Of Things That Strengthen, Confirm, and Increase Magic
Perrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (1:73): W, 2: 48 + an addition at mid-text
This chapter, De virtute scripturae et de imprecationibus et inscriptionibus faciendis (“Of Things That Strengthen, Confirm, and Increase Magic”), 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 2:48 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
Agrippa's claim that 'writing is the last expression of the mind, and is the number of speech and voice' — absent from the 1510 draft, a deliberate mature addition — positions written inscription at the threshold between natural and celestial magic. Speech belongs to the natural order (it is air shaped by bodily organs); writing is further removed from the body and partakes more purely of the rational (celestial) register. Writing's capacity to embody meaning in a physical but non-temporal form — fixed, inspectable, transferable — makes it the appropriate medium for mathematical-celestial operations. This is why Book II's magical programme is primarily a programme of written characters, tables, and sigils: writing is not merely the record of thought but its closest material analogue in the natural world, and therefore the medium through which celestial mathematical structure can be impressed on matter.
Scholarly Perspectives
Scholarship on Book I, Chapter 73 clusters around two interlocking debates: the structural architecture of De occulta philosophia as a whole, and the nature of Agrippa's theory of language. Lehrich (2003) treats the chapter as one of two transitional passages bridging natural and celestial magic, attaching particular weight to the chapter's opening claim that 'writing is the last expression of the mind, and is the number of speech and voice.' He observes that this formulation appears only in the final 1533 text and is absent from the Juvenile Draft, arguing that the fully developed theory of language as connective tissue across the three worlds was a late and deliberate elaboration. For Lehrich, I:73 is the structural hinge at which natural magic — having worked through mental intention and vocal speech — crosses into the celestial sphere of written inscription, confirming that Agrippa's natural magic is fundamentally a magic of logos. Miles (2008) approaches the same chapter from a sharply different angle, reading it alongside I:69 to substantiate his argument that Agrippa holds an explicitly instrumental and arbitrary theory of language. Where Lehrich emphasizes the chapter's place in a teleological semiotic architecture, Miles emphasizes its plain-stated communicative theory: words externalize mental content and declare the speaker's will, with no suggestion that signs are ontologically fused with the realities they name. Together the two scholars establish I:73 as a site where the tension between Agrippa's systematic occult architecture and his nominally anti-magical linguistic declarations is most sharply concentrated.