I wanted to begin my own journey with a formal introduction to western esotericism from none other than H. Agrippa.

Physically speaking, this small volume is aesthetically pleasing in the extreme, and feels good to hold. The ribbon bookmark was much appreciated.

Content-wise, we have a lot said on divination, astrology, and looking at the natural world with a mixture of early-modern "science" and mysticism, to name just a few topics. I found the mixture of pretty much total hearsay (and even the occasional unhinged assertion) with likely-verifiable information pretty interesting from an academic standpoint, as I'm a historian by education. The way educated people thought about knowledge in the 16th century was somewhat different from our own, and lacked the rigor some of us are now used to. However, and I found this to perhaps be the most important concept that the work teaches, Agrippa reminds us, tantalizingly, that: "...none of this can simply be learned from books, but rather must be learned from experience..." I'm paraphrasing here, but the point stands. We must experiment, and not just read. Practice makes perfect.

As far as the quality of the translation - I simply can't comment, as I don't speak, read, or write Latin, and can't compare an original Latin text with Mr. Young's work. I have read on the web that Mr. Young as a translator is rather unknown outside of BLP's publications, but I found his translations of the various poems in the text to be interesting as he was able to maintain rhyming schemes and a measure of meter.

While it remains to be seen how I will use the information presented in this work, I will certainly be grabbing the other three volumes to round out the simple and mundane start to my own path.