received, it said, from many gods. Eros had taught them how to
fashion forms in which a divine soul could dwell, and whisper what
they would into sleeping minds; and Ate forms from which demonic
beings could pour madness, or unquiet dreams, into sleeping blood;
and Hermes, that if you powerfully imagined a hound at your bedside
it would keep watch there until you woke, and drive away all but the
mightiest demons, but that if your imagination was weakly, the hound
would be weakly also, and the demons prevail, and the hound soon die;
and Aphrodite, that if you made, by a strong imagining, a dove
crowned with silver and had it flutter over your head, its soft
cooing would make sweet dreams of immortal love gather and brood over
mortal sleep; and all divinities alike had revealed with many
warnings and lamentations that all minds are continually giving birth
to such beings, and sending them forth to work health or disease, joy
or madness. If you would give forms to the evil powers, it went on,
you were to make them ugly, thrusting out a lip, with the thirsts of
life, or breaking the proportions of a body with the burdens of life;
but the divine powers would only appear in beautiful shapes, which
are but, as it were, shapes trembling out of existence, folding up
into a timeless ecstasy, drifting with half-shut eyes, into a sleepy
stillness. The bodiless souls who descended into these forms were
what men called the moods; and worked all great changes in the world;
for just as the magician or the artist could call them when he would,
so they could call out of the mind of the magician or the artist, or
if they were demons, out of the mind of the mad or the ignoble, what
shape they would, and through its voice and its gestures pour
themselves out upon the world. In this way all great events were
accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a
faint sigh into men's minds and then changing their thoughts and
their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair