Natural Magic

...from which a great part of Natural Magic depends. Having weighed everything, Magic takes these as its attendants and helpful arts; whoever is ignorant of these must be utterly excluded from here. Nor should anyone be thought a Magician Magus: a wise practitioner of natural science and philosophy, distinct from a common sorcerer unless he is distinguished by these disciplines. Let the Magician be a craftsman by nature’s gift and highly knowledgeable; for the knowledgeable man without craftsmanship, or the ignorant craftsman—should he lack certain natural qualities—are so joined that he will waste his effort in vain and not achieve his desired goal.

There are some, however, so naturally skilled and knowledgeable in these matters by the gifts of Nature that they seem to have been formed by God Himself. I do not say this as if art cannot refine anything, or that what is good cannot be made better, or that what is not at its best cannot somehow be sharpened and corrected. Weighing with lynx-like eyes original: "Lynceis oculis"; a reference to Lynceus, the Argonaut famous for his superhumanly sharp sight what reveals itself to him, so that having inspected the matter he may work diligently—I wanted to say this so that if an unlearned man is deceived, he does not turn the blame on us, but blames his own ignorance. This is a weakness not of the teacher, but of the practitioner.

For if these things are handled by someone less ingenious, the credibility of the science is diminished; it leads to things that are most true and occur through necessary causes appearing to be mere accidents. Thus, if you apply the proper active agents to passive subjects The concept that "active" forces (like heat or spirit) acting upon "passive" matter (like water or earth) produces all natural effects, you will produce wonders. And if you seek even more wonderful things—those which can scarcely be obtained—remove the knowledge of their underlying cause. For he who knows the causes diminishes the authority of the wonder too much. Indeed, that is a wonder

Arrusio Curnus: Likely a reference to an ancient author or a specific cited case

whose cause is hidden from the spectator; it retains its rarity and strangeness only so long as the causes remain concealed. Someone once extinguished a lamp and then, by bringing it near a wall or a stone, lit it again as if it were a marvelous thing. But then (says Galen Galen of Pergamon, the famous Greek physician and philosopher) that wonder ceased to seem so when they discovered it had been in contact with sulfur original: "sulphure"; sulfur was known to ignite easily, explaining the "miracle". And the Ephesian Likely referring to a philosopher from Ephesus, such as Heraclitus says: "A miracle is dissolved by the very thing from which it seems to be a miracle."