But on the contrary we find, as that most learned man himself has related, that the causes of the sacred rites rendered from the books of Numa Pompilius could in no way be tolerated, nor were they deemed worthy that, being not only read, they should become known to the religious, but that, having at least been written, they should be hidden away in darkness. For now I shall say what in the third book of this work I had promised I would say in its proper place. For, as one reads in the same Varro in the book On the Worship of the Gods, 'A certain Terentius, having an estate at the Janiculum, and his plowman, driving the plow near the tomb of Numa Pompilius, having dug up out of the earth his books in which were written the causes of the sacred institutions, carried them into the City to the praetor.'
'But he, when he had inspected the opening portions, brought so great a matter before the senate. There, when the leading men had read certain of the causes why each thing had been instituted in the sacred rites, the senate assented to the dead Numa, and, like religious conscript fathers, decreed that the praetor should burn those books.' Let each believe what he thinks; nay rather, let any distinguished defender of so great an impiety say what raving contentiousness has suggested ought to be said.
Let it suffice for me to point out that the reasons for the sacred rites, set down in writing by King Pompilius, the founder of the Romans' rites, ought not to have been made known either to the people, or to the senate, or even to the priests themselves; and that Numa Pompilius himself, by an unlawful curiosity, arrived at those secrets of the demons which he indeed wrote down, so that he might have a source from which, by reading, he could be reminded. Yet, being king, one who feared no man at all, he dared neither to teach these things to anyone, nor to destroy them by erasing or by consuming them in any way whatever. Thus, what he willed that no one should know, lest he teach men wicked things, and yet feared to violate, lest he render the demons angry, he buried in the place he thought safe, not believing that the plough could ever come near his tomb.
But the senate, since it dreaded to condemn the religion of its forefathers and was therefore compelled to assent to Numa, nevertheless judged those books to be so pernicious that it did not order them buried again — lest human curiosity should seek all the more vehemently a matter now betrayed — but ordered that these abominable records be destroyed by fire; so that, since they now deemed it necessary to perform those rites, it was more tolerable to err with the reasons for them unknown, than for the state to be thrown into turmoil once they were known. [XXXV] For Numa himself, to whom no prophet of God, no holy angel, was sent, was driven to practise hydromancy, so as to see in water the images of the gods — or rather the mockeries of demons — from whom he might hear what he ought to establish and observe in the sacred rites.
This kind of divination the same Varro says was brought from the Persians, and he records that both Numa himself and afterwards the philosopher Pythagoras made use of it; where, with blood employed, he asserts that even the dead below are consulted, and he says it is called in Greek 'nekyomanteia.' Whether it be termed hydromancy or necromancy, it is the very same thing, wherein the dead seem to divine. By what arts these things are done, let those responsible look to it. For I do not wish to say that these arts, even before the coming of our Saviour, were wont to be forbidden by the laws of the cities of the nations themselves and punished with the severest penalty. I do not wish, I say, to affirm this; for perhaps such things were then permitted.
Yet it was by these arts that Pompilius learned those sacred rites, whose ceremonies he made public but whose reasons he buried (so did he too fear what he had learned); and the senate burned the books that betrayed those reasons. Why then does Varro offer me some other reasons for those rites — I know not what — as though they were physical? For if those books had contained such reasons, they surely would not have been burned; or else the conscript fathers would likewise have burned these of Varro's, written and published to Caesar the pontiff. Now, because Numa Pompilius drew off water — that is, carried it out — from which to perform hydromancy, he is therefore said to have had the nymph Egeria as his wife, as is set forth in the aforesaid book of Varro. For so are actual deeds wont, by a sprinkling of falsehoods, to be turned into fables.
In that hydromancy, then, that most inquisitive Roman king both learned the sacred rites which the pontiffs were to keep in their books, and their reasons, which he willed that no one but himself should know. And so he caused these, written separately, in a manner to die with him, since he took care that they be thus withdrawn from men's knowledge and buried. Either, therefore, the desires of the demons written there were so filthy and noxious that from them the whole of that civil theology would appear execrable even among such men — men who had taken upon themselves so many shameful things in those very rites;
or else all those beings were betrayed to be nothing other than dead men, whom, through so long an antiquity of time, almost all the peoples of the nations had believed to be immortal gods — while those same demons took delight in such rites, demons who, by certain attestations of deceptive miracles, substituted themselves to be worshipped in place of those very dead whom they had caused to be reckoned gods. But by the hidden providence of the true God it came to pass that they were both permitted to confess all these things to Pompilius, their friend, having been won over by those arts through which hydromancy could be performed, and yet were not permitted to advise him that, being about to die, he should rather burn them than bury them;
so that they might not become known, they had no power to resist either the plough by which they were dug up, or the pen of Varro by which the things done in this matter have come down to our memory. For they cannot do what they are not permitted; and they are permitted, by the deep and just judgment of the most high God, according to the deserts of those whom it is just should be either merely afflicted by them, or even subjected to and deceived by them. And how pernicious those writings were judged to be, and how alien from the worship of true divinity, may be understood from this: that the senate preferred to burn what Pompilius had hidden, rather than to fear what he feared — he who could not dare to do this. Let him, then, who is unwilling to have a pious life even now, seek eternal life through such rites;
but let him who does not wish to have fellowship with the malignant demons not dread the noxious superstition by which they are worshipped, but rather acknowledge the true religion by which they are exposed and overcome.