BOOK ONE.

...the proper active agents to passive subjects. Let the practitioner also be wealthy: for we work with difficulty if resources are not available; it is necessary to be enriched so that we may philosophize, not to philosophize so that we may be enriched. Let him not spare expenses, but be lavish in his searching; and while he searches more attentively and thoroughly, let him not be reluctant to repeat the process with patience, nor spare labor: for the secrets of Nature are not opened to the idle and lazy. Whence Epicharmus A Greek philosopher and dramatist known for his pithy observations on human nature used to say: The gods sell us all good things for the price of labor. original Greek: τῶν πόνων πωλοῦσιν ἁμιν πάντα τἀγαθὰ θεοί The gods sell everything to mortals for the price of labor. And if the result does not respond to the description, know that something was lacking; for we have written briefly not for the unrefined and beginners, but for the ingenious and the skilled.

The opinions of the ancients regarding the

causes of wonderful operations. CHAPTER III.

Those effects of Nature which we often witness so inflamed the minds of the ancient philosophers in the discernment of causes that they labored over it not a little, and even wandered in error; different men expressed different opinions, which we have decided to report before we proceed further. At the beginning, to trace the opinions from the most remote times, all the Egyptians Egyptians, who it is clear were the first to dare to scrutinize and measure the effects of the heavens—after they lived in the level expanses of open fields with the benefit of perpetual clear weather, and since nothing rose from the earth that could obstruct the contemplation of the sky—discovering the stars to be eternally bright and clear, they placed all their care in the knowledge of the stars’ influences. And since the hunt astrologers for causes greatly terrified the idle, they ascribed everything to the sky and the stars, so that they believed each fate fatum: here meaning the predetermined course of a person's life and the influence of the heaven was induced at the hour of birth and death, by the moving back and forth of the stars...