Origen, writing against Celsus, supposes the reality of magic, and says that the Magi who came to adore Jesus Christ at Bethlehem, wishing to perform their accustomed operations, not being able to succeed, a superior power preventing the effect and imposing silence on the demon, they sought out the cause, and beheld at the same time a divine sign in the heavens, whence they concluded that it was the Being spoken of by Balaam, and that the new King whose birth he had predicted, was born in Judea, and immediately they resolved to go and seek him. Origen believes that magicians, according to the rules of their art, often foretell the future, and that their predictions are followed by the event, unless the power of God, or that of the angels, prevents the effect of their conjurations, and puts them to silence.[164] Footnotes: [153] Homer, Iliad, IV. [154] Acts xix. 19. [155] Acts viii. 9; xiii. 8. [156] Pind. Od. iv. [157] Plin. I. 28. [158] Cato de Rerustic. c. 160. [159] Psalm lvii. Jer. vii. 17. Eccles. x. 11. [160] Plin. lib. viii. c. 50. [161] Job xl. 25. [162] Ecclus. xii. 13. "Frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis."--_Virgil_, Ecl. viii. "Vipereas rumpo verbis et carmine fauces."--_Ovid._ [163] Plin. lib. xxviii. [164] The fables of Jason and many others of the same class are said by Fortuitus Comes to have a reference to alchemy. CHAPTER XIII. EXAMPLES WHICH PROVE THE REALITY OF MAGIC. St. Augustine[165] remarks that not only the poets, but the historians even, relate that Diomede, of whom the Greeks have made a divinity, had not the happiness to return to his country with the other princes who had been at the siege of Troy; that his companions were changed into birds, and that these birds have their dwelling in the environs of the Temple of Diomede, which is situated near Mount Garganos; that these birds caress the Greeks who come to visit this temple, but fly at and peck the strangers who arrive there. Varro, the most learned of Romans, to render this more credible, relates what everybody knows about Circe, who changed the companions of Ulysses into beasts; and what is said of the Arcadians, who, after having drawn lots, swam over a certain lake, after which they were metamorphosed into wolves, and ran about in the forests like other wolves. If during the time of their transmutation they did not eat human flesh, at the end of nine years they repassed the same lake, and resumed their former shape. The same Varro relates of a certain Demenotas that, having tasted the flesh of a child which the Arcadians had immolated to their god Lycaea, he had also been changed into a wolf, and ten years after he had resumed his natural form, had appeared at the Olympic games, and won the prize for pugilism.