The Renaissance

Bungus covered $700$ quarto pages. He worked with great

industry and satisfaction on $666$, which is the number of the beast in Revelation (xiii. 18), the symbol of Antichrist. He reduced the name of the `impious' Martin Luther to a form which may express this formidable number. Placing $a=1$, $b=2$, etc, $k=10$, $l=20$, etc., he finds, after misspelling the name, that ${\text{M}}_{(30)}{\text{A}}_{(1)}{\text{R}}_{(80)}{\text{T}}_{(100)}{\text{I}}_{(9)}{\text{N}}_{(40)}$ ${\text{L}}_{(20)}{\text{V}}_{(200)}{\text{T}}_{(100)}{\text{E}}_{(5)}{\text{R}}_{(80)}{\text{A}}_{(1)}$ constitutes the number required. These attacks on the great reformer were not unprovoked, for his friend, Michael Stifel, the most acute and original of the early mathematicians of Germany, exercised an equal ingenuity in showing that the above number referred to Pope Leo X.,–-a demonstration which gave Stifel unspeakable comfort.22

Astrology also was still a favourite study. It is well

known that Cardan, Maurolycus, Regiomontanus, and many

other eminent scientists who lived at a period even later than

this, engaged in deep astrological study; but it is not so generally known that besides the occult sciences already named, men engaged in the mystic study of star-polygons and magic

squares. "The pentagramma gives you pain," says Faust to Mephistopheles. It is of deep psychological interest to see scientists, like the great Kepler, demonstrate on one page a

theorem on star-polygons, with strict geometric rigour, while on the next page, perhaps, he explains their use as amulets or in conjurations.1 Playfair, speaking of Cardan as an astrologer,

calls him "a melancholy proof that there is no folly or weakness too great to be united to high intellectual attainments."26 Let our judgment not be too harsh. The period under consideration is too near the Middle Ages to admit of complete emancipation from mysticism even among scientists. Scholars like Kepler, Napier, Albrecht Dürer, while in the

van of progress and planting one foot upon the firm ground of truly scientific inquiry, were still resting with the other foot upon the scholastic ideas of preceding ages.