The Second Book Of Occult Philosophy, or Magic
by Henry Cornelius Agrippa
Annotated by Donald Tyson
Chapter I
Of the necessity of mathematical learning, and of the many wonderful works which are done by mathematical arts only.
The doctrines of mathematics are so necessary to, and have such an affinity with magic, that they that do profess it without them, are quite out of the way, and labour in vain, and shall in no wise obtain their desired effect. For whatsoever things are, and are done in these inferior natural virtues, are all done, and governed by number, weight, measure, harmony, motion, and light. And all things which we see in these inferiors, have root, and foundation in them.
Yet nevertheless without natural virtues, of mathematical doctrines only works like to naturals can be produced, as Plato saith,1 a thing not partaking of truth or divinty, but certain images kin to them, as bodies going, or speaking, which yet want the animal faculty, such as were those which amongst the ancients were called Dedalus his images,2 and αντοματα,3 of which Aristotle makes mention, viz. the three-footed images4 of Vulcan,5 and Dedalus, moving themselves, which Homer saith6 came out of thier own accord to exercise, and which we read, moved themselves at the feast of Hiraba the philosophical exerciser: as also that golden statues performed the offices of cup-bearers, and carvers to the guests. Also we read of the statues of Mercury,7 which did speak, and the wooden dove of Arthita, which did fly, and the miracles of Boethius, which Cassiodorus made mention of, vis. Diomedes in brass, sounding a trumpet, and a brazen snake hissing, and pictures of birds singing most sweetly.
Of this kind are those miracles of images which proceed from geometry, and optics, of which we made some mention in the first book, where we spoke of the element of Air.8 So there are made glasses, some concave, others of the form of a column, making the representations of things in the air seem like shadows at a distance: of which sort Apollonius, and Vitellius in their books De Perspectiva, and Speculis, taught the making, and the use.9
And we read that magnus Pompeius brought a certain glass10 amongst the spoils from the East, to Rome, in which were seen armies of armed men. And there are made certain transparent glasses, which being dipped in some certain juices of herbs, and irradiated with an artificial light, fill the whole air round about with visions.11 And I know how to make reciprocal glasses, in which the sun shining, all things which were illustrated by the rays thereof are apparently seen many miles off.
Hence a magician, expert in natural philosophy, and mathematics, and knowing the middle sciences consisting of both these, arithmatic, music, geometry, optics, astronomy, and such sciences that are the weights, measures, proportions, articles, and joints, knowing also mechanical arts resulting from these, may without any wonder, if he excel other men in art, and wit do many wonderful things, which the most prudent, and wise men may much admire.
Are there not some relics extant of the ancients' works, vis. Hercules',12 and Alexander's pillars, the Gate of Caspia made of brass, and shut with iron beams, that it could by no wit or art, be broken? And the pyramids13 of Julius Caesar erected at rome near the hill Vaticanus, and the mountains built by art14 in the middle of the sea, and towers, and heaps of stones,15 such as I saw in England put together by an incredible art.
And we read in faithful histories that in former times rockes have been cut off, and valleys made, and mountains made into a plain, rockes have been digged through, promontories have been opened in the sea, the bowels of the Earth made hollow, rivers divided, 16 seas joined to seas,17, the seas restrained, the bottom of the sea been searched, pools exhausted, fens dried up, new islands made,18 and again restored to the continent,19 all which, althoughthey may seem to be against nature, yet we read have been done, and we see some relics of the remaining to this day, which the vulgar say were the works of the Devil, seeing the arts and artificers thereof have been dead out of all memory, neither are there any that care to understand, or search into them.
Therefore they seeing any wonderful sight, do impute it to the Devil, as his work, or think it is a miracle, which indeed is a work of natural or mathematical philosophy. As if anyone should be ignorant of the virtue of the loadstone, and should see heavy iron drawn upwards, or hanged in the air (as we read the iron image of Mercury did long since at Treveris hang up in the middle of the temple by loadstones,20 this verse attesting the same:
The iron white rod bearer flies in the air.
The like to which we read was done concerning the image of the Sun at Rome, in the temple of Serapis)21 would not such an ignorant man, I say, presently say it is the work of the Devil? But if he shall know the virtue of the loadstone to the iron, and shall make trial of it, he presently ceaseth to wonder, and doth no more scruple it to be the work of nature.
But here it is convenient that you know, that as by natural virtues we collect natural virtues, so by abstracted, mathematical, and celestial, we receive celestial virtues, as motion, life, sense, speech, soothsaying, and divination, even in matter less disposed, as that which is not made by nature, but only by art. And so images that speak, and foretell things to come, are said to be made, as William of Paris relates of a brazen head22 made under the rising of Saturn,23 which they say spake with a man's voice.
But he that will choose a disposed matter, and most fit to receive, and a most powerful agent, shall undoubtedly produce more powerful effects. For it is a general opinion of the Pythagoreans, that as mathematical things are more formal than natural, so also they are more efficacious: as they have less dependence in their being, so also in their operation. But amongst all mathematical things, numbers, as they have more of form in them, so also are more efficacious, to which not only heathen philosophers, but also Hebrew, and Christian divines do attribute virtue, and efficacy, as well to effect what is good, as what is bad.
Notes - Chapter I
1. Plato saith - See note 8, ch. LXIII, bk. III.
2. Dedalus his images - About the wooden statues scattered throughout ancient Greece, called daidala, Plato says: "Your statements, Euthyphro, look like the work of Daedalus, founder of my line. If I had made them, and they were my positions, no doubt you would poke fun at me, and say that, being in his line, the figures I construct with words runn off, as did his statues, and will not stay where they are put" (Euthyphro 11c [Hamilton and Cairns, 180]). And in another place he makes a similar reference:
Socrates: It is because you have not observed the statues of Daedalus. Perhaps you don't have them in your country.
Meno: What makes you say that?
Socrates: They too, if no one ties them down, run away and escape. If tied, they stay where they are put.
(Meno 97d [Hamilton and Cairns, 381])
On the daidala, see the biographical note on Daedalus.
3. αντοματα - Automata: contrivances that move by themselves.
4. three-footed images - Tripods, ornamental vessels often presented as prizes or votive offerings. They were taken as plunder in war and served almost as monetary units.
5. Vulcan - Roman fire god and artificer, who is bound up and confused with the Greek god Hephaestos. In classical times they were treated as the same deity. He was the son of Zeus and Hera, or of Hera alone, lame in one foot but strong and hardy with a handsome bearded face and powerful arms. The homes of the gods and all their magical possessions and beautiful jewelry were made by hephaestos, who despite his skill was constantly mocked because of his infirmity: "But among the blessed immorals uncontrollable laughter/went up as they saw Hephaistos bustling about the palace" (Homer Iliad 1, lines 599-600 [Lattimore, 75]). In Homer the god is characterized both as a cunning craftsman (Odyssey 8, lines 272-81 [Lattimore, 128)] and as the lord of the heat and flame (Iliad 21, lines 342-76 [Lattimore, 427-8]).
6. Homer saith - Of the 20 serving tripods fashioned by the smoth of the gods, Hephaestos, Homer writes: "And he had set golden wheels underneath the base of each one/so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal/gathering, and return to his house: a wonder to look at" (Iliad 18, lines 375-8 [Lattimore, 385]). Homer also writes of the mechanical attendants that helped the lame god to walk: "These are golden, and in appearance like living young women./There is intelligence in their hearts, and there is speech in them/and strength, and from the immortal gods they have learned how to do things" (ibid., lines 418-20 [Lattimore, 386]).
7. statues of Mercury - See note 11, ch. LII, bk. III.
8. element of Air - See ch. VI, bk I.
9. and the use - A method of projecting images with concave and plane mirrors was known from ancient times, and is described by Roger Bacon in his De Speculis.
10. certain glass - Pompey must have obtained this mirror in his pursuit of the fleeing army of Mithra - dates in 65 BC, or during the subsequent two-year eastern campaign in Syria and Palestine. Or can it possibly have been a crude telescope?
11. with visions - This sounds very much like a slide projector, which presumably cast the shadows of substances clinging to the glass upon the wall.
12. Hercules' - The pillars of Hercules are the two great rocks that stand opposite sides of teh entrance tot he Mediterranean Sea. According to myth, they were once together, but hercules tore them apart in order to get to Cadiz.
13. pyramis - Pyrame, or obelisk, a large single block of stone carved in the shape of a four sided pilar with a pyramidal top sheathed in reflective metal. The roman Emperors admired those in Egypt and stole many to erect in Rome.
14. mountains built by art - Perhaps such legends took their origin from coral atolls, which can be very symmetrical; or volcanic uprisings, which appear with relative suddenness.
15. heaps of stones - Stonehenge, or some similar site
16. rivers divided - The prodigies in the preceding list appear to derive from Plato's description of the great building works of Atlantis, in his Critias.
17. seas joined to seas - The Egyptians constructed a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea:
Pasammetichus left a son called Necos, who succeeded him upon the throne. This prince was the first to attempt the construction of the canal to the Red Sea - a work completed afterwards by Darius the Persian - the length of which is four day's journey, and the width such as to admit of two triremes being rowed along it abreast. (Herodotus History 2 [Rawlinson, 137]).
18. new islands made - Perhaps this refers to the artificial Lake of Moeris: "It is manifestly an artificial excavation, for nearly in the center there stand two pyramids, rising to the height of fifty fathoms above the surface of the water, and extending as far beneath, crowned each of them with a colossal statue sitting upon a throne" (ibid., 134).
19. restored to the continent - The island of Pharos was joined to the Egyptian city of Alexandria by an artificial dyke called the Heptastadium.
20. temple by loadstones -
"So then, if human art can effect such rare conclusions, that such as know them not would think them divine effects - as when an iron image was hung in a certain temple so strangely that the ignorant would have verily believed they had seen a work of God's immediate power, yet it hung so just because it was between two lodestones, whereof one was placed in teh roof of the temple, and the other in the floor, without touching anything at all..." (Augustine City of God 21.6 [Healey, 2:326]).
The architect Timochares began to erect a vaulted roof of lodestone, in the Temple of Arsinoe {wife and sister of King Ptolemy II of Egypt], at Alexandria, in order that the iron statue of that princess might have the appearance of hanging suspended in the air: his death, however, and that of King Ptolemaeus, who had ordered this monument to be erected in honour of his sister, prevented the completion of the project. (Pliny 34.42 [Bostock and Riley, 6:209])
It is just as likely that work stopped when Timochares began to realize the enormity of the technical difficulties involved in such a feat of engineering, and that the scale he planned was effectively impossible. That Latin poet Claudius Claudianus, who lived in the beginning of the fourth century, mentions a temple that held a statue of Venus made of loadstoen, and another of Mars, of iron. During marriage ceremonies these were allowed to come together. If the two statues were suspended on wires, and gently swung together so that they clung, this is feasible.
21. Serapis - The Ptolomaic form of Osiris, said to be a combination of the names Apis and Osiris: "But the greatest part of the priests do say that Osiris and Apis are both of them but one complex being, whole they tell us in their sacred commentaries and sermons that we are to look upon the Apis as the beautiful image of the soul of Isiris" (Plutarch Isis and Osiris 29 [Goodwin, 4:90]). Serapis was linked with the Sun, as Isis was with the Moon, and was regarded as the "male counterpart of Isis" (Budge 1904, 2:20:349). Their worshop was introduced into Rome in the time of Sulla *81-79 BC), and despite resistance from both the senate, and later the Emperor Augustus, soon took firm hold.
22. brazen head - Tales of oracular heads of brass were popular. Brewer (1870) enumerates five, the most notable being that of Albertus Magnus, which took 30 years to make and was shattered by his disciple, Thomas Aquinas, who is also supposed to have smashed his master's automatic doorman. Also famous is that of Roger Bacon:
With seven years tossing nigromantic charms,
Poring upon dark Hecat's principles,
I have framed out a monstrous head of brass,
That, by the enchanting forces of the devil,
Shall tell out strange and uncouth aphorisms,
And girt fair England with a wall of brass.
(Robert Green Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, sc. 11, lines 17-22. In Elizabethan Plays, ed. Arthur H. Nethercot, Charles R. Baskervill, and Virgil B. Heitzel [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971])
According to Lewis Spence, it was revealed in 1818 that in the imperial museum of Vienna had been discovered several heads of Baphomet, the god of the Knights Templars: "These heads represent the divinity of the gnostics, named Mete, or Wisdom. For a long time there was preserved at Marseilles one of these gilded heads, seized in a retreat of the Templars when the latter were pursued by the law" (Spence 1920, 203).
23. rising of Saturn - The head of Baphomet was supposed to possess a beard and the horns of a goat, or by other accounts to be a goat's head (ibid., 63-4). Saturn, who is depicted as an ancient bearded man, rules the zodiac sign of Capricorn, the Goat.