ABSTRACT
Astrology is also responsible for giving birth to other illicit practices, such as chiromancy, geomancy, hydromancy, and so forth. Philomathes objects that many of these have long been in use by men and women who mean no harm by them, but Epistemon (James) counters this by saying that anyone who practises the simple rudiments of ritual magic puts himself in thrall to the devil, ‘and so cometh plainly to a contract with him, wherein is specially contained forms and effects’. James VI’s apparent Calvinist credentials seem to have attracted the interest of Dutch translators and publishers after he acceded to the English throne, probably as a result of the flourishing state of magic and witchcraft in the Low Countries at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century and the increasingly heated fulminations of the Dutch Reformed Church against them.
