ON OCCULT PHILOSOPHY

...how they differ among themselves, and how they agree, it instructs us; hence producing its wonderful effects by uniting the virtues of things through their application to one another, and to their appropriate passive subjects below, everywhere coupling and marrying In the context of Renaissance magic, "marrying" (maritans) refers to the alchemical or magical act of joining a celestial influence to a physical object. them to the gifts and virtues of the superiors. This is the most perfect and supreme science, this higher and holier philosophy; this, finally, is the absolute consummation of all most noble philosophy. For since all governing philosophy is divided into physics, mathematics, and theology: physics teaches the nature of those things which are in the world, and investigates and probes their causes, effects, times, places, modes, outcomes, integrities, and parts:

How many are the species of things called elements,
what heat produces, what the earth, what the moist air,
what they generate: from whence come the beginnings of the great sky,
from whence the flow of the sea, or the Iris The rainbow. with its various colors.
What makes the clouds return the noisy thunder:
from whence the lightning is hurled from the ethereal hall.
What secrets the torches Meteors or shooting stars. show by night, what cause brings forth
comets, and what hidden power shakes the swelling earth,
what are the seeds of gold, what the seeds of iron,
and the entire ingenious force of hidden nature.

Virgil:

Physics, the observer of natures, embraces all these things, and those which Virgil sings:

From whence the race of men and of beasts, as well as rain and fires,
from whence the shaking of the earth, by what force the deep seas swell
after breaking their barriers, and sink back into themselves.
The virtues of herbs, the spirits and rages of wild beasts,
every kind of shrub, as well as of stones and of reptiles.

Mathematics, however, teaches us to know nature in its flat and three-dimensionally extended form, and to observe the motion and progress of the celestial bodies.

Whither the golden stars are carried by swift motion,
what forces the dull moon now to grow dim,
and the sun to suffer eclipses with its light withdrawn.

And what Virgil sings:

Wherefore the golden sun rules the orb measured out in certain parts
through the twelve stars The twelve signs of the Zodiac. of the world:
it shows the paths of the sky, and points out the stars,
the various eclipses of the sun, and the labors Eclipses or phases. of the moon,
Arcturus, the Pleiades, the Hyades, and the twin Triones The constellations of the Great and Little Bear..
Why the winter suns hasten so much to dip themselves in the ocean,
or what delay hinders the slow nights.

All these things are discerned through mathematics itself:

Hence we can predict storms in a doubtful sky,
hence the day of harvest, and the time for sowing,
and when to drive the oars into the unfaithful marble The sea....