This is a stolen book!

KIRCHER, Athanasius. Arithmologia sive de abditis Numerorum mysterijs qua origo, antiquitas & fabrica numerorum exponitur... Denique post Cabalistarum, Arabum, Gnosticorum, aliorumque magica impietates detectas…

Rome, ex Typographia Varesij,., 1665

Quarto (230 x 165 mm), [16 (including frontispiece)], 301, [11] pages, 3 folding printed tables (one in red and black), full-page woodcut arms of dedicatee on verso of title-page, woodcut initials, tailpieces and illustrations. Binding: contemporary Italian limp vellum. Some leaves browned, two old repairs to frontespice and title-page; a good copy.

Only edition of one of the few works devoted to the cabalistic and alchemic proprieties of numbers. “The Arithmologia one of Kircher's more curious works, is a veritable gold mine of curiosities: magic formulas, amulets, and simboli matrices. For Kircher all knowledge was to some extent bound up in mystery, and this was particurarly true of numerology. The mystical nature of numbers had been the object of volumes of both Hebraic and Greek treatises, from Pythagoras to the Cabbala, since antiquity. Kircher did not accept the mysticism uncritically, however. Indeed, much of the work is dedicated to discrediting common superstitions about numbers. He begins the book with a speculative history of the origin of Greek and Roman numerals; he later gives the history of Hebrew and Arabic numerals. Much of the work deals with the alleged mystical numerology of the Gnostics, Cabbalists, and Newpythagoreans. Kircher is not slow to accuse these groups of superstition and paganism. For Kircher, as for most of his contemporaries, the universe was hierarchical and orderly. He was convinced that the order could be represented by numbers in a mystical and meaningful way. The works of his contemporaries Leibnitz (1646-1716) and Newton (1642-1726) resulted from this faith in mathematics and its power to circumscribe the universe. The Arithmologia, like most of Kircher's works, appears at the juncture between the mystical numerologies, handed down from antiquity, and modern mathematics. Yet the gulf between these is not without a bridge, and few modern mathematicians would reject, without pause, Kircher's (and Pythagoras') conviction that ‘all creation is filled with numbers'.(Merrill).

Merrill 19; Caillet II, n.5769; Sommervogel IV, 1063; Wellcome III, 395.