TIIK OCCULT SCIENCES. 



23' 



lie met at Venice, in 1570, a Cypriot gentleman named Antoine Bragadin, 

 who kept up a princely establishment, and who, by means of his diabolic art, 

 was able to supply the Venetian Senate with five hundred thousand crowns 

 which he had manufactured. This same Bragadin unfortunately went to 

 Bavaria, where he was condemned to the stake ; he obtained, however, by 

 payment of a large sum and by confessing his crimes, the privilege of being 

 beheaded upon a scaffold hung with black, and surmounted by a gibbet 

 covered with copper plates, " which," says a writer of that period, " were 

 typical of the deceptions practised by this coiner of gold." 



Fig. 168. Old-maid Witch. Fac-simile of a Wood Engraving attributed to Holbein, taken from 

 the German Translation of Botthius's " Consolations of Philosophy," Augsburg Edition, 1537, 

 in folio. 



Most of the hermetic philosophers, whether magicians or not, claimed to 

 be in possession of the secrets of the Cabal, which was not, however, identical 

 with the great Jewish Cabal communicated to Adam, according to the rabbis, 

 by the angels after his expulsion from Paradise, and appropriated by the 

 Kastrni philosophers in the early ages of Christianity. It was at first a 

 wholly speculative science, which assumed to fathom the secrets of the crea- 

 tion and of the Divine Xature, while the hermetists and magicians merely 

 recognised in the Cabal, as understood by them, the art of causing certain 



