The Philosophy of Natural Magic

About this book

A stone, a planet and a spoken word belong to the same network of influences in Renaissance natural magic. Henry Cornelius Agrippa describes a universe dense with correspondences and hidden sympathies.

The Philosophy of Natural Magic, drawn from his influential Three Books of Occult Philosophy, explores the relationships that practitioners believed connected terrestrial and celestial things. Its strange classifications reveal a premodern effort to give magic intellectual order. Its vocabulary comes from a period when natural philosophy and occult speculation still shared much of their language.