The Works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Part 2

...will they strike me with their machinations, with what ignominies will they pursue me? First, the louse-ridden Grammarians will rail against me, and with their etymologies will label my name "gouty" from Agrippa. Astonished poets will traduce me with poems on behalf of Momus or the Aesopic goat. Trifling Historiographers will profane me over Pausanias and Herostratus. Loud-mouthed Rhetoricians, with angry eyes, terrible countenances, thunderous voices, and dire gesticulations, will accuse me of treason. Monstrous Memoriographers will batter my brain with masks. Combative Dialecticians will hurl their countless shafts of syllogisms at me. Flexiloquent Sophists will block my path with their verbal snares and their own insoluble knots, as if casting a bridle upon me. The barbarian Lullist will rave with absurd words and solecisms. Impious Mathematicians will proscribe me from earth and heaven. Atomograph Arithmetic-men, having stirred up moneylenders against me, will compel me to account for foreign debts. The stubborn Gambler will drive me to the noose. The fortune-telling Pythagorean will calculate unlucky numbers. The prying Geomancer will cast unhappy figures of prison and sorrow. Many-toned Musicians will sing of me in the crossroads as a fable for the masses, and with shrill croaks and the discordant din of shells, basins, and platters, they will deafen me more than they are wont to do at the weddings of digamists. Pompous Matrons will exclude me from their dances. Charming Girls will deny me kisses; gossiping Handmaidens will mock me as a dancing camel, and the dancing Actor will play a tragedy about me upon a shameful stage. The hundred-handed Gladiator will attack me from the right and the left. Perplexed Geometers, by throwing in triangles and tetragonic circles, will capture me as if entangled in the knots of Gordius. A vain Optician will paint and carve me more deformed than Thersites himself. Wandering Cosmometers will relegate me beyond the Sauromatae to the glacial regions. The Daedalian Architect will clandestinely tunnel beneath with inexpugnable engines, and will force me, once seized, to wander in unobservable labyrinths. The Stygian Metallurgist will condemn me to the mine-pits. Fatal Astrologers will threaten me with the gallows, and by the fleeting vertigo of the heavens, they will keep me from the heights; menacing Diviners will predict every evil. The importunate Physiognomist will defame me as cold to love and weak of thigh. The delirious Metoposcopist will pronounce me a brain-addled ass. The fatalistic Chiromancer will divine everything inauspiciously. The prophetic Augur will cast bad omens upon me. The portentous Speculator will send the avenging flames of Jove and the fires of the prophetic lightning bolt. The dark Dream-interpreter will terrify me with nocturnal phantoms. The raving Prophet will deceive me with an ambiguous oracle. Prodigious Magicians will transform me—like another Apuleius or Lucian—into an ass, though not a golden one, but perhaps a...