Psellus on Africanus’s paradoxes of generation, thieves, and farming

From Michael Psellus, On paradoxical readings. Conception is worked by God and Nature, as I at least am persuaded; but Africanus says that there is also a technical generation, and it will be generated technically if the man about to come to intercourse should smear the member with hare’s blood or with goose fat: in that way male, in this way female.

And this man also draws down milk from breasts by a technical method, and those swelling after childbirth he quenches with a cyprine cerate. He also makes a woman barren by hanging an atokion on her: this is a frog’s brain wrapped in a linen rag. And to those in hard labor, putting a gagate stone into the left hand, he makes them give birth quickly. There have been made by him also other conception-mixtures and devices and [lock unrestored: παιδοται] and by him other conception-mixtures and devices and child-making plasters.

And he has a styptic thing composed from mulberry twigs, an amulet when the luminaries are under the earth; and he gives it its power by a certain unspeakable incantation. He also dyes white hairs from pounded litharge. He also makes a voice-training remedy from iris and tragacanth. He also rusts gold with the saliva of a rabid dog. And he makes an antipathetic for beasts’ strikes with the two-faced plaster. And he names certain scorpion-remedies as paradoxes.

And he makes a certain test of hidden thieves, cutting off the tongues of frog-tadpoles and pickling them, then at the time of need mixing them with barley-meal and giving them to those under suspicion of the taking-away of the thing sought. And the one who took away the stolen thing, he says, as if becoming in a trance, openly publishes himself; and he names the food “thief-detector.”

And about farming too this man says paradoxes. For a mulberry-tree, he says, bears white mulberries when it has received a grafted-in white poplar; and a white poplar in which a mulberry has been budded would also bear the same. And peaches become most-red inscribed, if someone inscribes the fruit that lies in the stone. He also stops a plague either with balsam sap or with the foul-smelling confinement of the tanner’s trade, by opposites. He also prepares wine of every kind, one with nard-spike, one with mastic-flower, and another with another drug. He also fashions hyacinth-stones and emerald-stones and sardonyxes. And he treats asp-bites and mist of the eyes not with the known drugs but with certain amulets and incantations.