 It is only in recent Porta scholarship that his endeavor has been encompassed in a less fragmented way. Generally speaking, Porta reacted to the challenges of ecclesiastical censorship by attempting to abstain from metaphysical speculation and theology; there is good reason to believe that Porta’s naturalist stance was actually a consequence of ecclesiastical persecution (Trabucco 2002, 2005). Accordingly, he developed a strictly natural magic—natural in the sense that the formal principles driving the movement of things in the cosmos were taken as “occult”, with many causes of their often marvelous properties per se unknowable to us. Porta’s experiments thus prudently sought to eclipse all hint of religious topics, including God, the soul, and demons. Firmly rooted in a southern Italian intellectual environment, Porta also is silent on Copernicanism or the discovery of the new world. He is thus one of the emblematic figures at the threshold of modernity (Torrini 2016). By eliding discussion of the metaphysical and religious implications of his experiments, Porta tends to direct attention to the physical preconditions and occult yet natural qualities that allow for spectacular manifestations of portentous qualities in physical bodies, whether human, animal or vegetable. The infamous recipe for an unguent employed by witches is a good example of Porta’s approach: the nocturnal flights and orgiastic encounters with demons and the devil that represent witchcraft’s stock-in-trade are, according to Porta, in fact mere hallucinations caused by belladonna—a material substance with occult but non-demonic properties (Balbiani 2001). This explanation rests on the extent to which the human soul is affected by the occult properties of natural substances. Like Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), who with his De incantationibus had sought to naturalize all miracles, Porta seeks to bypass the question of “proper” miracles produced by divine intercession. Yet, and in contrast to Pomponazzi, who sought to eliminate as much as he could of the preternatural, Porta continued to believe fervently in occult sympathies up to his last unpublished works. Thus, and perhaps for the first time in Porta’s long career, the late Thaumaturgia systematically address Neoplatonic demonology (Maggi 2015). For Porta, the visible and perceptible qualities of certain material dispositions become embodied signs of a larger and ultimately divine cosmic order to which all natural bodies, including human beings, are subject.