Other men of the same period prominent in science who held similar beliefs we can scarcely stop to mention. There was Vincent de Beauvais, the great encyclopedist, and Bernard Gordon, a physician of Montpellier and a medical writer of considerable note, who nevertheless recommended the use of a magic formula for the treatment of epilepsy.[34] There was Albertus Magnus with his trust in such wonderful powers of stones as to cure ulcers, counteract potions, conciliate human hearts, and win battles; and his theory that ligatures and suspensions, and gems carved with proper images possess similar strange virtues.[35] There was Arnald of Villanova who propounded such admirable doctrines as that a physician ought first of all to understand the chief functions of life and chief organs of the body and that the science of particular things is the foundation of all knowledge, and yet who believed in astrological medicine, wrote on oneiromancy and interpreted dreams, translated treatises on incantations, ligatures and other magic devices, and composed a book on the _Tetragrammaton_ or ineffable name of Jehovah.[36] That marvelous power of words—especially of the divine names of angels and of the Supreme Deity—which we may suppose Arnald to have touched upon in his _Tetragrammaton_, was discussed at length by a series of scholars at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century whose names are most familiar to the student of those times. These men pushed the practice of allegorical interpretation of sacred writings, which had been in constant vogue among religious and theological writers from the days of the early Christian Fathers, to the extreme of discovering sublime secrets not only by regarding every incident and object in Scripture as a parable, but by treating the text itself as a cryptogram. Not only, like Isidore, did they see in every numerical measurement in the Bible mystic meaning, but in the very letters they doubted not there was hidden that knowledge by which one might gain control of all the processes of the universe; nay, penetrate through the ten sephiroth to the unspeakable and infinite source of all. For our visible universe is but the reflected image of an invisible, and each has subtle and practically unlimited power over the other. The key to that power is words. Such were the doctrines held by Pico Della Mirandola (1463–1494) who asserted that no science gave surer proof of Christ’s divinity than magical and cabalistic science;[37] such were the doctrines of the renowned humanist, John Reuchlin, who connected letters in the sacred text with individual angels;[38] of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) who, inspired by Reuchlin’s _De verbo mirifico_ and _De arte cabalistica_, declared that whoever knew the true pronunciation of the name Jehovah had “the world in his mouth;”[39] of Trithemius from whom Paracelsus is said to have acquired the “Cabala of the spiritual, astral and material worlds.”[40]