 But these theoretical speculations fill only a minor part of Porta’s two versions of the Magia naturalis. The bulk of these texts was dedicated to more or less eccentric recipes: incubators for hens’ eggs, an improved camera obscura that won’t invert its images, tinctures to remove spots from your skin, ways to roast animals alive and drug people, a magic lamp fuelled with hare’s fat that will make even respectable women strip naked (Kodera 2006, Kodera 2020b). Next to these recipes, Porta tells his readers stories. One is about a raging bull which becomes tame and docile when fastened to a barren tree; another is about a hyena’s shadow that will silence barking dogs. Porta was one of the most popular bards of such stories in his time. Much like today’s consumers of science fiction or fantasy literature, early modern readers seem to have delighted in such accounts of inexplicable phenomena, familiar from Classical literature and philosophy, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pliny’s Naturalis historia, Aristotle’s Problemata and the spurious De mundo, and the mirabilia (marvels) attributed to Albertus Magnus. Marvelous performances of this sort were not limited to an audience of ruling elites, but were peddled widely on marketplaces. Wonder drugs and cure-alls filled books by a whole class of semi-literate “professors of secrets” (professori dei segreti) who eked out more or less glamorous livelihoods by selling emetics and purges. Their drugs sometimes contained powerful (and experimental) chemical substances, such as mercury oxide and other products of alchemists’ furnaces (Gentilcore 1998; Eamon 2010, 2017; Smith 2011).