors secretly, with a low and hidden voice, in ludicrous and invented oracles, by such an artifice that no bystander can perceive anything of the secret procedure by which the speakers whisper to each other. Even to this day it is shown to visitors who, not grasping its mechanism, suspect the presence of some hidden demon.… I have set up a device of this sort, so that I might show the impostures and deceptive frauds of the ancient priests in the consultation of the oracles.211
Kircher’s Oracle had been widely admired, and his assistant, the alchemist Giorgio de Sepibus, chose it as his favourite of the Jesuit’s machines.212 Filippo Buonanni had the head engraved for his 1709 catalogue of the Museum, and in the image (Plate Three) we can recognise Buonanni’s description of a ‘horrible face, lean and ugly, with a forehead of curls, its eyes and mouth gaping open’.213 Before its creation, Kircher, together with his protégé Caspar Schott, had already seen an example of a speaking statue at the home of their friend Francesco Serra.214 Schott himself mentioned Serra’s statue in the course of a conventional account of the demonic voice, taken from Martin del Rio: here fraus daemonum and fraus sacrificulorum gentilium could coexist happily.215 Kircher, likewise, was eager to assure his readers that demons were involved in the ancient oracles, alongside deceptive priests.
Van Dale jeers at Kircher’s disclaimer.216 A long tradition has been swept away. For Ficino, the oracular statue had been the illicit abode of daemones; for Kircher, priests as well as demons were present. But for Van Dale, there is no longer anything supernatural. This is technology stripped of all magical associations, repositioned instead as the engine of fraud—a symbolic moment in the early modern ‘mechanisation of the world-picture’.
As Van Dale later stressed, the sources on Delphi disagreed about how the voice was produced because no outsider had been granted access to the Pythia’s adyton.217 The master theme of his account of the oracles is therefore secrecy, and the means of achieving it. His model here is not only Lucian but also Eusebius, who had noted the use of narcotics, spies, and, most of all, ‘secret shrines and recesses inaccessible to the multitude’.218 This material was perfectly commonplace: Hugo Grotius, to take one example of many, had noted that heathen miracles were performed ‘in a hideaway, at night, in the presence of one or two men, whose eyes could easily be tricked by the cunning of priests with some false appearance of things’.219 Van Dale deals at length with the caves and adyta from which oracles were delivered.220 With regards to Delphi, each classical element is reconfigured as a mechanism to prevent scrutiny of the oracular process: the laurel said to have grown in the adyton, for instance, here offers a physical barrier to the visitor, while the prophetic vapours are replaced by narcotic fumigations for derangement of the senses and reason.221 The 1687 etching of the Pythia makes a further satirical analogy, for it shows a plume of smoke issuing from an object that closer examination reveals to be a Christian thurible (Plate Two). The Pythia’s foaming, finally, could be effected by herbs, as Van Dale knew from his medical training as well as his reading.222 When he comes to oracles delivered by letter—and Van Dale is characteristically careful to pinpoint the classical sources223—he repeats Lucian’s careworn techniques, adding to them an intelligence-gathering fantasy elaborated from Eusebius:
Plate Two. Antonie van Dale, De oraculis ethnicorum dissertationes duae (Amsterdam, 1700), fig. 4, ‘Pythia jam tripode insidens, et Responsa reddens’ (detail)
Plate Three. Engraving of Athanasius Kircher’s Delphicum oraculum. From Filippo Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709), Tabula 25. Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London
[The priests’ spies] either elicited information with crafty questions over drinks, while cleverly getting their foreign guests tanked under the pretext of kindness, or defrauded the servants in this way, corrupting them with bribes or rewards, if they could not trick the masters; for they had to take every precaution in case the authority of the oracle should suffer any detriment. Alternatively, while the masters were away with their retinue on business … the priests explored their belongings, or tried by other wiles to ascertain their visitors’ secrets.224
The secrecy and technological sophistication of the oracles are central to Van Dale’s argument, because true demonic possession is distinguished by its openness and simplicity:
The Devil himself had no need of such caves and adyta, nor the other circumstances around the oracles, as we learn from the example of the soothsaying girl in Acts 16.16; but the use of such machines was necessary for those impostors who deceived the credulity of men with their oracles, as if these were divine.225
But the significance of secrecy goes deeper still. Van Dale, like everyone else, uses the oracles to construct value by antithesis. He associates secrecy with the control of information by the cultural élite, and so with the rôle of authority and faith in the transmission of belief. His rejection of this value, in favour of openness and the free flow of knowledge, extends to the very style of De oraculis. Its length stems in part from an insistence on quoting in full all relevant sources, ancient and modern, both in the original language and in translation where necessary. The virtue of this is spelled out: ‘Let us listen to Eusebius himself speaking Greek’, he writes in one place, ‘lest the reader be forced to rest on the authority of our translation’.226 Whereas the ancient priests looked after the authority of their oracles, Van Dale gives up his own authority over the historical matter, a fact appreciated by one reviewer.227 This presentation of raw material reaches even the level of single words: the oracles, for instance, are regularly referred to as χρηστήρια.
In line with this philosophy, the reasoning of De oraculis is based entirely on named sources, never on convention. And the rigour of Van Dale’s critical acumen is striking. If his work’s rhetorical power depends in part on an imaginative reconstruction of the past, this reconstruction fills a space prepared by the banishment of unfounded tradition. As Peter Gay said of the philosophes, Van Dale ‘employed destructive criticism to clear the ground for construction, so that criticism itself achieved a creative role’.228
Much of the first dissertatio is taken up with an assault on the fables invoked by Christian writers to prove that the oracles had fallen silent by the power of Christ: among these were the death of Pan, and the ‘Hebrew boy’ response given to Augustus.229 To counter the latter, Van Dale uses the kinds of arguments first deployed by Lorenzo Valla against the Donation of Constantine. He observes that none of the early Fathers made use of the oracle in their apologetics, as they surely would have if they had known it, and that it is anachronistic, being in verse when, as was clear from Cicero, the oracles had long been delivered in prose.230 But the real problem is that of testimony and its reliability: for what could be sillier than seeking Christian witness from the Devil, the ‘Father of Lies’ himself?231
In denying the ‘Hebrew boy’ oracle, Van Dale was criticising the judgement of many early modern scholars, such as Peucer and Baronio. But another point led him to assail the reasoning of a much more important figure—Eusebius. In his preface, Van Dale insists that he has no wish to undermine the authority of the Fathers, observing only that they had been human and as liable to error as anyone else, as they themselves admitted.232
But when it comes to Eusebius, such politesse goes out the window. Eusebius, as we saw in Chapter One, made use of a number of verses from Porphyry to argue that the oracles were the product of bloodthirsty daemones, and that they ceased with the coming of Christ.233 But as Van Dale argues, Eusebius has wholly misread and misunderstood his source. Porphyry had not been talking about the oracles at all, but about the plagues and other miseries afflicting Rome, then blamed by many on the Christians. ‘Was Eusebius a liar’, asks Van Dale, ‘or was he stupid and dull-witted, unable to understand what Porphyry wrote or thought on the matter?’234 The pagan had been a ‘scorner of Christ and Christian doctrine’, and his testimony was not to be trusted, any more than that of the Father of Lies himself.235 Van Dale thus weaves a network of unreliable testimony and transmission, noting also that Eusebius’s readers copied his opinion uncritically, without bothering to think for themselves about the words quoted. For sure, such blind reiteration produces books ‘much more easily and with less fuss’—but that is no excuse.236 Any argument by consensus, resting on such poor foundations in Eusebius, must fall to pieces: Van Dale’s closeness here to his friend Bayle, whose Pensées appeared in the same year, is striking.237 To combat such a spread of error, Van Dale, like Bayle, makes a point of meticulously quoting and analysing each of the ancient sources for himself. He does not always succeed.238
Not only did the Fathers and their modern Christian followers misinterpret the information they took from the pagans, they were unduly influenced by its philosophical presuppositions. Anti-Trinitarians had already denounced the amor Platonis of those Fathers they believed to have introduced the Trinity into Christian theology.239 Van Dale now argued that the Fathers’ idea of oracle-giving demons was itself borrowed from the Platonists, a pernicious example of the Ethnicismus, the ‘heathenising’, of which Christian doctrine should be stripped: the claim was not original, but it was elaborated with a new degree of erudition.240
In his efforts to purge the Gospel of its later encrustations of fable and pagan philosophy, Van Dale was aligned both with the Protestant spirit of sola Scriptura and with the philological efforts of both confessions in his own day—the De oraculis may be compared, for instance, to the work of Jean-Baptiste Thiers or Jean Mabillon.241 He defended his aims with the argument that Christian error made the true faith more susceptible to the attacks of atheists, and repeatedly stressed that his aim was not to attack or undermine Christianity itself, or even the existence of demons.242 The Bible, he insisted, made no claims about the pagan oracles, and so the Christian conscience, or at least the Protestant conscience, was free to reach its own conclusions.
At the same time, Van Dale recognised that his thesis was unorthodox, and that he ran the risk of being labelled an enemy of the Christian religion. Whereas previous scholars had stressed their agreement with learned authorities, he was rather proud to be alone in his view, or nearly alone, since he noted Rhodiginus before him.243 But those who stood against common beliefs, especially beliefs sanctioned by the Church Fathers, incurred censure. In a letter of January 1683, Van Dale’s friend Jacob Jobsz Ackerman, although in agreement with his conclusions, had tried to convince him not to publish, noting the apologetic use of the oracles by Crellius, Episcopius, and Grotius: ‘it cannot be judicious to antagonise everybody by straying off the beaten path—in this way one opposes oneself to others, and invites many knocks on the head’.244 De oraculis did, indeed, arouse some controversy, although the nature and extent of this has been overstated. Its two most prominent critics, Georg Moebius and Joachim Oudaan, each had a personal axe to grind, for both had already been mocked by Van Dale.245 Their reactions, it must be said, were wholly different. Moebius, in the second edition of his Tractatus on oracles, took Van Dale to task on two counts.246 First, it was not true that the Bible was silent on the matter, as was evident from both the Witch of Endor and the proscriptions of Deuteronomy. Second, the weight of testimony supported the existence of demonic marvels, including correct predictions of the future:
Truly, if one may argue in this way [i.e., like Van Dale], then all the evidence taken from good historians collapses and goes up in smoke. But then the greater part of Van Dale’s treatise De oraculis will also collapse, for most of what appears there derives from historians and other authors.247
In none of this is outrage, only pointed scholarly disagreement, and a fundamentally different view of testimonial authority. Precisely the same divergence on testimony can be seen in the dispute between Fontenelle and Baltus, as we shall see in the next chapter. More polite still were the remarks against Van Dale in Johann Christoph Landgraf’s Exercitatio de oraculis gentilium (1688), and the Mennonite apparently maintained civility in a letter replying to that scholar.248 For the Danish theologian Trogillus Arnkiel, writing two years later, Van Dale was guilty only of reasoning from the particular to the general—the classic objection.249 The early journal reviews of De oraculis, meanwhile, were largely neutral, even if Bayle seemed to embrace its theses.250 The Collegiant Oudaan, who translated Moebius’s Tractatus into Dutch, with an intemperate preface lambasting Van Dale as a heretic comparable to Vanini and Koerbagh, was unique in his apoplexy.251 The two, initially friends, had already clashed long before, and the preface, containing not a single argument, smacks more of wounded pride than of genuine critique. Ackerman, indeed, had already warned Van Dale in 1683 that Oudaan and his circle were against him.252 The Collegiant’s response should not be taken as a reliable indicator of Van Dale’s reception. Another attack on Van Dale would better reflect the precise threat in his work. In 1709 the Jesuit professor of mathematics, Michel Mourgues, agreed that the oracles had been the product of human fraud—at least for the most part—but objected to his characterisation of the Fathers as credulous and superstitious. They too, he argued, had seen deceit at Delphi.253 It was Van Dale’s view of the Fathers, not of the oracles, that caused offence.
• • •
In the imposture thesis—in Vanini, Venier, Le Vayer, Van Dale, and later Voltaire—has often been perceived a certain venom, a forked tongue. This perception is not wholly incorrect, but it is prone to mislead. Such ‘leperous distilment’ suited only certain ears, and then only where some further authority was at stake. More often than not, imposture sat comfortably with the almost universal view of pagan religion as corrupt, vain, superstitious, and worthy of its destruction.
The most remarkable aspect of Van Dale’s reception is not that his work provoked occasional squabbles among contemporaries, but rather that, alone among modern texts on the pagan oracles, it continued to be cited into the nineteenth century, and by authors entirely uninterested in the question of demonic activity.254 Oracular imposture was taken for granted by this period, not only thanks to the diffusion of Fontenelle’s treatise, but also because it had been convincingly integrated into the canon of humanist scholarship, a canon set to outlive the theological worldview from which it had grown. This integration must be credited to Van Dale.
1Maurice Swabey, ‘The Oracle at Delphi’, in Voices from Abegweet; or, The Home on the Wave (London, 1878), p. 42.
2The French and Italian scholarship on Vanini has been extensive; see especially Emile Namer, La vie et l’œuvre de J. C. Vanini, prince des libertins, mort à Toulouse sur le bûcher en 1619 (Paris, 1980); Didier Foucault, Un philosophe libertin dans l’Europe baroque: Giulio Cesare Vanini, 1585–1619 (Paris, 2003); and Giovanni Papuli, Studi vaniniani (Lecce, 2006).
3Giulio Cesare Vanini, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis libri quatuor (Paris, 1616), p. 379 on Pomponazzi (the work is hereafter referenced as De admirandis arcanis). Gui Patin, Patiniana, in Naudaeana et Patiniana, ou Singularitez remarquables (Paris, 1701), p. 31, dismissed Vanini’s book as a mere confection of Scaliger, Fracastoro, and Pomponazzi, but against this see Emile Namer, ‘Vanini n’est-il qu’un plagiare?’, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 117 (1934), 291–295, p. 293, n. 2.
4Vanini, De admirandis arcanis, p. 391 (IV.52): ‘[I. C.] Subtilissima Philosophiae nostrae rudimenta pariunt haec praeclara facinora: at in Christianae fidei obsequium ea libens detestor, imo tacite detestatus sum, antequam ioci ergo excogitassem. ALEX. Quid igitur de Oraculis censes? I. C. Sacerdotum imposturas fuisse.’
5Frank E. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA, 1959), pp. 47–53, 65–70.
6Antonio Corsano, Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo: Scienza, tecnica, filosofia dal Cardano al Lessing (Bari, 1968), p. 166; Gianni Paganini, in Theophrastus redivivus, ed. Guido Canziani and Gianni Paganini, 2 vols. (Milan, 1981), p. 380 (see below, n. 60); Marcella Leopizzi, ‘Giulio Cesare Vanini entre le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle’, in D’Un siècle à l’autre: Littèrature et sociètè de 1590 à 1610, ed. Philippe Desan and Giovanni Dotoli (Paris, 2001), 345–355.
7The primary source on Vanini’s martyrdom, allegedly an eyewitness, and parroted throughout the seventeenth century, is Gabriel Barthelemi Grammont, Historiarum Galliae ab excessu Henrici IV libri xviii (1643: Amsterdam, 1653), pp. 209–212.
8Pietro Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni (Florence, 2011), pp. 68–69: ‘Mihi autem videtur neque tutum neque secundum verecundiam dictum quod a plerisque dici solet haec experimenta negantibus, haec scilicet esse ab hominibus conficta, velut Aesopi apologi, ad instructionem plebis: vel quod sunt sacerdotum aucupia ad subripiendas pecunias, et ut in honore habeantur.… Ego, inquam, hanc sententiam non approbo, quandoquidem viri moribus gravissimi, doctrina eminentissimi, et antiqui [novi 1556] et veteres, tam Graeci quam Latini, ac Barbari, haec verissima esse affirmant.’ See also his remarks at pp. 94–95, specifically on divination.
9Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 34. On the magic mirror, see the note at Pomponazzi, Les Causes des merveilles de la nature, ou Les enchantements, trans. Henri Busson (Paris, 1930), p. 113, n. 4.
10Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 69: ‘Verum hi decipiuntur, quoniam, cum aliquando haec talia fabulosa comperta sunt, et aliquando visa sunt illusiones, ex particulari universale intulerunt: quod ex logicae imperitia provenire manifestum est’.
11Especially Georg Moebius, Tractatus philologico-theologicus de oraculorum ethnicorum origine, propagatione et duratione (Leipzig, 1657), pp. 13–14, and Daniel Clasen, De oraculis gentilium et in specie de vaticinis sibyllinis libri tres (Helmstadt, 1673), pp. 25–27 (I.6), both arguing against Rhodiginus. [Jean-François Baltus], Réponse à l’Histoire des oracles (Strasbourg, 1707), pp. 235 (II.13) and 241 (II.14); and see chapter five below, p. 239. The two arguments would even survive into the nineteenth century, now made by spiritualists who had more in common with Pomponazzi than with Baltus: Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden, 1808), p. 93, would make the first, and Théodore Bouys, Nouvelles considèrations puisèes dans la clairvoyance instinctive de l’homme, sur les oracles, les sibylles et les prophètes (Paris, 1806), p. 4, the second. On the context for Schubert and Bouys, see chapter six below, p. 267. The argument from experience had also been used against Pomponazzi’s naturalism; see, e.g., Stefano Tiepolo [Francesco Piccolomini], Academicarum contemplationum libri decem (Venice, 1576), p. 104; Jacques Charpentier, Platonis cum Aristotele in universa philosophia comparatio (Paris, 1573), p. 340.
12Giulio Cesare Vanini, Amphitheatrum aeternae providentiae divino-magicum, christiano-physicum nec non astrologo-catholicum, adversus veteres philosophos, atheos, epicureos, peripateticos et stoicos (Lyon, 1615), p. 36: ‘nulla in hoc adhibenda est fides, cum pleni sint omnes libri, plenae omnium sapientum voces, plena omnia, tum Graecarum, tum Latinarum antiquitatum monumenta, quae verissima doceant et indubitata oraculorum responsa. Deceptus est infoelix Atheus [i.e., Machiavelli], quia nonnulla idolorum miracula fabulosa aliquando potuit legisse, quare ex particulari contra Dialecticorum regulam universale intulit, omnia fuisse falsa: quae propositio non habet consecutionis probationem secundum formam, ab uno enim ad omnia non necessario concluditur.’ On Machiavelli, see below, pp. 145–147.
13Vanini, De admirandis arcanis, pp. 392–404 (IV.53).
14See Vanini, De admirandis arcanis, IV.56 on augury.
15Anthony Grafton, ‘The Strange Deaths of Hermes and the Sibyls’, in his Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 162–177.
16Silvia Berti, ‘Unmasking the Truth: The Theme of Imposture in Early Modern European Culture’, in Everything Connects: In Conference with R. H. Popkin, ed. J. Force and D. S. Katz (Leiden, 1999), 21–36.
17Daniel 14:1–22. On fraud in the pagan histories, see chapter one above, n. 17.
18See chapter one, pp. 55–60. Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, De rerum praenotione libri novem (Strasbourg, 1507), sig. T3r (IX.2); Caspar Peucer, Commentarius de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Frankfurt, 1593), p. 221 (III.1).
19Alessandro Sardi, De rerum inventoribus libri duo, de iis maxime, quorum nulla mentio est apud Polydorum (Mainz, 1577), p. 55, asserts that demons began the oracles, but notes also that Demosthenes and other philosophers saw priestly fraud.
20See chapter one above, p. 18.
21Pierre Massé, De l’imposture et tromperie des diables (Paris, 1579), fols. 147v–148r (II.1); Benedict Pereira, Adversus fallaces et superstitiosas artes (Ingolstadt, 1591), p. 172 (III.2); [Conimbricenses], Commentarii in quatuor libros de coelo, meteorologicos et parva naturalia Aristotelis Stagirita (Cologne, 1603), glossing De coelo II, col. 247 (III.9.3).
22Ludovicus Caelius Rhodiginus, Lectionum antiquarum libri XXX (Basel, 1542), p. 48 (II.12). See chapter one, n. 97.
23Celio Calcagini, ‘Oraculorum liber’, in his Opera aliquot (Basel, 1544), 640–646. On Calcagnini, see Alfonso Lazzari, ‘Un enciclopedico del secolo XVI: Celio Calcagnini’, Atti e Memorie della Deputazione Ferrarese di Storia Patria 30 (1936); Quirinus Breen, ‘Celio Calcagnini (1479–1541)’, Church History 21 (1952), 225–238; and on Calcagnini and Erasmus, see also Augustin Renaudet, Érasme et l’Italie (Geneva, 1954), p. 221.
24Erasmus, Adagia I.vii.76, had already noted Lucian’s mockery of the oracle of Trophonius.
25Calcagnini, ‘Oraculorum liber’, p. 641: ‘praeter summum illum rerum opificem mortalium atque immortalium rerum arbitrum, neminem esse cui venturi temporis ratio constet’. Aedituus adds that ‘Quae Phoebo pater omnipotens, mihi Phoebus Apollo praedixit’, on which see chapter two above, n. 52.
26Calcagnini, ‘Oraculorum liber’, p. 641: ‘Quid frustra petitis, non nostrum est scire futura.’ The line would later be quoted by Giulio Sirenio, De fato, fol. 149r (IX.13), and Jean Jacques Boissard, Tractatus de divinatione et magicis praestigiis (Oppenheim, 1616), p. 122, labelling it, oddly, ‘saepius repetitum’.
27Calcagnini, ‘Oraculorum liber’, p. 641: ‘exornatoque praestigiatore aliquo ex nostris popularibus, supposititia personataque responsa edidissemus’.
28Celio Calcagnini, Apologia festivissima pro Ταυ contra Σιγμα, Lucianicae accusationi respondens (Basel, 1539); and see Michael Zappala, Lucian of Samosata in the Two Hesperias: An Essay in Literary and Cultural Transmission (Potomac, MD, 1990), p. 152.
29Calcagnini, ‘Oraculorum liber’, p. 646:
At hoc nobis perquam facile, nam et Alexander qui hanc artem multa autoritate in Ponto ad Aboni murum professus est, tres imprimis astus sectatoribus suis imitandos reliquit. Nam vel eam cerae partem, quae post signum haerebat, acu candefacta liquefactam diducebat. Tum ubi legisset rursus calefactam acu caeram: eam quae a tergo funiculi fuerat, signo eodem manente facile coagmentabat. Aut certo peculiari utebatur collyrio. Id ex pice berittia, bitumine ac lapide perspicuo trito et caera et mastiche constabat. Hoc igni calefactum, inuncto tamen prius suillo pingui, signo applicabat, ac symboli figuram excipiebat. Id simulatque aruisset (arebat autem protinus) commode resignabat libellos: quibus perlectis impositae cerae denuo, perinde atque e lapide, signum idem imprimebat ad archetypi similitudinem mire effictum. Interdum etiam calce in gluten coniecta quo vulgo codicillos adglutinant, atque ex his confecta ceu caera, mollem adhuc eam admovebat signo, statimque detrahebat. Nam illico siccescit adeo ut cornu vel ferro potius reddatur solidius.
30Lucian, Alexander 17. Further permutations of these tricks would be recorded by Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium IV.34, with the caution, ‘Don’t try this at home’. On Lucian in the context of Greek seals and seal-breaking, see Frank Santi Russell, Information Gathering in Classical Greece (Ann Arbor, 1999), p. 186. The same techniques were well utilised by the inventor Samuel Morland to open Spanish seals in the 1680s, on which see H. W. Dickinson, Sir Samuel Morland: Diplomat and Inventor, 1625–1695 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 95–100.
31Giulio Sirenio, De fato (Venice, 1563), fol. 144v (IX.7), and following him Miguel de Medina, Christianae paraenesis, sive de recta in deum fide libri vii (Venice, 1564), fol. 34v; Jean Jacques Boissard, Tractatus de divinatione et magicis praestigiis (Oppenheim, [1616]), p. 122; Francisco Torreblanca Villalpando, Daemonologia, sive, De magia naturali, daemoniacae, licita, et illicita, deque aperta et occulta, interventione et invocatione daemonis libri quatuor (Mainz, 1623), p. 74 (I.11); Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones in Genesim (Paris, 1623), col. 1268; Gerard Joannes Vossius, De theologia gentili, et physiologia christiana, sive de origine ac progressu idololatriae, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1641), I, p. 44.
32Francis Xavier, Epistolae aliaque scripta, ed. G. Schurhammer and I. Wicki, 2 vols. (Rome, 1944), I, 160–177. Letter dated Jan. 15, 1544, Cochin.
33Xavier, Epistolae, II, p. 170: ‘Es gente que nunca dize verdad, y siempre piensan cómo an de sutilmente mintir y engañar los pobres simplices y ignorantes’.
34Samuel Champlain, Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois (Paris, 1613), p. 221.
35Champlain, Voyages, p. 222: ‘Ces drosles contrefont aussi leur voix grosse et claire’; and p. 223: ‘Je leur remonstrois souvent que tout ce qu’ils faisoient n’estoit que folie, et qu’ils ne devoient y adjouster foy.’
36Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1609), pp. 688–690 (III.6), noting as a parallel that ‘entre les Grecs il y a un proverbe trivial qui porte que sans argent les oracles de Phoebus sont muets’. Paul Le Jeune, Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’année 1634 (Paris, 1635), especially pp. 48–53, 78.
37Giorgio Raguseo, Epistolarum mathematicarum seu de divinatione libri duo (Paris, 1623), pp. 572–573, and see also chapter three above, p. 119. Also Antonio Bernardi della Mirandola, Disputationes: in quibus primum ex professo monomachia … philosophicis rationibus astruitur, etc. (Basel, 1562), p. 518; Sirenio, De fato, fol. 144v (IX.6); and Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate libri xvii (Basel, 1557), especially p. 652 (XVI.93): ‘sacerdotes malum malo fraude addidere’.
38Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Francesco Bausi, 2 vols. (Rome, 2001), I, pp. 83–84 (I.12):
La vita della religione gentile era fondata sopra i responsi degli oracoli e sopra la setta delli arioli e delli aruspici; tutte le altre loro cerimonie, sacrificii e riti dependevano da queste, perché loro facilmente credevono che quello Iddio che ti poteva predire il tuo futuro bene o il tuo futuro male, te lo potessi ancora concedere. Di qui nascevano i templi, di qui i sacrificii, di qui le supplicazioni e ogni altra cerimonia in venerargli; per che l’oracolo di Delo, il tempio di Giove Ammone e altri celebri oracoli, i quali riempievano il mondo di ammirazione e divozione. Come costoro cominciarono dipoi a parlare a modo de’ potenti, e che questa falsità fu scoperta ne’ popoli, diventarono gli uomini increduli e atti a perturbare ogni ordine buono.
See Cicero’s idea that the oracles fell silent with the decline of superstition, discussed in chapter one, p. 24. Machiavelli’s understanding of the oracles is illustrated by a story about Delphi related in Discorsi I.13.
39John Najemy, ‘Papirius and the Chickens, or Machiavelli on the Necessity of Interpreting Religion’, Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999), 659–681; Harvey Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses of Livy (Chicago and London, 2001), pp. 72–76; Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp. 78–79.
40Plato, Republic III, 414b–e; Scaevola apud Augustine, De civitate Dei IV.27; Averroes, Commentary on Plato’s Republic I.30–32. Interestingly, Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica IV.1, so crucial an authority on the oracles, treated them in the context of state religion, distinguished, according to the tripartite theology of Varro, from the religion of poets and that of philosophers. Rhodiginus, Lectionum antiquarum libri XXX, p. 48 (II.12), follows Eusebius in this regard.
41Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 46.
42Parel, Machiavellian Cosmos, p. 52.
43See, generally, Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli—The First Century: Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility, and Irrelevance (Oxford, 2005), and Alain Dierkens, ed., L’antimachiavelisme, de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Brussels, 1997).
44[Innocent Gentillet], Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un Royaume ou autre Principauté, contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin ([Geneva], 1576), pp. 215–221 (II.5); below I use C. Edward Rathé’s edition of the work as Anti-Machiavel (Geneva, 1968), pp. 232–238. I have not found much interest in the oracles among Machiavelli’s later critics, despite their general outrage at his views on political religion. Pierre Coret, Defensio veritatis adversus assertiones Catholicae fidei repugnantes, in Antonio Possevino, Iudicium de Nuae militis Galli, Ioannis Bodini, Philippi Mornaei, et Nicolai Machiavelli quibusdam scriptis (Lyon, 1593), p. 255, emphasises the religious zeal of the Romans, who brought gifts to Delphi but only, in reality, ‘diabolo sacrificarunt’. Thomas Fitzherbert, The Second Part of a Treatise concerning Policy and Religion ([Douai], 1610), offers two chapters outlining a conventional account of Roman religion; the second of these (chap. 8, pp. 60–74) deals with divination, but ignores oracles in favour of auguries, of which Fitzherbert remarks, p. 64, that ‘when they proved true, it was either by chance, or els because almighty God for a just punishment of the superstition of the Romans, suffered them to be deluded by the devill … being author of these devinations’.
45Gentillet, Discours, ed. Rathé, pp. 232–233:
Et quant à ce que Machiavel presuppose, que les oracles estoyent quelques responses supposees par les Prestres de Apollo, de Iupiter Ammon, ou des autres Dieux des Payens, il monstre bien qu’il est une beste, et qu’il a peu leu. Ie ne veux pas nier que quelques fois les Prestres n’y ayent peu mesler du leur, mais au reste, il est certain que ces oracles estoyent responses diaboliques, que le Diable faisoit luy mesme, ou faisoit faire par quelque Prestre ou Prestresse qu’il mettoit en ecstase et hors de son sens. Or ces Prestres et Prestresses ne savoyent communément rien ou peu, tant s’en faut qu’ils eussent sceu respondre en vers. Et puis il estoit impossible qu’ils eussent peu avoir avertissemens des regions si lointaines, dont l’on venoit pour consulter les oracles, mesmes des particularitez dont on demandoit response ordinairement à ces oracles, pour pouvoir bastir leurs responses à propos. Or je ne veux pas m’arrester à prouver plus amplement ce poinct, car ceux qui ont leu quelque peu des escrits des anciens, savent bien qu’il est tout certain que ces oracles estoyent voix qui venoyent des diables, ausquels les Payens servoyent, sous ces noms d’Apollo, de Iupiter, et autres semblables Dieux.
46Anglo, Machiavelli, pp. 319–320.
47Gentillet, Discours, ed. Rathé, p. 221:
Joint aussi (comme nous avons mosntré cy devant) que la doctrine Chrestienne comprend beaucoup plus parfaitement les vertus de bonnes moeurs, que ne faisoit la doctrine des Payens. Pourquoy donc ose dire ce puant Machiavel que les hommes devindrent meschans, comme esclaves deschainez, quand les oracles defaillirent? ou a il trouvé cela? Ou-a-il leu que les hommes fussent pires et plus mal complexionnez du temps que les oracles defaillirent qu’au paravant? Par le contraire nous lisons que lorsque les oracles defaillirent (qui fut du temps de la primitive Eglise) les hommes qui s’adonnoyent à la Religion Chrestienne estoyent d’une saincte vie et conversation.
48As Rathé observes, Discours, p. 231, n. 213: ‘Gentillet voit bien que l’objectivité et le relativisme du secrétaire florentin l’ont mené à considérer comme phénomènes semblables la religion païenne et la religion chrétienne’. Pamela D. Stewart, Innocent Gentillet e la sua polemica antimachiavellica (Florence, 1969), p. 69, notes that Gentillet ‘interpreta l’osservazione circa la crisi della fede negli oracoli pagani come un’accusa alla religione cristiana e un’altra dimostrazione di empietà e di ateismo’.
49Vanini, Amphitheatrum, pp. 35–36 (I.6): ‘Nicolaus Machiavellus … existimavit haec omnia falsa esse, et a Principibus ad incautae plebeculae instructionem conficta, ut quam ratio non posset ad officium, religio saltem duceret’. See pp. 50–51 (I.8) on Machiavelli and ecclesiastical miracles.
50Vanini, Amphitheatrum, p. 35 (I.6): ‘Atheorum facile princeps, perniciosissimo libello de Principe’.
51Vanini, Amphitheatrum, pp. 38–40 on Pomponazzi, and pp. 43–50 on Cardano. Vanini claims to have dealt with Pomponazzi at more length in a work entitled Apologia pro Mosayca, et Christiana Lege adversus Physicos, Astronomos et Politicos—probably imaginary. As Didier Foucault remarks, Un philosoph libertin, p. 512, ‘à chaque fois que ce texte [the Apologia] est signifié, c’est pour éviter à son auteur de développer son point de vue’. Pomponazzi and Cardano are also attacked on miracles at pp. 57–78 (I.8).
52Vanini, Amphitheatrum, p. 37 (I.6): ‘ex Christianorum sententia Daemon potuit id efficere’. See also De admirandis arcanis, p. 379 (IV.52).
53Mersenne, Quaestiones, cols. 286, 385–90. Mersenne ignores Vanini’s De admirandis arcanis. On his hostility to astrology, see Robert Lenoble, Mersenne, ou La naissance du mècanisme (Paris, 1943), pp. 121–133.
54Mersenne, Quaestiones, col. 382.
55Mersenne, Quaestiones, cols. 286 and 379–380.
56Mersenne, Quaestiones, cols. 102–103, 382, 1268.
57Girolamo Franzosi, De divinatione per somnum et de prophetia (Frankfurt, 1632), fols. 4r–7r.
58Henry More, Antidote against Atheisme (London, 1653), p. 159, against Vanini’s natural explanation of aerial apparitions; Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (London, 1656), pp. 48–49, grouping Vanini with Cardano and Pomponazzi; The Immortality of the Soul (London, 1659), p. 13; An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (London, 1660), pp. 335–336, turning Copernicus against Vanini and Pomponazzi. See also Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae (London 1662), p. 392, where Vanini and Cardano are awarded the astrological theory of religion in explicit contradistinction to the imposture thesis.
59See below, n. 178.
60Theophrastus redivivus, ed. Guido Canziani and Gianni Paganini, 2 vols. (Milan, 1981). For a range of opinions on the work, see J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London, 1960), pp. 67–69; Tullio Gregory, Theophrastus redivivus: erudizione e ateismo nel Seicento (Naples, 1979); and Alan Charles Kors, Atheism in France, 1650–1729. Vol. 1. The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton, 1990), pp. 222–225. A work of the eighteenth century, purporting to be a translation of the Theophrastus, contains two chapters on the oracles, largely derivative of Fontenelle: La fausseté des miracles des deux testamens, prouvée par le parallele avec de semblables prodiges opérés dans diverses sectes (n.p., 1770?), pp. 128–156.
61Theophrastus redivivus, ed. Canziani and Paganini, II, pp. 364–379 (II.3). Boethus apud Plutarch De Pythiae oraculis, 398f–399a.
62Theophrastus redivivus, ed. Canziani and Paganini, II, p. 426 (II.5): ‘Quemadmodum olim Graecorum et aliorum oracula cessavisse praedicant, ante et in adventu Christi, certe post hunc adventum debebant etiam aliis in terrae partibus cessare: non enim vis eius ac potestas gradatim procedere… sed se torrentis instar ubique magno impetu diffundere.’
63Le “Traité des trois imposteurs” et “L’Esprit de Spinosa”: Philosophie clandestine entre 1678 et 1768, ed. Françoise Charles-Daubert (Oxford, 1999), pp. 572, 728; see pp. 272–301 for an analysis of sources.
64Vanini, De admirandis arcanis, p. 428 (I.7): ‘Multa in eo libro scripta sunt, quibus a me nulla praestatur fides. Così va il mondo.’
65Despite this, the Sorbonne rejected De admirandis arcanis a month after publication, on the grounds that it had approved a different text; see Ivan Jadin, ‘Pomponace mythique: La sincérité religieuse de Pietro Pomponazzi dans le miroir de sa réputation française’, Tijdschrift voor de Studie van de Verlichting en van het Vrije Denken 14–15 (1986–87), p. 33.
66Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri cum refutationibus dogmatum quae contra fidem Christianam ab eo asserta sunt (1658: Amsterdam, 1684), p. 312: ‘Labor est solum in discernendo, quandonam facta fuerit praedictio aut interventu Daemonis, aut Vatum vafricie, aut rogantium credulitate.’
67Le Jeune, Relation, p. 78; q.v. n. 36 above.
68Jacques Basnage, Antiquitez judaïques, ou remarques critiques sur la République des Hébreux, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1713), I, p. li: ‘c’étoit un Imposteur, et cette imposture en découvre une infinité d’autres’. On Basnage, see chapter six below, pp. 249–252.
69Vanini, De admirandis arcanis, p. 419 (IV.56): ‘Tullius, quem prae mille Trismegistis literaria Respublica deveneratur’. Didier Foucault, ‘Libertinisme et détournement de l’autorité biblique dans l’oeuvre de Vanini’, in Didier Foucault and Pascal Payen, eds., Les autorités: Dynamiques et mutations d’une figure de référence à l’antiquité (Grenoble, 2007), 89–106, describes Vanini’s rejection of arguments from authority, especially that of Pomponazzi and Aristotle. By contrast, Jean-Claude Margolin, ‘Rationalisme et irrationalisme dans la pensée de Jérôme Cardan’, in Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles, n.s., 2–3 (1969), 89–128, p. 103, casts doubt on the ‘valeur rationelle’ of Vanini’s critique of Cardano for the ‘usage impénitent qu’il fait de l’argument d’autorité’. It is plain that Vanini, like most of his peers, relies frequently on authority; but we need not dismiss such a reliance, intrinsic to intellectual projects of all kinds and eras, as irrational. In chapter five, I extend this analysis to the case of Fontenelle.
70Vanini, De admirandis arcanis, p. 391 (IV.52): ‘Ob publicae potestatis formidinem allatrare Philosophi non audebant.’ Compare Theophrastus redivivus, p. 365.
71Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I.13, II.1.
72Cardano, ‘Praecantationes’, in Contradicentes II, p. 520 (II.2.7), ‘Quid est, et Propter quid est, praesupponunt quaestionem Si est’.
73Antonie van Dale, De oraculis (1683, see below, n. 205), pp. 475-476, quoting Daniel Sennert, Medicinae practicae libri II.1.14, in Opera, 3 vols. (Paris, 1641), II, p. 385: ‘Quae historia omnes Naturae scrutatores merito monere debet, ne causas rei, et τό διότι prius quaerant, quam τό ὅτι sit manifestum, et de re ipsa plane constet.’ See also, in the same year as Van Dale, Pierre Bayle, Pensées diverses (see below, n. 111), § 49, on the futile quest for the causes of something that does not exist. In his Continuation des pensées diverses, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1705), I, § 47, Bayle would remark that Van Dale’s book furnished the perfect illustration of the principle. Maria Teresa Marcialis, Fontenelle: un filosofo mondano (Gallizzi, 1978), p. 33, finds an antecedent in the Port-Royal Logique, while Jean Garagnon, ‘Fontenelle et La Mothe Le Vayer: une source pour l’Histoire des oracles’, French Studies Bulletin: A Quarterly Supplement, 78 (2001), 6–7, traces the dictum to Montaigne and La Mothe Le Vayer.
74On the story of the golden tooth, see Robert Jütte, “Ein Wunder wie der goldene Zahn”: Eine “unerhörte””Begebenheit aus dem Jahre 1593 macht Geschichte(n) (Ostfildern, 2004). On the story in regards to the pagan oracles, see Jütte, Ein Wunder, pp. 94–99, and his ‘A Medical Miracle Revisited: The Enlightenment Debate on a Miraculous Golden Tooth’, in Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Aldershot, 2007), 195–203. Books of marvels, in this period, began to incorporate the notion of imposture; see, e.g., Simon Goulart, Histoires admirables et memorables de nostre temps (Rouen, 1606), fols. 193r–206v.
75Edward Muir, The Leopold von Ranke Manuscript Collection of Syracuse University: The Complete Catalogue (Syracuse, 1983), p. 66, identifies Venier as a senator of the Venetian Republic and historian of the Council of Ten. A treatise De religione, mentioned in the preface to De oraculis, exists in manuscript—Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr, Fondo Morosini-Grimini, Cod. 41.
76Gaudenzio Roberti, ed., Miscellanea italica erudita, 4 vols. (Parma, 1690–92), III, 569–630; Jacobus Gronovius, ed., Thesaurus Graecarum antiquitatum, 12 vols. (Leiden, 1697–1702), VII, 325–356.
77A rare later exception can be found in Pierre Petit, De sibylla (Leipzig, 1686), pp. 92–103, who accepts the astralism of Pomponazzi and Cardano in describing the prophecies of the Sibyls, while denying it as an acceptable explanation of the demonic oracles. In this distinction he resembles Vanini (see above, p. 139), although the similarity is superficial and probably a coincidence.
78Giovanni Antonio Venier, De oraculis et divinationibus antiquorum tractatus (1624: Basel, 1628), p. 1: ‘cum primum Christiana Religio per orbem vulgari coepit, Oracula fere omnia loqui desierunt’, ‘veram huius rei [sc. defectus oraculorum] causam.… Christi in Terram adventus fuit’. At the end, p. 56, ‘patet, ob Christi adventum eas [sc. statuas] loqui desiisse, qui malis Daemonibus vim Homines fallendi ademerat’.
79Venier, De oraculis, p. 10.
80Venier recognises Plutarch’s distinction between primary and secondary causes, but argues, De oraculis, p. 43, contra the exhalation thesis, that ‘res naturales non omnes ubique pereunt, et Oracula, uno loco defecta, alibi prodiissent, si eorum ortus et interitus provenisset a causa naturali’. This was conventional; Peter Martyr Vermigli, Loci communes (London, 1576), p. 72, had argued the same.
81Venier, De oraculis, p. 51: ‘Nonnulli, futurorum praevisionem, intellectus Agentis lumini attribuunt. Alii, eam a Deo per coelestes intelligentias immitti, dicunt. Alii asserunt, a coelestibus intelligentiis, per coeli motum, phantasmata in nobis excitantem, produci. Qui omnes non recte ex principiis naturalibus philosophantur.’
82Venier, De oraculis, p. 52, ascribing the view that we can prognosticate via the celestial intelligences to a misinterpretation of Averroes. On Averroes and whether separate substances can know particulars, see chapter three above, n. 97.
83Venier, De oraculis, p. 52: ‘Deum et coelestes intelligentias haec inferiora curare, et de Homine curam in primis habere; cum is sit finis, cuius gratia caetera omnia facta sunt: et propterea, in conservandas leges, et Religiones, maxime incumbere; quia haec ad Hominum gubernationem spectant’.
84Venier, De oraculis, p. 52: ‘ex mente Aristotelis; quidquid faceret Deus, esset ipsemet Deus … ut lumine fidei faciunt nostri Theologi’.
85Venier, De oraculis, p. 49: ‘Philosophus nunquam concederet futura a nobis praevideri’.
86On Boccadiferro, see chapter three above, p. 108.
87Venier, De oraculis, p. 53: ‘doctrina Aristotelis, dicimus, omnium mirabilium, quae narrantur, causam assignari non posse’.
88Venier, De oraculis, p. 53: ‘vel a malis Idolatricae Religionis Sacerdotibus, lucri causa; vel ab Exercituum Ducibus, ad animandos Milites; vel a Legumlatoribus, ad Populi obedientiam legibus comparandam, conficta fuisse’.
89Venier, De oraculis, pp. 54–55:
Aristoteles … diceretque illius Religionis vi factum, ut consulentes accommodarent Fanaticorum responsa ad futurorum praedictionem: interpretando verba, quae responderant, aptandoque ea rebus, prout consentaneum videbatur. Notandum vero, apud Delphos, et alia praecipua Oracula, non licuisse cuilibet consulenti fatidicam mulierem alloqui. Nam Delphis Mulier secus cortinam latebat; nec ei erat, nisi cum Sacerdotibus, consuetudo. Et Oraculorum consulturi templum ingrediebantur, et ante Dei simulacrum exponebant, quid optarent, quod a Muliere, et Sacerdotibus, secus altare existentibus, audiebatur. Tunc Mulier tripodem asscendebat; repletaque furore, quidquid in buccam venerat, pronuntiabat; nihilominus de his, quae petita fuerant, loquebatur, quia fanatici, cum delirant, sermonem semper habent de iis, in quae ante delirium cogitationem fixam habuere. Sacerdotes postea, pro ut melius poterant, Mulieris dicta in duo vel tria carmina, consulentium petitioni accommodata, redigebant; sed eo verborum artificio composita, ut errare non possent.
90Venier, De oraculis, p. 56: ‘omnes Idolatricae Religionis Theologi, ac Historici, in hoc cum nostris conveniunt, ut statuas locutas asseverent’.
91Henri Busson, La Religion des classiques, 1660–1685 (Paris, 1948), p. 263: ‘C’est sur ce point un libertin authentique, aristotélicien comme Pomponazzi, mais plus hardi.’ Nicholas Davidson, ‘Unbelief and Atheism in Italy, 1500–1700’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wooton (Oxford, 2003), 55–85, p. 72, notes that Venier ‘called all ancient prophecies fraudulent … but he conspicuously failed to exclude identical Christian examples from his condemnation’. Ralph Häfner, Götter im Exil: Frühneuzeitliches Dichtungsverständnis im Spannungsfeld christlicher Apologetik und philologischer Kritik (ca. 1590–1736) (Tübingen, 2003), pp. 72–73, offers a more rounded view of Venier, although he is principally interested in the Platonic aspects of De oraculis.
92Moebius, Tractatus (1657), p. 24.
93Petrus Cunaeus, De republica Hebraeorum (Leiden, 1617), pp. 486–487. See Antonius Thysius, Exercitationes miscellaneae (Leiden, 1639), 72–80 (no. 13), especially pp. 78–80. Cunaeus’s inheritors in the next century, Willem Goeree and Jacques Basnage, would be vocal in their support for the imposture thesis; see chapter six below, pp. 249–252 and n. 10.
94Vossius, De theologia gentili, I, p. 44 (I.6): ‘Sed non si oracula latentium fuerint hominum imposturae, eo non fraude etiam constiterint illudentium daemonum.’ Giuseppe Maria Maraviglia, Pseudomantia veterum, et recentiorum explosa, sive, De fide divinationibus adhibenda tractatus (Venice, 1662), p. 20: ‘oraculorum authores etiam apud Veteres fuerint non Dii, sed vel Daemones, vel homines callidissimi, et praestigiatores’.
95Christoph Wittich, Oratio inauguralis de oraculorum divinorum veritate et gentilium falsitate (1671), in Exercitationes theologicae (Leiden, 1682), 397–414.
96Moebius, Tractatus (1657), pp. 39–50.
97Wittich, Oratio, p. 400: ‘Omnia haec ad lucri cupidos sacerdotes pertinere videmus, qui ex credula et superstitiosa multitudine consulentium augebant suas divitias.… Faciles pararunt impostoribus aditus ad capiendos consulentium animos Spes et Metus cum superstitione societate inita.’
98On the libertins, see the introduction to part two above, n. 7.
99Erasmus, Apophthegmata III, Diogenes 7, translating Diogenes Laertius, Vita Diogenis 4.
100François Rabelais, Tiers livre (1546), chap. 24, in Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jacques Boulenger (Paris, 1955), p. 415: ‘ne conseilleroys-je facillement adjouster foy à leurs responses: trop de gens y ont esté trompéz’. See also the Sibyl of Panzoust at pp. 384–394 (III.16–18), and Bacbuc at pp. 879–884 (V.43–45). The connection between Bacbuc and the Pythia would later be made explicit in a burlesque passage of Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, ed. Paul Vernière (Paris, 1970), pp. 250–251.
101Jacques Tahureau, Les Dialogues non moins profitables que facetieux (1565), ed. Max Gauna (Paris and Geneva, 1981), p. 150: ‘estoient au tems passé un tas de belistres qui contrefaisoient des divinateurs, pipans et abusans ainsi le simple populaire, à celle fin de se faire reverer de lui et le brider d’une crainte soubs l’umbre et pretexte de leur vaine et superstitieuse religion’.
102L’Histoire du poète Sibus, in Edouard Fournier, ed., Variétés historiques et littéraires: Recueil de pièces volantes rares et curieuses en prose et en verse, 10 vols. (Paris, 1855–63), VII, p. 122: ‘Tous les gens d’esprit sçavent que ces oracles n’ont esté que des fourberies des prestres des anciens pour mettre par là leurs temples en vogue, et que, s’ils reussissoient quelquefois, ce n’estoit que par hazard’.
103Busson, La Religion des classiques, p. 45: ‘plus d’esprit que de philosophie’.
104[Augustin Simon Irailh], Querelles littéraires, ou Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des révolutions de la République des Lettres, depuis HOMERE jusqu’à nos jours, 4 vols. (Paris, 1761), II, p. 2: ‘plus d’esprit que de génie’. See Claudine Poulouin, ‘L’Histoire des oracles de Fontenelle comme “dénaturation” du traité de Van Dale’, Revue Fontenelle 2 (2004), 135–152, on satirical style in Fontenelle.
105Busson, La Religion des classiques, pp. 262–267, discusses Molière in the context of the imposture thesis of the oracles. Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau de Visé, La Devineresse, ou Les faux enchantemens (1680); ed. Julia Prest (London, 2007).
106Michel de Montaigne, ‘Des prognostications’, in his Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris, 2007), p. 66: ‘le parler obscur, ambigu et fantastique du jargon prophetique’.
107Montaigne, ‘Des prognostications’, p. 63: ‘la forcenee curiosité de nostre nature, s’amusant à preoccuper les choses futures, comme si elle n’avoit pas assez affaire à digerer les presentes’.
108Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont este faussement soupconnez de magie (Paris, 1625), p. 35 on oracular statues: ‘quelque Historiens tesmoignent … qu’il [le Diable] entretenoit les Gentils en leurs superstitions par le moyen des masses de pierre et statuës qui rendoient des oracles’. See also pp. 531–537 against modern speaking statues.
109Cyrano de Bergerac, ‘Contre les sorciers’ (1654), in Lettres satyriques et amoureuses, précédées de Lettres diverses, ed. Jean-Charles Darmon and Alain Mothu (Paris, 1999), 85–93, p. 90: ‘nous sommes obligé de croire que l’empire du diable cessa quand Dieu vint au monde. Que les Oracles furent étouffés sous le berceau du Messie.…’
110Samuel de Sorbière, Lettres et discours sur diverses matieres curieuses (Paris, 1660), Lettre XIX to Cardinal Mazarin, 96–111, p. 108.
111Pierre Bayle, Pensèes diverses sur la comète, ed. A. Prat, 2 vols. (Paris, 1911–12), I, pp. 56–70 (§§ 17–18) and 201–209 (§§ 80–81); p. 207 on Demosthenes.
112Bayle, Pensées diverses, I, pp. 127–129 (§ 45) and 160–163 (§ 61). See p. 145, n. 34 above on Lescarbot. Manuel, The Eighteenth Century, p. 35, reads Bayle’s position as ironic, without any evidence.
113See above, pp. 150–151 and n. 53.
114Gassendi, Syntagma, pp. 294–332. On the genesis of the Syntagma, see René Pintard, La Mothe le Vayer, Gassendi, Guy Patin: Études de bibliographie et de critique suivies de textes inédits de Guy Patin (Paris, [1943]), pp. 32–46.
115Gassendi, Syntagma, pp. 312, 332.
116Gassendi, Syntagma, pp. 328–332.
117Gassendi, Syntagma, p. 330. The title of Gassendi’s work is also significant: Epicurus is to be refuted when he writes ‘contra fidem Christianam’. On Gassendi’s orthodoxy, see Sylvia Murr, ‘Gassendi’s Scepticism as a Religious Attitude’, in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden, 1993), 12–30.
118The two major accounts of La Mothe Le Vayer’s thought remain Florence L. Wickelgren, La Mothe le Vayer: Sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris, 1934), and René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1943), pp. 134–147, 505–538. On Le Vayer, Montaigne, and the inherited library, see Wickelgren, La Mothe le Vayer, p. 43, 258–261, and Pintard, Libertinage, p. 595, n. 2 to p. 139, more sceptical about their intellectual relationship.
119François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, in his Nouveaux petits Traittez en forme de Lettres, escrites à diverses personnes studieuses (Paris, 1659), 74–146. For ease of consultation alongside other ‘lettres’ quoted below, I here use François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, in Oeuvres, 15 vols. (Paris, 1669), XI, 443–479. This work has received some scholarly attention: Pintard, Libertinage, pp. 134–147; Gianni Paganini, ‘Fontenelle et la critique des oracles entre libertinisme et clandestinité’, in Fontenelle: Actes du colloque tenu à Rouen du 6 au 10 octobre 1987, ed. Alan Niderst (Paris, 1989), 333–349, recycled in his Skepsis: Le débat des modernes sur le scepticisme (Paris, 2008), pp. 84–87; Isabelle Moreau, ‘La Mothe le Vayer: l’ “Histoire des oracles” d’un philosophe sceptique’, Revue Fontenelle 2 (2004), 115–134.
120La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 477: ‘nous ne sçaurions estre determinément de l’opinion d’Aristote, quoique parlant humainement elle paroisse la plus vrai-semblable’.
121La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 478: ‘La Prediction estoit un art de charlatanerie parmi les Payens, comme elle l’est encore aujourd’huy dans toutes les Provinces de l’Amerique, et parmi nous mesmes à l’égard de beaucoup de credules.… Tant de fausses possessions de personnes qu’on exorcise, et dont nous voions tous les jours qu’on abuse impudemment, outre le peuple, les plus simples de quelque condition qu’ils soient, nous doivent rendre suspect tout ce qui a esté écrit des Sibylles, et de tant de mysterieux Oracles qu’ont eu les anciens.’
122La Mothe Le Vayer, Lettre sur la comédie de l’imposteur, ed. Robert McBride (Durham, 1994).
123La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 452.
124Pintard, Libertinage, p. 595, n. 2 to p. 139, weighs Le Vayer’s citations of ancient and modern sources.
125La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 461, quoting Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, p. 243—‘trop libre pour estre traduite’—and p. 451, citing Cardano, De sapientia.
126La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 473: ‘les Propheties mesme de l’ancienne loi, que nous sommes obligez de reverer, avoient aussi leurs obscuritez’, citing 1 Samuel 3:1 and 2 Esdras 4:16. See the very different treatment of that analogy by the pious Jesuit, Claude-Francois Menestrier, La philosophie des images énigmatiques (Lyon, 1694), p. 11: ‘L’obscurité est essentielle aux Propheties, parce qu’elles regardent les choses futures que Dieu seul connoît, et revele à qui il veut et comme il veut.’
127Pintard, Libertinage, p. 532; Paganini, ‘Fontenelle et la critique des oracles’, pp. 336–338; Moreau, ‘La Mothe le Vayer’, p. 132. On the principle of credulity, La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 467: ‘l’homme est un ingenieux animal à se decevoir luy-mesme’, and, anticipating Bayle and Fontenelle against arguments from consensus, La Mothe Le Vayer, De la credulité, in Oeuvres, XI, p. 150: ‘L’homme est un animal si credule, qu’il ne faut pour établir les plus grandes faussetez, qu’avoir la hardiesse de les dire’.
128Pintard, Libertinage, p. 533; Paganini, Skepsis, p. 87.
129La Mothe Le Vayer, Rapports de l’histoire profane à la sainte, in Oeuvres, XI, p. 295: ‘ce qu’on remarque dans la fausse religion de fort semblable à la bonne, est ce qui la rend plus rejettable et plus criminelle; comme le Singe n’a rien qui le rende plus laid et plus ridicule, que d’approcher, comme il fait, de la figure humaine sans la posseder.… Ils ont en tort, je l’avouë, de scandaliser des paralleles que vous tiriez innocement entre quelques actions de nos Patriarches sacrez, et celles des Heros profanes du Paganisme.’ See also the author’s Parallèles historiques, in Oeuvres XII, p. 28: ‘le Diable a toûjours tâché de s’attribuer le culte, qui n’est dû qu’à Dieu, usant de mille singeries’. On the simia Dei motif, see chapter two above, pp. 66–69.
130Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford, 2003), pp. 82–87.
131La Mothe Le Vayer, Rapports, pp. 300–301: ‘ils les faisoient souvent eux mesmes pour le bien de la Religion’.
132La Mothe Le Vayer, Des oracles, p. 475: ‘tout ce que les Oracles payens avoient de mauvais, n’a pas empesché beaucoup des prémiers Pere de l’Eglise de s’en servir contre les Infideles, pour establir des veritéz Chrestiennes’.
133Gassendi, Syntagma, p. 312: ‘Patres et Doctores sacri invehuntur in Ethnicos, quod se persuaderi ac decipi sinant a Daemonibus, historiaeque exstant, ac versus de Daemonibus, tum ad Servatoris Domini adventum, tum ad conspectum, jussumque virorum sanctitate illustrium coactis obmutescere’.
134Louis Thomassin, La Methode d’étudier et d’enseigner chrétiennement et solidement les lettres humaines par rapport aux lettres divines et aux écritures, 6 vols. (Paris, 1681–93), I, p. 590 (II.21, § 19): ‘Ainsi on se détrompoit … des fourberies de la pluspart des Oracles, qui n’estoient effectivement que des impostures, où les hommes se trompoient les uns les autres par des paroles obscures et à double sens.’
135Thomassin, La methode, I, p. 590: ‘La veritable raison du silence imposé aux Oracles estoit que par l’incarnation du Verbe divin, la verité éclaroit le monde et y répandoit une abondance de lumieres tout autres qu’auparavant.’
136On the history of witchcraft debates in England, see Ian Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c.1650–c.1750 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 6–84.
137On the word, see Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Phillipson and Skinner (Cambridge, 2011), 209–231, tracing it to 1657. On the anti-priestcraft tradition in England, see Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 61–98; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992); and S. J. Barnett, Idol Temples and Crafty Priests: The Origins of Enlightenment Anticlericalism (Basingstoke, 1999).
138Sydney Anglo, ‘Melancholia and Witchcraft: The Debate between Wier, Bodin, and Scot’, in Folié et déraison à la Renaissance: Colloque international tenu en novembre 1973, ed. Alois Gerlo (Brussels, 1976), 209–222, and his ‘Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft: Scepticism and Sadduceeism’, in The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Sydney Anglo (London, 1977), 106–139; against Anglo’s interpretation of Scot, Leland Estes, ‘Reginald Scot and His Discoverie of Witchcraft: Religion and Science in the Opposition to the European Witch Craze’, Church History 52 (1983), 444–456. On Weyer and Bodin, see chapter two, p. 48.
139Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), pp. 80, 171, 179. On Scot and Pomponazzi, see Gijsbert Voet (pr.), Disputationes selectae, 4 vols. (Utrecht, 1648–69), III, p. 564, and Estes, ‘Reginald Scot’, p. 452, n. 29.
140Scot, Discoverie, VII.4–6, VIII.3–6.
141Scot, Discoverie, p. 165 (VIII.6); pp. 133–134 (VII.4).
142Scot, Discoverie, p. 162 (VIII.3), gives Pomponazzi’s explanation; VIII.4 retells the death of Pan, the whole business described, p. 163, as ‘a merrie jest devised by Thamus’, and the diabolical lamentation merely ‘some Eccho in the Sea’. With the expression ‘merry jest’ Scot reduces a popular device of Christian apologetics to the status of the anticlerical fabliaux beloved in sixteenth-century England, as collected in P. M. Zell, ed., A Hundred Merry Tales and other Jestbooks (Lincoln, NE, 1963).
143Scot, Discoverie, p. 165 (VIII.5).
144Scot, Discoverie, p. 161 (VIII.3).
145Scot, Discoverie, p. 166 (VIII.6).
146Henry Holland, A Treatise against Witchcraft: or A Dialogue, Wherein the Greatest Doubts Concerning that Sinne, are Briefly Answered (Cambridge, 1590), sig. C1v. See also Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster, ed. Montague Summers (Aldington, 1951), p. 42.
147Holland, ‘A Short Discourse Shewing the Most Certen and Principal Meanes Ordeined of God to discover, expell, and to confound all the Sathanicall inventions of witchcraft and Sorcerie’, attached to the Treatise against Witchcraft, p. 8.
148George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (London, 1593), sig. E4v; James I, Daemonologie in Forme of a Dialogue (Edinburgh, 1597), pp. 35–36; William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608), pp. 4–6, 97–98; John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-Craft (London, 1616), p. 38; Robert Filmer, An Advertisement to the Jury-Men of England, Touching Witches (London, 1653), p. 20, also noting the exhalation theory.
149Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark Shewing the Divine Cause of the Distractions of the Whole Nation of England and of the Christian World (London, 1655), pp. 18, 43, 65–68, 79–84, 92; John Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft Debated, Or a Discourse against their Opinion that affirm Witches (London, 1669), pp. 18, 72; John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677), pp. 121–122, 127.
150John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London, 1992), p. 27.
151Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant (London, 1636), p. 3.
152Blount, A Voyage, p. 47. Blount believed that he was looking at the statue of Memnon, which is in fact near Luxor, about three hundred miles south of the Great Sphinx. See also, ten years later, Balthasar de Monconys, Journal des voyages, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1665–66), I, p. 185 (Feb 1647): ‘la traditive est que les Prestres venoient sous cette Idole [i.e., the Sphinx] par le Puy de la Pyramide, et y rendoient les oracles; il y a aussi un trou au dessus de la teste où un homme peut demeurer debout sans estre veu, qui peut-estre servoit encore à la fourberie’. Compare Van Dale, De oraculis (1683, see below, n. 205), pp. 285–286.
153Blount, A Voyage, pp. 49–51.
154Thomas Keck (d. 1671), admitted to Middle Temple in 1651, composed his annotations in 1654. See [Thomas Keck], Annotations upon Religio Medici, in Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 5th ed. (London, 1959), 175–297, with the note on the oracles at pp. 252–257.
155[Keck], Annotations, p. 256.
156See chapter one above, n. 81.
157John Selden, Table-Talk, being the Discourses, 2nd ed. (London, 1696), sv. ‘Oracles’, pp. 113–114.
158On the 1768 treatise, see below, pp. 182–184.
159See Bostridge, Witchcraft and Its Transformations, p. 43 on Hobbes in the tradition of Scot.
160Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. G. A. J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann, 2 vols. (London, 2005), II, p. 98 (I.12). Compare Hobbes’s earlier dismissal of profane divination, including astrology, in his Elementorum philosophiae sectio secunda de homine (London, 1658), p. 82. Despite its later publication, this work, along with De corpore and De cive, was composed in the late 1630s.
161Hobbes, Leviathan, II, p. 93 (I.12).
162See chapter five below, especially pp. 209–210.
163Hobbes, Leviathan, II, p. 98 (I.12).
164Hobbes, Leviathan, II, p. 334 (III.36): ‘the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapour from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for the time really mad, and spake like mad-men’.
165Thomas Tenison, The Creed of Mr. Hobbes Examined in a Feigned Conference between him and a Student in Divinity (London, 1670), p. 61. Compare Tenison’s later Of Idolatry a Discourse (London, 1678), p. 88 on demonic oracles. Against Hobbes see also John Bramhall, Castigations of Mr. Hobbes his Last Animadversions in the Case Concerning Liberty and Universal Necessity (London, 1657), p. 488.
166Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), p. 712: ‘that there were even amongst the Pagans, Predictions of Future Events, not discoverable by any Humane Sagacity … seems to be undenyable from History’. On Cudworth, see chapter two above, n. 69.
167Tenison, The Creed of Mr. Hobbes, p. 61.
168Tenison, Of Idolatry, p. 148 on the cessation, as well as p. 274, approving the ‘Hebrew boy’ oracle.
169Michael Hunter, ‘The Witchcraft Controversy and the Nature of Free-Thought in Restoration England: John Wagstaffe’s The Question of Witchcraft Debated (1669)’, in his Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain (Woodbridge, 1995), 286–307.
170Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft (1669), p. 18.
171R. T., The Opinion of Witchcraft Vindicated (London, 1670), pp. 3–4.
172R. T., The Opinion of Witchcraft Vindicated, pp. 25–29, claiming, p. 25, that the oracles ceased ‘suddenly after our Saviours time: beginning sensibly to fall away at the time of his Birth, and since his Death being wholly extinguish’d’.
173R. T., The Opinion of Witchcraft Vindicated, p. 4.
174See chapter five below, p. 245.
175John Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft Debated, Or a Discourse against their Opinion that affirm Witches, 2nd ed. (London, 1671), pp. 35–37, also making use of Casaubon to decry the ‘Hebrew boy’ oracle as a forgery, on which see chapter two above, p. 78.
176Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft (1671), pp. 34–35.
177See, e.g., Robert Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion with the Import and Use of Scripture-Metaphors, and the Nature of the Union betwixt Christ and Believers (London, 1675), pp. 78–79 and 108–109, positing both fraud and Satanic imposition.
178Philostratus, Life of Apollonius Tyanaeus, trans. and ed. Charles Blount (London, 1680), p. 82, citing Vanini, De admirandis arcanis IV.56. This passage also repeats verbatim, though uncited, a line from Machiavelli’s passage on the oracles, in Henry Neville’s translation: ‘Now the Religion of the Gentiles ran much upon the Answers of Oracles, Divinations, and Soothsaying, upon which all the rest of their Sacrifices, Rights, and Ceremonies, did depend; for they did not doubt, but that the same thing which could presage your fortune, (be it good, or be it bad) could as easily confer it.’ See Niccolò Machiavelli, Works, trans. [Henry Neville] (London, 1675), p. 284, and for the original, see n. 38 above. On Vanini, see also Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, tr. Blount, p. 112; on Vanini and Blount, see Ugo Bonanate, Charles Blount. Libertinismo e deismo nel Seicento inglese (Florence, 1972), pp. 101–102.
179Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, trans. Blount, p. 31, and [Charles Blount], Great is Diana of the Ephesians: or, the Original of idolatry (London, 1680), p. 9. On the theme of religious imposture in Blount, see Dario Pfanner, Tra scetticismo e libertinismo: Charles Blount (1654–1693) e la cultura del libero pensiero nell’Inghilterra degli ultimi Stuart (Naples, 2004), pp. 44–57.
180Thomas Pope Blount, ‘That Interest Governs the World’, in his Essays on Several Subjects (London, 1692), pp. 8–10, with a Machiavellian flavour. Against this passage, see John Edwards, A Farther Enquiry into Several Remarkable Texts of the Old and New Testament (London, 1692), pp. 302–313.
181Julia Griffin, ‘Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil: Some New Questions’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700 7 (1998), 162–201, p. 187, describes the text as ‘a Herbertian kernel … with Blountian wrapping’. See also Champion, Pillars of Priestcraft, pp. 143–146. The work survives in two manuscripts—British Library Add MSS 4366 and 29770, the latter with numbered paragraphs.
182Griffin, ‘Edward Lord Herbert’, p. 167.
183Edward Herbert, A Dialogue between a Tutor and his Pupil (London, 1768), p. 43; [Blount], Great is Diana, p. 3.
184Herbert, A Dialogue, pp. 131–132.
185Herbert, A Dialogue, p. 130.
186Herbert, A Dialogue, p. 133. Although the Tutor rejects the natural causes of oracles, he does allow, pp. 172–174, in good Renaissance fashion, the existence of occult properties in herbs.
187C[harles] B[lount], ‘A Dialogue Concerning Revelations’, in his Religio Laici (London, 1683), pp. 18–32.
188Herbert, A Dialogue, p. 99.
189On the Cartesian heritage of this passage, and on its connection to the literature of spirit-discernment, see Anthony Ossa-Richardson, ‘Gijsbert Voet and discretio spirituum after Descartes’, in Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period, ed. Johannes Machielsen and Clare Copeland (Leiden, 2012), 235–253.
190Herbert, A Dialogue, p. 64.
191Herbert, A Dialogue, p. 99.
192On Palingh and Van Dale, see Hans de Waardt, ‘Abraham Palingh: Ein holländischer Baptist und die Macht des Teufels’, in Von Unfug des Hexen-Processes: Gegner der Hexenverfolgungen von Johann Weyer bis Friedrich Spee, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Otto Ulbricht (Wiesbaden, 1992), 247–268, p. 264. Gary K. Waite, ‘From David Joris to Balthasar Bekker?’, Fides et Historia 28 (1996), 4–26, situates Palingh in the context of Mennonite scepticism about the efficacy of the Devil, also discussing Pieter Jansz Twisck, Jan Jansz Deutel, and Van Dale. Deutel, Een kort tractaetje tegen de toovery (Hoorn, 1670), p. 33, had earlier included the Delphic oracle in his attack on divination as mere human guesswork. On the general setting of Dutch scepticism during the period, see Andrew Fix, ‘Mennonites and Rationalism in the Seventeenth Century’, in From Martyr to Muppy: A Historical Introduction to Cultural Assimilation Processes of a Religious Minority in the Netherlands: The Mennonites, ed. Alastair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra, and Piet Visser (Amsterdam, 1994), 159–174, and Willem Frijhoff, ‘The Emancipation of the Dutch Elites from the Magic Universe’, in The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, ed. Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (Stanford, 1996), 201–218.
193Reginald Scot, Ontdecking van tovery, trans. Thomas Basson (Leiden, 1609, 1637; Beverwijk, 1638); William Perkins, Tractaet van de ongodlijcke tooverconst, trans. Vincent Meusevoet (Amsterdam, 1611). Palingh read both translations, on which see de Waardt, ‘Abraham Palingh’, p. 257.
194Abraham Palingh, ’t Afgerukt mom-aansight der tooverye (Amsterdam, 1659), pp. 65–66 (§ 155–156): ‘Tymon. Dat de Priesters en Priesterinnen te Delphos / met bedrogh omgegaen hebben / dat is kennelijck. Want de Goden der Heydenen die en waren niet anders doode lijcken / gefigureert meest na boose menschen / of dat ergher is / naer onredelijcke dieren / of naer eenighe schepseten. Dan Sonne en Mane / die wy wel weten / dat gheen antwoorde geven en kormen / op het ghene haer gevraeght wierdt. Maer alsoo veele onder haer Toovenaers gheweest zijn / soo hebben sy die antwoorden ontfanghen van den Duyvel. Eusebius. Armen klap Tymon, die opinie van dat de Duyvel soude gheantwoort hebben / dat is gantsch onwaerachtigh / sy en hadden tot sulcken hedriegherye gheen Duyvel van doen / sy konden dat alleen genoegh uyt wercken.…’ See also the exchange on p. 43 (§ 117–118).
195Palingh, ’t Afgerukt mom-aansight, p. 34 (§ 92): ‘Ja dat wil ick segghen / dat alle Voorsegginghe of teycken-bediedinge / gelijckde bedrieghelijcke Joden en Heydenen van alle tijden ghedaen hebben / en van veel menschen gelooft en gheacht / niet is dan bedroch / dickwils onder schijn van Godtsdienst gebruyckt / versiert van boose Priesters om haer profijts wille / gelijch de Tijdt-schriften dat uytwijsen.’
196Michiel Wielema, ‘Adriaan Koerbagh: Biblical Criticism and Enlightenment’, in The Early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, 1650–1750: Selected Papers of a Conference held at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, 22–23 March 2001, ed. Wiep van Bunge (Leiden and Boston, 2003), 61–80, and his The March of the Libertines: Spinozists and the Dutch Reformed Church (1660–1750) (Hilversum, 2004), pp. 82–88.
197The intellectual similarity between Koerbagh and Spinoza must be treated with caution, however, as is clear from Wielema, ‘Adriaan Koerbagh’.
198Vrederick Waarmond [i.e., Adriaan Koerbagh], Een bloemhof van allerley lieflijkheyd sonder verdriet (Amsterdam, 1668), p. 447, sv. ‘Mirakel’: ‘De Godsgeleerden willen dat een wonderwerk sal zijn iets’t geen tegen of boven de natuur geschied: ‘t welk valsch is / want dat en kan niet tegen of boven de natuur geschieden.’ Een bloemhof, p. 231, sv. ‘Demoniaak’.
199Waarmond [Koerbagh], Een bloemhof, p. 474, sv. ‘Oracul’: ‘De heydense Godspraaken houwen op / en zijn verdweenen doe de gemeene luyden vernamen / dat het bedriegeryen der geestelijken waaren / die sy winstshalven pleegden.’
200This treatise is exceptionally rare, surviving in only two copies, both in The Hague; even the critical edition of 1974 can be found only in a few copies in the Netherlands and Germany. Since writing this book, a critical edition and English translation has appeared as A Light Shining in Dark Places, to Illuminate the Main Questions of Theology and Religion, ed. and trans. Michiel R. Wielema (Leiden, etc.: 2011).
201Jan Koerbagh and Adriaan Koerbagh, Een ligt schijnende in duystere plaatsen (1668), ed. Hubert Vandenbossche (Brussels, 1974), pp. 460–461, for the stock examples from Cicero, pp. 463–464 on demons.
202Koerbagh, Een ligt, p. 469: ‘So datmen ook seggen kan, dat de verkondiging vande waare Leere JESU, waar door de menschen opening der oogen hebben bekomen, is geweest de reden en oorsaak van het ophouden der godspraak.’ Compare Een ligt, p. 467: ‘De reden dan en oorsaak van de ophouding der godspraaken is deese, te weeten dat de meeste gemeene menschen tot die kennisse gekomen sijn, datse hebben beginnen te mercken en gewaar te worden hat lang gepleagde bedrog, waar door de bedriegers hunne bedriegerijen niet langer hebben durven pleagen uijt vreese van gevaar en ongemack, datse iets van ‘t volk mogten komen te lijden’.
203Meindert Evers, ‘Die ‘Orakel’ von Antonius van Dale (1638–1708): Eine Steitschrift’, Lias 8 (1981), 225–267. On Van Dale, see also Martin Pott, Aufklärung und Aberglaube: Die deutsche Frühaufklärung im Spiegel ihrer Aberglaubenskritik (Tübingen, 1992), pp. 207–213; Häfner, Götter im Exil, pp. 389–392; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 361–364; and Martin Mulsow, ‘From Antiquarian Imagination to the Reconstruction of Institutions: Antonius van Dale on Religion’, in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800, ed. François Louis and Peter Miller (Ann Arbor, 2012).
204Van Dale, Verhandeling (see note below), p. 201. Van Dale probably knew Koerbagh’s Bloemhof, which had some currency in the Low Countries; Ligt, although printed, was suppressed so violently as to be essentially clandestine, and Van Dale is unlikely to have seen it.
205Antonie van Dale, De oraculis ethnicorum dissertationes duae (Amsterdam, 1683); Verhandeling van de oude orakelen der heydenen (Amsterdam, 1687); Dissertationes de origine ac progressu idololatriae et superstitionum (Amsterdam, 1696) (hereafter De idololatria); De oraculis ethnicorum dissertationes duae (Amsterdam, 1700). A review of the Dutch version, commenting on its differences from the 1683 Latin, can be found in Bibliothèque universelle et historique 7 (1687), 344–351.
206Van Dale, Verhandeling, pp. 117–121; De idololatria, pp. 654–657.
207Van Dale, De idololatria, pp. 649–650, and De oraculis (1700), p. 153.
208Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 244–245: ‘per tubam locutoriam vocem intenderet, ut sic humanis majora sonare videretur’. The invention of this device was contested. In 1671 Samuel Morland brought out a treatise, Tuba Stentoro-phonica (London, 1671), outlining his own contraption, and disputing priority with Kircher; on this matter see Dickinson, Sir Samuel Morland, pp. 40–44. Van Dale, p. 245, names both and refuses to adjudicate. Fontenelle, however, names only Morland; see chapter five below, n. 240.
209Van Dale, Verhandeling, p. 198; De oraculis (1700), p. 159.
210Lucian, Alexander, 26, using the windpipes of cranes; Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 300.
211Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia nova (Kempten, 1673), p. 113 (I.6.1): ‘Accidit porro, ut Musaeum meum privatum in aptiorem patentioremque Collegii Romani locum quem Galleriam vocant, transferre cogerer, intra quam et paulo ante dictus tubus translatus, etiamnum ab omnibus exteris spectatur et auditur sub nomine Delphici Oraculi intitulatus, hac tamen differentia, ut quod tubus, qui primo elatiori voce prolata verba in remota spacia diffusa palam propagabat; nunc submissa et occulta voce clam in ludicris oraculis fictisque consultationibus peragat eo artificio, ut nemo adstantium de secreto, reciproca colloquentium mussitatione instituto percipere quicquam valeat, quod et advenis in hunc usque diem exhibetur non sine daemonis alicuius latentis suspicione, eorum qui machinam non capiunt … huiusmodi artificium condidi, ut imposturas et fallacias fraudesque veterum Sacerdotum in Oraculorum consultatione ostenderem.’ Quoted in Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 301–302, and again, in another context, in his De idololatria, pp. 669–670—evidently a favourite anecdote.
212Giorgio de Sepibus, Romani Collegii Societatis Jesui Musaeum celeberrimum (Amsterdam, 1678), pp. 60–61. Sir Thomas Browne’s son Edward was less impressed, remarking in a 1665 letter to his father that Kircher’s Oracle was ‘no great matter’. See Thomas Browne, Works, ed. Simon Wilkin, 4 vols. (London, 1836), I, p. 87.
213Filippo Buonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum (Rome, 1709), p. 75: ‘Caput exponimus sub numero 3 e marmore albo fabrefactum, vultum horridum habens, macie deformatum, crispata fronte, oculis, et ore patulo’, with the engraving at Tabula 25, image 3.
214Michael John Gorman, ‘Between the Demonic and the Miraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Culture of Machines’, in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg (Stanford, 2001), 59–70.
215Caspar Schott, Magia universalis naturae et artis, 4 vols. (Würzburg, 1657), I, p. 42 (I.10). See also II, § III.3, for practical advice on constructing such statues, and see Dietrich Unverzagt, Philosophia, Historia, Technica: Caspar Schotts Magia universalis (Bad Nauheim, 2000), pp. 112–115. See also Raguseo, Epistolarum mathematicarum libri duo, pp. 578–579, on oracular statues: ‘paucos esse mihi persuadeam, qui non intelligant, ea ipsa aut latentium hominum, aut illudentium Daemonium imposturas fuisse’.
216Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 302. On Van Dale and Kircher, see Häfner, Götter im Exil, p. 392; and Leigh Schmidt, ‘Visualizing God’s Silence: Oracles, the Enlightenment, and Elihu Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx’, in Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally Promey (Berkeley, 2001), 211–228, p. 219.
217Van Dale, De oraculis (1700), p. 156.
218Chapter one above, n. 92.
219Hugo Grotius, De veritate religionis christianae (Paris, 1627), pp. 122–123: ‘Quaedam quae facta dicuntur, contigerunt in recessu, nocte, coram uno aut altero, quorum oculis falsa rerum specie per astus sacerdotum imponi facile potuit.’
220Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 226–240.
221Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 244–246.
222Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 255, noting the effects of caviar, soapwort, and sapo Hispanicus.
223Chief among these was the oracle of Mopsus related by Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum 434d–f; Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 317–322.
224Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 320: ‘corycaeos … qui, aut inter pocula, dum hospites peregrinos benevolentiae praetextu callide inebriarent, per subdolas quaestiunculas aliqua eliciebant; aut servos, si Dominos ipsos nequirent, tali modo circumveniebant, eosve pretio ac mercede corrumpebant (nam omnibus possibilibus modis cavendum erat, ne oraculi auctoritas detrimenti aliquid caperet) aut, dum domini cum toto famulitio abessent occupati … sarcinas eorum explorabant; aliisve versutiis penetrare horum advenarum arcana tentabant.’ The word corycaeos, ‘spies’, is likely borrowed from Rhodiginus’s paraphrase of Eusebius (q.v. n. 22 above). On Lucian and letter opening, see above, p. 143.
225Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 201: ‘ipse Diabolus non talibus antris atque adytis, ac caeteris circumstantiis circa Oracula sua opus habuerit, docet nos exemplum ancillae fatidicae Act.16.v.16.… Sed opus erat quam maxime talia machinamenta usurpare, illis impostoribus qui per Oracula sua, quasi vero, Deorum, credulitati hominum illudebant.’ On Acts 16:16, see chapter one above, p. 30.
226Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 218: ‘Sed audiamus ipsum Eusebium Graece loquentem, ne quis nostrae versionis auctoritati stare cogatur’.
227Acta eruditorum, May 1684, 207–212, p. 210: Van Dale ‘nemini cuiquam velit obtrudere, suum potius cuique de rationibus citationibusque suis judicium relinquens’.
228Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (London, 1969), I, p. xiii.
229On which see chapter one above, p. 40.
230Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 39, 53. See also Casaubon’s arguments against Baronio, discussed in chapter two above, pp. 78–79.
231Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 36.
232Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 17.
233Chapter one above, pp. 35–36.
234Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 24: ‘Itane mendax fuerit Eusebius, itave aut hebes aut stupidus, ut intelligere nequiverit, quid Porphyrius de ea re vel scripserit vel intellexerit?’ See also pp. 63–64. Origen is likewise guilty of misreading Celsus, as Van Dale argues at pp. 68–69.
235Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 15: ‘irrisor ille Christi, Christianaeque Doctrinae’. See p. 225, where Porphyry is described as ‘acerrimus Christianorum hostis’.
236Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 24: ‘longe commodius ac minori negotio’.
237On Bayle and Van Dale, see Mulsow, ‘From Antiquarian Imagination’, nn. 2, 54.
238For instance, Van Dale copies the error of Philippe de Mornay and others, in ascribing verses from the Tübingen Theosophy to Porphyry, on which see chapter two above, n. 122.
239Walther Glawe, Die Hellenisierung des Christentums in der Geschichte der Theologie von Luther bis auf die Gegenwart (Aalen, 1973), pp. 38–60; Alain le Boulluec, ‘Antiplatonisme et théologie patristique: quelques acteurs et témoins des controverses trinitaires aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, in Contre Platon. I. Le Platonisme dévoilé, ed. Monique Dixsaut (Paris, 1993), 415–436.
240Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), pp. 185–192. Compare, e.g., Wagstaffe, The Question of Witchcraft (1669), p. 77, or, in another context, Matthieu Bochart, Traité de l’origine du service des reliques (Saumur, 1656), pp. 590–592. See also Bayle, Pensées diverses, p. 201 (§ 79), on comet superstition as a Christian remnant of paganism, and p. 221 (§ 84) on Platonism, quoted in chapter five below, n. 84.
241A similar parallel would be drawn by Basnage, Antiquitez judaïques, II, pp. 874–878.
242Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), sig. *4r–v, pp. 3, 183.
243Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), sig. **4r–v, pp. 222–225. Vossius and others, he notes, had offered human fraud as a partial explanation of the oracles. On Vossius, see n. 94 above.
244Jacob Jobsz Ackerman to Antonie van Dale, Jan. 18 1683, Amsterdam University Library, Hs.J 21b, pp. 3–4: ‘dat … niet raadsaam kan zijn, sich zelven tegens elk, als buiten de gewoon straten, soo in ’t harnas te stellen, en datmen dusdoende sich zelven veel partijen maakt, en licht veel handen op ’t hooft krijgt’. On Crellius, etc., see chapter two above, pp. 61–62.
245Van Dale, De oraculis (1683), p. 27 on Oudaan; pp. 119 and especially 193 on Moebius. Van Dale, Verhandeling, pp. 19–20, 22, 62, attacks Oudaan further.
246Georg Moebius, Tractatus philologico-theologicus de oraculorum ethnicorum origine, propagatione et duratione, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1685), pp. 6–10 and 44–45, and see Van Dale’s response, Verhandeling, pp. 134–141.
247Moebius, Tractatus (1685), p. 45: ‘Verum si sic argumentari licet, cadit, et in fumum abit omnis probatio, quae ex bonis Historicis desumitur. Imo potissima pars Tractatus de Oraculis D. Van Dalen cadet, quippe qui pleraque, quae ibidem occurrunt, ex historicis, et aliis authoribus desumsit.’
248Johann Christoph Landgraf (pr.), Exercitatio de oraculis gentilium (Jena, 1688), p. 2; on Van Dale’s reply, see Evers, ‘Orakel’, p. 261, n. 124.
249Trogillus Arnkiel, Cimbrische Heyden-Religion, 4 vols. (Hamburg, 1690), I, p. 318, citing Moebius. The same objection would be made in a review of Van Dale, prompted by Baltus’s book, in the Trévoux Memoires pour l’histoires des sciences et des beaux arts (August 1707), p. 1382.
250Pierre Bayle, in Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, Mar. 1684, 1–18; Acta eruditorum, May 1684, 207–212, a review misunderstood by Evers, ‘Orakel’, p. 239, although he valuably identifies its author as Joachim Feller; Journal des Sçavans (1684), 129–131.
251Joachim Oudaan in Georg Moebius, Verhandeling van den oorsprongk, verder-uytbreyding, en volhanding der heydensche orakelen, trans. Oudaan (Rotterdam, 1687), sigs. A2r–B4v.
252Ackerman to van Dale, AUL Hs.J 21b, p. 3: ‘Wat Oudaen belangt daar is geen twijffel hij zal daer immer zeggen tegen u en verstaan, en veel liever willen dat sullen eeuwig donker en achter wegen bleef. Als mede alle of meest alle die dan zijn geslachten anders zijn, sullen mijns oordeels ’t hooft schudden.’ On Van Dale and Oudaan, see Evers, ‘Orakel’, p. 234.
253See chapter six below, pp. 252–253.
254Even so late an author as Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination, 4 vols. (Paris, 1879–82), II, p. 228n., cites a catalogue of oracles from Van Dale, even though he rejects his explanation elsewhere; see chapter six below, n. 268.
