Magia Naturalis, oder Hauß-, Kunst- und Wunder-Buch

their aversion and inclination, and thus they might learn to provide an order for their governance.
10. This art is therefore so full of power and secrets, and teaches the recognition of the hidden properties of things and the whole of nature to such an extent—and how one thing agrees with another or not, joining them together or separating them—that such effects arise therefrom which the common folk hold for wonder-works, as they seem to exceed human understanding. Hence it was so common in Ethiopia or the Land of the Moors, because there the herbs, stones, and other necessities belonging to this were to be found in greater abundance.
11. And accordingly, those who take pleasure in beholding this wonder-art may well regard its works as nothing other than works of nature, which art merely serves, and to which she renders proper assistance as a handmaid: so that where she perceives that something is lacking here

or there in things related by nature, she knows how to replace it through subtle exhalations, according to the proper number and at the right time. Just as we see in agriculture, that nature itself brings forth the herbs and seeds, but art only prepares them. Therefore the poet Antipho was wont to say: we could hardly become masters through art of that in which nature precedes us. And Plotinus calls a Magus, or such a wonder-artist, a servant and not a master of nature.
12. But as for those who are superstitious, wicked, and forgetful of God, let them keep far from here, as we wish to have nothing to do with them, and shall shut our doors against them; being of the opinion that they should justly be driven out, punished, and rooted out, not only from this threshold but from cities and lands.
13. But what the office of such a servant of nature entails, and what it is necessary for him to know, we wish to report further in what follows.

The III. Chapter.

What a Magus or Natural Artist must know, and how he must otherwise be constituted.

Because we have described Magic or the wonder-art in such a way that it proposes to effect something, and belongs to the operative kind of natural wisdom, such an artist should rightly have become perfectly learned in philosophy and the knowledge of nature. For from these he can learn: