Page:Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia) (1651).djvu/279

by the straitness of angles and rayes: And stars are then most potent when they possess four corners in the figure of the heaven, and make a cross, by the projection of their rayes mutually. It hath moreover (as we shewed before) a very great correspondency with the numbers 5. 7. 9. most potent numbers. It was also reckoned by the Egyptian Priests, from the beginning of Religion amongst sacred letters, signifying amongst them allegorically the life of future salvation. It was also impressed on the Picture of Serapis, and was had in great veneration amongst the Greeks. But what here belongs to Religion we shall discuss elsewhere. This is to be observed, whatsoever wonderfull thing figures work when we write tham in Papers, Plates, or Images, they do not do it but by the vertue acquired from sublimer figures, by a certain affection which a natural apitude or resemblance procures, in as much as they are exactly configured to them; as from an opposite wall the Eccho is caused, and in a hollow glass the collection of the solarie rayes, which afterward reflecting upon an opposite body, either wood, or any combustible thing doth forthwith burne it: or as an Harpe causeth a resounding in an other Harpe, which is no otherwise but because a sutable and a like figure is set before it, or as two strings on a Harpe being touched with an equall distance of time, and modulated to the same intention, when one is touched the other shakes also: Also the figures, of which we have spoken, & what characters soever concern the vertues of the Celestial figures as they shall be opportunely impressed upon things, those ruling, or be rightly framed, as one figure is of affinity with, and doth express an other. And as these are spoken of figures, so also they are to be understood of Geometrical bodies, which are a Sphear, a Tetracedron, Hexacedron, Octocedron, Icocedron, Dodecacedron, and such like. Neither must we pass over what figures Phythagoras and his followers, Timeus, Locrus, and Plato assigned to the Elements and Heavens: for first of all they assigned to the earth a four square, and a square of eight solid angles, and of