Chapter XXXVIII. How We May Draw Not Only Celestial and Vital, but Also Certain Intellectual and Divine Gifts From Above

The Philosophy of Natural Magic, by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, L. W. de Laurence ed. [1913], at sacred-texts.com

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

How We May Draw Not Only Celestial and Vital, but Also Certain Intellectual and Divine Gifts From Above.

Magicians teach that celestial gifts may, through inferiors being conformable to superiors, be drawn down by opportune influences of the heaven; and so, also, by these celestial gifts, the celestial angels (as they are servants of the stars) may be procured and conveyed to us. Iamblichus, Proclus and Synesius, with the whole school of Platonists, confirm that not only celestial and vital but also certain intellectual, angelical and divine gifts may, be received from above by some certain matters having a natural power of divinity (i. e.), which have a natural correspondency with the superiors, being rightly received and opportunely gathered together according to the rules of natural philosophy and astronomy. And Mercurius Trismegistus writes, that an Image, rightly made of certain proper things, appropriated

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to any one certain angel will presently be animated by that angel. Of the same, also, Austin (St. Augustine) makes mention in his eighth book, De Civitate Dei (the City of God). For this is the harmony of the world, that things supercelestial be drawn down by the celestial, and the supernatural by those natural, because there is One Operative Virtue that is diffused through all kinds of things; by which virtue, indeed, as manifest things are produced out of occult causes, so a magician doth make use of things manifest to draw forth things that are occult, viz., through the rays of the Stars, through fumes, lights, sounds, and natural things which are agreeable to those celestial, in which, aside from their corporeal qualities, there is, also, a kind of reason, sense and harmony, and incorporeal and divine measures and orders.

So we read that the ancients were wont often to receive some divine and wonderful thing by certain natural things: So the stone that is bred in the apple of the eye of a civet eat, held under the tongue of a man, is said to make him to divine or prophesy; the same is selenite, the moon-stone, reported to do. So they say that the Images of Gods may be called up by the stone called anchitis; ^* and that the ghosts of the dead may be, being called up, kept up by the stone synochitis. The like doth the herb aglauphotis do, which is also called marmorites, growing upon the marbles of Arabia, as saith Pliny, and the which magicians use. Also there is an herb called rheangelida with which magicians drinking of can prophesy. Moreover, there are some herbs by which the dead are raised to life; whence Xanthus the historian tells that with a certain herb called balus, a young dragon being killed, was made alive again;

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also, that by the same herb a certain man of Tillum, whom a dragon killed, was restored to life; and Juba reports, that in Arabia a certain man was by a certain herb restored to life. But whether or no any such things can be done, indeed, upon man by the virtue of herbs or any other natural thing, we shall discourse in the following chapter. Now, it is certain and manifest, that such things can be done upon other animals. So if flies, that are drowned, be put into warm ashes they revive. And bees, being drowned, do in like matter recover life in the juice of the herb catnip; and eels, being dead for want of water, if with their whole bodies they be put under mud in vinegar and the blood of a vulture being put to them, will all of them, in a few days, recover life. They say that if the fish echeneis be cut into pieces and cast into the sea, the parts will within a little time come together and live. Also we know that the pelican doth restore her young to life, being killed, with her own blood.

Footnotes

126:* This was, in all probability, some mineral that resembled Dr. Dee's celebrated stone, which was cannel-coal, a black mineral coal sufficiently hard to be cut and polished and used by him as a Magic Mirror.