Natural magic in the context of Renaissance magic is that part of the occult which deals with natural forces directly, as opposed to ceremonial magic which deals with the summoning of spirits. Natural magic sometimes makes use of physical substances from the natural world such as stones or herbs. In the Medieval era, many theologians utilized the term natural magic when referring to the properties of the natural world that would operate within the realm of divinity. Natural magic worked to expose underlying mechanisms occurring in nature that cannot be explained through rational knowledge. The lack of concrete evidence results in these mechanisms being referred to as "occult properties". Natural magic so defined includes astrology, alchemy, and certain disciplines that would today be considered fields of natural science, such as astronomy and chemistry (divergently evolved from astrology and alchemy, respectively) or botany (from herbology). Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher wrote that "there are as many types of natural magic as there are subjects of applied sciences". Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa discusses natural magic in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), where he calls it "nothing else but the highest power of natural sciences". The Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who founded the tradition of Christian Kabbalah, argued that natural magic was "the practical part of natural science" and was lawful rather than heretical. The concept of natural magic dates back to ancient philosophical traditions that proposed the existence of hidden properties within nature and their relationship to the world. These ideas were spread to Western Europe through the translation of Greco-Arabic texts into Latin and became especially influential in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Source: Wikipedia (en)