Of the Virtue of Numbers and Their Mystical Powers
Perrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (1:67): W, 1: 44 + a short addition at the end
This chapter, Quomodo animus humanus potest coniungi cum colestium animis et intelligen- tiis atque simul cum illis mirabiles quasdam virtutes rebus inferioribus impri (“Of the Virtue of Numbers and Their Mystical Powers”), 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 1:44 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 makes self-knowledge a precondition of magical operation, drawing on the Platonic maxim 'know thyself' as interpreted through Neoplatonic psychology. Agrippa's argument is that the aspiring magician must 'know and understand the property, virtue, measure, order, and degree of his own soul among the powers in the universe itself' — the soul is not a private psychological entity but a microcosmic participant in the cosmic hierarchy, and knowing the soul is knowing one's position in the universal order. This grounds the magician's operations: he works as a precisely located node in the cosmic network, not as an external agent imposing will on matter. Agrippa draws on Ficino's Neoplatonic psychology and the Hermetic *microcosmus* tradition while tilting toward a practical epistemological conclusion: the magician who does not know himself cannot know which operations his soul's position in the hierarchy licenses.
Scholarly Perspectives
Daniels (1968) anchors his reading of Book I, Chapter 67 within his larger argument that De occulta philosophia operates as a form of Renaissance fideism — a position in which speculative cosmological claims are deliberately held at one remove from demonstrated knowledge. The chapter's prescription that the aspiring magician must 'know and understand the property, virtue, measure, order, and degree of his own soul among the powers in the universe itself' is, for Daniels, one of the few moments in the entire treatise where Agrippa steps beyond taxonomic cataloguing and offers an explicit interpretive framework. Daniels reads this as the Neoplatonic microcosm-macrocosm doctrine asserting that self-knowledge and cosmological participation are inseparable. Yet Daniels is careful to note the tension this creates for his portrait of Agrippa as fundamentally empiricist in orientation: just as Hume could employ interpretive patterns while remaining epistemologically skeptical of their grounding, Agrippa could articulate a Platonic cosmological vision while acknowledging that such constructions were probably in error and could not be rationally secured. For Daniels, Chapter 67 is the 'conjecture' layer that floats above the empirical bedrock, sustained not by demonstration but by faith, placing the chapter at the center of the historiographical debate over whether Agrippa is best understood as a committed Neoplatonist, a skeptic, or — as Daniels insists — a fideist for whom speculative synthesis is legitimate precisely because it never claims the authority of knowledge.