PRÆFATIO

This treatise, truly, will be able to prove itself most useful to the Reader, if any other has, not through idle speculation (like a sailor from a map), which is often futile and fantastic and does not accord with the thing itself, but through the experience and use of the things that are taught here. Thus, it ought to be held not without justification as a thread of Ariadne, or a Cynosura a constellation used for navigation, a guiding star, or a simple signpost in this very long study and course, or rather in this most intricate Labyrinth and immense Ocean. For it will lead back whoever is wandering in the mountains and not recognizing the philosophical matter (as Arnold Arnold of Villanova complains in the first chapter of his New Light), even though it is openly sold for a high price, according to the same witness, in the manner of that Battus a legendary character known for being a guide to the place where the Egyptian Apis or Bull is hidden.

But if anyone in this journey, as in the sea, suffers shipwreck, it is not the art itself that should be blamed, but either the inexperience or the misfortune of the man who either did not navigate correctly, or did not reef the sails with enough foresight, or did not avoid the reefs. And if anyone in this work, which is like a mirror, does not see himself, the fault must be imputed not to the mirror, but to his own eyes. The things that are said here are collected not from my own brain, but from the monuments of the ancient philosophers that have become known to me, so that they may be able to show the way to travelers, like a signpost placed on a road, lest they be dragged off into bypaths.