Celestial Realm, Vegetal Worlds, and the Marvelous in the First Book of Kyranides

Abstract:The first book of the Hermetic Kyranides consists of 24 alphabetical chapters, one each listing a plant, a bird, a stone, and a fish, whose names all begin with the same letter of the Greek alphabet, and expounding their medical and magical properties. Even though the book deals entirely with the issue of natural sympathies and antipathies employed to attain various ends, it surprisingly lacks a great number of astrological references. My purpose in this paper is to analyze the rare and quite implicit at times relationships among stars and plants, including plant products, tracked down in the text.