Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/29

21] of the early Christian Fathers, to the extreme of discovering sublime secrets not only by regarding every incident and object in Scripture as a parable, but by treating the text itself as a cryptogram. Not only, like Isidore, did they see in every numerical measurement in the Bible mystic meaning, but in the very letters they doubted not there was hidden that knowledge by which one might gain control of all the processes of the universe; nay, penetrate through the ten sephiroth to the unspeakable and infinite source of all. For our visible universe is but the reflected image of an invisible, and each has subtle and practically unlimited power over the other. The key to that power is words. Such were the doctrines held by Pico Della Mirandola (1463-1494) who asserted that no science gave surer proof of Christ's divinity than magical and cabalistic science; such were the doctrines of the renowned humanist, John Reuchlin, who connected letters in the sacred text with individual angels; of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) who, inspired by Reuchlin's De verbe mirifico and De arte cabalistica, declared that whoever knew the true pronunciation of the name Jehovah had "the world in his mouth;" of Trithemius from whom Paracelsus is said to have acquired the "Cabala of the spiritual, astral and material worlds."

Moreover, the writings of men primarily devoted to science continued through the sixteenth and on into the