 Porta’s many difficulties with the inquisition—censors disapproved of his works on divinatory arts such as physiognomonics, the art of predicting character traits from the faces of humans—were compounded by the distrust of more orthodox intellectuals such as Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596), who would have loved to see Porta burn at the stake for naturalizing the Witches’ Sabbath, because Porta—like Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576)—had divulged a recipe for the infamous witch’s unguent (Magia 1558: lib.2, ch. 26; Ernst 1990; Balbiani 2001).