Of Compound Images
Perrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (1:42): W, 1: 48 + W, 1: 49 + two additions (one still absent from A)
This chapter, De quorundam veneficiorum admirandis virtutibus (“Of Compound Images”), occupies a significant place in Agrippa's systematic exposition of occult philosophy. In the 1533 Cologne printed edition (De occulta philosophia libri tres, sigla K in Perrone Compagni's critical apparatus), the text represents Agrippa's mature formulation of the ideas it addresses, the product of over two decades of reading, travel, and revision since the composition of the Würzburg draft.
This chapter corresponds to W 1:48, W 1:49 in the Würzburg draft, with shorter additions in the 1533 text. The core argument is preserved from W, but Agrippa refined it with supplementary passages, qualifying or extending particular points.
The extent of revision in this chapter illustrates the dynamic character of Agrippa's rewriting process. Rather than simply updating facts, he appears to have substantially reconfigured the argument. Comparison with the partial edition A — which represents an intermediate stage — may reveal whether the additions were introduced gradually or in a single later revision.
Agrippa's Argument
The chapter demonstrates the natural-magic programme at its most challenging: the same substance (menstrual blood, from Pliny's Natural History) simultaneously cures fevers, repels vermin, banishes serpents, and poisons everything it touches. Agrippa's argument is not that this is credible folk medicine but that the Plinian evidence illustrates the principle of occult virtues: a thing's power is irreducible to its observable material properties, and may work beneficially or destructively depending on what it is applied to. The explanatory formula — 'the power of this poison is so great that it is a poison even to poisonous creatures' — exemplifies Agrippa's empiricist epistemology: the cause (whatever makes menstrual blood efficacious) lies beyond reason's reach; the effects, as attested by Pliny and others, are the evidence. This same material will later be re-deployed in De nobilitate with its negative valence suppressed — evidence of deliberate rhetorical selection, not naive credulity.
Scholarly Perspectives
Chapter 42 of Book I, which catalogues the occult virtues and dangers of menstrual blood following Pliny's natural-historical framework, has attracted sustained scholarly attention precisely because of the interpretive pressure Agrippa places on this passage across his wider corpus. Newman (2002) provides the most detailed reading, demonstrating that Agrippa here preserves the full ambivalence of the Plinian tradition: menstrual blood holds curative power against fevers, vermin, and serpents, but Agrippa carefully explains that such efficacy operates because 'the power of this poison is so great that it is a poison even to poisonous creatures.' Newman's central contribution is to show what happens when Agrippa subsequently quarries this same material for De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus: the poison logic is silently suppressed, and only the apotropaic and quasi-miraculous properties survive. The comparison exposes a deliberate rhetorical strategy: De nobilitate is not a transparent record of Agrippa's esoteric convictions but a selectively shaped redeployment of his own occult philosophy. For Newman, DOP 1.42 is therefore the indispensable control text against which the feminist text's editorial decisions become legible, situating the chapter at the intersection of natural history, occult philosophy, and Agrippa's feminist rhetoric.