Commentary on the First and Second Chapters of the Thirtieth Book of the Natural History of Gaius Plinius Secundus

the sensed with the senses; the senses with things. For there is this mutual connection and continuity, so that every higher virtue, through individual lower things, in a long and continuous series, distributing its rays, arrives even to the last. For thus the lower things are mutually connected to the higher, so that from their head and beginning, the first cause, like some stretched cord, proceeds even to the lowest; if one of the ends of which is touched, the rest suddenly tremble; and the touch of this resonates and moves the rest even to the other. For the Magi transmit that through lower things conforming to the higher, celestial gifts can be drawn by opportune celestial influxes. Such is the concord of the world, that even super-celestial things can be drawn by celestial, and supernatural things, as they claim, by natural, and can conspire; because one creating virtue and participation of species is diffused through all things; which virtue, just as it produces manifest things from hidden reasons, so it assumes manifest things to be hidden, so that it may attract through the rays of the stars, through tones, through natural things congruent to the celestial, with which we shall treat here, and by corporeal measure, and (I might almost say) divine. Thus we read that the ancients were accustomed to receive and perform something divine, and if I may say so, miraculous, through certain natural things, and to evoke demons and spirits. For man in a certain way smells of celestial majesty, whence he shows by many signs that the rational nature is propagated from it; for he can perform the pre-sensing of certain future things, and render it conformable to the higher, provided it be as it should: so that even those things which are higher correspond to the lower. From these, the more learned conjecture that the property of the human species is Solar, according to the astrologers of the Arabs, on account of the study of glory and truth, and also on account of the erect and beautiful stature, and indeed from the subtlety of the humors and the clarity of the spirit, and the outstanding perspicacity of the imagination; they also add a Mercurial force on account of the strenuous motion of a versatile wit, and many things of that kind, which will be said in their own place. Furthermore, since man is a miracle, a great animal, to be venerated, as the Platonists claim. For we read—