COMMENTARY ON THE FIRST AND SECOND CHAPTERS OF THE THIRTIETH BOOK OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GAIUS PLINY THE ELDER

The most eloquent writer, containing a most brief and learned compendium of natural magic.

Three dots arranged in an inverted triangle pattern as a decorative element.

In their panegyrics, rhetoricians, and in their judgments, orators are accustomed to recall the subject at hand to a contention of honor, and using a comparison of things among themselves, to reason where there is greater fruit and hope of pleasure, goodness of deeds, virtue, and glory. They believe they have acted most happily when, consulting the boredom of their listeners, they have gathered many things into one or two turns of speech, leaving those things which they might have hoped to say from the beginning for the listeners to think about, rather than enumerating each thing in its entirety. Thus we shall act in this compendium of magic, which we have always considered to be a remarkable part of natural philosophy, as will become clear and known from what follows: namely, that magic is the absolute consummation of natural philosophy and the most perfect and highest science. For this reason, we have determined to treat it and its kinds somewhat more accurately here.

Those most learned in more recondite literature have handed down in their monuments that one part of magic is infamous and ill-omened due to the commerce of unclean spirits, while the other part is almost nothing else but an active portion of natural philosophy. More learned Greeks do not call the former magic, but Goëtia sorcery/necromancy, which is prepared and shaped by the art of nefarious curiosity through incantations and charms. Others call this Theurgy divine working/high magic, though with some differentiation, so that those dedicated to illicit arts—a kind of which Zabulus the Devil is said to have invented—they wish to be understood as damnable, whom they also call maleficos evildoers/witches. For they say the Goëtia belongs to these, about which—