Inaugural Physico-Medical Dissertation on the Magnetism of the Macrocosm and Microcosm

for example, the painting of a Scorpion on a copper plate, sculpted at the hour of Saturn original: "♄ni", with the third face of Aquarius rising with the same Saturn, to restrain hemorrhages, or the seal of fish against gout. Such paintings are indeed soldiers of light armor, whom to oppose to such great hordes of sufficiently armed enemies would be to incite puppies against lions; in a word, they are defenseless and unarmed. From where, I ask, is that power? Perhaps from the paintings themselves? Indeed! The remarkable power of these signs and their causal connection with remarkable effects, if it pleases the Gods: What does the figure of a scorpion have to do with restraining hemorrhages? Would it not be better to carve the figure of the round-leaved fungus likely referring to rotundifolia or a specific medicinal mushroom onto such a plate, since it still has some use in Medicine for stopping hemorrhages. But someone might say that that virtue is derived from heaven into the paintings, with the influences of celestial powers or stars having been more attentively observed by the Sculptors, with the concurrence, position, influx, and other phenomena variously exhaling and changing by turns. But these things are said more easily than they are demonstrated by any appearance of truth. That a certain power of the higher world is given into sublunary things, sound reason entirely persuades, since the superior things, constituted in the same sphere of naturalness as the inferior, suppose a certain link and mutual coherence among themselves. But such paintings are constituted outside the boundaries of nature; they are not bodies, but the shadows of them, or indeed merely shadowy delineations. You might object: Perhaps paintings alone provide remarkable effects. Paintings, for instance, which depict girls of no common beauty, are accustomed to excite sparks of love in the hearts of lovers. So do various painters move affections in men by variously painted things? Thus we have received in histories that pregnant women, by the mere gaze at the most elegant images, often graphically molded their fetuses into the same, and brought forth girls and boys of the most elegant form. But, in truth,