The First Book.

...traveled to foreign lands; and when they returned home again, they highly praised this art and kept it entirely secret.

4. Those most experienced in the secret exercises of wisdom say that this is the very pinnacle of the natural sciences Della Porta defines magic not as sorcery, but as the ultimate mastery of physics and biology, through which a person attains the most perfect learning in these matters. If any excellent thing can be imagined within the Art of Nature that appears to someone as a "Wonder-Work," they count it as part of Magic.

5. Others say that this is the active part of natural wisdom, which teaches how to join one nature to another artfully and at the right time, thereby producing certain effects.

6. The Platonic teachers, and among them even Plotinus (b) In the Book of Sacrifice and Magic. says (drawing from Mercury original: "ex Mercurio," referring to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage associated with the Hermetic tradition), that this is a science through which the lower is made subject to the higher—or the earthly to the heavenly—and that by certain attractions brought about by art, the general Form (and Soul) of the world is enticed to participate in the work.

7. Therefore, the Egyptians called Nature herself a "Wunder-Artist" The German Wunder-Künstlerin implies a female creator of miracles, because she possesses a certain power to entice and draw something uniform through something else of its kind. This power consists in love; and when they found that one thing was drawn to another through a certain equality and kinship of natures, they called these "magical" or "wondrous natural attractions."

8. To us, however, it seems as if Magic is nothing other than a complete surveying of all of nature. For if one knows how to rightly observe the movement of the heavens, the stars, and the elements, as well as their changes, he will also be able to thoroughly fathom the hidden secrets found in animals, herbs, and minerals original: "Bergwercks-Sachen," literally "mine-things", as well as their birth and decay. Thus, this science seems to radiate from the very face of Nature itself, as we shall hear further.

9. Plato also seems to aim at this (c) In the Alcibiades. when he says: it seems to him that the Magic or "Art of Wonders" of Zoroaster was nothing other than a science of Divine things and the right use of the same. In this science, the children of the Persian kings were instructed—alongside other royal exercises—so that they might learn to organize and establish their own government of the land according to the pattern of the universal government of the world The idea that a king's rule should mirror the harmonious order of the cosmos. For this reason, M. Tullius Marcus Tullius Cicero (d) In the Book of Divinations. also says that among the Persians, no one could attain royal majesty and dignity unless he had first been instructed in the science of Magic; so that, just as Nature governs the world through the relationships things have toward one another...