Of the Wonderful Virtues of Numbers
Perrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (1:68): W, 1: 43
This chapter, desiderat (“Of the Wonderful Virtues of Numbers”), 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 closely to W 1:43 in the Würzburg draft and appears to be substantially preserved in the 1533 edition. The direct correspondence shows that Agrippa regarded this material as settled relatively early and did not feel compelled to revise it significantly.
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
Daniels (1964) identifies Agrippa's numerological reasoning as grounded in a practical empiricism: number is privileged because numerical regularities are the most reliably observable form of occult correspondence. Lehrich (2003) traces the intellectual tradition to Iamblichus and Pico, for whom numbers are ontological principles rather than merely abstract quantities — a position that elevates the scales of correspondence from mnemonics to cosmological architecture.