That the pagan nations owning and serving the Prince of this World, and being supernaturally served by him in return, actively practised magic at the time of our Blessed Saviour's first coming, is generally allowed. And that the Christian writers of early times, more particularly S. Gregory Thaumaturgus, admitted the reality and force of the sorcerers' incantations and powers, is abundantly evident from their words and reasoning. The case of the damsel of Thyatira, "possessed with a spirit of divination," who "brought her masters much gain by soothsaying," clearly establishes this point; and so does the apostle's authoritative action:--"Paul, being grieved, turned and said to the spirit, I command thee in the Name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. And he came out the same hour."[63]
When, three centuries after the Day of Pentecost, the Church of God commenced numbering up her earliest triumphs, the soothsayers, the diviners, and the dealers with evil spirits began to experience her righteous and beneficent power. Constantine, urged to action by those who sat in the seats of the apostles, formally sanctioned the condemnation of magicians; but of course under Julian the Apostate, magic rites were not only still commonly in vogue, but were publicly patronized. Later on, Valentinian re-enacted the laws of Constantine; and under Theodosius the severest penalties were likewise enforced against the practice of magic; and, in truth, against every phase of pagan worship. But a general belief in sorcery and divination remained powerful and active long after the supreme and glorious victory of Christianity in the sixth century; and the manner in which the authorities of the Christian Church met the belief, and, by Sacraments and Sacramentals, aided the faithful to withstand the legions of the Devil and his human allies, is perfectly familiar to the student of history.
The well-known conviction that demons had appeared to mankind under the names of sylvans, gnomes, and fauns was common enough amongst the Romans prior to the revelation of Christianity; while the conviction that these demons had sometimes made women the object of their passion was arrived at by many. Justin Martyr and S. Augustine of Hippo[64] seem to imply something of the sort; and marriage or commerce with demons was a charge frequently made against witches, even from the earliest times.[65] It was said that these demons owned a remarkable attachment to women with beautiful hair,--a belief possibly founded on the passage in S. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians,[66] in which he exhorts women to cover their heads "because of the angels." In the middle ages the intercourse of philosophers belonging to certain secret societies with sylphs and salamanders was also believed by many:[67] and, later on, the study of astrology, with its fatalistic theories, and the restoration of the heresies of the Manichees, served to aid in more systematically formulating that belief in witchcraft and the supernatural which was for centuries so universal, and which never could have become so without a sure and solid substratum of fact and truth.