Against Celsus 7.3

He says, then: The things foretold by the Pythian priestess, or the priestesses of Dodona, or the Clarian Apollo, or at Branchidae, or at the shrine of Ammon, and by countless other prophets, by whom practically the whole earth was colonized, they count as nothing; but what was said, or not said, in the manner of those people by the men in Judaea, as those around Phoenicia and Palestine are accustomed to do even now, these they think marvellous and unchangeable. Let us say, then, about the oracles he has listed, that we could collect from Aristotle and the Peripatetic philosophers a good deal to overthrow the belief in the Pythian priestess and the other oracles; and we could also quote what Epicurus and those who embrace his doctrine say about them, to show that some Greeks too overthrow the prophecies believed in and admired throughout Greece. But let it be granted that the matters of the Pythian priestess and the other oracles are not fictions or human pretences of divine inspiration. Let us see, then, whether even so it can be shown to those who examine the facts as lovers of truth that one who accepts that these oracles are real need not admit that there are gods in them, but rather certain evil demons and spirits hostile to the human race, which hinder the soul's ascent, its journey through virtue, and its restoration to God through true piety. It is recorded, then, about the Pythian priestess, whose oracle seems the most famous of all, that the prophetess of Apollo, sitting over the mouth of the Castalian cave, receives a spirit through her female parts; filled with it, she utters what are regarded as solemn and divine oracles. See from this whether the impurity and profanity of that spirit is not shown, since it enters the soul of the prophetess not through thin and invisible pores, far purer than a woman's parts, but through those which it would not be lawful for a chaste man to look at, much less to speak of or touch; and this not once or twice (for perhaps that would have seemed more tolerable), but as often as she is believed to prophesy from Apollo. Moreover, to bring the supposed prophetess into ecstasy and a frenzied state, so that she is in no way conscious of herself, is not the work of a divine spirit. For the one possessed by the divine Spirit ought, much more than anyone taught by the oracles, to be helped toward what contributes to ordinary life according to nature, whether toward what is profitable or what is advantageous, and to be most clear-sighted precisely at the time when the divine is with him.