PEUCER, Kaspar

by Kaspar Peucer

£2,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

Second edition in French of Peucer s encyclopaedic work on divination; it seems to have been the most influential of his numerous writings which were concerned with the varied fields of medicine, astronomy, mathematics, natural history, and psychology , (Thorndike VI p. 493). On the whole the work approves of divination in natural circumstances reading dreams, for instance, or the stars, but agrees with the Bible in condemning certain branches of divination related to demons and witchcraft. Peucer s bias is unflinchingly Protestant, denying the possibility of Miracles, and he attributed the successfulness of relics and invocations of saints to demons rather than divinity. After discussing divination in general, he turns to oracles and theomancy, then to magic, which he thus incorrectly implies is a variety of divination, whereas the opposite is true, then to divination from entrails, to augury and aruspicina, to lot-casting under which he puts geomancy and divining from names and numbers and to dreams and their interpretation. Next he considers medical prognostications, meteorology and weather prediction, physiognomy and chiromancy, astrology, and last prodigies and portents (Thorndike VI p. 495). He is highly suspicious of Alchemy as a purely devilish art on the one hand, but on the other entirely approving of Astrology, which he himself put to practice and considered essential to the study of medicine. Kasper Peucer (1525 1602) was a prominent physician and scholar who stud

• Binding: Hardcover

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