Talk:Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Citation needed for "golden symmetry"[edit]

What does Agrippa actually say about that diagram? Is the "golden symmetry" a reference to anything related to "golden ratio"? Or is this somebody's modern inference from the figure? It's hard to see any body parts aligned well enough with segments of the pentagram to relate them to known mathematical ratios thereof. Dicklyon 22:01, 15 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The diagram appears in relation to Book Two, Chap. XXVII, which in James Freake's Seventeenth Century English translation is titled "Of the proportion, measure and harmony of man's body." The Golden Ratio was already an extant concept during the Renaissance, and while not referenced directly in the text, has been known to pertain to the proportions of segments of an interlaced pentagram since the time of Pythagoras. The chapter as a whole is very much in tone with the notions of shared symmetry, harmony, etc. of the body and natural phenomena. Agrippa believed himself to be participating in the recovery and dissemination of Classical sciences. He was a contemporary of Leonardo DaVinci, and steeped in the same climate of learning. The lines between what we would call science and what here is called magic remained blurred well into the modern period, and even colored the thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, more than two hundred years later. 2600:2B00:9214:4800:248D:F65:7219:B6A5 (talk) 13:55, 2 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Naming convention[edit]

I have moved this title to Three Books of Occult Philosophy and deprecated some of the redirects as well as removing some unlinked references to the old titles. The common English name of this work is Three Books of Occult Philosophy, reflecting the title of the 1651 translation by John French. The original name was De Occulta Philosophia libri III. Libri tres de occulta philosophia, which has been used commonly on Wikipedia for some unknown reason, isn't even correct in Latin and is extremely rare in usage elsewhere, much of which may be references back to Wikipedia. Three Books about Occult Philosophy also appears it may have originated on Wikipedia and is incorrect. A Google search on the English Google found

Three Books of Occult Philosophy - over 70K hits
De Occulta Philosophia - over 38K hits
De Occulta Philosophia libri tres - 12,400 hits
De Occulta Philosophia libri III - 8,600 hits
Libri tres De Occulta Philosophia - 2,190 hits
Three Books about Occult Philosophy - 1,630 hits

I have deprecated (removed all significant incoming links) to the last two. If another redirect is needed, it's probably the fourth one, De Occulta Philosophia libri III, or simply Occult Philosophy, which is a currently a non-existent page.--Doug.^{(talk • contribs)} 08:56, 18 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

No dates?[edit]

When was the book written/published? This kind of info should be in the article.72.89.142.185 (talk) 05:05, 19 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Improvements needed[edit]

This article is a stub concerning what is likely one of the most important works of occultism in the last thousand years, if not the most important. I've been reading it on and off in the last year, but I'm no scholar. If we could find someone with good knowledge of the books to edit this we could have a very interesting article. For now, I've removed the section about templars since, well, no one has provided a source in the last 4 years and a half and I've yet to see a mention of the templars in the books. I'll see what else I can do to improve the article. Akesgeroth (talk) 05:44, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]