Note 72 — BOOK IV DIVINERS AND MAGICIANS

περὶ μαθηματικῶν. The article is omitted; but he must mean the students and not the study. This is curious, because Mathematicus in the Rome of Hippolytus must have meant astrologer and nothing else, and what follows has nothing to do with astrology. Rather is it what was called in the Renaissance Arithmomancy. Cruice refers us to Athanasius Kircher’s Arithmologia on the subject. Cornelius Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine Scientiarum, writes of it as “The Pythagorean lot,” and it is described in Gaspar Peucer’s De præcipuis Divinationum generibus, 1604.