Numeri e alterità. L'eco di Pitagora nella "Taumatologia" di Giovan Battista Della Porta

As with symbols in general, numbers are regarded as admitting a plurality of meanings, according to their literary context and the different orders of reality they are embedded in. In the wake of Ficino and Pico, the corpus of teachings devoted to arithmology enjoyed a rapid growth from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Christian Platonic explanation of arithmological data retains the three-fold pattern of ancient Pythagoreanism regarding the interpretation of number in cosmological, ethical, and theological terms. By exploring Della Porta's Taumatologia, this essay attempts to reconsider the relations between number symbolism, natural philosophy, magic and music.