Thus gems are potent in religion and divination, love-charms and child-birth, medicine and agriculture. The poem fails, however, to touch upon their uses in alchemy or relations to the stars, nor does it contain much of anything that can be called necromancy. But the author ranks the virtues of stones above those of herbs, whose powers disappear with age. Moreover, some plants are injurious, whereas the marvelous virtues of stones are almost all beneficial as well as permanent. “There is great force in herbs,” he says, “but far greater in stones,”[1317] an observation often repeated in the middle ages. [Sidenote: Magic herbs and demons in Orphic rites.] More stress is laid upon the power of demons and herbs in a description which has been left us by Saint Cyprian,[1318] bishop of Antioch in the third century, of some pagan mysteries upon Mount Olympus into which he was initiated when a boy of fifteen and which have been explained as Orphic rites. His initiation was under the charge of seven hierophants, lasted for forty days, and included instruction in the virtues of magic herbs and visions of the operations of demons. He was also taught the meaning of musical notes and harmonies, and saw how times and seasons were governed by good and evil spirits. In short, magic, pseudo-science, occult virtue, and perhaps astrology formed an important part of Orphic lore. [Sidenote: Books ascribed to Zoroaster.] Cumont states in his _Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism_ that “towards the end of the Alexandrine period the books ascribed to the half-mythical masters of the Persian science, Zoroaster, Hosthanes and Hystaspes, were translated into Greek, and until the end of paganism those names enjoyed a prodigious authority.”[1319] Pliny regarded Zoroaster as the founder of magic and we have met other examples of his reputation as a magician. Later we shall find him cited several times in the Byzantine _Geoponica_ which seems to use a book ascribed to him on the sympathy and antipathy existing between natural objects.[1320] Naturally a number of pseudo-Zoroastrian books were in circulation, some of which Porphyry, the Neo-Platonist, is said to have suppressed. At least he tells us in his _Life of Plotinus_[1321] that certain Christians and other men claimed to possess certain revelations of Zoroaster, but that he advanced many arguments to show that their book was not written by Zoroaster but was a recent composition. [Sidenote: _The Chaldean Oracles._]