Now they first see the moon’s greatness, beauty, and nature, which is not simple nor unmixed, but a composition as it were of earth and star. For as the earth mixed with wind and moisture becomes soft, and as the blood tempered with the flesh gives it sense; so they say that the moon, being mingled with an ethereal quintessence even to the very bottom, is animated, becomes fruitful, and generative, and is equally counterpoised with ponderosity and lightness. For even the world itself, being composed of some things naturally moving upwards and others by nature tending downwards, is exempt from all local motion or change of place. These things also Xenocrates seems by a certain divine reasoning to have understood, having taken his first light from Plato. For Plato it was who first affirmed that every star is compounded of fire and earth, by the means of certain intermediate natures given in proportion; forasmuch as nothing can be an object of human sense which has not in some proportion a mixture of earth and light. Now Xenocrates says that the stars and the sun are composed of fire and the first or primitive solid; the moon of the second solid and its own peculiar air; and the earth, of water, fire, and the third solid. For neither is the solid alone by itself, nor the rare alone by itself, capable or susceptible of a soul. And let thus much suffice for the substance of the moon. Now as to her breadth and magnitude, it is not such as the geometricians deliver, but manifoldly greater. And she seldom measures the shadow of the earth by her greatness, not because she is small, but because she adds to her motion by heat, that she may quickly pass the shady place, carrying with her the souls of the blessed, which make haste and cry. For when they are in the shadow, they can no longer hear the harmony of the heavenly bodies. And withal, the souls of the damned are from below presented to them, lamenting and wailing through this shadow. Wherefore also in eclipses, many are wont to ring vessels of brass, and to make a noise and clattering to be heard by these souls. Moreover, that which is called the face of the moon affrights them when they draw near it, seeming to them a dreadful and terrible sight; whereas indeed it is not so. But as our earth has deep and great bays, one here running between Hercules’s pillars into the land to us, and others without, as the Caspian, and those about the Red Sea; so in the moon also there are hollows and great depths. Now of these, the greatest they call the gulf of Hecate, where the souls punish or are punished according to the evils they suffered or did whilst they were Daemons. The two others are long passages, through which the soul must go sometimes to that part of the moon which is towards heaven, and sometimes to that which is towards earth. Now that part of the moon which is towards heaven is called the Elysian fields; and that which is towards the earth, the fields of Proserpine that is opposite to the earth.