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37. And all these omens are of force just so far as has been
arranged with the devils by that previous understanding in the mind
which is, as it were, the common language, but they are all full of
hurtful curiosity, torturing anxiety, and deadly slavery. For it was
not because they had meaning that they were attended to, but it was by
attending to and marking them that they came to have meaning. And so
they are made different for different people, according to their
several notions and prejudices. For those spirits which are bent upon
deceiving, take care to provide for each person the same sort of omens
as they see his own conjectures and preconceptions have already
entangled him in. For, to take an illustration, the same figure of
the letter X, which is made in the shape of a cross, means one thing
among the Greeks and another among the Latins, not by nature, but by
agreement and pre-arrangement as to its signification; and so, any
one who knows both languages uses this letter in a different sense when
writing to a Greek from that in which he uses it when writing to a
Latin. And the same sound, beta, which is the name of a letter
among the Greeks, is the name of a vegetable among the Latins; and
when I say, lege, these two syllables mean one thing to a Greek and
another to a Latin. Now, just as all these signs affect the mind
according to the arrangements of the community in which each man lives,
and affect different men's minds differently, because these
arrangements are different; and as, further, men did not agree upon
them as signs because they were already significant, but on the
contrary they are now significant because men have agreed upon them; in
the same way also, those signs by which the ruinous intercourse with
devils is maintained have meaning just in proportion to each man's
observations. And this appears quite plainly in the rites of the
augurs; for they, both before they observe the omens and after they
have completed their observations, take pains not to see the flight or
hear the cries of birds, because these omens are of no significance
apart from the previous arrangement in the mind of the observer.
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