Of Divination and Its Kinds
Perrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (1:54): new (some passages still absent from A)
This chapter, significationem habeant (“Of Divination and Its Kinds”), 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.
According to Perrone Compagni's table of comparison, this chapter is new in the 1533 edition and has no direct counterpart in the Würzburg manuscript (W = MS M.ch.q.50). The description notes: \u201c(some passages still absent from A).\u201d Its addition reflects the conceptual enrichment Agrippa undertook between approximately 1510 and the early 1530s, incorporating sources and arguments unavailable or unexplored in the juvenile draft.
The stability of this chapter across the manuscript and printed versions suggests it belongs to the secure core of Agrippa's natural-magical argument as it was constituted by 1510. Such chapters allow scholars to reconstruct the intellectual foundation on which the more elaborate structures of the 1533 edition were built.
Scholarly Perspectives
Agrippa's treatment of divination connects the practical programme of natural magic to the theory of the soul's prophetic capacities developed more fully in Book III. Daniels (1964) notes that Agrippa's empiricism applies here as elsewhere: the evidence for divination's efficacy comes from accumulated testimony, not theoretical demonstration. Lehrich (2003) situates the divination chapters at the boundary between natural and celestial magic, where material operations begin to shade into the soul's capacity to receive information from higher sources.