Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) was a German humanist, jurist, physician, soldier and theologian, author of the most comprehensive account of learned magic produced in the Renaissance, De occulta philosophia libri tres (drafted 1510, printed 1531–1533), and of the most sweeping attack on human learning written in the same period, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (written 1526, printed 1530). He wrote both books and stood by both. The first gathers the natural magic of Marsilio Ficino, the Kabbalistic magic of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, the Hermetic doctrine of regeneration, the Neoplatonic theory of the soul and a large inheritance of medieval astrological, talismanic and ritual material into one ordered account of how the powers that descend from God through the three worlds may be drawn down into things, and of how the human mind may climb by the same steps back to its source. The second declares every science uncertain and every art vain, calls magic “a mixture of idolatry, astrology and superstitious physic”, and leaves the Word of God as the only sure knowledge. How the two books fit together is the central question of Agrippa scholarship. The answer that most recent work gives, and that this entry follows, is that they are the destructive and constructive halves of a single religious project, in which the reform of magic and the reform of Christian learning were one undertaking.
His life was as unsettled as his reputation. He served the Emperor Maximilian as a soldier in Italy, lectured at Dôle, Pavia and Turin, acted as advocate and orator of the city of Metz, practised medicine at Geneva, Fribourg and Lyon, was physician to the mother of Francis I and then archivist and historiographer to Margaret of Austria, and ended under the protection of Hermann von Wied, the reforming Archbishop of Cologne. He quarrelled with Franciscans and Dominicans, with the theologians of Louvain and the Sorbonne, and with the courtiers of two courts; he defended a Christian reading of Reuchlin’s Kabbalah at Dôle and a peasant woman accused of witchcraft at Metz. Within a decade of his death the story was circulating that he had died in the company of a demon in the shape of a black dog; by 1580 Jean Bodin was calling him the greatest sorcerer of his age, and Marlowe’s Faustus resolved to be “as cunning as Agrippa was”. The systematic magus and the sceptical fideist, the necromancer of legend and the Erasmian humanist of the letters: these pairs have governed four centuries of reading, and the sections that follow try to show how the historical Agrippa held them together.1
Life#
Cologne, Paris, and Spain (1486–1508)#
Agrippa was born in Cologne in 1486. The year is secure, from his own statements and from the age recorded at his death; the day conventionally given, 14 September, rests on no known document and probably descends from an astrological nativity. His family name was Cornelis. “Agrippa” he took from Colonia Agrippina, the Roman name of his native city, and “von Nettesheim” from a village a few miles to the north; he was already “Henricus de Nettesheym” when he matriculated at the University of Cologne on 22 July 1499, aged twelve or thirteen. He later claimed that his father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had served the Roman emperors and the princes of Austria, and that he himself had followed them into the service of Maximilian. The nobility implied by the toponymic was asserted by Agrippa and never documented; the safest description of his origins is a Cologne family of modest gentry or burgher standing. He said that he had imbibed astrology from his parents in childhood.2
At Cologne he took the bachelor’s degree in 1500 and the licentiate in arts on 14 March 1502. The faculty was a stronghold of Albertism, the school that took Albertus Magnus rather than Thomas Aquinas as its master, and Agrippa’s earliest reading in natural philosophy and in the pseudo-Albertine literature of “secrets” dates from these years; so does his acquaintance with Pliny’s Natural History and, through the Cologne humanist Andreas Canter, with the combinatory Art of Ramon Llull. He later styled himself doctor of both laws and of medicine, and a knight (eques auratus [gold-spurred knight]). No university record of any of these degrees has been produced. Nineteenth-century scholarship rejected the medical doctorate and doubted the legal one; Charles Nauert left open the possibility that they were obtained during the undocumented years 1502–1507 or 1511–1518; the knighthood, which Agrippa said he had earned “by valour in war, among the troops in open battle”, rests on his word alone.3
The years 1502–1507 are almost blank. Agrippa’s own account is that he was destined for the Emperor’s service from boyhood, served for a time as an under-secretary and then soldiered for seven years in the Italian camps. By March 1507 he was in Paris, and the printed correspondence opens there with letters from an Italian friend, Landulphus, who urged him back to a circle of companions bound by secrecy and shared arcane studies. Later scholarship, following Paola Zambelli, has reconstructed this Paris sodalitium as a brotherhood that included Charles de Bovelles, Symphorien Champier, Germain de Brie, Germain de Ganay and the painter Jean Perréal. The letters themselves name none of these as members; the circle they show is smaller and more obscure, and its purpose, beyond the study of res arcanae, is not stated.4
In 1508 Agrippa went to Spain. The letters describe an armed venture in Catalonia undertaken with a dispossessed Catalan companion: a siege in a fortified tower in a rocky valley near Tarragona, where he and his companions were penned in by hostile peasants for nearly two months; a message smuggled out by a shepherd-boy disguised as a leper; an escape across marsh and mountain on 14 August 1508; and a return by way of Barcelona, Valencia, the Balearics, Sardinia and Naples to Avignon, from which he wrote to Landulphus at Lyon on 17 December. Henry Morley’s Victorian biography turned this into an imperial plot; the modern consensus is that the purpose of the expedition is unknown.5
Dôle, Würzburg, and London (1509–1510)#
In 1509, with the support of Antoine de Vergy, Archbishop of Besançon and chancellor of the university, Agrippa was engaged to lecture at Dôle in the Franche-Comté on Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico (1494), the founding text of Christian Kabbalah. He opened the course with an oration in praise of Margaret of Austria, governor of the Franche-Comté and the Netherlands, and began to write for her the De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, which he would not print for twenty years. The lectures ended in denunciation. During Lent 1510 the Franciscan Jean Catilinet, provincial of Burgundy, preaching before Margaret at Ghent, accused Agrippa of being a “judaizing heretic” for expounding Reuchlin; the Dôle appointment lapsed, and Agrippa answered from London with the Expostulatio against Catilinet.6
Between the Dôle lectures and the London journey falls the encounter that produced his most famous book. In the winter of 1509–1510 he visited Johannes Trithemius, the former Abbot of Sponheim, now abbot of St James’s at Würzburg, the leading authority in Germany on cryptography, angelology and the defence of a “natural” magic. In the dedication of De occulta philosophia Agrippa recalled that over a few days they had “conferred together of divers things concerning chymistry, magic and cabala”, and that the great question between them had been why magic, “accounted by all ancient philosophers the chiefest science”, had come to be “odious to and suspected by the holy Fathers, exploded by divines and condemned by sacred canons”. Encouraged by the abbot, he composed “three compendious books of magic” and sent them to Würzburg for correction. Trithemius’s reply of 8 April 1510 praised the young author’s “more than vulgar learning” and added the counsel that has been attached to Agrippa’s name ever since: to communicate “vulgar secrets to vulgar friends, but higher and secret to higher and secret friends only. Give hay to an ox, sugar to a parrot only; understand my meaning, lest you be trod under the oxen’s feet, as oftentimes it falls out.”7
In 1510 Agrippa was in London on what he later called a “most secret business” (occultissimum negotium), probably for the Emperor. He lodged with John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, in the Colet family house at Stepney, and there studied the Epistles of St Paul, on which he wrote a commentary that was lost and only partly recovered in 1523. The Pauline reading of these months, in the household of the most evangelical of the English humanists, is one root of the theology of faith that governs everything he wrote after 1516. Back in Cologne in 1510–1511 he held public disputations on theological questions and, by his own account, fell out with the Dominicans.8
Italy in the Emperor’s Service (1511–1518)#
From 1511 to 1518 Agrippa was in Italy, “for seven years in the Emperor’s pay”. He attended the schismatic Council of Pisa (1511–1512) as theologian to Cardinal Bernardino de Carvajal, was excommunicated with the council by Julius II and absolved under Leo X in 1513. In 1512 he lectured at the University of Pavia on Plato’s Symposium, and in 1515 on the Hermetic Pimander in Ficino’s translation; the second oration, which reads the Hermetic revelation as a prophecy of Christ, is the earliest statement of the Christian Hermetism that shapes his mature work. At Pavia, about 1514–1515, he married an Italian woman of good family whose name is unknown; he praised her from Metz in 1518 as “young, noble and well-mannered”, and a son, Aymon, is attested by 1517. The doctorates in law and medicine he claimed to have received at Pavia in 1515 belong, as noted above, to the undocumented claims.9
The French victory at Marignano (13–14 September 1515) drove him from Pavia with the loss of his manuscripts and, on his own account, into destitution. He found a patron in William IX Paleologus, Marquis of Montferrat, at Casale, and dedicated to him two short works composed in 1515–1516: the fragmentary Dialogus de homine, on man as the image of God, and the De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum, on the three ways of knowing God. In 1516 he lectured at Turin on the Pauline Epistles; it was his last university appointment. His connection with the Antonine order at Sant’Antonio di Ranverso in Piedmont, documented in letters of 1517, is the setting in which the commentary on Llull’s Ars brevis was dedicated to the order’s preceptor, and probably the occasion of the sermon on the finding of St Antony’s relics.10
Metz (1518–1520)#
In February 1518 Agrippa was appointed orator et advocatus — public advocate and orator — of the free imperial city of Metz. Here he wrote the De originali peccato (1518), dedicated to Dietrich Wichwael, titular Bishop of Cyrene and suffragan of Cologne, whose objections to its allegorical reading of the Fall he answered in a letter of 6 February 1518. Here too he entered the two quarrels that fixed his reputation with the mendicant orders. The first concerned St Anne. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples had argued in the second edition of his De Maria Magdalena, triduo Christi et ex tribus una Maria disceptatio (1518) that the legend of St Anne’s three marriages was unfounded and that the Virgin’s mother had borne only one child; Agrippa defended him against the Dominican prior of Metz, Claude Salini, and the Observant Franciscan Dominique Delphinus, in a series of propositions and replies that he printed, with a sarcastic Defensio against a Dominican opponent, only in 1534. Lefèvre himself received the offer of alliance nervously.11
The second quarrel is the case of the woman of Woippy. In 1519 a peasant woman from the village of Woippy, near Metz, was accused of witchcraft; the first article against her was that her mother had been burnt as a witch. The Dominican inquisitor Nicolas Savin sat as assessor beside the episcopal official, the woman was returned to the custody of her accusers, tortured on the inquisitor’s advice and starved, and when the official, dying, declared her innocent, Savin demanded further torture. Agrippa wrote to the new official refuting the inquisitor’s argument that witchcraft is inherited — an argument drawn from the Malleus maleficarum, according to which witches consecrate their children to demons — with an argument from baptism: if the child of impious parents is damned by inheritance, what becomes of the sacrament that casts Satan out of every soul? The chapter removed the inquisitor, the woman was absolved and her accusers fined. Agrippa told the story again in De vanitate (ch. 96), and it made him, in the sixteenth century and after, a hero of the opposition to the witch trials. Vera Hoorens and Hans Renders have argued that he acted in his official capacity as legal adviser to the magistrates rather than as the woman’s advocate, that Savin resumed his prosecutions once Agrippa had left, and that the treatise against the inquisitors of witches attributed to him by Sisto da Siena and Johann Weyer is probably not his; the case itself, and the argument from baptism, are not in doubt.12
The Metz years also brought news of his father’s death and a circle of friends whose letters fill the second book of the correspondence: the Celestine Claude Dieudonné, who copied his manuscripts; Jean Rogier Brennon, curé of Sainte-Croix; the jurist Claude Chansonnette (Cantiuncula). By the end of January 1520 the hostility of the friars had made the city untenable, and Agrippa left with his wife and son for Cologne.13
Geneva, Fribourg, and Lyon (1520–1527)#
At Cologne, where he lived with his mother and sister, his wife fell ill in November 1520. She died in the spring of 1521, at or on the road to Metz, and was buried at Sainte-Croix with an endowed anniversary. Agrippa went on to Geneva, where he practised medicine, received citizenship on 11 July 1522 and, late in 1521, married Jeanne-Louise Tissie, a Genevan of good family then eighteen; she bore him six children, of whom the sons Henri (born Lyon 1524) and Jean (born Lyon 1525) survived him. From March 1523 to the spring of 1524 he was city physician at Fribourg, and in the spring of 1524 he moved to Lyon as physician to Louise of Savoy, mother of Francis I.14
The Lyon appointment was the making and the breaking of his French career. In the spring of 1526 he wrote the De sacramento matrimonii for Marguerite d’Alençon, the King’s sister, a dedication that misfired badly; in June he completed the Dehortatio gentilis theologiae, a warning against the excesses of “gentile theology”; and by September he had finished the De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, written, as Vittoria Perrone Compagni puts it, “in the midst of such dramatic misadventures”. The misadventures were these. Agrippa declined to furnish Louise with the astrological prognostication she wanted for her son’s campaign, and in letters to the royal physician Jean Chapelain (September 1526) he remarked that she was making a superstitious use of judicial astrology “driven by vain hope”; the remark was passed on. His salary stopped, he was forbidden to leave France, and he was suspected, with reason, of sympathy for the rebel Constable de Bourbon, whose agents he corresponded with in the spring of 1527 until Bourbon’s death before Rome on 6 May. From December 1527 to July 1528 he waited in Paris for a passport; the Duke of Vendôme tore up his pass, saying that he would sign nothing for a fortune-teller, and Agrippa crossed the frontier alone.15
Antwerp and Mechelen (1528–1532)#
He reached Antwerp in July 1528 and practised medicine, alchemy and astrology there while seeking a court appointment. In January 1529 he obtained an imperial printing privilege, and in the same year the Antwerp printer Michael Hillenius issued the collection of short works that had lain in manuscript since Dôle, Casale and Metz: the De nobilitate, the Expostulatio, the De triplici ratione, the Dehortatio, the De originali peccato, the De sacramento matrimonii, the sermon on St Antony’s relics and a regimen against the plague. When plague came to Antwerp that summer most of the physicians left the city; Agrippa stayed, and on 17 August 1529 his wife died of it. His colleagues afterwards accused him of practising without licence. On 27 December 1529 Margaret of Austria appointed him her archivist (indiciarius) and imperial historiographer. He wrote a Historia of the double coronation of Charles V at Bologna (February 1530) and, when Margaret died on 1 December 1530, her funeral oration. His pay was withheld.16
Publication now ran ahead of patronage. Johannes Grapheus printed De vanitate at Antwerp in September 1530, and in January 1531 Agrippa signed at Mechelen the dedication to Hermann von Wied of the enlarged first book of De occulta philosophia, which Grapheus printed in February with a table of contents for the two books to follow; a Paris issue by Christian Wechel appeared the same year. De vanitate was at once referred — by Margaret herself, according to the Brill dictionary — to the theologians of Louvain, who extracted forty-three censured articles and pronounced the book “scandalous, impious and heretical”; the Sorbonne condemned the Paris edition on 2 March 1531. The Privy Council at Mechelen required an answer, and Agrippa wrote the Apologia adversus calumnias, dedicated to the papal legate Cardinal Campeggio, and the Querela super calumnia, a complaint against the courtiers who had used the affair to strip him of his imperial stipend. Both were printed in 1533. In August 1531 he was briefly imprisoned for debt at Brussels. Erasmus, whose support he sought, replied with admiration and caution, and in a letter from Freiburg of 21 April 1533 warned him that monks and theologians “are not to be overcome, even if one had a better cause than St Paul had”. About 1532 Agrippa married for a third time, a woman of Mechelen whose name is unknown; according to Weyer he repudiated her at Bonn in 1535.17
Bonn and the Last Journey (1532–1535)#
Hermann von Wied, Archbishop-Elector of Cologne, whose attempt at a Lutheranising reform of his diocese would cost him his see in 1547, wrote to Agrippa on 2 February 1532 inviting him to Poppelsdorf, and took him under formal protection that June. From November 1532 Agrippa lived at Bonn, in the archbishop’s territory, while the Cologne printer Johannes Soter set the complete De occulta philosophia in type. Shortly before Christmas the Dominican inquisitor Konrad Köllin denounced the book to the city council as heretical and blasphemous and had the printing suspended. Agrippa’s appeal to the council, dated 11 January 1533 and later printed in German as a “letter against the sophists”, failed; Hermann’s intervention succeeded; and the book appeared in July 1533 with the imperial privilege on its title-page and, at the end, an appendix of the chapters of De vanitate that condemn magic. Agrippa’s correspondence stops in the same month.18
The last two years are thinly documented. In 1534 he printed at Cologne the De beatissimae Annae monogamia, reviving the Metz quarrel, and a pseudonymous Dialogus de vanitate scientiarum, a further defence of the declamation; on 22 February 1534 he addressed a legal memorandum from Bonn to the Parliament of the Low Countries. The young Johann Weyer, later the author of De praestigiis daemonum and the most important sixteenth-century opponent of the witch trials, lived in his household as pupil and famulus at Bonn about 1533–1534, and is the only witness for what followed. According to Weyer, Agrippa remained at Bonn until 1535, then returned to France, was arrested at Lyon on the orders of Francis I — the old offence against the King’s mother had not been forgotten — and was released through the intercession of friends. He died at Grenoble in 1535 (the day, 18 February, given in several reference works, is unsourced; Perrone Compagni allows “1535 or, at the latest, 1536”), and was buried in the church of the Dominicans, the order he had fought for twenty-five years. The hostile tradition, beginning with Paolo Giovio, put his death in a squalid inn at Lyon. His three surviving sons settled in Dauphiné.19
Thought#
The System in Outline#
Agrippa’s system can be stated in a few sentences, and it is worth doing so before the parts are examined, because the parts are numerous and the books that contain them were written to be hard to read.
The universe is a hierarchy of three worlds: the elemental world of bodies, the celestial world of stars and planets, and the intellectual world of angels and separated minds, above which stands God, the “original” or archetypal world. Every power (virtus [power or virtue]) that exists below comes down from above. God does not act on the lower world directly but through a chain of mediators, “by angels, the heavens, stars, elements, animals, plants, metals and stones”, so that each thing in nature carries a share of a higher power and bears its signature. Because the chain is continuous it can be climbed as well as descended. Magic is the knowledge of this chain: it discovers the hidden powers of things, joins lower things to the higher things that govern them, and so produces effects that the ignorant call miracles. It has three parts corresponding to the three worlds, natural magic (the subject of Book I of De occulta philosophia), celestial or mathematical magic (Book II) and ceremonial or religious magic (Book III), and a magician who lacks any of the three sciences on which they rest — natural philosophy, mathematics and theology — “cannot possibly be able to understand the rationality of magic”.20
That is the exoteric system, and by itself it is the system of a compendium. What makes Agrippa’s book more than a compendium is the second doctrine on which the first depends. The human being is a small world containing everything in the great world, and, more than that, an image of God. The soul has three parts: an immortal mind (mens), which is a divine light and never sins; a lower sensitive soul (idolum, “the image”), which is bound to the body and always tends to evil; and, between them, reason (ratio), which is free and may attach itself to either. When reason cleaves to the mind, the whole soul is united to its divine part and may in the end be “assumed into God”; a soul in that condition Agrippa calls, in a phrase he attributes to “the magicians”, “a soul standing and not falling”, and he declares that “the form of all magical power is from the soul of man standing and not falling”. Every operation described in the three books, from the gathering of a Solar herb to the calling of an angel, works only in so far as the operator’s mind has been purified, elevated and, through religion, joined to the powers it invokes. Magic is therefore less a technique than a condition of the person. The end of the ascent is not power over nature but transformation: “to know God himself, the worker of all things, and to pass into him by a whole image of likeness … whereby thou mayest be transformed and made as God”. Agrippa called this “the true, high occult philosophy of wonderful works”, and said that its key is the intellect and its price is to “die to the world, and to the flesh, and to all senses, and to the whole animal man”.21
The third element of the system is a theory of knowledge that seems at first to contradict the other two. In De vanitate Agrippa argued that every human science rests on undemonstrated premises accepted on authority, that the sciences contradict one another and are “never perfect, but both doubtful, full of error and contention”, and that “it is far safer to be ignorant than to know”. Truth is reached “by no syllogistical demonstration, no human discourse of reason, but only by faith”, and the only sure knowledge is the Word of God, which “is sufficient to expound and interpret itself, and judging of all men, is judged by none”. Since the “sciences” thus dismissed include natural, mathematical and ceremonial magic, Kabbalah and the three books of his youth, the reader who comes to De occulta philosophia after De vanitate seems to hold two incompatible books by one author. The resolution that Agrippa himself gave, and that recent scholarship has largely accepted, is that the two are addressed to different faculties. Reason, working on its own, produces the arrogant and quarrelsome learning that De vanitate demolishes; the mind illuminated by faith, working through a purified reason, produces the knowledge that De occulta philosophia describes and that the Dehortatio, the De triplici ratione and the De originali peccato place above all “gentile” philosophy. Faith is prior to reason; reason may not disturb faith; but reason enlightened by faith may then “philosophise, dispute and formulate deductions concerning all created things”. The destructive book clears the ground that the constructive book builds on.22
The sections that follow set out these three elements in turn: the descent of power through the three worlds and the means of drawing it down (the matter of Books I and II); the ascent of the mind through religion (Book III); and the relation between doubt and faith that binds the two great works together. A final section describes the sources of the synthesis and the debate about its originality.
The Three Worlds and the Descent of Virtue#
The opening chapter of De occulta philosophia is the whole system in miniature. “Seeing there is a threefold world, elementary, celestial and intellectual, and every inferior is governed by its superior and receiveth the influence of the virtues thereof, so that the very original and chief Worker of all doth by angels, the heavens, stars, elements, animals, plants, metals and stones convey from himself the virtues of his omnipotency upon us, for whose service he made and created all these things: wise men conceive it no way irrational that it should be possible for us to ascend by the same degrees through each world, to the same very original world itself, the Maker of all things and first Cause, from whence all things are and proceed; and also to enjoy not only these virtues which are already in the more excellent kind of things, but also, besides these, to draw new virtues from above.” The magicians therefore “seek after the virtues of the elementary world through the help of physic and natural philosophy … then of the celestial world in the rays and influences thereof, according to the rules of astrologers and the doctrines of mathematicians … moreover they ratify and confirm all these with the powers of divers intelligences, through the sacred ceremonies of religions”. The three books follow that order.23
Two ideas govern the descent. The first is the Platonic theory of Ideas as Agrippa took it from Ficino. All the Ideas exist in God as one simple form; in the Soul of the World they are many, as “seminal forms”; through those forms the World Soul shapes the stars and gives each of them a figure; and every species of thing below “hath its celestial shape or figure that is suitable to it, from which also proceeds a wonderful power of operating”. The order of causes runs from the Ideas to the governing intelligences, from these to the aspects of the heavens that dispose matter, and lastly to the temperaments of the elements: “the form therefore and virtue of things comes first from the Ideas, then from the ruling and governing intelligences, then from the aspects of the heavens disposing, and lastly from the tempers of the elements disposed”. A miracle, in this scheme, is not a violation of the order but God working “these mediums being laid aside”.24
The second idea is the distinction between manifest and occult qualities. The four elements and their combinations account for the obvious properties of bodies, heat and cold, weight and lightness. But there are “other virtues in things which are not from any element, as to expel poison, to drive away the noxious vapours of minerals, to attract iron”; these are “a sequel of the species and form of this or that thing”, and they are called occult “because their causes lie hid, and man’s intellect cannot in any way reach and find them out”. They are known by experience rather than reason, and they are the proper field of natural magic. The loadstone’s attraction, the antipathy of the diamond and the loadstone, the medicinal power of herbs, the effect of the wolf’s skin on the lamb’s — the long catalogues of Book I are the inventory of these powers, arranged under the seven planets, the twelve signs and the fixed stars whose “rays” impress them.25
Occult Virtue, the Spirit of the World, and the Chain of Sympathy#
How does a power that is incorporeal reach a body? Agrippa’s answer, from Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda, is the spirit of the world (spiritus mundi [spirit of the world]). Between the World Soul and the gross bodies of the elemental world there is need of “a more excellent medium, such a one that may be as it were no body but as it were a soul, or as it were no soul but as it were a body, by which the soul may be joined to the body”. This medium is the quintessence, “not from the four elements but a certain first thing, having its being above and besides them”; it is in the body of the world as our spirit is in the body of man, and “there is nothing found in the whole world that hath not a spark of the virtue thereof”. Things receive it from the rays of the stars “so far forth as they render themselves conformable to them”. Agrippa adds, as one who had practised alchemy, that the alchemists try to extract this spirit from gold and silver, and that he had seen it done, “but we could make no more gold than the weight of that was out of which we extracted the spirit”.26
Because all things share in this spirit, they are linked by sympathy and antipathy. “Every thing moves and turns itself to its like, and inclines that to itself with all its might”, so that the practical rule of natural magic is to find the thing in which a desired property is “in a more eminent manner than in any other thing” and to take “that part in which such a property or virtue is most vigorous”. The world is a hierarchy of images: “the first image of God is the world, of the world man, of man beasts”. The famous statement of the chain follows: “Divinity is annexed to the mind, the mind to the intellect, the intellect to the intention, the intention to the imagination, the imagination to the senses, the senses at last to things. For this is the band and continuity of nature, that all superior virtue doth flow through every inferior with a long and continued series, dispersing its rays even to the very last things … as a certain string stretched out to the lowermost things of all, of which string if one end be touched, the whole doth presently shake.” This is the doctrine of correspondences in its Renaissance form: not a list of resemblances but a single vibrating cord running from God to stones, along which action passes in both directions.27
The cord passes through the human soul, and Book I ends with the chapters that make the magician’s own mind the chief instrument. The passions of the soul alter the body; “so great a power is there of the soul upon the body, that which way soever that imagines and dreams that it goes, thither doth it lead the body”. A soul “strongly elevated and inflamed with a strong imagination sends forth health or sickness, not only in its proper body but also in other bodies”; fascination is the passage of one person’s spirit into another’s through the eyes. Above all, the mind can conform itself to a star and “be filled with the virtues of that star as if it were a proper receptacle of the influence thereof”. The condition of every operation is faith, “a firm adhesion, a fixed intention and vehement application of the worker”: “we must therefore in every work and application of things affect vehemently, imagine, hope and believe strongly, for that will be a great help … as a firm and strong belief doth work wonderful things, although it be in false works, so distrust and doubting doth dissipate and break the virtue of the mind of the worker”. And the magician must “know the virtue, measure, order and degree of his own soul in the power of the universe”. Self-knowledge, imagination and belief are the natural roots of what Book III will describe as religion.28
Number, Harmony, and the Celestial Images#
Book II turns from things to forms. “The doctrines of mathematics are so necessary to and have such an affinity with magic, that they that do profess it without them are quite out of the way”; for everything in the lower world “is done and governed by number, weight, measure, harmony, motion and light”. Numbers “have more of form in them” than bodies and so are more efficacious; they were “the principal pattern in the mind of the Creator” and have “the greatest and most simple commixtion with the Ideas in the mind of God”. The numbers that matter are not the numbers of merchants but “formal” numbers, the archetypal one, two, three and so on, which are sources of the qualities of things: “numbers do work very much upon the soul, figures upon the body, and harmony upon the whole animal”.29
The chapters on the numbers from one to twelve each end in a scala, a table of correspondences whose rows are the worlds — the archetypal world (a divine name of so many letters), the intellectual, the celestial, the elemental, “the lesser world” of man, and the infernal — and whose cells list the things of that number in each world. In the Scale of Four the corners of the world, the archangels Michael, Raphael, Gabriel and Uriel, the four rulers of the elements, the evangelists, the seasons, the humours, the four princes of devils and the four rivers of hell stand in a single column. The Scale of Seven aligns the seven planets with seven angels “which stand in the presence of God”, seven birds, fishes, animals, metals and stones, seven members and seven “holes of the head”, and the seven habitations of the damned taken from the Kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla’s Garden of Nuts. The Scale of Ten sets out the ten divine names, the ten Sephiroth, the ten orders of angels according to Dionysius and according to the Hebrews, the ten spheres with their Hebrew names, ten parts of the body and ten orders of the damned. These tables, more than any other single feature of the book, were what later occultists took from Agrippa; they are the ancestors of every later “table of correspondences”, down to Aleister Crowley’s 777. Agrippa explains their metaphysics in the chapter on ten: God, “that first unity, before he communicated himself to inferiors, diffused himself first into the first of numbers, the number three, then into the number ten, as into ten Ideas and measures of making all numbers and all things, which the Hebrews call ten attributes and account ten divine names”.30
From the scales the book proceeds to the operative uses of number and figure. The “sacred tables of the planets” — the magic squares of three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine, whose rows and columns sum to constant totals — “represent that divine order of celestial numbers, impressed upon celestials by the Ideas of the divine mind, by means of the soul of the world”. Over each stands a divine name whose letters sum to the constant, together with the name of an intelligence (for good) and a spirit (for evil), and from each the seal of the planet and the characters of its intelligence and spirit are drawn; engraved on the planet’s metal at the right time they “help to bring forth”, “conduce to gain, riches, favour and love”, “make a man potent in war”, “equal a man to kings and princes”, “procure concord”, “conduce to memory, understanding and divination”. Geometrical figures act on the spirits as one harp answers another. Music, “a most powerful imaginer of all things”, allures the celestial influence and changes the affections of hearers, and the proportions of the human body — the man with arms outstretched who fills a square, and the man in the circle whose limbs mark out a pentagon — show that man “doth contain and maintain in himself all numbers, measures, weights, motions, elements and all other things”, so that “there is no member in man which hath not correspondence with some sign, star, intelligence, divine name, something in God himself the Archetype”.31
The astrological chapters give the times and the images. Nothing is to be done “without the assistance of the Moon”, the “receptacle of all the heavenly influences” from which the golden chain of Plato begins; the twenty-eight mansions of the Moon, with their Arabic names and their effects, and the thirty-six “faces” of the zodiac with the images that rise in each — “in the first face of Aries ascendeth the image of a black man, standing and clothed in a white garment” — are set out from the Arabic tradition of the Picatrix, as are the images of the planets (Saturn as a man with a stag’s face and camel’s feet seated on a dragon, Venus a naked maiden with a mirror), the images of the fifteen “Behenian” fixed stars and the talismans of the mansions. Here Agrippa is most nearly a practical handbook, and here he inserts his most important qualification. Such images “work nothing unless they be so vivified that either a natural, or celestial, or heroical, or animastical, or demoniacal, or angelical virtue be in them or assistant to them. But who can give a soul to an image, or make a stone to live, or metal, or wood, or wax?” Nobody, he answers, but he who “(the elements being restrained, nature being overcome, the heavens being overpowered) transcends the progress of angels and comes to the very Archetype itself”. The book of celestial magic thus ends by pointing beyond itself: the celestial souls are to be contemplated rather than their bodies, and “in the first place we must implore assistance from the first Author, praying not only with mouth but with a religious gesture and supplicant soul”. The word is the image of God, the intellect the image of the word, the soul the image of the intellect, “and our word is the image of the soul, by which it acts upon natural things naturally”.32
Words, Names, and the Writing of Angels#
A theory of language runs through all three books and is, in Christopher Lehrich’s reading, their unifying subject. Words carry “the virtue of the speaker with a certain efficacy unto the hearers”, and among words the proper names of things are “certain rays of things, everywhere present at all times, keeping the power of things”. A name has two significations: a natural one, “by the influence of the celestial harmony”, and an arbitrary one “by the imposition of man”; when the two coincide, as in the names Adam gave, the name is “with a double virtue, natural and arbitrary, made most efficacious to act”. Hebrew is the language in which this coincidence is fullest. Its twenty-two letters, divided into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples, “are the foundation of the world and of creatures that are and are named in it”, and their permutation is the method of the Sefer Yetzirah: “he therefore that will find them out must by each joining together of the letters so long examine them, until the voice of God is manifest”. Writing is “the last expression of the mind”, and every magical work is to carry an inscription declaring its purpose.33
Book III raises the doctrine to its theological level. God is one simple essence in three persons, but “there are in him many divine powers, which as beams flow from him, which the philosophers of the gentiles call gods, the Hebrew masters numerations, we name attributes”. These are the ten Sephiroth, “as it were vestments, instruments or exemplars of the Archetype”, each paired with a divine name, a person of the Trinity, an order of angels, a sphere and a ruling intelligence; from Keter, attributed to the Father and governed by Metatron, “the prince of faces”, to Malkhut, “a church, temple of God, and a gate”, where “the soul of Messiah” presides over the blessed souls. Above the names stands the Shem ha-Mephorash, the seventy-two-letter name extracted from three verses of Exodus, from which the seventy-two angels are drawn by a method Agrippa sets out in full, with the tables of temurah by which letters are commuted. Angels may be named from their offices, calculated from the figure of the heavens, or taken from the Kabbalistic tables; their characters — the “celestial writing”, the alphabet of “Malachim” and the script called “the passing of the river” — are derived from the Hebrew letters laid on the nine chambers of a grid.34
Two principles keep this apparatus from being a mechanical sorcery. First, “sacred words have not their power in magical operations from themselves, as they are words, but from the occult divine powers working by them in the minds of those who by faith adhere to them”. Second, the characters of angels do not bind them. Angelic spirits, “seeing they are of a pure intellect and altogether incorporeal, are not marked with any marks or characters”; the figures we assign them from their names or works are our own devices, “by which we cannot any way compel them to us, but by which we rise up to them”. The ladder of names is a ladder for the operator, not a leash for the angel. And its top rung is Christian. After Christ “the name of four letters is no further necessary, the whole virtue thereof being translated into the name Jesus, in which only miracles are done”, so that “the Hebrews and Kabbalists most skilful in the divine names can work nothing after Christ by those old names”. The same sentence closes the chapter on Kabbalah in De vanitate; it is the point at which Agrippa’s Christian Kabbalah and his Christian scepticism coincide.35
Religion, Dignification, and the Ascent of the Mind#
Book III opens by declaring that natural and celestial magic are incomplete without the third part. “Holy religion purgeth the mind and maketh it divine, it helpeth nature and strengtheneth natural powers, as a physician helpeth the health of the body and a husbandman the strength of the earth. Whosoever therefore, religion being laid aside, do confide only in natural things, are wont very oft to be deceived by evil spirits.” Religion here is defined as “a certain discipline of external holy things and ceremonies by the which, as it were by certain signs, we are admonished of internal and spiritual things”; superstition is any worship “different from the true religion”, and Agrippa is careful to add that the ancient authors of ceremonial magic were Chaldeans, Egyptians and Arabs “whose religion was perverse and polluted idolatry”, so that whatever he relates from them is “only related out of other authors, and not put down by us for truth”. But the conclusion is not a retreat: “to superadd the powers of religion to physical and mathematical virtues is so far from a fault, that not to join them is an heinous sin”.36
The central chapter of the book, and perhaps of Agrippa’s thought, is the third, on “what dignification is required that one may be a true magician and a worker of miracles”. The understanding is “the only worker of wonders”, but when it is “overwhelmed by too much commerce with the flesh” it is “not worthy of the command of divine substances; therefore many prosecute this art in vain”. Dignity is made up of three things. Natural dignity is a well-disposed body and a favourable nativity. Meritorious dignity is won by “learning and practice” and by the withdrawal of the soul into itself in contemplation, “for there is even in our own selves the apprehension and power of all things”. Sacramental dignity is the “character of the divine virtue and power” stamped on the person by a rite, which Agrippa refers to “the ecclesiastical mysteries”, that is, to the sacraments and orders of the Church. Only one so dignified can “by praying, consecrating, sacrificing, invocating, attract spiritual and celestial powers and imprint them on those things thou pleasest”; “whosoever beyond the authority of his office, without the merit of sanctity and learning, beyond the dignity of nature and education, shall presume to work anything in magic, shall work in vain”. The three guides on the way are love, hope and faith, and “faith is the root of all miracles, by which alone, as the Platonists testify, we approach to God”. The purified mind sees “all the stations, grounds, causes and sciences of things both natural and immortal in the divine truth itself, as it were in a certain glass of eternity” — and then “the evil spirits obey us, the stars are disordered, the heavenly powers compelled, the elements made obedient”. Agrippa adds two warnings that show how seriously he took the claim: whoever works “by religion alone” without the natural and celestial powers “is swallowed up by the divine power and cannot live long”; whoever attempts it unpurified “doth bring upon himself judgement and is delivered to the evil spirit to be devoured”.37
The middle chapters of Book III describe the population of the intellectual world — the three kinds of intelligences, the nine Dionysian hierarchies, the nine orders of evil spirits, the demons’ shadowy bodies, the good and evil genius assigned to each person — and the methods of calling good spirits and binding evil ones, with the three “bonds” taken from the elemental, celestial and divine worlds, of which the last, “when we swear by the sacraments, by the miracles, by the divine names”, is “the highest of all and the strongest”. But the ascent proper is described in the chapters on the soul and on the four frenzies. Following Plato’s Phaedrus through Ficino, Agrippa distinguishes four “divine frenzies” (furores) by which the soul is drawn out of the body’s dominion: the frenzy of the Muses, which “stirs up and tempers the mind and makes it divine by drawing superior things to inferior things by things natural”, in nine degrees from the stones and herbs of the Moon to the “numbers, figures and characters” of the primum mobile; the frenzy of Dionysus, which “by expiations exterior and interior, by conjurations, mysteries, solemnities, rites, temples and observations” diverts the soul into the mind and “makes it a fit and pure temple of the gods”; the frenzy of Apollo, from the mind of the world, which by sacred mysteries and vows “makes the soul rise above the mind” into prophecy; and the frenzy of Venus, which “by a fervent love converts and transmutes the mind to God, and makes it altogether like to God, as it were the proper image of God”. Here Agrippa quotes the Asclepius: “O Asclepius! Man is a great miracle, an animal to be honoured and adored; for he passeth into the nature of God, whereby he becomes God.” Love, he adds with Orpheus, is “without eyes, because it is above the intellect”. The chapters that follow, on rapture, ecstasy, prophetic dreams and lots, and then on cleanness, abstinence, penitence, expiation, adoration, sacrifice, consecration and observance, read like a manual of ascetic religion; and their theology is explicitly Christian. The best prayer “is not uttered in words but with a religious silence and sincere cogitation is offered to God”; “the true sacrifice which purgeth any man and uniteth him to God is twofold: one which the high priest Christ offered for the remission of sins … the other by the which a man offereth up himself clean, unspotted, for a living sacrifice to God”; and “our Lord Jesus Christ, the true high priest, concluded all sacrifices in bread and wine only”.38
The Threefold Soul and the “Soul Standing and Not Falling”#
The doctrine that turns all this from a religion of the magician into a metaphysics of the person is the account of the soul in chapters 36 to 44 of Book III, the section that Agrippa rewrote most thoroughly between 1510 and 1533, drawing on his own Dialogus de homine and on the Zoharic material he found in Francesco Giorgio. “The most abundant God, as Trismegistus saith, hath framed two images like himself, the world and man”; man is “the other world and the other image of God, because he hath in himself all that is contained in the greater world”, and “whosoever therefore shall know himself shall know all things in himself; especially he shall know God, according to whose image he was made”. Following “Plotinus and all the Platonists, after Trismegistus”, the soul has a supreme part, “that divine thing which they call the mind, or superior portion, or illuminated intellect”, which Moses calls the breath of life; a lowest part, “the sensitive soul, which they also call an image” (idolum), which Paul calls the animal man; and a middle part, “the reasonable spirit knitting and tying together both extremes”. The supreme portion “never sinneth”; the inferior “is always overwhelmed in evil”. The middle is free: “if it constantly adhere to the superior portion, it is at length united and beatified with it, until it be assumed into God; if it adhere unto the inferior soul, it is depraved and becomes vicious, until it be made a wicked spirit”. Reason “unless it be illuminated by the mind is not free from error”. “Man therefore by the nature of his body is under fate; the soul of man by the sensitiveness moveth nature in fate, but by the mind is above fate, in the order of providence; yet reason is free at its own choice.”39
The mind, “because it is from God or from the intelligible world, is therefore immortal and eternal”; reason “is long-lived by the benefit of its celestial original”; the sensitive soul “is subject to destruction”. A soul that is united to the mind “is called the soul standing and not falling”, and such a soul, “being associated to his image of divinity”, can accomplish any work in the world “by its own power without any external help. Therefore the form of all magical power is from the soul of man standing and not falling.” This is the sentence towards which the whole book has been moving. The powers catalogued in Books I and II, the names and rites of Book III, are instruments; the agent is the mind united to its source. It is the doctrine Agrippa had already put in a letter of 1527 to the Augustinian Aurelio d’Aquapendente, which he printed as an appendix to the 1533 edition: “in us is the operator of all wonderful effects, who knows how to discern and effect, and that without any sin or offence to God, whatsoever the monstrous mathematicians, the prodigious magicians, the envious alchemist and bewitching necromancers can do by spirits. In us, I say, is the operator of miracles.” And it is why he could say in the same letter that the great books of magic, astrology and alchemy “are found vain, fictitious and false as often as they are practised according to the letter”: “there is therefore another meaning than what is written in letters”, veiled in mysteries, which “no man can attain to by reading of books only, without a skilful and faithful master, unless he be divinely illuminated”.40
Two consequences follow. One is that Agrippa’s magic is a doctrine of regeneration in the sense of the thirteenth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum and of Lodovico Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis: the soul reborn in God participates in God’s creative power, and magic is the exercise of that participation. Wouter Hanegraaff has argued that this Lazzarellian doctrine, and not the astral magic of Ficino, is “the key to Agrippa’s worldview”, and that the book operates on two levels, an exoteric encyclopaedia of magical procedures and an esoteric teaching for the few who understand that magical power “is a result of man’s assimilation into God, not the instrument for attaining it”. The other consequence is the tension that Michael Keefer named “Agrippa’s dilemma”. A doctrine of self-deification by ascent through one’s own mind sits uneasily beside the Christian doctrine of salvation by descending grace; the Church had condemned exactly such claims in the Gnostics and in Simon Magus, and Agrippa, who names both in the chapter of De vanitate that retracts his youthful work, knew it. Noel Putnik reads the two models of ascension, the Hermetic-Platonic climb by personal initiative and the Christian reception of grace across an ontological gap, as coexisting in the text as “an irresolvable ambiguity” rather than a synthesis. Whether one calls it a dilemma or a two-level doctrine, the point of contact is the same: the “soul standing and not falling” is at once the magus who commands the elements and the Christian who has died to the world.41
Doubt and Faith: The Two Books as One Project#
The relation between De vanitate and De occulta philosophia is discussed under each work below; here the principle is stated. Agrippa’s fullest theoretical account of it is the little De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum of 1516, written between the two. God may be known in three ways, corresponding to three books: the book of nature, which the gentile philosophers read; the book of the Law, which the Jews read; and the Gospel, which the Christians read; and there are three ascending powers of knowing, sense, reason and the spiritual intellect. The first two ways are true but incomplete; only the third, which is faith in the incarnate Word, is whole. Adam’s sin is repeated whenever reason “proudly proclaims an autonomy of its own”, and the Hermetic “man is a great miracle” becomes, in Agrippa’s Christianised version, “a great miracle is the Christian man”. The De originali peccato of 1518 turns this into an allegory of the soul: Adam is the mind and faith, Eve is reason, the serpent is sensuality; “reason is posterior to faith, and faith is by nature prior to reason”, and “it is not permitted to reason to disturb faith”. The Dehortatio gentilis theologiae of 1526 warns his own friends against the “gentile theology” of the Hermetic books when it is pursued instead of Christian instruction rather than in its light.42
Read against these texts, De vanitate is the pars destruens [destructive part] of a single argument. Its target is not knowledge but the pretension of unaided reason and the tyranny of the schools, “a most detestable custom … to swear their disciples never to contradict Aristotle, Boethius, Thomas, Albertus, or some such like school-deity”; its positive doctrine is that “the notions of all things are trusted within your own breasts”, that God “created our souls, which are like rational trees, full of forms and Ideas”, obscured by the Fall, and that the Word of God, read by “every one, man and woman, old and young”, restores them. The retraction of magic in its forty-eighth chapter is real — Agrippa did repent the “vanities” of his youth, the geomancy and judicial astrology he had practised for pay, the books of goetia and the “rhapsody of superstition” of a Kabbalah pursued for its own sake — but it is a retraction of magic “practised according to the letter”. The same chapters were reprinted at the end of the 1533 De occulta philosophia as a Censura sive retractatio, and in the preface to that book Agrippa answered the obvious objection: “Behold, thou being a youth didst write, and now being old hast retracted it; what therefore hast thou set forth?” His answer was the revised book itself, which “we added some chapters to and inserted many things”, offered to the reader as “a work not only of my youth but of my present age”. Perrone Compagni’s judgement is that De vanitate belongs to no “true and proper profession of scepticism, of general anti-intellectualism, or of rigorous fideism”, but is a reformed epistemology in which the “demonic” and Aristotelian sciences are rejected so that the Platonic and Hermetic path of scientia in verbo Dei may be built; Marc van der Poel’s, that both books are declamationes, serious theological argument in a rhetorical genre that leaves the author free of literal commitment; Paola Zambelli’s, that the fideism masks a religious radicalism, in sympathy with the early Reformation, more dangerous to the authorities than the magic. What none of these readings now accepts is the older picture, which goes back to Nauert’s Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (1965) and to Richard Popkin’s history of scepticism, of a man who oscillated between occultism and fideist despair. The sequence of composition alone refutes it: the sceptical book was finished in 1526, and the magical book was revised, enlarged and published in the seven years after.43
Sources, Synthesis, and the Question of Originality#
Almost every doctrine in De occulta philosophia can be traced to a source, and Perrone Compagni’s critical edition traces them chapter by chapter. From Ficino’s De vita, his Platonic Theology and his translations of Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Porphyry, Synesius and Psellus come the spirit of the world, occult virtue, the theory of talismans, the celestial vehicle of the soul and the tripartite psychology; from Pico’s Conclusiones and Oratio the union of magic and Kabbalah, the three worlds and the dignity of man; from Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico the plan of the 1510 draft and the relation of faith and reason, and from his De arte cabalistica (1517) the Sephiroth, the seventy-two names and the letter-techniques of Book III; from Trithemius the encouragement, the cryptographic and angelological interests, the doctrine of the seven planetary spirits who govern the ages (De septem secundeis, cited in III.24), and, after 1520, a collection of manuscripts of magic that supplied the “technical” matter of Book II; from Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis the doctrine of regeneration; from the Latin Picatrix the suffumigations, the images of the faces, planets and mansions, and the planetary prayers, borrowed without attribution; from Albertus Magnus and the pseudo-Albertine Book of Secrets and Speculum astronomiae the stones, herbs and animals of Book I and the theory of astrological images; from Pliny the natural history; from Peter of Abano, Arnald of Villanova, Roger Bacon and Thebit ben Corat the seals and images; from Paulus Ricius the Kabbalistic psychology of the Fall; and from Francesco Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi (1525) the “new metaphysical structure” of the 1533 text and its Zoharic material. Frank Klaassen has shown, further, that beneath the Ficinian and Kabbalistic vocabulary lies the operative tradition of late medieval ritual magic, the Ars notoria, the Sworn Book and the necromantic manuals, so that the sixteenth-century occultists “stood firmly in the tradition of late medieval demonic and angelic magic”.44
The question of what Agrippa added has been answered in every register. Lynn Thorndike in 1941 thought him “a dabbler and trifler who did not adhere to any given interest for long”, and his book “disappointing”, “vague, totally lacking in precision”, its only merit its availability in print. D. P. Walker in 1958 saw its historical importance in its candour: Agrippa “exposes what Ficino, rather feebly, had tried to conceal: that his magic was really demonic”, and “by treating magic, pagan religion and Christianity as activities and beliefs of exactly the same kind, he demonstrates strikingly how dangerous Neoplatonic magic was from a Christian point of view”. Frances Yates in 1964 called it a convenient survey, the handbook that carried Ficino’s natural magic and Pico’s Kabbalist magic northward to Dee and to Bruno, and in 1979 raised it to “the indispensable handbook of Renaissance ‘Magia’ and ‘Cabala’”, a work of Christian Kabbalah that “leads up, in the third book on the supercelestial world, to the presentation of the Name of Jesus as now all-powerful”. Perrone Compagni locates the originality not in the materials, almost all borrowed, but in the theological and civic project that organises them, the “reform of magic” as a religious philosophy for the perfect philosopher, magus and priest; Lehrich in its coherence as a “magical hermeneutics”, a book about how to read the two books of Scripture and nature; Hanegraaff in its Lazzarellian core; Anthony Grafton, in Magus (2023), in the fact of system itself: “few of the dozens of manuscript compilations that transmitted magic through the Middle Ages reflected any effort to impose a system on the whole range of magical practices, as Agrippa’s book did”, and the result became “a desk reference for all learned magicians”. Dario Gurashi, the most active recent scholar, reads the whole œuvre, magical and theological, as one humanist reflection on the human being as imago Dei [image of God], capable of divinisation “in the deifying mirror”, in which magic is the part of knowledge that mediates between faith and reason.45
Whatever weight is given to these judgements, three things about the synthesis are not in dispute. It was the first to arrange the whole inheritance of Western learned magic, Greek, Arabic, Latin and Hebrew, under a single metaphysical scheme of descent and ascent. It made the human soul, and not the star, the demon or the name, the seat of magical power. And it was written as a Christian book by a man who believed, in Hanegraaff’s words, in “the compatibility of the biblical revelation and Hermetic wisdom”, and who, in the preface of 1533, defined the magician as “not a sorcerer, or one that is superstitious, or devilish, but a wise man, a priest, a prophet”.46
Works#
Agrippa’s writings are arranged here by date of first printing, with the date of composition given in each case, because nearly everything he wrote before 1526 was printed only in 1529–1534, and because the order of publication — the small theological works of 1529, the sceptical declamation of 1530, the magical summa of 1531–1533 — is the order in which his contemporaries met him. Works printed only after his death, or never printed in his lifetime, are treated at the end. Quotations follow the early English translations, with spelling modernised; where none exists the text is summarised from the Latin.47
De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus declamatio (Written 1509; Printed 1529) [Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex]#
At a glance. Declamation on the Nobility and Pre-eminence of the Female Sex. Drafted at Dôle in 1509 as an extension of the oration with which Agrippa opened his lectures on Reuchlin, and dedicated to Margaret of Austria; printed at Antwerp by Michael Hillenius in 1529 as the first item in the collection of Agrippa’s short works, and reprinted at Cologne in 1532 and frequently afterwards. It was translated into French, Italian (1544), German and Dutch, and three times into English: by David Clapham as A Treatise of the Nobility and Excellency of Womankind (1542), by Edward Fleetwood as The Glory of Women (1652), and by Henry Care, in a free and augmented paraphrase, as Female Pre-eminence (1670). The modern English edition is Albert Rabil’s (1996). The dedicatory letter announces “a matter hitherto unheard of, but not disagreeing with truth … to describe the nobility and excellency of the female sex”, and promises to prove it “not by rhetorical fictions and officious lies for praises, but by reason, authority, examples, and by the testimony of Holy Writ and of both laws”.48
Argument. The declamation opens with a concession that fixes its whole structure. God created man in his own likeness, “male and female created he them”, and “hath given but one similitude and likeness of the soul to both male and female, between whose souls there is no manner difference of kind”. In the soul, then, the sexes are equal. “But all other things which be in man, besides the divine substance of the soul, in those things the excellent and noble womanhood in a manner infinitely doth excel the rude gross kind of men.” The rest of the book is the proof, arranged as a series of ascending arguments. From the name: “Adam soundeth earth, but Eve is interpreted life; and as much as the life doth excel earth, so much the woman is to be preferred above the man”, to which Agrippa adds a Kabbalistic coda, that the name of woman “hath more affinity with the ineffable name of the divine omnipotence, called Tetragrammaton, than the name of man” — “but now we will leave these things, for they be read of few, and of fewer understood”. From the order of creation: God proceeded from the less to the more perfect, and woman, made last, is “the full end, most perfect of all God’s works, and of the same the very perfection”, the closing point of “the absolute, whole and most perfect circle” of creation, and therefore “the first of all things conceived in the mind of God”. From the place: woman was made in Paradise “among angels”, man “without Paradise, in the wild field among brute beasts”. From the matter: woman was formed not “of the vile clay or dirt, as the man was, but of a matter purified and lively”, so that “man is the work of nature, and woman the work of God”, and “therefore the woman is many times more apt and meet than the man to receive the heavenly light”.49
There follow the arguments from beauty, “the clear brightness of God’s visage naturally set in things”, with a long blazon of the female body and a catalogue of scriptural beauties; from physiology and modesty, a series of observations, many of them from Pliny, in which every difference between the sexes is read to the woman’s credit (she does not go bald, her washing-water stays clean, her body floats face-down “by the favour that nature beareth to her shamefast honesty”, her seed alone nourishes the child, she is more merciful, she excels in speech, “the chiefest treasure of mankind”); and then, at the book’s centre, the argument from the Fall. The fruit “was forbidden to the man, but not to the woman, which was not then created. For God would her to be free from the beginning. Therefore the man sinned in eating, not the woman. The man gave us death, not the woman. And all we sinned in Adam, not in Eve.” Eve, “being deceived, erred ignorantly”; hence only males are circumcised, Christ took the “more humble and lower kind” of man, and priesthood belongs to the sinner’s sex because the priest represents Christ who represents Adam. In the Gospel the risen Christ appeared first to women; no heresy ever arose from a woman; Christ was “bought and sold, accused, condemned, scourged, hanged on the cross … only by men”, and during the Passion the Church “did then remain only with the woman, that is to say, with the Virgin Mary”. The best of the female kind, the Virgin, excels the best male, John the Baptist; the worst creature is a man, Judas; Scripture shows many men damned “but we read in no place of any woman so condemned”.50
The last third of the book is historical and legal. A catalogue of male crimes (man “was first envious, first a murderer … men also first made confederacies with fiends and invented cursed witchcrafts”) is set against a catalogue of female virtue and achievement: prophetesses, priestesses, philosophers (Theano, Diotima, Aspasia), poets, rulers and warriors from Deborah to Joan of Arc, and, in the invincible art of magic, “Circe and Medea wrought far greater wonders than Zoroaster himself”. Roman law, canon law and the customs of the nations are shown to have honoured women. Then the peroration turns from praise to protest. If women are now subject, it is “by the great tyranny of men, prevailing against the laws of God and nature”: “as soon as a woman is born, even from her infancy, she is kept at home in idleness, and as though she were unmeet for any higher business, she is permitted to know no further than her needle and her thread … all offices belonging to the commonweal be forbidden them by the laws … also they be repelled from preaching of God’s word, against express and plain Scripture … and thus by these laws the women, being subdued as it were by force of arms, are constrained to give place to men, and to obey their subduers, not by no natural, no divine necessity or reason, but by custom, education, fortune and a certain tyrannical occasion”. The Pauline texts on subjection are “not repugnant but in the rind”, for “in Christ neither male nor female is of value, but a new creature”. Agrippa ends by disclaiming ambition: he wrote “lest that I, as one committing sacrilege, holding my peace, should seem privily to steal from so noble a kind the lauds and praises due to it”.51
Major themes. The equality of souls and the superiority of everything else; the exoneration of Eve; the argument that women’s subjection is a product of custom, education and law, not of nature or Scripture; the demonstration, conducted with the tools of humanist learning, that authority itself, rightly read, favours women.
Esoteric symbolism. Three things in the book belong to Agrippa’s Kabbalistic reading of Scripture: the affinity of the name of woman with the Tetragrammaton; the letter he that God took from his own name and gave to Sarah; and the idea that woman, as the last-created, is the first-intended, the point at which the circle of creation closes and returns to God. Barbara Newman has read these together as an “esoteric theology” of gender, and Perrone Compagni has shown that the exoneration of Eve, who “erred ignorantly”, is the seed of the allegory of the De originali peccato, in which Eve is reason, deceived, and Adam is faith, which turned wilfully to the flesh.52
Relation to other works. Written in the same year and in the same spirit as the Dôle lectures on De verbo mirifico, it is Agrippa’s first use of Kabbalistic argument; it prepares the psychology of the Fall in the De originali peccato and the De triplici ratione; and its praise of Circe and Medea shows the author of the 1510 De occulta philosophia at work. In the seventeenth century it was more often reprinted than any of his books except De vanitate.
Takeaway. Constance Jordan called it “the most explicit feminist text” of the early sixteenth century; Ian Maclean read it as a rhetorical exercise in a known genre; the truth is that it is both, a declamatio that uses the licence of paradox to say things — about education, office, preaching and the tyranny of custom — that no genre required of it. Its arguments recur in Castiglione’s circle, in Marie de Gournay and throughout the querelle des femmes.53
Expostulatio super expositione sua in librum De verbo mirifico cum Ioanne Catilineti (Written 1510; Printed 1529) [Expostulation With Jean Catilinet Concerning His Exposition of the Book On the Wonder-Working Word]#
At a glance. Expostulation with Jean Catilinet concerning his exposition of the book On the Wonder-Working Word. Written in London in 1510, from Colet’s house, and addressed to the Franciscan provincial of Burgundy who, preaching before Margaret of Austria at Ghent that Lent, had denounced Agrippa as a “judaizing heretic” for lecturing on Reuchlin at Dôle. Printed in the Hillenius collection of 1529.54
Argument. Agrippa defends the orthodoxy of Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico, “the Christian and Catholic book of the Christian doctor John Reuchlin”, and of the Christian Kabbalah it expounds: the doctrine that the divine names, and above all the name of Jesus, which Reuchlin read as the Tetragrammaton made pronounceable by the addition of the letter shin, are the source of the power of miracles. He rejects the charge of judaizing — “I am a Christian, but I do not dislike Jewish rabbis” — and reproves the preacher for calumniating from the pulpit a man he had never met and a book he had not read. The letter is the earliest witness to the Dôle oration in praise of Margaret, which was not among the printed Orationes.
Relation to other works. The Reuchlinian doctrine defended here is the doctrine of the 1510 De occulta philosophia, then in Trithemius’s hands; the Christological reading of the divine names reappears as the climax of Book III (III.11–12) and, in a sceptical key, in the chapter on Kabbalah in De vanitate.
Takeaway. A young lecturer’s self-defence, and the first of the many documents in which Agrippa’s quarrel with the mendicant orders is conducted in public.
De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum liber unus (Written 1516; Printed 1529) [On the Threefold Way of Knowing God]#
At a glance. On the Threefold Way of Knowing God. Composed at Casale Monferrato in 1516 and dedicated to William IX Paleologus, Marquis of Montferrat; printed, “somewhat expanded”, in the 1529 collection. The modern edition, with Italian translation and an introductory study, is Perrone Compagni’s Ermetismo e cristianesimo in Agrippa (2005).55
Argument. The “threefold way” is threefold in three senses. There are three books of revelation: the book of nature, read by the gentile philosophers; the book of the Law, read by the Jews; and the Gospel, the book of Christ, read by Christians. There are three ascending powers of knowing: sense, reason and the spiritual intellect. And there are the three schools’ criteria of truth. Each lower way is true as far as it goes, and the pagan sages, Hermes above all, saw much; but only the third way, faith in the Word made flesh, is complete, and the two lower ways lead to it only when they are read in its light. The Hermetic Asclepius had called man “a great miracle”; Agrippa rewrites the sentence: “a great miracle is the Christian man”. Reason that proclaims its own autonomy repeats the sin of Adam; the true Christian philosopher must become “a corrector of the foolish” and “a teacher of the immature”. The sources are the Corpus Hermeticum in Ficino’s translation, Lactantius, Pico, Reuchlin and Paulus Ricius.56
Relation to other works. The treatise states in the form of a hierarchy — faith above reason, the Gospel above nature and Law — the principle that De vanitate radicalises ten years later and that Book III of De occulta philosophia, on the knowledge of God through religion, builds upon; Perrone Compagni’s title signals her reading, that Hermetism is here subordinated to Christianity. Lehrich and Gurashi treat it, with the Dialogus de homine and the De originali peccato, as one anthropology of the image of God.
Takeaway. The clearest short statement of the theology that underlies both of Agrippa’s great books: revelation has degrees, and the highest degree judges the rest.
De originali peccato disputabilis opinionis declamatio (Written 1518; Printed 1529) [Declamation of a Disputable Opinion on Original Sin]#
At a glance. Declamation of a Disputable Opinion on Original Sin. Written at Metz early in 1518, dedicated to Dietrich Wichwael, titular Bishop of Cyrene, discussed with the Celestine Claude Dieudonné, who copied it; printed in 1529. Edited by Gurashi in Rinascimento militante (2024) and studied in his “Reason and Regeneration” (2022).57
Argument. The “disputable opinion” is that original sin “was nothing other than the carnal union of man and woman” (non aliud fuisse originale peccatum quam carnalem copulam viri et mulieris). The serpent is concupiscence; the tree of knowledge is earthly prudence and carnal affection; the tree of life is the contemplation of God; the fruit is generation by the flesh; the fig-leaves and coats of skins are shame and mortality. Beneath this crude allegory runs a second, psychological one, drawn from Ricius and from Ficino’s tripartite soul: Adam is the mind (mens) and faith, Eve is reason (ratio), the serpent is the sensual “image” (idolum). “Reason is posterior to faith, and faith is by nature prior to reason”; “it is not permitted to reason to disturb faith”. Both are guilty in different ways: Eve, reason, weakened faith by argument; Adam, faith, turned to the sensible. A numerology of the generations of Seth (ten) and Cain (eleven), and a reading of Naamah as voluptas, complete the exposition. Wichwael objected, and Agrippa defended the allegory in a letter of 6 February 1518.58
Major themes. The Fall as a permanent structure of the soul rather than a past event; the priority of faith over reason; the flesh as the site of sin and mortality; regeneration as the reversal of the Fall by the mind’s return to God.
Esoteric symbolism. The three figures of Genesis as the three parts of the Platonic soul, an interpretation that Agrippa carried into Book III of De occulta philosophia (III.36), where the same three parts, mind, reason and “image”, determine whether a soul stands or falls.
Relation to other works. It continues the exoneration of Eve in De nobilitate (she “erred ignorantly”, because reason is deceived where faith is wilful), applies the hierarchy of the De triplici ratione to the soul, and supplies the anthropology of the 1533 De occulta philosophia. Bayle and Du Pin remembered it as a scandal; Gurashi reads it as the hinge of Agrippa’s “militant” humanism.
Takeaway. The Fall, for Agrippa, is what happens whenever reason argues faith out of its place and the mind turns to the flesh; magic, in its highest sense, is the undoing of that fall.
Dehortatio gentilis theologiae (Delivered c. 1515–1516; Revised 1526; Printed 1529) [Dissuasion From Gentile Theology]#
At a glance. Dissuasion from Gentile Theology, “once delivered to certain friends”. An oration or open letter, probably first addressed to the Italian students of the Pavia and Casale years, reworked in June 1526 at Lyon and dedicated to Symphorien Bullioud, Bishop of Bazas; printed in 1529. Edited by Gurashi (2024).59
Argument. Agrippa warns his friends against their excessive appetite for the “gentile theology” of the Hermetic books and the Platonists when it is pursued at the expense of Christian instruction. The pagan sages are not to be despised — he had himself expounded the Pimander at Pavia as a prophecy of Christ — but their theology is a preparation, not a substitute, and those who linger in it repeat the error of the philosophers who knew God and did not glorify him as God.
Relation to other works. It is the counterweight to the Pavia oration on the Pimander and the De triplici ratione; read with them, it shows that the subordination of Hermetism to Christianity was Agrippa’s settled position before, during and after the writing of De vanitate.
Takeaway. The magus of the De occulta philosophia warning his own disciples not to mistake the ladder for the house.
De sacramento matrimonii declamatio (Written 1526; Printed 1526 and 1529) [Declamation on the Sacrament of Matrimony]#
At a glance. Declamation on the Sacrament of Matrimony. Written at Lyon in the spring of 1526 and dedicated to Marguerite d’Alençon, sister of Francis I; issued in Latin with a French version in 1526 and reprinted in 1529. Translated into English by David Clapham as The Commendation of Matrimony (1540, 1545), dedicated to Gregory Cromwell.60
Argument. Marriage is “most ancient, and first after that man was made … ordained before any sin, in the time of innocency”. It is indissoluble “for no diversity of manners, by no satiety … nor for age, barrenness or sickness … nor for no crime of heresy” — only fornication excepted, and even then the separated parties “be and remain man and wife”. Its three ends are help, propagation and the avoidance of fornication; it is of one man with one wife, for “one rib at the beginning was turned into one wife”, and in the Ark “God commanded no more women to be preserved than men”. The marital bond outranks kinship, for “man and wife be the mystery of God”. Marriage is lawful for the old, as David’s with Abishag shows. Consent must be free, against parents who “by a certain tyranny … compel them to be married to such as they hate” and against princes who force marriages and tax dowries. The charivari, the custom of mocking and fining those who marry a second time, is “a damnable fashion” that “must be taken away and plucked clean out of the dominions of France”. And the husband is told: “let thy wife be married unto thee, not her dowry … let not her be subject unto thee, but let her be with thee in all trust and counsel … not as a drudge, but as mistress of the house”. Adultery and the murder of a wife are worse than parricide.61
Relation to other works. The defence of second marriages and the Erasmian tone of the whole — censors found Erasmus and François Lambert’s De sacro coniugio behind it — made the dedication to a newly widowed princess, in Perrone Compagni’s words, “a blunder and a terrible failure”. Its picture of the wife as partner and mistress of the house continues the argument of De nobilitate; Zambelli read its treatment of marriage as evidence of Agrippa’s Lutheran sympathies.
Takeaway. A humanist treatise on marriage as a free, equal and sacramental partnership, remembered chiefly for having offended the person it was written to please.
The Remaining Pieces of the 1529 Collection#
The Hillenius volume also contained the Sermo de inventione reliquiarum beati Antonii heremitae, a sermon on the finding of the relics of St Antony the hermit written for a religious of the Antonine order, probably in Piedmont in 1517 rather than at Metz in 1518 as older accounts state; the Regimen adversus pestilentiam, a plague regimen informed by Agrippa’s practice in plague-stricken Antwerp, which the Opera prints with the earlier Contra pestem antidota securissima, “the securest antidotes against the plague”, composed at Metz in 1518–1519 and sent to a friend as “a little medical paper” of morning draughts and “vegetable things which resist the poison of the plague”; and, among the letters, the Pavia oration on the Pimander of 1515. These small works matter for the picture of a working physician and preacher that the letters confirm and the legend obscured.62
De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio (Written 1526; Printed 1530) [Declamation on the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts, and on the Excellence of the Word of God]#
At a glance. Declamation on the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts, and on the Excellence of the Word of God; most title-pages add invectiva. Written at Lyon in 1526, in the months after the loss of Louise of Savoy’s pension, and finished by September; revised until 1530; printed at Antwerp by Johannes Grapheus in September 1530, and at Cologne and Paris in 1531. Dedicated to Agostino Fornari (Augustinus Furnarius), a Genoese patrician and merchant who was Agrippa’s financial supporter at Lyon and Antwerp. One hundred and two chapters, a prefatory address to the reader and a peroration. Translated into German by Sebastian Franck (1534), into Italian by Lodovico Domenichi (1543), into French by Louis Turquet de Mayerne (1582; later reissued as Paradoxe sur l’incertitude, vanité et abus des sciences), into Dutch (1651), and into English twice: by James Sanford as Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences (1569; reissued 1575; modern edition by Catherine M. Dunn, 1974) and anonymously as The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (1676).63
Argument. The address to the reader sets the tone. “Wilt thou not look upon this labour of mine to be a most bold and almost Herculean attempt, to wage war against the giant-like opposition of all the arts and sciences?” The motive is not envy or ambition but the sight of “so many men, puffed up with human knowledge and learning”, who “not only contemn and despise the oracles of the sacred Scripture, but also prosecute and deride it”, and the “most detestable custom” of the schools “to swear their disciples never to contradict Aristotle, Boethius, Thomas, Albertus, or some such like school-deity”. The first chapter states the thesis against the “old opinion” that every science brings something of divinity to man: “there is nothing more pernicious, nothing more destructive to the well-being of men or to the salvation of our souls, than the arts and sciences themselves”. The sciences promise what the serpent promised, “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”; knowledge is morally neutral and takes its value from its possessor (whence “a perverse grammarian, an ostentatious poet, a lying historian … a wicked magician, a perfidious Kabbalist, and a heretical and seducing divine”); beatitude “consists not in the knowledge of good things, but in good life; not in understanding, but in living understandingly. Neither is it great learning, but good will, that joins men to God”. Every science rests on principles that cannot be demonstrated and must be believed on authority; the Academics and Pyrrhonists are cited with approval; “the tradition of all sciences are so dangerous and inconstant, that it is far safer to be ignorant than to know”; truth “can be apprehended by no contemplations of science … no syllogistical demonstration, no human discourse of reason, but only by faith”.64
The hundred chapters that follow are a tour of the whole encyclopaedia of learning, each art dismissed in turn, with a wit that is by turns Lucianic, Erasmian and merely savage. Grammar, poetry (“the female architect of falsehood”), history, rhetoric, logic (“the mystery of contention and darkness”) and sophistry open the sequence; Llull’s Art “is of no other use than only to show the pomp and magnificence of wit and learning”, and the art of memory produces “madness and frenzies”. The mathematical and mechanical arts follow, from arithmetic, dicing and music through dancing, fencing, stage-playing, geometry, optics, painting, sculpture, mirrors, architecture and mining to astronomy; three confessions punctuate them. Of geomancy: “I myself have written a geomancy, far different from those before mentioned, though not less superstitious and fallacious; or if you will, I may say, not less crowded with lies.” Of gunnery: “of which lately I myself have written a special treatise entitled Pyrography, which I now repent me to have done, seeing that it only teaches a most pernicious and destructive art.” Of judicial astrology, the longest of the divinatory chapters: “I myself learnt this art from my parents, and have lost not a little time and pains therein; but at length I found that the whole art had no other foundation than the mere figments and trifles of imagination; and it very much repents me of the time which I have wasted … and would wholly abandon the use thereof, unless the violent entreaties of great personages … did not compel me to continue my studies therein”. The other divinations — physiognomy, metoposcopy, chiromancy, geomancy again, augury, “speculatory” divination, dreams and prophetic frenzy — “depend upon chance, familiarity with spirits, or some apparent conjectures”, and all “have their root and foundation from astrology, as if it were the key that opens the door of all their mysteries”.65
Chapters 41 to 48 concern magic and are quoted at length below. Then natural philosophy, the soul and metaphysics are shown to be quarrels among philosophers; moral philosophy is custom (“that was then a vice which is now accounted a virtue”); politics cannot settle the best state; and a run of chapters on religion, images, temples, holy days, ceremonies, prelates and monks (“an abominable rout of sinners crept in among them”) leads to the chapters on prostitution and pandering, whose anticlerical jokes most offended the censors: “there can be no pope without testicles … wherever there be the most stately priories and abbeys, there are always certain bawdy-houses adjoining to them”. The household and the court come next; the chapters on courtiers and court ladies are a transparent satire of Louise of Savoy’s court. War is butchery, nobility “a dignity obtained by butchery, out of the blood and slaughter of the enemy”, heraldry a bestiary. Physic is “a kind of art of killing”; apothecaries, surgeons, anatomists, cooks and dieticians are dealt with; and the chapter on alchemy is one of the most deliberately ambiguous in the book, for having called it “a persecution of nature” whose adepts end “old, ragged, famished, with the continual use of quicksilver paralytic”, Agrippa adds: “many things could I say of this art, of which I am no great enemy, were I not sworn to silence”, lists its riddles (“the green lion, the fugitive hart … the dragon devouring his tail”) and gives a veiled description of the first matter “in such manner as none but the sons of art shall understand me”. The law, canon law, advocates, notaries and the Inquisition follow — the last chapter tells the story of the woman of Woippy — and then theology. Scholastic theology is “a certain hodge-podge or mixture of divine precepts and philosophical reasons, looking like a centaur”, its masters “sutlers of the Word of God”; interpretative theology is legitimate when done “by the help of the Spirit, as a key to a lock”; prophetic theology is knowledge “in an essential contact of divinity, apprehended through a clear vision in the divine light itself”.66
Chapter 100, “Of the Word of God”, is the positive thesis. “Ye have now heard how doubtful, how uncertain, how ambiguous all the sciences are … Now this key is nothing else but the Word of God.” Scripture “is sufficient to expound and interpret itself, and judging of all men, is judged by none”; its understanding comes “only by faith in Jesus Christ poured out into the soul from God the Father, by the Holy Ghost”; it belongs “not only to divines, but to every one, man and woman, old and young”, for Christ commanded the Gospel to be preached “not in the dark, not whispered in the ear, but openly, upon the housetops”. Chapter 101 declares that “there is nothing more contrary to Christian faith and religion than knowledge”, since Christ chose “unlearned persons of the vulgar people, void of knowledge, unskilful, and asses”; and the “digression in praise of the ass” that follows, a mock-sermon in the manner of Erasmus and Apuleius, explains that “there is no beast so fit and proper to retain divinity as the ass; into which creature if ye be not transformed, ye shall not be able to carry the divine mysteries”. The peroration addresses the reader as one of these asses. To attain “this divine and true wisdom, not of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but of the tree of life”, set aside the traditions of men and converse “not with the schools of philosophers and sophisters, but with your own selves. For the notions of all things are trusted within your own breasts … He created our souls, which are like rational trees, full of forms and Ideas; though through the sin of our first parents all things were concealed, and oblivion took place.” “There needs not long study, but humility of spirit and pureness of heart … This is Jesus Christ, the Word, the Son of God the Father, the true teacher.” And then the last sentence, which tells the reader what kind of book he has been reading: “But lest I should declaim beyond my hour-glass, let this be the end of our discourse.”67
The chapters on magic (41–48). Because they were reprinted in 1533 as the Censura sive retractatio at the end of De occulta philosophia, these chapters are the point at which the two books touch, and their content should be exact. Magic (ch. 41) is “so linked to astrology, as being her near kinswoman, that whoever professes magic without astrology does nothing”; the word is Persian and means no more than “a wise man or a philosopher”; and magic, “containing both natural philosophy and the mathematics, takes into the same society the forces and bands of all religions, joining to itself goetia and theurgy; which is the reason that magic is generally divided into natural and ceremonial”. Natural magic (ch. 42) is “the chief power of all the natural sciences … the top and perfection of natural philosophy, and … the active part of the same”; it “produces into open act the hidden and concealed powers of nature, so coupling inferior with superior faculties … that from thence many times great and marvellous miracles have been effected, not so much by art as nature, to whom art only shows herself a handmaid”; the Magi who adored Christ were such magicians; Roger Bacon produced roses in March. This chapter is not a retraction of anything. Mathematical magic (ch. 43), the art of Archytas’s dove, the talking statues and the brazen head, is a “delusory science” in which “magicians have adventured to proceed so far, by the help of that ancient and subtle serpent, the great promiser of knowledge, that aping him they become imitators of God and nature”. Magia venefica (ch. 44; “witchcraft” in the 1676 translation) works by potions and philtres, and its practitioners “do not only pry into natural things, but also those things which accompany nature … as numbers, figures, sounds, voice, lights, affections of the mind, and words”; by this “gradual and concatenated sympathy … not only natural and celestial gifts, but also intellectual and divine may be received into human souls” — the very doctrine of De occulta philosophia I.37 — but “some of them are arrived at such a height of madness” as to think a rightly made image “would receive life and motion”, so that “this natural magic, inclining toward conjuring and necromancy, is often entangled in the snares and delusions of evil spirits”.68
Goetia and necromancy (ch. 45) are “cursed for being familiar with unclean spirits … held abominable, and wholly condemned by the decrees of all lawgivers”: the invocation of the dead, the enchanting of children as oracles, the “pocket-demons” and “little spirits in glasses”, the compelling of spirits by sacred names, and worse, the worship of devils. From this crowd “have flowed all those books of darkness” published “under the feigned titles and names of Adam, Abel, Enoch, Abraham and Solomon; others under the names of Paulus, Honorius, Cyprian, Albertus, Thomas, Hierome, and one Eboracensis” — the grimoires, which “contain nothing but mere toys and gewgaws, and … were in far later ages contrived by such as were utterly ignorant of that magic professed by the ancients”. Yet “it doth not therefore follow that these delusions are fables”, or the laws would not punish them; and women, “more covetous of the knowledge of secrets … and more easily deluded”, are the devils’ more familiar company. Theurgy (ch. 46), which “pretends to have to do with none but good angels and the divine Numen himself”, proves “only the delusion and mockery of evil spirits”; its ceremonies of cleanliness, “which cleanliness renders them capable of being the receptacles … of divine spirits”, Agrippa says “we have abundantly discoursed thereof in our books of occult philosophy”; and Porphyry himself, its great authority, “concludes that by theurgic operations the soul may be made fit to receive spirits and angels … but that there can be any access to the Deity thereby, he altogether denies”. The Ars Almadel, the Ars notoria, the Ars Paulina and the Ars revelationum are of this school. The Kabbalah (ch. 47), “delivered by God to Moses” and “preserved by tradition only”, divides into a cosmology that “differs little from natural magic” and “a certain kind of symbolical theology” of names and numbers; and Agrippa, who “with great labour and diligence searched into” it, pronounces it “a mere rhapsody of superstition, and nothing but a kind of theurgic magic”, for if it were from God the Spirit of truth would not have hidden it from the Church, and “neither is there any other name in heaven or on earth by which we can be saved, but only the name of Jesus”; from “this Judaical ferment of Kabbalistic superstition” he derives the Ophites, Gnostics and Valentinians, who “invented a Kabbalah, corrupting the mysteries of the Christian faith”.69
Chapter 48, on praestigiae, illusions and legerdemain, ends with the retraction. “Out of all that hath been said, we must resolve that magic is but a mixture of idolatry, astrology and superstitious physic”, the seed-bed of the heretics who, “as Jannes and Jambres contradicted Moses, so do they resist the truth”, from Simon Magus, “the ringleader”, down to the Ophites, Gnostics, Cerdonians, Marcionites and Montanists. “’Tis true that, being young, I wrote three books of magic myself, which I entitled Of Occult Philosophy; in which, what errors soever I then committed in my youth, now grown more wary, I do publicly recant, as having formerly spent too much time in those vanities. This advantage I got, that now I know by what reasons to convince others of the ruin which those vanities will lead them into.” Those who “presume to prophesy and divine, not in the truth of God, but according to the operations of evil spirits, and boast themselves the workers of miracles … are all with Jannes and Jambres and Simon Magus destined to the eternal torments of hell-fire”.70
Major themes. The vanity of learning pursued for its own sake; the tyranny of authority in the schools; the priority of faith and the sufficiency of Scripture; the corruption of church, court, law and medicine; the ass as the emblem of the humility that alone can bear divine things.
Esoteric symbolism. The ass, “the hieroglyphic of fortitude and strength, patience and clemency”, whose influence “dependeth on the Sephirah Hochmah, which signifies wisdom”; the “rational trees, full of forms and Ideas”, which are the Platonic doctrine of innate knowledge in the language of Genesis; the alchemical riddles of chapter 90; and the persistent distinction, even in the chapters of condemnation, between a magic “practised according to the letter” and the magic “professed by the ancients”.
Relation to other works. The relation to De occulta philosophia is set out under Thought and again below. Within Agrippa’s œuvre the book realises the programme of the De triplici ratione, the Dehortatio and the De originali peccato, that reason arguing on its own repeats the Fall; and it provoked the Apologia and the Querela of 1533, in which Agrippa explained that a declamatio does not bind its author to every proposition it advances. Its models are Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and the paradoxical encomium of Lucian; its heirs are Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond, Sidney’s remark that “Agrippa will be as merry in showing the vanity of science as Erasmus was in commending of folly”, and Rabelais’s Her Trippa.
Takeaway. Nauert read the book as the record of a crisis; Bowen and Korkowski as a paradox in a known genre; Zambelli as concealed religious radicalism; Perrone Compagni as the clearing of the ground for a Platonic and Christian science; van der Poel as the serious theology of a humanist working in the freedom of declamation. What the text itself insists on is stated in its last sentence: it is a declamation, delivered against the hour-glass, and it is to be read as one — which does not mean that its author did not believe it.71
In artem brevem Raymundi Lullii commentaria (Written c. 1517; Printed 1531) [Commentaries on the Brief Art of Ramon Llull]#
At a glance. Commentaries on the Brief Art of Ramon Llull. Printed at Cologne by Johannes Soter in 1531 together with Llull’s Ars brevis, reissued at Cologne in 1533 and at Solingen in 1538 with woodcuts of the Lullian figures, and incorporated in the Zetzner editions of Llull’s works (Strasbourg, 1598–1651) through which the seventeenth century, including Leibniz, read it. Dedicated to Jean Laurencin of Lyon, preceptor of the Antonines at Sant’Antonio di Ranverso, which places its composition in Piedmont about 1517 rather than in 1509, the date sometimes given.72
Argument. Not a line-by-line commentary but, in Perrone Compagni’s phrase, “a new method of thinking”. Agrippa expounds Llull’s alphabet of nine absolute principles (goodness, greatness, duration, power, wisdom, will, virtue, truth, glory), the relative principles, the four figures, the questions, subjects and rules, and orients the whole toward “the invention of arguments”: the Art becomes a topical engine for finding what can be said on any subject, an instrument of extempore discourse. It is exactly this use that De vanitate mocks in its ninth chapter, where Llull’s “prodigious art … to enable any person to discourse extempore upon any subject” is said to have “far more of confidence than efficacy” — with the remark that “we have commented sufficiently upon this art already”.
Relation to other works. Agrippa’s Lullism went back to Andreas Canter at Cologne, and the combinatory alphabet of the Art is a cousin of the Kabbalistic permutation of letters in De occulta philosophia I.74 and III.25–27. Yates treated it as a step toward the encyclopaedic and combinatory tradition of Bruno and Kircher; Anita Traninger placed it at the head of German “effortless science” Lullism.
Takeaway. The one work of Agrippa’s that is purely a method, and the one he most openly disowned; its afterlife runs through the Zetzner Llull to Leibniz’s Dissertatio de arte combinatoria, and, in parody, to the thinking-machine of Swift’s Laputa.
De occulta philosophia libri tres (Drafted 1510; Book I Printed 1531; Complete Edition 1533) [Three Books of Occult Philosophy]#
At a glance. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Drafted in the winter and spring of 1509–1510 after the meeting with Trithemius and sent to him before 8 April 1510; circulated in manuscript for twenty years; revised and roughly doubled in length in the years before 1533. The enlarged Book I was printed at Antwerp by Johannes Grapheus in February 1531 (and at Paris by Christian Wechel the same year) with a dedication to Hermann von Wied dated Mechelen, January 1531, and a table of contents for Books II and III. The complete work was printed at Cologne by Johannes Soter, after the interruption described above, with a colophon of July 1533, in folio, under the title Henrici Cornelii Agrippae ab Nettesheym, a consiliis et archivis indiciarii sacrae Caesareae maiestatis, De occulta philosophia libri tres, with the imperial privilege on the title-page. Book I, on natural magic, has seventy-four chapters; Book II, on celestial or mathematical magic, sixty; Book III, on ceremonial or religious magic, sixty-five. The 1533 volume opens with Agrippa’s address to the reader, his dedicatory letter to Trithemius and the abbot’s reply, and the dedication to Hermann; further dedications to Hermann head Books II and III. It closes with an appendix containing two letters of 1527 to the Augustinian Aurelio d’Aquapendente, a letter of February 1528 “to a certain friend of the King’s court”, and the Censura sive retractatio de magia, the chapters of De vanitate on magic. The critical edition, which prints the 1533 text with the readings of the 1510 manuscript and identifies the sources chapter by chapter, is Perrone Compagni’s (Brill, 1992); the standard English translation was for three and a half centuries that of “J.F.” (1651), until the new translations of Paul Summers Young (2020–) and Eric Purdue (2021).73
The two versions. The manuscript that Agrippa sent to Würzburg survives (Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M.ch.q.50), and its comparison with the printed text, first exploited by Nauert and set out in full in the Brill edition, shows what twenty years of reading did to the book. The 1510 draft was a compendium shaped by Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico, with the three-world scheme, the theory of occult virtue, the numerology and a short third book already present; it circulated “imperfect and unpolished”, as Agrippa complained, “in Italy, in France, in Germany, through many men’s hands”, and in 1527 he told Aurelio that of the copies then in circulation “the two former [books] were deficient in many things, the third is wholly imperfect, and contains but a certain epitome of my writings”, promising “to set forth the whole work, being made entire and revised, reserving the key thereof for most intimate friends only”. Between the two versions he had read Ficino’s commentaries on Plato and Plotinus, Pico’s Conclusiones, Heptaplus and Disputationes, Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis, Gianfrancesco Pico’s De rerum praenotione, Erasmus, Ricius, Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica and Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi, and had acquired, in 1520, manuscripts of magic that had belonged to Trithemius. Book II received the mass of “technical” material — the tables, seals, images and mansions; Book III was recast most thoroughly, with new chapters on the Sephiroth, the divine names, the angels and demons, and the threefold soul; and the whole received, from Giorgio, what Perrone Compagni calls “a radically new approach to natural magic” and “a new metaphysical structure”. Agrippa acknowledged the seams: “we added some chapters, and we inserted many things … which the curious reader shall be able to understand by the inequality of the very phrase; for we were unwilling to begin the work anew and to unravel all that we had done, but to correct it, and put some flourish upon it”.74
The front matter. The address to the reader is Agrippa’s defence of the word in his title. Some readers, “of a crazy judgement”, will “cry out that I teach forbidden arts, sow the seed of heresies, offend pious ears and scandalise excellent wits; that I am a sorcerer, and superstitious, and devilish, who indeed am a magician: to whom I answer, that a magician doth not amongst learned men signify a sorcerer, or one that is superstitious, or devilish, but a wise man, a priest, a prophet; and that the Sibyls were magicianesses, and therefore prophesied most clearly of Christ; and that magicians, as wise men, by the wonderful secrets of the world, knew Christ the author of the world to be born, and came first of all to worship him”. Hostile readers are warned off in a sentence that later grimoire-makers loved to quote: “they are pernicious, and full of poison; the gate of Acheron is in this book; it speaks stones, let them take heed that it beat not out their brains”. The prudent reader, “if you have so much discretion of prudence as bees have in gathering honey”, may “read securely”, using what profits and leaving the rest, “for I do not approve of them, but declare them to you; but do not refuse other things, for they that look into the books of physicians do together with antidotes and medicines read also poisons”. Magic itself “teacheth many superfluous things and curious prodigies for ostentation”, to be left as empty; but what it does “for the profit of men, for the turning away of evil events, for the destroying of sorceries, for the curing of diseases, for the exterminating of phantasms, for the preserving of life, honour, fortune, may be done without offence to God or injury to religion”. Then the youth topos and the reckoning with De vanitate, quoted above: “I wrote this being scarce a young man … but being become a man, I retracted those things which I did being a boy, and in my book of the vanity and uncertainty of sciences I did for the most part retract this book.” The Trithemius letters follow (see Life), and then the dedication to Hermann, offering “a new work of most ancient and abstruse learning; I say a work of my curious youth, but a doctrine of antiquity, by none I dare say hitherto attempted to be restored”, and stating plainly that the reader “has the work not only of my youth but of my present age”.75
Book I: natural magic. The first two chapters define the three worlds and magic itself (see Thought). Chapters 3–8 treat the four elements and their threefold order: the pure and incorruptible elements of the first order; the compounded and changeable elements of the second, “which may by art be reduced to their pure simplicity”, the foundation of natural magic; and the “twice compounded” elements of the third order, “the infallible medium” or “soul of the middle nature”; with the rule that “he which shall know these qualities of the elements, and their mixtions, shall easily bring to pass such things that are wonderful and astonishing, and shall be perfect in magic”. The elements exist in everything, even in God, “as in the original and exemplary world all things are in all”, and the four infernal rivers are the elements in hell. Chapters 9–14 give the theory of occult virtue, the Ideas, the World Soul and the spirit of the world; chapters 15–21 the laws of sympathy and antipathy, the passage of virtue from thing to thing (the loadstone’s power infused into a ring, the drum of wolf-skin that silences the drum of lamb-skin), and the virtues that belong to a whole substance or to a part (the incorruptible bone luz). Chapters 22–33 are the great inventory of correspondences: the subjection of inferiors to superiors, the Solar things (gold, the lion, the phoenix, vervain), the Lunar (silver, crystal, dogs, cats “whose eyes become greater or less according to the course of the Moon”), the Saturnine (lead, the loadstone, mandrake, opium, the mole, the owl), and so on through Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury; the parts of plants (fruit from Jupiter, flowers from Venus, seed and bark from Mercury, roots from Saturn, wood from Mars, leaves from the Moon); the provinces of the planets; the signs and the fifteen fixed stars with their stones and herbs; and the “seals and characters” that every star impresses on natural things, with man as “the completest image of the whole universe”.76
Chapters 34–49 are operative. How to receive virtue from a star (as wood receives flame “by reason of sulphur, pitch and oil”); mixtures; the introduction of nobler forms and spontaneous generation, including the claim, made in the first person, that “by a hen sitting upon eggs may be generated a form like to a man, which I have seen, and know how to make”; the golden chain (ch. 37); the drawing down of intellectual gifts by “things manifest”, of which Hermes says “that an image rightly made of certain proper things, appropriated to any one certain angel, will presently be animated by that angel”; the animation of statues by the gods of the world; and then the catalogue of “bindings” (ch. 40) — “a binding of men into love or hatred, sickness or health … of thieves and robbers that they cannot steal … of ships, rivers, winds, lightnings, tempests” — effected “by sorceries, collyries, unguents, love-potions, by binding to and hanging up of things, by rings, by charms, by strong imaginations and passions, by images and characters, by enchantments and imprecations, by lights, by sound, by numbers, by words and names, invocations, sacrifices, by swearing, conjuring, consecrations, devotions”. The chapters that follow are the practical chapters that the Fourth Book and Francis Barrett later plundered: sorceries (menstrual blood, hippomanes, Pamphile’s ointment in Apuleius); suffumigations for each planet and sign (for the Sun “saffron, ambergris, musk, lignum-aloes … incorporated with the brain of an eagle, or the blood of a white cock”); collyries and unctions that make one “see the images of spirits in the air … as I know how to make of the gall of a man and the eyes of a black cat”; alligations and suspensions; rings made “when any star ascends fortunately” of the star’s metal, stone and herb; places; and light and colour, “first diffused from the mind of God into all things”.77
Chapters 50–60 concern the passage of virtue through the human body and mind: fascination, “a binding which comes from the spirit of the witch, through the eyes of him that is bewitched, entering to his heart”; observances and physiognomy; augury, auspices and prodigies; the divinations from the elements, geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy and pyromancy; resuscitation and long sleeps; dreams; and the chapter on melancholy (60), in which “a natural and white choler”, helped by Saturn, carries the mind first into imagination, where it “doth suddenly become a seat for inferior spirits” who teach manual arts, then into reason, where “middle spirits” teach natural and human things, and lastly into the understanding, where “sublime spirits” teach “the secrets of divine things”. Chapters 61–68 treat the inner senses, the eleven passions, the power of imagination over one’s own body and over others, faith as the condition of operation, and the union of the mind with the minds of the stars. Chapters 69–74, on speech, proper names, sentences, verses, charms, writing and letters, close the book with the theory of language summarised above and a folding table distributing the Greek and Latin letters to planets, signs and elements.78
Book II: celestial magic. The dedication explains the delay since 1531 by “the sudden and almost unexpected death of holy Margaret of Austria my princess” and by “the wickedness of some pulpit-sycophants and of some school-sophisters incessantly raging against me for a declamation I put forth concerning the vanity of things”. The book then proceeds as described under Thought: the necessity of mathematics (chs. 1–3), with its examples of automata, of the “reciprocal glasses” that show distant things and of the “brazen head made under the rising of Saturn”; the virtues of the numbers one to twelve with their scales (chs. 4–14), then of the numbers above twelve, the notation of numbers by the fingers and by the Roman, Greek and Hebrew letters “and certain other notes of magicians”, divination by the numbers of names, and the numbers consecrated to the elements and gods (chs. 15–21); the seven planetary tables with their seals, intelligences and spirits (ch. 22); geometrical figures (ch. 23); music, the voices and harmonies of the planets, the proportions of the human body and soul (chs. 24–28); the observation of the heavens — dignities, the fixed stars, the Sun and Moon, the twenty-eight mansions of the Moon, the planetary hours (chs. 29–34); and the astrological images, of the signs, faces and degrees, of the planets, of the head and tail of the dragon, of the mansions and of the fixed stars, with the images made “after the likeness of that which the mind of the worker desires” (chs. 35–50). Chapters 51–52 give the “characters” of the heavens, the writing called Malachim “by which all things are described and signified in the heaven for every knowing man to read”, and the characters drawn from the likeness of things (Saturn from a sickle, Venus from a looking-glass, the Moon from her horns); chapters 53–54 treat divinations and lots, whose root is astrology and whose virtue is the operator’s mind “carried forth into the excess of desire”. Chapters 55–59 argue, from the poets and philosophers, that the world and the heavens are alive and ensouled — “it would be absurd that all imperfect bodies and parts of the world, and every base animal, as flies and worms, should be worthy of a life, and have a life and soul, and the whole entire world … should have neither life nor soul” — and set out the Orphic names of the celestial souls, “not the names of evil deceiving spirits, but of natural and divine virtues, distributed to the world by the true God”. Chapter 60 ends the book with the ascent of the soul to the souls of the stars and the rule that “in the first place we must implore assistance from the first Author”.79
Book III: ceremonial magic. Dedicated to Hermann with the promise to disclose “those mysteries of divine and ceremonial magic which I have truly learned” from “the Isiaci, those old priests of the Egyptians, and Chaldeans, the ancient prophets of the Babylonians, the Kabbalists, the divine magicians of the Hebrews, also the Orpheans, Pythagoreans and Platonists”. The book falls into five movements. The first (chs. 1–6) is the theory of religion, secrecy and dignification, ending with the warnings quoted above; its second chapter enjoins silence — “whosoever therefore thou art that now desirest to study this science, keep silence and constantly conceal within the secret closets of your religious breast so holy a determination” — and announces that “you will pardon me if I pass over in silence many and the chiefest secret mysteries of ceremonial magic”, for “every magical experiment fleeth the public, seeks to be hid, is strengthened by silence, but is destroyed by publication”. The second (chs. 7–13) is a theology: God according to the ancient magicians and the philosophers, with Zoroaster’s definition, “the first of all those things which suffer neither decay nor corruption, unbegotten, never dying, without parts, and most like himself”; the Trinity as the Platonists knew it, “the father of the world”, “the Son and the first mind” and “the spirit or soul of the world”; the orthodox creed; the ten Sephiroth with their names, angels, spheres and intelligences; the divine names, Agla, Ararita, the seventy-two-letter Shem ha-Mephorash and the rule that “sacred words have not their power … from themselves”; the translation of the Tetragrammaton’s power into the name Jesus; and the “members of God”, the manifold powers “most simply abiding in God himself”, which a purified human body may come to house. The third movement (chs. 14–35) populates the intellectual world: the gods of the gentiles as the souls of the stars, worshipped lawfully with dulia though not with latria; the three kinds of intelligences, supercelestial, celestial and worldly, the last including the fiery, airy, watery and earthly spirits, “the gods of the woods, country gods, satyrs, familiars, fairies of the fountains”; the nine Dionysian orders and the Hebrew orders; the nine orders of evil spirits, from the “false gods” under Beelzebub to the “tempters and ensnarers” under Mammon, with the hope of Origen and the Kabbalists “that even some devils shall be saved”; the shadowy bodies of demons; the good and evil genius of every person and the threefold guardian, “one whereof is holy, another of the nativity, and the other of profession”; the language of angels, which if any is Hebrew; the names of spirits, the seven planetary angels, the twelve of the signs, the twenty-eight of the mansions, the four princes of the winds and the four kings of the evil spirits; the seventy-two angels and how to extract them; the calculation of names from the heavens and from the Kabbalistic tables; the three alphabets and the characters of spirits; the calling of good spirits and the binding of evil ones; the heroes and “terrestrial gods”, the blessed souls ruled by “the soul of the Messiah, that is Jesus Christ”, the apostles and disciples, and the kings and priests who are “mortal gods”.80
The fourth movement (chs. 36–52) is the doctrine of the soul and the ascent: man as the second image of God and microcosm; the threefold soul and the “soul standing and not falling”; the descent of the soul in its celestial vehicle and the gifts it receives from the planets and the angelic orders, “the degrees, the ladders, by the which men easily ascend to all kinds of powers”; the origin of evil “not from the malice of the influence, but from the evil disposition of the receiver”; the divine character imprinted on man; the opinions on the soul after death, including the Kabbalists’ teaching that souls “are revolved hither thrice, and no more”; necromancy, with its two kinds, necyomancy “raising the carcasses, which is not done without blood”, and sciomancy, “in which the calling up of the shadow only sufficeth”; the four frenzies; rapture, in which “if thou by leaving the body shalt pass into the spacious heavens, thou shalt be an immortal god”, with the shamans of Lapland who “can abstract themselves three whole days from their body”; dreams and the regimen for obtaining them; and sacred lots. The fifth movement (chs. 53–64) is the ascetic and liturgical discipline: cleanness of food, works, affections and garments (“white raiment and linen”); abstinence, fasting, chastity and solitude; penitence, “a spiritual martyrdom of the soul”, and confession; alms; outward expiations; adorations and vows; sacrifice; imprecations; the differences between prayers to God and to “inferior deities, as angels, stars, heroes”, which are to commemorate a scriptural precedent for the thing desired; consecrations, which infuse “a spiritual soul” into the matter of the work by “the virtue of the person himself consecrating, and the virtue of the prayer itself”, with the formulae for water, fire, oil, places, books and swords, “the sword of God, the rod of God, the staff of God, the vengeance of God”; the sacred things and observances of the Church, the Agnus Dei, bells and holy water; and the final observations — “in the first place implore God the Father, being one, that thou also mayest be one worthy of his favour; be clean, within and without, in a clean place”, and “to conclude, in all businesses put God before your eyes”.81
The conclusion. The sixty-fifth chapter is the key to the book’s manner, and Agrippa placed it last so that it would be read after everything else. “These are the things which for an introduction into magic we have collected out of the tradition of the ancients, and diversely compiled in this book, in short words, yet sufficient for those who are intelligent; some of these things are written in order, some without order, some things are delivered by fragments, some things are even hid, and left for the search of the intelligent … for we have delivered this art in such a manner that it may not be hid from the prudent and intelligent, and yet may not admit wicked and incredulous men to the mysteries of these secrets, but leave them destitute and astonished in the shade of ignorance and desperation. You therefore, sons of wisdom and learning, search diligently in this book, gathering together our dispersed intentions, which in divers places we have propounded, and what is hid in one place we make manifest in another … for you only have we written, whose mind is not corrupted, but regulated according to the right order of living, who in chastity and honesty and in sound faith fear and reverence God”. The wicked are told to keep away; the reader who fails is told to “accuse himself, who understandeth not our writings; for they are obscure, and covered with divers mysteries … therefore let no man be angry with me, if we have folded up the truth of this science with many enigmas, and dispersed it in divers places, for we have not hidden it from the wise, but from the wicked and ungodly”. The phrase dispersa intentio [dispersed intention], “dispersed intentions”, has become the name of Agrippa’s method, and of the interpretative problem he set his readers.82
The appendices. The two letters to Aurelio d’Aquapendente (Lyon, 24 September and 19 November 1527) tell the reader what to make of the book he has just read: that the writings of the magicians “are found vain, fictitious and false as often as they are practised according to the letter”; that “in us is the operator of miracles”; that the true occult philosophy is “to know God himself … and to pass into him by a whole image of likeness”; and that Agrippa himself, “a soldier, consecrated with man’s blood … bound to a most dear wife by the bond of flesh”, claims no such attainment, but only to be “a director, who waiting always at the doors, shows to others which way they must go”. The letter of 13 February 1528 denounces the French court for summoning “a certain master of spirits, that is a necromancer” from Germany to help against the Emperor — “see where their faith is placed, who seek for the preservation of a kingdom from devils” — while affirming that there are “natural sciences, metaphysical arts, occult ingenuities” that can lawfully “preserve kingdoms, dive into counsels, overcome enemies, deliver captives”, and a “theurgy” that belongs “only to a man of profound and perfect knowledge, and of a most pure life and faith”. The Censura is the eight chapters of De vanitate on magic, ending with the retraction; its colophon, “Anno M.D.XXXIII, in the month of July”, closes the volume. Placed where they are, the appendices tell the reader that the book is to be read twice: once as a treasury of operations, and once as a description of the mind that alone can perform them.83
Major themes. The descent of power through the three worlds and its ascent through the human mind; the unity of natural philosophy, mathematics and theology in a single “most perfect science”; the microcosm; correspondence, sympathy and the golden chain; number and name as the forms through which the divine order is impressed on things; religion as the completion of magic and faith as the root of miracles; dignification, purification and the “soul standing and not falling”; secrecy and the dispersed method.
Esoteric symbolism. The book’s images became the common stock of later Western esotericism: the three worlds and the ladder between them; the scales of correspondences from one to twelve; the seven planetary squares with their seals and the sigils of their intelligences and spirits; the figures of the human body inscribed in the square, the circle and the pentagram, with the planetary characters at the five points; the three secret alphabets, “Celestial”, “Malachim” and “the passing of the river”, and the “Theban” alphabet of Honorius; the seventy-two angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash; the images of the planets, faces and mansions; and the Tabula smaragdina’s “one thing” in the chapter on unity. Almost all of these were inherited — from the Picatrix, from Reuchlin, from Peter of Abano, from the Hermetic and Arabic image-books — but it was in this book that they were first assembled, systematised and given a metaphysical rationale, and it was from this book that Dee, Bruno, Fludd, Kircher, Barrett, Lévi, the Golden Dawn and Crowley took them.84
Relation to other works. The 1510 draft grew out of the Dôle lectures on Reuchlin and the Würzburg conversations; the 1533 revision drew on the Dialogus de homine, the De triplici ratione and the De originali peccato for its anthropology, and on the reading of the 1520s for its Kabbalah and its Platonism. The Censura binds it to De vanitate; the letters to Aurelio bind it to the correspondence; the Ad lectorem answers the Louvain and Cologne censors. It stands to Ficino’s De vita as a summa stands to a treatise, and to the medieval books of magic that it names in the letter to Trithemius — Bacon, “Robert an Englishman”, Peter of Abano, Albertus, Arnald, “Picatrix the Spaniard”, Cecco d’Ascoli — as a reformation stands to what it reforms.
Takeaway. Yates called it “the indispensable handbook of Renaissance Magia and Cabala”, and it is that; but the handbook is set inside a doctrine of the person, and the doctrine, not the handbook, is what its author asked to be read. Grafton’s judgement may stand for the modern consensus: a book that made “a desk reference for all learned magicians” out of centuries of scattered practice, written by a man who believed that the practice was nothing without the reborn mind that used it.85
Apologia adversus calumnias and Querela super calumnia (Written 1531; Printed 1533) [Apology Against Calumnies and Complaint Concerning Calumny]#
At a glance. Apology against the Calumnies brought against him, on account of the Declamation on the Vanity of the Sciences, by certain Louvain theologasters, dedicated to Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, papal legate; and Complaint of the Calumny wickedly and treacherously laid before the Emperor’s Majesty by certain most villainous sycophants on account of the same Declamation. Both were written at Mechelen and Bonn after the Louvain censure of 1531 — the Apologia was delivered to the President of the Privy Council by the end of February — and printed together in 1533, probably at Cologne. The Louvain articles, forty-three in number, are printed with the Apologia in the Appendix apologetica of the Opera.86
Argument. The Apologia answers the articles one by one, beginning with the first, which censured the opening assertion that nothing is more pernicious to the soul than the sciences themselves. Its governing principle is a theory of the genre: a declamatio does not bind its author to every proposition it advances; it says what is fitting to a declamation, some things seriously, some in jest, some by way of exercise; and to extract propositions from it as if from a treatise is to misread it. Around this Agrippa builds a defence of the book’s evangelical intention, a reminder of the Sorbonne’s earlier inconsistency, and a counter-attack on the “sophists” whose swearing of disciples to Aristotle and Thomas the book had denounced. The Querela is a complaint in the strict sense: it names the courtiers who had used the book to have his imperial stipend and post withdrawn and asks the Emperor for redress.
Relation to other works. The Apologia is the hermeneutic key that van der Poel uses to read all of Agrippa’s declamations, De nobilitate and De vanitate above all, as serious argument in a rhetorical form; it should be read with the Ad lectorem of 1533, written in the same months, which applies the same logic to the magical book.
Takeaway. Agrippa’s fullest statement of how he wished to be read: as a declaimer whose freedom is the freedom of the genre and whose seriousness is the seriousness of the Gospel.
De beatissimae Annae monogamia ac unico puerperio propositiones abbreviatae et articulatae (1534) [Abbreviated and Articulated Propositions on the Single Marriage and Single Childbearing of the Most Blessed Anne]#
At a glance. Abbreviated and Articulated Propositions on the Single Marriage and Single Childbearing of the Most Blessed Anne, with a Defensio propositionum praenominatarum contra quendam Dominicastrum, “a defence of the aforesaid propositions against a certain Dominicaster”, and related letters. Printed at Cologne in 1534 and reprinted in the Appendix apologetica of the Opera.87
Argument. The propositions abbreviate Lefèvre d’Étaples’s argument against the legend that St Anne married three times and bore three Marys: that Scripture and the earliest tradition know only one Anne, one marriage and one daughter, the Virgin, and that the “trinubium” is a late fable. The Defensio is a sarcastic reply to the Dominican prior who had attacked Agrippa at Metz fifteen years before, and it contains, in passing, the phrase occultissimum negotium for the London mission of 1510 and other autobiographical fragments on which the biographers depend.
Relation to other works. It closes the Metz quarrel of 1518–1520 and shows the humanist critic of legend at work alongside the author of De occulta philosophia; Erasmus, who had been asked to intervene, kept his distance.
Takeaway. A late, combative footnote to the St Anne controversy, more valuable now for its biographical asides than for its argument.
Dialogus de vanitate scientiarum et ruina Christianae religionis (1534) [Dialogue on the Vanity of the Sciences and the Ruin of the Christian Religion]#
At a glance. Dialogue on the Vanity of the Sciences and the Ruin of the Christian Religion, attributed on its title-page to “Godoschalcus Moncordius”, a Cistercian, and printed probably by Soter in 1534; edited by Zambelli in 1965 as a work of Agrippa’s.88
Argument. A defence of the declamation in dialogue form, in which the objections of its censors are put and answered and the ruin of Christian religion is laid at the door of the schools rather than of those who doubt them. Its attribution to Agrippa, accepted by Zambelli and treated as probable by Perrone Compagni, rests on its content, its printer and its date.
Takeaway. If it is his, the last word of Agrippa’s decade-long defence of De vanitate, and evidence that he still thought the sceptical book worth defending in the year after the magical one appeared.
Works Printed After His Death, or Never Printed#
The Orationes decem and the coronation history. Ten orations were printed with the letters in the Opera: the inaugural lecture on Plato’s Symposium at Pavia (1512), “containing the praise of love”, divine and human; the oration on Hermes Trismegistus delivered at Pavia in 1515 to open the course on the Pimander, “or on the wisdom and power of God”, in which the “true Pimander” is identified with Christ, the “angel of counsel” — the text that Zambelli made the centrepiece of her reading of Agrippa’s religion and that Hanegraaff reads as Lazzarellian, since it identifies the Hermetic revealer with “our Lord the crucified Nazarene Jesus Christ”; an oration for a candidate taking the doctorate; the oration to the lords of Metz on his acceptance as their advocate and orator (1518) and three others written for the city; an oration for a Carmelite kinsman at Paris; one for the son of Christian II of Denmark at the Emperor’s coming (1531); and the funeral oration for Margaret of Austria (Mechelen, December 1530 or early 1531). With them was printed the Historia de duplici coronatione Caroli V, Agrippa’s account, as imperial historiographer, of the Emperor’s coronation with the iron and the imperial crowns at Bologna in February 1530.89
The Epistolarum ad familiares libri septem. Some five hundred letters to and from Agrippa, from March 1507 to July 1533, arranged in seven books and first printed in the Opera. They are the principal source for his life, and Auguste Prost, Henry Morley and Nauert built their biographies on them; but they are also a body of thought. The letters to Trithemius and the abbot’s reply are the manifesto of the reformed magic; the two letters to Aurelio and the letter on the French necromancer, printed by Agrippa himself in 1533, are its interior gloss; the Metz letters to Wichwael, Dieudonné and Cantiuncula on original sin, St Anne and the witch trial show the humanist theologian at work; the Lyon and Paris letters of 1526–1528 record the composition of De vanitate and the collapse of his French fortunes; the Antwerp letters of 1529 the plague and his wife’s death; and the last two books, 1531–1533, the Louvain affair, the correspondence with Erasmus and Campeggio, and the printing of De occulta philosophia. Agrippa’s plea to the Cologne council of 11 January 1533 belongs with them. No letter mentions Faust; the association is later legend.90
The Dialogus de homine. A fragmentary dialogue on man as the image of God, begun at Pavia or Casale in 1515–1516 for William Paleologus, copied by Dieudonné at Metz and cited in De vanitate (ch. 52) as “a dialogue which we have written of man”. It treats the three worlds in man and the dignity of body and soul, and supplied the nucleus of chapter 36 of Book III of De occulta philosophia. Edited by Zambelli (1958) and, with commentary, by Gurashi (2021).91
The geomancy. A short treatise on geomancy, printed in the Opera and translated by Robert Turner in his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy volume (1655), is Agrippa’s own; it is the work he disowned in De vanitate as “not less crowded with lies” than the geomancies he criticised. It defines geomancy as “an art of divination whereby the judgement may be rendered by lot, or destiny, to every question of every thing whatsoever”, by points cast at random from which figures are formed “according to the reason or rule of equality or inequality” and reduced to the celestial figures; distinguishes two “radical virtues”, one in ceremonies that provoke the spirits of the earth, the other, “by far more true and pure”, in “the very soul itself of the projector”, so that “this art hath the same radix with the art of astrological questions”; and sets out the sixteen figures with their planetary and zodiacal attributions — Agrippa’s own, “far more true and rational” than “that which vulgarly is used” — and the construction of the Mothers, Daughters, Nieces, Witnesses and Judge.92
The spurious Fourth Book. In 1559, at Marburg, there appeared a Liber quartus de occulta philosophia, seu de ceremoniis magicis, attributed to Agrippa, together with the Heptameron ascribed to Peter of Abano. It presents itself as “a complement and key of our other books of occult philosophy and of all magical operations”, written because in those books the matter was treated “rather theorically than practically”, and it mechanises the last chapters of Book III: the calculation of the names of planetary “presidents” and of the “princes of the evil spirits”, their characters, the “shapes familiar to the spirits” of each planet, the pentacles, the consecrations, the Liber spirituum — “a book of evil spirits, ceremoniously to be composed in their name and order” and buried for three days in the middle of the circle — the seven-day retreat, the circle drawn “with a sanctified coal”, the triangle outside the circle for lying spirits, the threefold conjuration “from stronger to stronger, using objurgations, contumelies, cursings and punishments”, and the licence to depart, with a necromantic coda in churchyards. Johann Weyer, who had lived in Agrippa’s house, denounced it as a forgery in De praestigiis daemonum (1563); Thomas Willard has proposed the French Paracelsian Jacques Gohory as its author. It was nevertheless appended to the Lyon editions of the Three Books from the 1560s and to the Opera, translated by Robert Turner in 1655 in a volume that also contained the Heptameron, Georg Pictorius’s Isagoge on sublunary spirits, Gerard of Cremona’s astronomical geomancy and the Arbatel, and it became, with the Heptameron, the template of later grimoire ceremonial and the source of Agrippa’s reputation as the author of a manual of conjuration.93
The Opera and the modern editions. Agrippa’s collected works appeared in two volumes “at Lyon, per Beringos fratres”, undated; the imprint is false, and Zambelli attributed the edition to Tommaso Guarino of Basel about 1580. The first volume contains the Three Books with the spurious Fourth Book, the Heptameron, the geomancy, the Isagoge, the Arbatel and other magical texts; the second, De vanitate, the Apologia and Querela, the Llull commentary, the De triplici ratione, De nobilitate, Dehortatio, Expostulatio, De sacramento matrimonii, De originali peccato, the sermon on St Antony, the plague tracts, the seven books of letters, the ten orations and the coronation history; some issues add an Appendix apologetica with the Louvain articles and the St Anne propositions. It was reissued into the seventeenth century and reprinted by Olms (1970) with an introduction by Richard Popkin. The 1533 De occulta philosophia was reproduced in facsimile by Karl Anton Nowotny (1967), with commentary, and edited critically by Perrone Compagni (1992); De nobilitate by Antonioli, Béné and Sauvage (1990) and Rabil (1996); De triplici ratione by Perrone Compagni (2005); the Dialogus de homine by Zambelli (1958) and Gurashi (2021); the Dialogus de vanitate by Zambelli (1965); the Dehortatio and De originali peccato by Gurashi (2024); De vanitate in Sanford’s translation by Dunn (1974) and in Domenichi’s by Tiziana Provvidera (2004). In English the Three Books have been read in J.F.’s translation of 1651, reprinted in Willis Whitehead’s edition of Book I as The Philosophy of Natural Magic (1897), in Donald Tyson’s annotated edition (1993), which has made the book the working manual of contemporary ceremonial and astrological magic, and in Joseph Peterson’s online edition corrected against the Latin (2000); Purdue’s translation of 2021, made from Perrone Compagni’s text, corrects the astrological and technical errors of 1651 and restores the original figures. French translations appeared at The Hague in 1727 and, by A. Levasseur, at Paris in 1910–1911; a German version by Friedrich Barth in 1855.94
Reception and Significance#
In his lifetime Agrippa was censured for the sceptical book and obstructed over the magical one, but he was not prosecuted for magic. The Louvain and Sorbonne condemnations of 1531 concerned De vanitate; the Cologne inquisitor’s action of 1532–1533 was an attempt to stop a printing, defeated by an archbishop; and van der Poel’s finding stands, that no evidence exists that Agrippa was seriously accused, let alone persecuted, for his interest in or practice of the occult arts while he lived. Erasmus admired the “courage” and “eloquence” of De vanitate and told him to get out of the quarrel. Ortwin Gratius’s Lamentationes obscurorum virorum (1518) had already mocked him as “Agrippa Stygianus”. The transformation of the humanist into the sorcerer was the work of the generation after his death.95
It began with Paolo Giovio’s Elogia (1546), which reported that Agrippa had died in a mean inn at Lyon attended by “an evil genius in the shape of a black dog”, that on his deathbed he had torn from the animal’s neck a collar studded with nails in magical patterns and cried “Begone, accursed beast, that hast utterly destroyed me!”, and that the dog had plunged into the Saône. Melanchthon, lecturing at Wittenberg in the 1550s, paired Faustus’s devil-dog with “that scoundrel who wrote De vanitate artium”, and Johannes Gast gave Faustus a devil-dog of his own; so the two legends grew up together, and Agrippa became, in Keefer’s phrase, a “double presence” in the Faustian century. Weyer, who had walked the dog on a leash as Agrippa’s famulus, gave its name (Monsieur), its size (moderate), its colour (black) and its habit of sleeping under its master’s bedclothes, and dismissed the demon “from the emptiest rumour of the crowd”; he also exposed the Fourth Book as a forgery. It made no difference. Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie (1580) declared that “there is no man of sound judgement who does not confess, after reading Agrippa’s books, that he was one of the greatest sorcerers in the world”, and attacked Weyer for defending him; André Thevet repeated the dog; Martín Del Rio’s Disquisitiones magicae (1599–1600) added the story of the lodger at Louvain who opened Agrippa’s conjuring book, was strangled by the demon it summoned, and whose corpse Agrippa made the demon walk through the market-place before letting it fall, and the story of the coins he paid innkeepers that turned to horn. Gabriel Naudé defended him in the Apologie pour tous les grands personnages faussement soupçonnez de magie (1625), and the historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bayle among them, weighed the evidence; but the legend had by then a life of its own, and in Breton folklore “l’Agrippa” became the name of a living grimoire, chained and locked, that only a priest could handle.96
The literary afterlife runs beside the legend. Rabelais’s Her Trippa in the Tiers Livre (1546), the diviner who lists every “-mancy” known to man yet cannot see that he is a cuckold, is a portrait of the physician of Lyon and a parody of the divinatory chapters of De vanitate. Montaigne drew on the same book in the Apology for Raymond Sebond, and through Montaigne it entered the history of scepticism; Sidney remarked in the Defence of Poesy that “Agrippa will be as merry in showing the vanity of science as Erasmus was in commending of folly”. Marlowe’s Faustus, whose opening speeches echo De occulta philosophia before the name is spoken, resolves to “be as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadows made all Europe honour him”; Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (1594) has Agrippa at Wittenberg conjure Cicero to deliver the Pro Roscio for Erasmus and More, show Charles V the Nine Worthies and show Surrey his Geraldine in a mirror; Yates read Spenser, Chapman and Shakespeare through him. Goethe’s Faust and his poodle descend, by way of Gast and Melanchthon, from the same stock. And in Frankenstein (1818) the thirteen-year-old Victor “chanced to find a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa” at Thonon, was told by his father that it was “sad trash”, and went on to Ingolstadt with “Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, who had long reigned the lords of my imagination” — the modern myth of forbidden knowledge attached, at its origin, to Agrippa’s name.97
Among the magicians the influence was direct and lasting. John Dee owned and used the Three Books; Yates made his Monas hieroglyphica and his angelic conversations Agrippan, and Nicholas Clulee and Deborah Harkness have qualified but not dissolved the connection. Giordano Bruno’s De magia and Theses de magia draw heavily on Agrippa, and Zambelli has documented Bruno as a reader of Agrippa’s prohibited books. Thomas Vaughan, who wrote the encomium for the 1651 translation (“But his three books with the three worlds shall stand”), read Agrippa’s alchemy as a doctrine of the purification of elementary earth. Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher used him. The Portuguese Inquisition tried a man in 1581 for owning “a very handsome book”, the De occulta philosophia. In the age of occultism the book was quarried rather than read: Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801) is largely Agrippa and the Fourth Book with the seams hidden; Éliphas Lévi ranked him among the great initiates while criticising him, and took from II.27 the pentagram inscribed in the human figure that became the emblem of the microcosm; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn put the planetary squares and sigils of II.22 and the three alphabets of III.30 into its curriculum, and Crowley’s 777 (1909) is a descendant, through Mathers, of the scales of II.4–14. The twentieth-century revival of practical Renaissance magic has run through the same book: Tyson’s annotated edition of 1993 made it the working manual of contemporary ceremonial and “traditional astrological” magic, and Purdue’s translation of 2021, made from the critical Latin text, has given practitioners for the first time a version free of the errors of 1651.98
The scholarly reception is a history of the originality debate summarised under Thought. Thorndike’s dismissal of 1941 was answered by Walker’s account of 1958, which gave Agrippa a place in the history of Ficinian magic as the man who exposed its demonic implications, and by Nauert’s articles of 1957 and 1959 and monograph of 1965, which made him a case study in the late Renaissance “crisis” of confidence in reason. Yates’s Giordano Bruno (1964) and Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) made him the indispensable transmitter of “Magia and Cabala” to England and the model of the Christian Kabbalist, and lamented his fate as “the scapegoat of the whole movement, hounded as a black magician”. Zambelli’s studies from 1965 onward, based on unpublished letters and manuscripts, replaced the oscillating sceptic with a “critical magus” of radical religious sympathies; Bowen and Korkowski read De vanitate as paradox; Keefer’s “Agrippa’s Dilemma” (1988) located the ambivalence in the doctrine of Hermetic rebirth rather than in biography. The 1990s brought the critical edition (Perrone Compagni, 1992), the humanist-theological reading of the declamations (van der Poel, 1997) and Brann’s study of Trithemius; the 2000s Lehrich’s Language of Demons and Angels (2003), the first book-length study of the De occulta philosophia as a coherent system, Hanegraaff’s “Better than Magic” (2009), which relocated its centre in Lazzarelli, Zambelli’s White Magic, Black Magic (2007), and Michaela Valente’s entry in the Brill Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (2005), which set out the biography, the structure of the three books as “a neoplatonic credo”, the debt to “lesser-known figures like Lazzarelli”, and the resolution of the apparent contradiction through Agrippa’s distinction of faith and reason. Since then Klaassen (2013) has recovered the medieval ritual-magic base beneath the Renaissance vocabulary; Putnik has traced the two models of ascension, the “cosmic ladder” of words and the reception “from black magician to proto-feminist”; Gurashi has re-edited the early theological works and read the whole œuvre as a militant humanism of the imago Dei; Hoorens and Renders have reassessed the witch-trial hero; and Grafton’s Magus (2023) has placed Agrippa at the end of a history of the learned magician as a craft-intellectual type, the man who gave the practice a system. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry by Perrone Compagni (2017, revised 2025) is the current summary.99
Agrippa’s significance for the history of Western esotericism is of three kinds. He is the author of its most influential single book, the text through which the magic of the Florentine Platonists, the Kabbalah of Pico and Reuchlin, the image-magic of the Arabs and the ritual magic of the medieval clerics were transmitted, as one system, to every later century. He is the clearest early example of the figure that the later tradition would call the magus, the learned man who claims that the powers of nature and heaven are available to a purified mind, and the first to make that claim the explicit foundation of a magical system. And he is the test case for the relation between esoteric knowledge and religious doubt, the man who wrote the summa of magic and the summa of scepticism, and who insisted, against four centuries of readers who preferred one or the other, that a Christian could hold both.100
Bibliography#
Primary#
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus declamatio, with De sacramento matrimonii declamatio, De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum, Dehortatio gentilis theologiae, De originali peccato, Expostulatio … cum Ioanne Catilineti, Sermo de inventione reliquiarum beati Antonii and Regimen adversus pestilentiam. Antwerp: Michael Hillenius, 1529.
——. De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio. Antwerp: Johannes Grapheus, 1530.
——. In artem brevem Raymundi Lullii commentaria. Cologne: Johannes Soter, 1531.
——. De occulta philosophia liber primus. Antwerp: Johannes Grapheus, 1531; Paris: Christian Wechel, 1531.
——. De occulta philosophia libri tres. [Cologne: Johannes Soter], July 1533. Facsimile, ed. Karl Anton Nowotny. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1967.
——. Apologia adversus calumnias propter declamationem De vanitate scientiarum et excellentia verbi Dei sibi per aliquos Lovanienses theologistas intentatas, with Querela super calumnia. [Cologne], 1533.
——. De beatissimae Annae monogamia ac unico puerperio propositiones abbreviatae et articulatae, with Defensio propositionum praenominatarum contra quendam Dominicastrum. Cologne, 1534.
——. [attributed]. Dialogus de vanitate scientiarum et ruina Christianae religionis. [Cologne: Soter], 1534. Ed. Paola Zambelli, Rinascimento n.s. 5 (1965), 249–294.
——. Ein Sendtbrieff an Burgermeister unnd Raht der Stat Cöln wider die Sophisten. Strasbourg, 1535.
——. [spurious]. Liber quartus de occulta philosophia, seu de ceremoniis magicis; cui accesserunt Elementa magica Petri de Abano. Marburg, 1559.
——. Opera. 2 vols. Lyon: “per Beringos fratres”, n.d. [Basel?, c. 1580]. Reprint, with an introduction by Richard H. Popkin, Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1970. (Contains the Epistolarum ad familiares libri septem, the Orationes decem, the Historia de duplici coronatione Caroli V and the geomancy.)
——. Dialogus de homine. Ed. Paola Zambelli, Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 13 (1958), 47–71; ed. Dario Gurashi, in In deifico speculo (2021), 184–201.
——. De occulta philosophia libri tres. Ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni. Studies in the History of Christian Thought 48. Leiden: Brill, 1992.
——. De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus. Ed. Roland Antonioli, Charles Béné and Odette Sauvage. Geneva: Droz, 1990.
——. De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum. Ed. and trans. Vittoria Perrone Compagni, in Ermetismo e cristianesimo in Agrippa: Il De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum. Florence: Polistampa, 2005.
——. Dehortatio gentilis theologiae and De originali peccato. Ed. Dario Gurashi, in Rinascimento militante: Studi sulla filosofia di Agrippa von Nettesheim. Padua: CLEUP, 2024.
English translations
Clapham, David (trans.), The Commendation of Matrimony. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1540.
——. A Treatise of the Nobility and Excellency of Womankind. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542.
Sanford, James (trans.), Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences. London: Henry Wykes, 1569; ed. Catherine M. Dunn, Northridge: California State University, 1974.
J.F. [John French] (trans.), Three Books of Occult Philosophy. London: R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651. Ed. Donald Tyson, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, St Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1993; online edition ed. Joseph H. Peterson, esotericarchives.com, 2000.
Fleetwood, Edward (trans.), The Glory of Women. London: Robert Ibbitson, 1652.
Turner, Robert (trans.), Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, with Of Geomancy, the Heptameron, the Isagoge, the astronomical geomancy and the Arbatel. London, 1655.
Care, Henry (trans.), Female Pre-eminence: or, The Dignity and Excellency of that Sex, above the Male. London: for Henry Million, 1670.
The Vanity of Arts and Sciences. London: J.C. for Samuel Speed, 1676.
Whitehead, Willis F. (ed.), The Philosophy of Natural Magic. Chicago: Hahn & Whitehead, 1897.
Rabil, Albert, Jr. (ed. and trans.), Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Young, Paul Summers (trans.), De occulta philosophia. 4 vols. Black Letter Press, 2020–.
Purdue, Eric (trans.), Three Books of Occult Philosophy. 3 vols. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2021.
Secondary#
Backus, Irena, “Agrippa on ‘Human Knowledge of God’ and ‘Human Knowledge of the External World’,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 65:2 (1983), 147–159.
Baron, Frank, Faustus on Trial: The Origins of Johann Spies’s “Historia” in an Age of Witch Hunting. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992.
Blum, Paul Richard, and Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, “Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535): Philosophical Magic, Empiricism, and Skepticism,” in P. R. Blum (ed.), Philosophers of the Renaissance. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010, 124–132.
Bowen, Barbara C., “Cornelius Agrippa’s De vanitate: Polemic or Paradox?” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 34:2 (1972), 249–256.
Brann, Noel L., Trithemius and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Calder, I. R. F., “A Note on Magic Squares in the Philosophy of Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949), 196–199.
Clulee, Nicholas H., John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion. London: Routledge, 1988.
Copenhaver, Brian P., Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Dagron, Tristan, “Secrets de la nature et mystères divins: Corneille Agrippa lecteur de Pic,” in Dominique de Courcelles (ed.), D’un principe philosophique à un genre littéraire: les “Secrets”. Paris: Champion, 2005, 105–132.
Grafton, Anthony, Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023.
Gurashi, Dario, “Religion and Ideology in the Young Agrippa: Notes on the Intellectual Vocation,” Mediterranea 5 (2020), 153–192.
——. In deifico speculo: Agrippa’s Humanism. Trans. Brian McNeil. Paderborn: Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021.
——. “Reason and Regeneration: A Study on Agrippa’s De originali peccato,” Mediterranea 7 (2022), 519–568.
——. Rinascimento militante: Studi sulla filosofia di Agrippa von Nettesheim. Padua: CLEUP, 2024.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J., “Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and Lazzarellian Hermetism,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4:1 (2009), 1–25.
——. “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa,” in Christopher Partridge (ed.), The Occult World. London: Routledge, 2015, 92–99.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J., and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005.
Harkness, Deborah E., John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Hoorens, Vera, and Hans Renders, “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Witchcraft: A Reappraisal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43:1 (2012), 3–18.
Jordan, Constance, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Keefer, Michael H., “Agrippa’s Dilemma: Hermetic ‘Rebirth’ and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia,” Renaissance Quarterly 41:4 (1988), 614–653.
——. “Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius (1486–1535),” in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 1. London: Routledge, 1998, 130–133.
——. “Cornelius Agrippa’s Double Presence in the Faustian Century,” in J. M. van der Laan and Andrew Weeks (eds.), The Faustian Century: German Literature and Culture in the Age of Luther and Faustus. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013, 67–91.
Klaassen, Frank, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013.
Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. London: Nelson, 1964.
Korkowski, Eugene, “Agrippa as Ironist,” Neophilologus 60:4 (1976), 594–607.
Lehrich, Christopher I., The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 119. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
Leitão, José Vieira, “A Very Handsome Book: A Case Study on the Reception of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Portugal,” Melancolia 5 (2020), 54–80.
Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Morley, Henry, Cornelius Agrippa: The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Doctor and Knight, Commonly Known as a Magician. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1856.
Müller-Jahncke, Wolf-Dieter, “The Attitude of Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) towards Alchemy,” Ambix 22 (1975), 134–150.
Nauert, Charles G., Jr., “Magic and Skepticism in Agrippa’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 18:2 (1957), 161–182.
——. “Agrippa in Renaissance Italy: The Esoteric Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 6 (1959), 195–222.
——. Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought. Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences 55. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965.
Newman, Barbara, “Renaissance Feminism and Esoteric Theology: The Case of Cornelius Agrippa,” Viator 24 (1993), 337–356.
Newman, William R., “Thomas Vaughan as an Interpreter of Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Ambix 29:3 (1982), 125–140.
Perrone Compagni, Vittoria, “Picatrix latinus: Concezioni filosofico-religiose e prassi magica,” Medioevo 1 (1975), 237–338.
——. “Una fonte di Cornelio Agrippa: il De harmonia mundi di Francesco Giorgio Veneto,” Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia, Università di Firenze 4 (1982), 45–74.
——. “Riforma della magia e riforme della cultura in Agrippa,” I castelli di Yale 2 (1997), 115–140.
——. “‘Dispersa intentio’: Alchemy, Magic and Scepticism in Agrippa,” Early Science and Medicine 5:2 (2000), 160–177.
——. “Astrologia e filosofia occulta in Agrippa,” Rinascimento n.s. 41 (2001), 93–111.
——. Ermetismo e cristianesimo in Agrippa: Il De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum. Florence: Polistampa, 2005.
——. “L’innocenza di Eva: Retorica e teologia nel De nobilitate foeminei sexus di Agrippa,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 12:1 (2006), 59–80.
——. “Il De occulta philosophia di Cornelio Agrippa: Parole chiave: uomo-microcosmo, prisca theologia, cabala, magia,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 13:2 (2007), 429–448.
——. “‘Tutius ignorare quam scire’: Cornelius Agrippa and Scepticism,” in Gianni Paganini and José R. Maia Neto (eds.), Renaissance Scepticisms. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009, 91–110.
——. “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2017; revised 2025.
Popkin, Richard H., The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960; expanded as The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Prost, Auguste, Les sciences et les arts occultes au XVIe siècle: Corneille Agrippa, sa vie et ses œuvres. 2 vols. Paris: Champion, 1881–1882.
Putnik, Noel, The Pious Impiety of Agrippa’s Magic. Saarbrücken: VDM, 2010.
——. “Agrippa’s Cosmic Ladder: Building a World with Words in the De occulta philosophia,” in Peter J. Forshaw (ed.), Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism. Aries Book Series 23. Leiden: Brill, 2017, 81–102.
——. Obtinere Mentem Divinam: The Spiritual Anthropology of Cornelius Agrippa. PhD dissertation, Central European University, Budapest, 2017.
——. “Agrippa’s Magical Piety and the Insufficiency of the Revelation,” in Fidele Signaculum: Writings in Honour of György Endre Szőnyi. Szeged: University of Szeged, 2022, 849–865.
——. “From Black Magician to Proto-Feminist: The Reception of Cornelius Agrippa’s Oeuvre Through the Centuries,” Etnoantropološki problemi 19:2 (2024), 401–425.
Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, vol. 1: 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2012.
Secret, François, “L’originalité du De occulta philosophia,” Charis: Archives de l’Unicorne 2 (1990), 57–87.
Strazzoni, Andrea, “Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius,” in Marco Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. Cham: Springer, 2022.
Thorndike, Lynn, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. V: The Sixteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941, ch. 8.
Traninger, Anita, Mühelose Wissenschaft: Lullismus und Rhetorik in den deutschsprachigen Ländern der Frühen Neuzeit. Munich: Fink, 2001.
Valente, Michaela, “Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill, 2005, 4–8.
——. Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022.
van der Poel, Marc, Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and His Declamations. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 77. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Walker, D. P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London: Warburg Institute, 1958.
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——. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
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——. “Cornelio Agrippa, Erasmo e la teologia umanistica,” Rinascimento n.s. 10 (1970), 29–88.
——. “Cornelio Agrippa, Sisto da Siena e gli inquisitori,” Memorie Domenicane n.s. 3 (1972), 146–164.
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——. White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance: From Ficino, Pico, Della Porta to Trithemius, Agrippa, Bruno. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
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——. Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2003, ch. 3.
Guided Inquiry
Questions for Socrates
12 questions grounded in this entry open directly in Socrates with Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa as the reading context.
Faith, Reason, and the Reborn Mind
- When Agrippa calls magical writings vain when practiced “according to the letter,” yet insists that “in us is the operator of miracles,” is he retracting magic—or relocating it from procedure to a transformed person?→
- If faith is prior to reason and reason may not disturb faith, what genuine work remains for reason—especially when Agrippa also calls it free?→
- If the immortal mind never sins and the lower soul always tends toward evil, where does moral responsibility reside?→
- Does Agrippa’s requirement of natural, meritorious, and sacramental dignity make magical knowledge an ethical achievement, an institutional privilege, or both?→
Nature, Correspondence, and Language
- If occult qualities are known through experience while their causes remain beyond reason, what separates Agrippa’s natural magic from disciplined empiricism—or from an untestable theory?→
- Is Agrippa’s chain of sympathy an explanation of causation or a metaphor for cosmic unity—and what evidence could distinguish the two?→
- When Agrippa says strong belief can produce effects even in false works, does efficacy count as evidence of truth?→
- If names possess both natural and conventional meanings, when could a name be naturally true—and who could determine that?→
Authority, Genre, and Afterlives
- Agrippa challenged inherited witchcraft by appealing to baptism; does the Woippy case show theology restraining persecution, or merely one religious authority defeating another?→
- If De nobilitate is both a paradoxical declamation and a challenge to women’s legal and educational subordination, how should its rhetorical genre affect our judgment of its seriousness?→
- When nearly every component of De occulta philosophia has a traceable source, can arranging inherited materials into a new metaphysical system itself constitute originality?→
- Why did the demon-dog legend and literary image of forbidden knowledge outlast Agrippa’s historical identity—and what does that reveal about how traditions create their authors?→
Source ApparatusNotes100 notes
- ↩
Jean Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1580), quoted in Michael H. Keefer, “Cornelius Agrippa’s Double Presence in the Faustian Century,” in J. M. van der Laan and Andrew Weeks (eds.), The Faustian Century: German Literature and Culture in the Age of Luther and Faustus (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 67–91; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (A-text, 1604), I.i. The characterisation of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia as pars destruens and pars construens is Vittoria Perrone Compagni’s: “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 15 February 2017; substantive revision 28 March 2025). The entry on Agrippa in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 4–8, is by Michaela Valente and is cited below as “the Brill dictionary”. Unless otherwise stated, quotations from De occulta philosophia are from the English translation by “J.F.” (Three Books of Occult Philosophy, London: R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651), with spelling and punctuation modernised and chapter numbers those of the 1533 edition; quotations from De vanitate are from the anonymous translation of 1676 (The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, London: J.C. for Samuel Speed), similarly modernised.
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Perrone Compagni, SEP entry (as in n. 1), §1; Heinrich Grimm, “Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 1 (1953), 105–106 (“Der Adel war erdichtet”); Auguste Prost, Les sciences et les arts occultes au XVIe siècle: Corneille Agrippa, sa vie et ses œuvres, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1881–1882), I, 170–174, who first showed that the family name was Cornelis and that “Agrippa” derives from Colonia Agrippina; Martin Bock, “Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Portal Rheinische Geschichte (Landschaftsverband Rheinland, 2018; revised 2025), citing the university matriculation register for “Henricus de Nettesheym”, 22 July 1499. Agrippa’s claims about his ancestors and his service to Maximilian are in Epistolae VI.18 and VII.21 (Opera, II, 971, 1021), quoted by Henry Morley, Cornelius Agrippa: The Life of Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1856), I, 3 n.; his boyhood astrology in De vanitate, ch. 31. The birthday of 14 September appears in every modern reference work but in none of the nineteenth-century documentary biographies (Prost gives only “né à Cologne en 1486”); it is best treated as traditional. The Brill dictionary’s headword gives Nettesheim as the birthplace; Agrippa himself told the Cologne council that he was born in their city (Epistolae VII.26).
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The Cologne degrees are recorded in the faculty’s Dekanatsbuch (Bock, as in n. 2); the Albertist, Plinian and Lullian formation is described by Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1. On the doctorates: Prost (as in n. 2), I, 67–74; Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), ch. 1; Morley, I, 95 and 287–288, who accepts a doctorate in divinity at Dôle (1509) and doctorates in law and medicine at Pavia (1515) on the strength of Agrippa’s own statements (Epistolae I.19; VII.21). The claim to knighthood, “earned by valour in war, among the troops in open battle”, is in Epistolae VII.21 (Morley, I, 288).
- ↩
Epistolae I.1 and I.3 (Landulphus, Paris, 26 March 1507; Agrippa, Cologne, 20 May 1507); Morley, I, 14–25; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1, who reports the reconstruction of the sodalitium as including Bovelles, Champier, de Brie, de Ganay and Perréal; Paola Zambelli, “Cornelio Agrippa: Scritti inediti e dispersi,” Rinascimento n.s. 5 (1965), 195–323, for the hypothesis. The Brill dictionary describes the circle as “a secret circle or self-help society” interested in res arcanae.
- ↩
Epistolae I.4–10, summarised at length by Morley, I, 48–71, who identified the “Vallis Rotunda” of the letters with Vila-rodona in the Alt Camp; Prost, I, 198; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1: “a mysterious journey to Spain, seemingly engaged in a military mission.” The siege, the leper stratagem and the escape of 14 August 1508 are Agrippa’s own narrative; the political purpose and the Emperor’s involvement are Morley’s inferences.
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1; Bock (as in n. 2) on Antoine de Vergy; the Brill dictionary on the drafting of De nobilitate “partly to win the favour of Margaret of Austria”. Catilinet’s denunciation and its consequences are described in Agrippa’s own Expostulatio (see under Works).
- ↩
Agrippa’s dedicatory letter to Trithemius (undated; Würzburg, early 1510) and Trithemius’s reply “from our monastery of Peapolis, the 8th day of April 1510”, both printed before Book I of the 1533 edition and in the 1651 translation. “Peapolis” is Trithemius’s Greek coinage for Herbipolis (Würzburg). The Latin of the maxim, as usually transcribed, runs “da foenum bovi, saccharum psittaco tantum; intellige mentem meam, ne boum pedibus subiiciaris, ut plerisque contingit”; the transcription should be checked against the 1533 edition or the Brill text. On the meeting: Perrone Compagni, SEP, §2; Noel L. Brann, Trithemius and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999).
- ↩
The occultissimum negotium is Agrippa’s phrase in the Defensio propositionum of 1534, cited by Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1; on Colet and Stepney, Morley, I, 231–236; on the lost Commentariola on the Pauline Epistles, recovered in part in 1523, Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1. The claim in some German accounts that Agrippa heard Colet lecture at Oxford confuses the dates: Colet had been Dean of St Paul’s since 1505. The Cologne disputations of 1510–1511 are reported by Bock (as in n. 2).
- ↩
“Septennio illius stipendio militavi”: Epistolae VII.21 (Morley, I, 3 n.). The Council of Pisa and the absolution of 1513: Morley, I, 257–262; the Brill dictionary, 4. The Pavia lectures of 1512 and 1515: Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1; the 1515 oration is printed among the Orationes (see under Works). The first marriage: the Brill dictionary (“married his first (Italian) wife in Pavia”); Agrippa’s praise of her, from Metz in 1518, is in Epistolae II.19 (Morley, I, 289). Aymon is attested in a letter of March 1517 (Bock, as in n. 2).
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §§1 and 3; the Brill dictionary, 4–5, which dates the Turin lectures to 1516 (older accounts give 1517); Prost, I, 319 (Casale, September 1516). On the Antonine connection and the dedication of the Llull commentary to Jean Laurencin, preceptor of Sant’Antonio di Ranverso, see under Works; the date of the commentary (c. 1517 rather than the 1509 sometimes given) is inferred from that dedication.
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1; Morley, II, 42–52, for the St Anne dispute and its protagonists (Morley’s “Claudius Salini” and “Dominic Delphinus”); the Brill dictionary names the prior “Claude Salin”. Wichwael’s objections and Agrippa’s reply of 6 February 1518 are Epistolae II.18–19. Lefèvre’s anxious reaction is noted by Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1.
- ↩
The Metz letters on the case, Epistolae II.38–47 (Opera, II, 752–757), summarised by Morley, II, 51–64; De vanitate, ch. 96 (“when I was president of the commonwealth in the city of Mediomatricum, I had a very great contest with an inquisitor … by the grace of baptism Satan is cast out of us”); Vera Hoorens and Hans Renders, “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Witchcraft: A Reappraisal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 43:1 (2012), 3–18. The Brill dictionary summarises Agrippa’s argument as the claim “that the sacrament of baptism was stronger than the pact with the devil”.
- ↩
Morley, II, 32–33 (the father’s death, reported by his mother while he was at Metz), 37–38, 53, 64–66; the Benedictine Histoire de Metz records that he was “hunted from this town in 1520” (Morley, II, 65).
- ↩
Morley, II, 82–83, 102–105 (the first wife’s illness and death, Epistolae III.8, IV.19; the Genevan marriage); Agrippa’s letter of 1529 on his second wife, who “lived with me for eight years all but a month” and died “within twenty-three days of the age of twenty-six” (Morley, II, 256), which fixes the marriage to about September 1521 rather than the 1522 usually given; Bock (as in n. 2) for the Genevan hospital appointment and the Fribourg post; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1, for Geneva, Fribourg and Lyon; Prost’s appendices for the later history of Henri (d. 1573) and Jean (commander of Saint-Antoine d’Aubeterre, 1562). The Brill dictionary places the first wife’s death “probably during the travel with her husband to Geneva”.
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1 (“His refusal to furnish an astrological prognostication for François I and his incautious remarks about Louise’s superstition, which a friend passed on to her, sparked off her open hostility”); the letters to Chapelain of summer and September 1526 (Epistolae IV.39–41; Morley, II, 145–148); the Bourbon correspondence of 26 February and 30 March 1527 (Morley, II, 222–229); Paris and the Duke of Vendôme, Morley, II, 235–248. The completion of De vanitate in September 1526 is given by the Brill dictionary.
- ↩
Prost, I, 172 (the privilege, Mechelen, 19 January 1529); Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1 (the Hillenius collection; the appointment as “archivist and imperial historiographer”); the Brill dictionary, 5 (the plague, the physicians’ flight and the later accusation of illegal practice); Morley, II, 255–257, 261–264. Morley’s translation of Agrippa’s letter makes the wife die “on the seventh day, which was the seventh of August”, although the fever is said to have begun on St Lawrence’s day (10 August); 17 August 1529, the date given by the German biographical tradition, is the reading that fits the letter’s own arithmetic.
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §§1 and 4; the Brill dictionary, 5 (Margaret’s referral to Louvain; the imprisonment for debt in Brussels, August 1531); Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), ch. 1, for the Sorbonne’s date; Morley, II, 265–303 (the printing of Book I, the Louvain articles, the Apologia and Querela, the Erasmus letters); the dedication to Hermann is dated “from Mechlinia, in the month of January 1531” in the 1533 edition and the 1651 translation, not 1533 as sometimes stated. On the third marriage: Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, II.5, “ubi conjugem Mechliniensem Bonnae repudiasset anno MDXXXV”, quoted by Morley, II, 313 n.; Morley dates the marriage to 1532 (II, 285). The marriage is sometimes misdated to 1535, which is the year of the repudiation.
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5 (“Shortly before Christmas, however, the Dominican inquisitor Conrad Köllin denounced the book as heretical and blasphemous, getting the city’s Senate to suspend the printing”; “the forceful intervention of Hermann … enabled De occulta philosophia to appear, even though accompanied by an appendix including the chapters of De vanitate which criticized magic”); Charles Zika, “Agrippa of Nettesheim and His Appeal to the Cologne Council in 1533: The Politics of Knowledge in Early Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in his Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003), ch. 3; Morley, II, 288–303 (Hermann’s letter of 2 February 1532; the appeal; Morley calls the inquisitor “Conrad of Ulm”). The German printing of the appeal is Ein Sendtbrieff an Burgermeister unnd Raht der Stat Cöln wider die Sophisten (Strasbourg, 1535).
- ↩
Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1: “According to his pupil Johannes Wier (1515–1565), Agrippa was in Bonn until 1535. He then returned to France, where he was arrested on the order of François I. Shortly after his release, he died in Grenoble in 1535 or, at the latest, in 1536”; the Brill dictionary, 5 (Dominican burial); Morley, II, 313–320, who adds a Grenoble tradition that he died in the house of the receiver-general Vachon in the Rue des Clercs. The day 18 February 1535 is given by the Neue Deutsche Biographie and later reference works but by no source I have been able to trace; Weyer gives only the year. On Weyer in Agrippa’s household: Michaela Valente, Johann Wier: Debating the Devil and Witches in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), ch. 1. The 1534 memorandum and the Dialogus are noted by Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.1–2. The definition of magic as “the most absolute perfection of all most excellent philosophy” (totius nobilissimae philosophiae absoluta consummatio, I.2) deliberately revises Pico’s formula that magic is the most perfect accomplishment of natural philosophy; see Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.36, III.44; Agrippa to Aurelio d’Aquapendente, Lyon, 19 November 1527, printed as an appendix to the 1533 edition and in the 1651 translation (“that philosophy which you require to know … is to know God himself, the worker of all things, and to pass into him by a whole image of likeness, as by an essential contract and bond, whereby thou mayest be transformed and made as God … This is that true, high occult philosophy of wonderful works. The key thereof is the intellect … For we must die, I say die to the world, and to the flesh, and all senses, and to the whole man animal, who would enter into these closets of secrets”).
- ↩
De vanitate, ch. 1 and ch. 100; the quotation on philosophising about created things is from the Apologia as summarised in the Brill dictionary, 6–7, which resolves the apparent contradiction by “Agrippa’s sharp distinction of reason and faith”. On the priority of faith: De originali peccato (“Ratio posterior est fide et fides natura prior ratione”; “Neque licet rationi turbare fidem”), on which see Dario Gurashi, “Reason and Regeneration: A Study on Agrippa’s De originali peccato,” Mediterranea 7 (2022), 519–568.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.1. The chapter ends with a submission to the judgement of “the universal Church and the congregation of the faithful”, which was already in the 1510 draft.
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De occulta philosophia I.11–13; the theory of Ideas and seminal forms is Ficino’s (Theologia Platonica; De vita III.1), and the order of causes in I.13 is Agrippa’s reconciliation of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plato, Avicenna, Hermes and Albertus Magnus.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.9–10, I.15–33. The catalogues of Solar, Lunar, Saturnine, Jovial, Martial, Venereal and Mercurial things (I.23–29) and of the fifteen fixed stars with their stones and herbs (I.32) descend from Ficino, from the pseudo-Albertine Liber aggregationis and from the Hermetic Liber de quindecim stellis attributed to “Hermes and Thebit”.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.14, drawing on Ficino, De vita III.3; Perrone Compagni, “‘Dispersa intentio’: Alchemy, Magic and Scepticism in Agrippa,” Early Science and Medicine 5:2 (2000), 160–177, on Agrippa’s acceptance of alchemy as a natural and spiritual doctrine rather than a transmutative practice; Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke, “The Attitude of Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) towards Alchemy,” Ambix 22 (1975), 134–150.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.15, I.37. The image of the stretched string is from Ficino’s Plotinus; the “golden chain” is named in II.32 as Plato’s.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.50 (fascination), I.63–67. The chapter on melancholy (I.60), which describes how the humour, “helped by any celestial influx, especially of Saturn”, makes the mind a seat successively of inferior, middle and sublime spirits, is the text through which Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl read Dürer’s Melencolia I (Saturn and Melancholy, London: Nelson, 1964), and through which Yates read Elizabethan melancholy (The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, ch. 6).
- ↩
De occulta philosophia II.1–3. The distinction between formal and “mercantile” number is from Boethius’s De arithmetica; the claim that “the Abbot Joachim proceeded no other way in his prophecies but by formal numbers” (II.2) is Agrippa’s own.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia II.4–14; the “seven habitations of infernals which Rabbi Joseph of Castilia the Kabbalist describes in the Garden of Nuts” (II.10) come from Gikatilla’s Ginnat Egoz by way of Reuchlin. On the scales as the model for later tables of correspondences, and on Crowley’s 777 (1909) as their descendant through S. L. MacGregor Mathers, see Noel Putnik, “From Black Magician to Proto-Feminist: The Reception of Cornelius Agrippa’s Oeuvre Through the Centuries,” Etnoantropološki problemi 19:2 (2024), 401–425; the specific loci in the Golden Dawn papers have not been checked for this entry.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia II.22 (the tables and their uses; the totals are 45, 136, 325, 666, 1225, 2080 and 3321), II.23, II.24–28. I. R. F. Calder, “A Note on Magic Squares in the Philosophy of Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949), 196–199, traced the squares to Arabic and Latin sources. The pentagram inscribed in the human figure (II.27) became, through Éliphas Lévi and the Golden Dawn, the standard occult emblem of the microcosm.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia II.32–33 (the Moon and her mansions), II.37 (the faces), II.38–44 (the planetary images), II.46–47 (the images of the mansions and of the fixed stars), II.50, II.60. The dependence of these chapters on the Latin Picatrix is established by Perrone Compagni, “Picatrix latinus: Concezioni filosofico-religiose e prassi magica,” Medioevo 1 (1975), 237–338, and in the apparatus of her edition; the Latin text is edited by David Pingree, Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm (London: Warburg Institute, 1986).
- ↩
De occulta philosophia I.69–74; Lehrich (as in n. 17), chs. 2–3: “In reading DOP, then, we are reading a book about reading”; words in Hebrew are “connected to their referents not by cultural convention but by divine fiat”.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.10 (the Sephiroth), III.11 (the divine names), III.25 (the Shem ha-Mephorash, from Exodus 14:19–21), III.26–28 (the calculation of names), III.29–30 (the characters and the three alphabets); the sources are Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica, Ricius’s Portae lucis (his translation of Gikatilla’s Sha’are Orah, 1516) and Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi; see Perrone Compagni, “Una fonte di Cornelio Agrippa: il De harmonia mundi di Francesco Giorgio Veneto,” Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia, Università di Firenze 4 (1982), 45–74, and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Geschichte der christlichen Kabbala, vol. 1 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2012).
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.11, III.12, III.30; De vanitate, ch. 47 (“neither is there any other name in heaven or on earth by which we can be saved, but only the name of Jesus”). Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, ch. 5, made the Christological climax of Book III the ground for classing the whole work as Christian Kabbalah.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.1, III.4. The disclaimer of III.4, like the “narrative not affirmative” disclaimer of the 1533 preface, was read by the sixteenth century as a formality and by Walker as a confession; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5, reads it as a serious distinction between the ceremonies of “polluted” idolatry and the Christian rites that alone give sacramental dignity.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.3, III.5, III.6. The three dignities are discussed by Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5, who traces the notion of a dignificatio by nature, merit and religion partly to Avicenna’s homo perfectus, and by Noel Putnik, Obtinere Mentem Divinam: The Spiritual Anthropology of Cornelius Agrippa (PhD dissertation, Central European University, Budapest, 2017).
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.16–24, III.32–33, III.45–49 (the four frenzies, after Ficino’s commentary on the Phaedrus and his De divino furore), III.50–52, III.53–64; the quotations on prayer and sacrifice are from III.58 and III.59. The passage from the Asclepius (ch. 6), “magnum miraculum est homo”, is quoted in III.49; Yates (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964, ch. 7) made it the motto of Renaissance magic, and Hanegraaff has objected that she quoted the Asclepius while ignoring the philosophical Corpus Hermeticum on which Agrippa’s doctrine of regeneration depends.
- ↩
De occulta philosophia III.36 (misnumbered “XXXIIII” in the 1651 printing), III.43. Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5: “Juxtaposing the original nucleus, drawn from his own unfinished Dialogus de homine … with selected passages from the doctrine of the Zohar … (via Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi), Agrippa was able to elaborate further his cherished doctrine of three parts of human soul.” The terms mens, ratio and idolum are Ficino’s, from the Theologia Platonica, XIII.
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De occulta philosophia III.44; Agrippa to Aurelio d’Aquapendente, Lyon, 24 September 1527 (1651 appendix). The phrase “soul standing and not falling” (anima stans et non cadens) is one that Agrippa attributes to “the magicians”; its ultimate source is the Chaldean and Neoplatonic doctrine of the undescended part of the soul, transmitted through Ficino.
- ↩
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and Lazzarellian Hermetism,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4:1 (2009), 1–25, quoting Perrone Compagni’s formulation with approval; Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005); Michael H. Keefer, “Agrippa’s Dilemma: Hermetic ‘Rebirth’ and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia,” Renaissance Quarterly 41:4 (1988), 614–653; Noel Putnik, Two Conflicting Notions of Ascension in Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (MA thesis, Central European University, 2007), published as The Pious Impiety of Agrippa’s Magic (Saarbrücken: VDM, 2010), and “Agrippa’s Cosmic Ladder: Building a World with Words in the De occulta philosophia,” in Peter J. Forshaw (ed.), Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 81–102.
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De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum, ed. and trans. Vittoria Perrone Compagni, Ermetismo e cristianesimo in Agrippa: Il De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum (Florence: Polistampa, 2005), with the introductory study on Hermetism and Christianity in the early writings; the summary of its argument follows Perrone Compagni, SEP, §3 (“Magnum miraculum est homo Christianus!”; reason “proudly proclaims an autonomy of its own”). De originali peccato: Gurashi (as in n. 22). Dehortatio: Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1.
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De vanitate, “To the Reader”, ch. 48, ch. 100 and the Peroratio; De occulta philosophia, “To the Reader” (1533). Perrone Compagni, “‘Tutius ignorare quam scire’: Cornelius Agrippa and Scepticism,” in Gianni Paganini and José R. Maia Neto (eds.), Renaissance Scepticisms (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 91–110, and SEP, §4; Marc van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and His Declamations (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Paola Zambelli, “Magic and Radical Reformation in Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976), 69–103, and White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2007), part II; Nauert (as in n. 3); Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1960; expanded edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Keefer (as in n. 41), 618, observes that De vanitate “did not make any explicit recantation of his passion for occult sciences”; Agrippa “simply admitted that there might have been something wrong in his juvenile work on magic” (Perrone Compagni, SEP, §4).
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Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5, whose list of the works Agrippa studied between 1510 and 1533 (Ficino’s commentaries on Plato and Plotinus; Pico’s Conclusiones, Heptaplus and Disputationes; Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis; Gianfrancesco Pico’s De rerum praenotione; Erasmus; Ricius; Reuchlin’s De arte cabalistica; Giorgio’s De harmonia mundi) and of the manuscripts “which had belonged to Trithemius and which came into Agrippa’s possession in 1520” is followed here; Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, ed. V. Perrone Compagni (Leiden: Brill, 1992), apparatus; Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), ch. 7; Charles Zika, “Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976), 104–138; William R. Newman, “Thomas Vaughan as an Interpreter of Agrippa von Nettesheim,” Ambix 29:3 (1982), 125–140, who showed that the “one thing” of II.4 derives from Trithemius’s letter interpreting the Tabula smaragdina.
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Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. V (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), ch. 8, 127–138; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), 90–96; Yates, Giordano Bruno (as in n. 38), ch. 7, and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (as in n. 28), ch. 5; Perrone Compagni, “Riforma della magia e riforme della cultura in Agrippa,” I castelli di Yale 2 (1997), 115–140, and “Il De occulta philosophia di Cornelio Agrippa: Parole chiave: uomo-microcosmo, prisca theologia, cabala, magia,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 13:2 (2007), 429–448; Lehrich (as in n. 17); Hanegraaff (as in n. 41); Anthony Grafton, Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023), ch. 5; Dario Gurashi, In deifico speculo: Agrippa’s Humanism, trans. Brian McNeil (Paderborn: Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021), and Rinascimento militante: Studi sulla filosofia di Agrippa von Nettesheim (Padua: CLEUP, 2024).
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Hanegraaff, “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa,” in Christopher Partridge (ed.), The Occult World (London: Routledge, 2015), 92–99; De occulta philosophia, “To the Reader” (1533).
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The chronology of composition and printing follows Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1, and the bibliographical notes in Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965). The contents of the 1529 collection (De nobilitate; De sacramento matrimonii; De triplici ratione; Dehortatio; De originali peccato; Expostulatio; Sermo de inventione reliquiarum; Regimen adversus pestilentiam) are given by Andrea Strazzoni, “Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius,” in Marco Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Cham: Springer, 2022).
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Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, ed. and trans. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), with the introduction “Agrippa and the Feminist Tradition”; the Latin text with French translation, ed. R. Antonioli, C. Béné and O. Sauvage (Geneva: Droz, 1990). The dedication is quoted from Fleetwood’s translation (The Glory of Women, London: Robert Ibbitson, 1652). Care’s Female Pre-eminence (London: for Henry Million, 1670), dedicated to Catherine of Braganza, is sometimes confused with Fleetwood’s version, which it paraphrases and expands; the two are distinct books.
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Quotations from David Clapham’s translation, A Treatise of the Nobility and Excellency of Womankind (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1542), spelling modernised, checked against the Latin of the 1529 edition (“Vir itaque naturae opus, mulier opificium Dei”; “ipsum nomen mulieris plus affinitatis habere cum nomine ineffabili divinae omnipotentiae … quam nomen viri”).
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Clapham (as in n. 49); the Latin of the central sentence: “Vir itaque comedendo peccavit, non mulier; vir mortem dedit, non mulier. Et nos omnes peccavimus in Adam, non in Eva.”
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Clapham (as in n. 49), peroration and close; the reference to Joan of Arc “Anno Domini 1428” shows that the text was revised after Dôle.
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Barbara Newman, “Renaissance Feminism and Esoteric Theology: The Case of Cornelius Agrippa,” Viator 24 (1993), 337–356; Vittoria Perrone Compagni, “L’innocenza di Eva: Retorica e teologia nel De nobilitate foeminei sexus di Agrippa,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 12:1 (2006), 59–80; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1 (Eve “was not prohibited”).
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Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Putnik (as in n. 30), on the “proto-feminist” label as a modern horizon of reception.
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Opera, II, 492–498 (Olms pagination); Morley, I, 258 (written “from Dean Colet’s house”); the Brill dictionary, 4; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1. The sentence “I am a Christian, but I do not dislike Jewish rabbis” is quoted from the Expostulatio in the English literature; I have not verified the Latin.
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Perrone Compagni (ed. and trans.), Ermetismo e cristianesimo in Agrippa (as in n. 42); Opera, II, 452–481; the dedication to William Paleologus is printed in Epistolae II.
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The summary follows Perrone Compagni, SEP, §3, and the introduction to her edition.
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Gurashi, Rinascimento militante (as in n. 45), 257–279 (text); Gurashi, “Reason and Regeneration” (as in n. 22); Opera, II, 550–565.
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Gurashi, “Reason and Regeneration” (as in n. 22); Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1; Epistolae II.18–19 (Wichwael’s objections and Agrippa’s reply).
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Opera, II, 482–491; Gurashi, Rinascimento militante (as in n. 45), 111–122; the dedication to Bullioud is Epistolae IV; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1, describes it as a warning against contemporaries’ excessive curiosity for Hermetic “gentile theology” at the expense of Christian instruction.
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Opera, II, 536–549; David Clapham, The Commendation of Matrimony (London: Berthelet, 1540); Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1.
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Clapham, Commendation (as in n. 60), spelling modernised. On the censors’ identification of Erasmus and Lambert behind the treatise, and on Marguerite’s resentment, Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1; Paola Zambelli, “Mariage et luthéranisme d’après Henri Corneille Agrippa,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1 (1997), 79–102.
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Opera, II, catalogue and text of the Sermo and Contra pestem antidota; Morley, II, 28–30, 44–46 (the Metz plague paper); the Antonine letters of 1517 (Epistolae II) for the date of the sermon. The Pavia oration is treated below with the Orationes.
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Perrone Compagni, SEP, §4; Nauert (as in n. 47), ch. 7; James Sanford’s translation, ed. Catherine M. Dunn, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences (Northridge: California State University, 1974); The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (London: J.C. for Samuel Speed, 1676), from which the quotations in this section are taken with spelling modernised. The dedication “Spectabili viro, Domino Augustino Furnario, civi Genuensi” and the Ad lectorem are quoted from the Lyon Opera, II. The first edition’s colophon of September 1530 is reported by Prost, I, 97.
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De vanitate, “To the Reader” and ch. 1. The Latin tutius ignorare quam scire is the title of Perrone Compagni’s essay (as in n. 43).
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De vanitate, chs. 4, 7, 9–10, 13, 22, 26, 31–32, 40. The Pyrographia on gunnery is lost.
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De vanitate, chs. 49–99; the alchemical chapter is ch. 90, on which see Perrone Compagni, “‘Dispersa intentio’” (as in n. 26), and Lehrich (as in n. 17), appendix 2; the Woippy story is ch. 96.
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De vanitate, chs. 100–102 and the Peroratio (“ne ultra clepsydram declamem”). On the digression on the ass as a sermon joyeux in the manner of Erasmus’s Moria and Apuleius, Barbara C. Bowen, “Cornelius Agrippa’s De vanitate: Polemic or Paradox?” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 34:2 (1972), 249–256.
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De vanitate, chs. 41–44 (1676 translation); the 1533 Censura reprints exactly these chapters, 41–48, not, as is sometimes said, ch. 48 alone.
- ↩
De vanitate, chs. 45–47.
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De vanitate, ch. 48 (1676 translation). The 1651 translation of the Censura renders the retraction: “But of magic I wrote whilst I was very young three large books, which I called Of Occult Philosophy, in which what was then through the curiosity of my youth erroneous, I now being more advised am willing to have retracted by this recantation; I formerly spent much time and costs in these vanities.” Sanford’s 1569 rendering, the one usually quoted, has not been checked against a copy for this entry.
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Nauert (as in n. 47); Bowen (as in n. 67); Eugene Korkowski, “Agrippa as Ironist,” Neophilologus 60:4 (1976), 594–607; Zambelli (as in n. 43); Perrone Compagni (as in n. 43); van der Poel (as in n. 43). Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595); Rabelais, Tiers Livre (1546), ch. 25; on Montaigne’s use of De vanitate in the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, Pierre Villey, Les sources et l’évolution des Essais de Montaigne (Paris: Hachette, 1908).
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Opera, II, 315–451, followed by a Tabula abbreviata in artem brevem R. Lullii; the dedication “Reverendo pariter atque generoso Domino, Domino Ioanni Laurentino Lugdunensi, Praeceptori primario Divi Antonii apud Rivum eversum”; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1 (“not a true commentary, but rather a new method of thinking”); Anita Traninger, Mühelose Wissenschaft: Lullismus und Rhetorik in den deutschsprachigen Ländern der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Fink, 2001); Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), ch. 8; Paolo Rossi, Clavis universalis (Milan: Ricciardi, 1960). The Cologne 1531 imprint is Soter’s; the Solingen 1538 reissue carries eight woodcut Lullian figures.
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Perrone Compagni, SEP, §§2 and 5, and the introduction to her edition, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1–50; Karl Anton Nowotny (ed.), De occulta philosophia (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1967), facsimile of the 1533 edition with commentary. The 1533 title and colophon are cited from the McGill University copy; the chapter counts are those of 1533 and of the 1651 translation, which misnumbers several headings (two chapters XIII in Book II; “XXXIIII” for XXXVI in Book III). Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. “J.F.” (London: R.W. for Gregory Moule, 1651), whom the tradition identifies as the physician John French; Donald Tyson’s edition (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1993) credits “James Freake”, an attribution without documentary support. Eric Purdue (trans.), Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 3 vols (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2021); Paul Summers Young (trans.), De occulta philosophia, 4 vols (Black Letter Press, 2020–), the fourth volume containing the apocryphal Fourth Book.
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Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5: “Comparison of the 1510 dedication copy, sent by Agrippa to Trithemius (MS Würzburg, M.ch.q.50), with the printed final edition (Cologne 1533), reveals the careful and thorough revision and enlargement to which the first draft was subjected. The book doubled in length, and fresh ideas and references were included”; Agrippa to Aurelio, 24 September 1527 (1651 appendix); De occulta philosophia, “To the Reader” (1533). Nauert (as in n. 47) was the first to use the Würzburg manuscript; Perrone Compagni’s edition prints its readings in a second register and tabulates the correspondences of chapters. The shelfmark is given as in the SEP article.
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De occulta philosophia, “To the Reader”; dedication to Hermann von Wied, Mechelen, January 1531 (1651 translation). The 1651 volume adds a short life of Agrippa, Thomas Vaughan’s verse encomium (“But his three books with the three worlds shall stand”), the translator’s address “Judicious Reader!” and a dedication to Robert Child; there is no second Agrippan address to the reader after the Censura, as is sometimes stated.
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De occulta philosophia I.3–8, I.9–14, I.15–21, I.22–33. The chapters are summarised from the 1651 text collated with Peterson’s online edition; chapter divisions follow 1533.
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De occulta philosophia I.34–49; the hen’s-egg homunculus is I.36, the golden chain I.37, the catalogue of bindings I.40, the planetary suffumigations I.44, the collyries I.45, rings I.47.
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De occulta philosophia I.50–60, I.61–68, I.69–74.
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De occulta philosophia II, dedication and chs. 1–60; the quotations are from II.1, II.51, II.54, II.56, II.58 and II.60.
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De occulta philosophia III, dedication and chs. 1–35; quotations from III.2, III.7, III.8, III.16, III.18, III.22, III.34.
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De occulta philosophia III.36–52 and III.53–64; quotations from III.38, III.39, III.41, III.42, III.50, III.54, III.56, III.62, III.64.
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De occulta philosophia III.65, “The Conclusion of the Whole Work” (1651 translation), quoted in part; the whole chapter is short and should be read entire. On dispersa intentio as method: Perrone Compagni (as in n. 26).
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The 1533 appendix, translated in the 1651 edition and printed by Peterson with Book III. The Aurelio letters are the texts on which Keefer (as in n. 41) builds the “Hermetic rebirth” pole of Agrippa’s dilemma; on the letter of 13 February 1528 and the German necromancer summoned by Louise of Savoy’s court, Morley, II, 238–241.
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On the transmission of these figures see Reception below; Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (as in n. 28), chs. 5 and 8; Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn (Chicago: Aries Press, 1937–1940), for the planetary squares, sigils and the three alphabets in the Order’s curriculum.
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Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (as in n. 28), ch. 5; Grafton (as in n. 45), ch. 5, and his popular précis “Marked by Stars: Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy,” Public Domain Review, 12 October 2023.
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Opera, II, and the Appendix apologetica (the Louvain articles are headed “Sequuntur articuli Lovaniensium, authentico transumpto, sed absque ullo interposito Senatus decreto” and run to XLIII); the dedication “Reverendissimo in Christo Patri … Domino Laurentio Campegio”; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §4; van der Poel (as in n. 43), for the definition of declamatio as the hermeneutic key. The exact Latin of that definition has not been verified for this entry; the addressee of the Querela is given by some accounts as Eustache Chapuys.
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Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1 (“[n.p.], 1534”); the Appendix apologetica of the Opera (Ghent copy); Morley, II, 42–52, for the Metz background. The Dominican opponent is identified as Claude Salini (the prior) in most accounts and as Dominique Dauphin in some.
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Paola Zambelli (ed.), “Dialogus de vanitate scientiarum et ruina Christianae religionis,” in “Cornelio Agrippa: Scritti inediti e dispersi,” Rinascimento n.s. 5 (1965), 249–294; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §1 (“probably by Soter, 1534”).
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Opera, II (“Orationes decem ante hoc seorsim editae”); the titles are cited from the Opera: “Oratio in praelectione Convivii Platonis, amoris laudem continens”; “Oratio habita Papiae in praelectione Hermetis Trismegisti”; “Oratio ad Metensium dominos, dum in illorum advocatum et oratorem acceptaretur”; “Oratio habita in funere divae Margaretae, Austriacorum et Burgundionum principis”; “Historia de duplici coronatione Caroli V”. Zambelli (as in n. 43), 1976; Hanegraaff (as in n. 41), on the Pavia oration’s identification of Pimander with Christ; Morley, I, 279, on the Symposium lecture (“the topic of the oration being love, divine and human”).
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Opera, II, “Epistolarum ad familiares libri septem”; Prost (as in n. 2); Morley (as in n. 2); Nauert (as in n. 47). The letters are numbered by book and letter in this entry as in the Lyon edition. The count of “about 460–500” letters is approximate; no complete modern edition or English translation exists.
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Paola Zambelli (ed.), “Dialogus de homine,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 13 (1958), 47–71; Gurashi, In deifico speculo (as in n. 45), 184–201; Perrone Compagni, SEP, §5.
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“Henry Cornelius Agrippa, of Geomancy,” in Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1655), spelling modernised; De vanitate, chs. 13 and 36.
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Henrici Cornelii Agrippae liber quartus de occulta philosophia, seu de ceremoniis magicis; cui accesserunt Elementa magica Petri de Abano (Marburg, 1559); Turner’s 1655 volume (reissued 1665), whose preface “To the unprejudiced reader” (dated August 1654) insists that “magic and witchcraft are far different sciences”; the quotations are from Turner, spelling modernised. On Weyer’s denunciation: De praestigiis daemonum (Basel: Oporinus, 1563), II.5; Thomas Willard’s attribution to Jacques Gohory (1520–1576) is reported by Joseph H. Peterson in the introduction to his online edition of the Fourth Book (esotericarchives.com). Arthur Edward Waite reprinted it in The Book of Ceremonial Magic (London: Rider, 1911) “with some needful prunings” while calling it “imbecility”. Only the first tome of the Arbatel, the “Isagoge” of forty-nine aphorisms (Basel, 1575), ever existed.
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Opera, 2 vols (Lyon: per Beringos fratres, n.d. [Basel: Guarino?, c. 1580]; repr. Hildesheim and New York: Olms, 1970, with an introduction by Richard H. Popkin); Paola Zambelli, “Cornelio Agrippa, Sisto da Siena e gli inquisitori,” Memorie Domenicane n.s. 3 (1972), 146–164, for the attribution to Guarino; Perrone Compagni, SEP, bibliography. The editions and translations listed are those cited in the Bibliography below; Willis F. Whitehead (ed.), The Philosophy of Natural Magic (Chicago: Hahn & Whitehead, 1897); La philosophie occulte (The Hague: R. C. Alberts, 1727), 2 vols, translator anonymous; A. Levasseur (trans.), La philosophie occulte ou la magie (Paris: Chacornac, 1910–1911); Friedrich Barth (trans.), Die magischen Werke (Stuttgart, 1855); Tiziana Provvidera (ed.), Della vanità delle scienze (Turin: Aragno, 2004). Richard Smoley’s review of Purdue in Quest (2022) judges the new translation clearer but Tyson’s notes fuller.
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Van der Poel (as in n. 43), whose conclusion is that “no evidence exists that Agrippa was seriously accused, much less persecuted, for his interest in or practice of magical or occult arts during his lifetime”; Morley, II, 279–281, 294–297 (Erasmus); Keefer, “Double Presence” (as in n. 1), on Gratius. On the censorship of his works after his death and his place on the Index, Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic (as in n. 43), part II.
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Paolo Giovio, Elogia doctorum virorum (Venice, 1546) — “Abi perdita bestia, quae me totum perdidisti” — and Melanchthon, in Johannes Manlius, Locorum communium collectanea (1563), both quoted by Keefer, “Double Presence” (as in n. 1); Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum (Basel, 1563; expanded editions to 1583), II.5, on which see Willem de Blécourt, “A Man and His Dog” (International Society for Folk Narrative Research, online), and Valente, Johann Wier (as in n. 19); Bodin, Démonomanie (as in n. 1); André Thevet, Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris, 1584); Martín Del Rio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Louvain, 1599–1600), II, q. 29 (Morley, II, 314–318); Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de magie (Paris, 1625); Anatole Le Braz, La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Paris: Champion, 1893), on “l’Agrippa”. Frank Baron, Faustus on Trial (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), on the Wittenberg genesis of the Faust legend.
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Rabelais, Tiers Livre, ch. 25; Villey (as in n. 71); Sidney, The Defence of Poesy (1595); Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, A-text, I.i, with Keefer’s introduction to his edition (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1991; 2nd ed. 2007) on the Agrippan echoes of the opening speeches; Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594); Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (as in n. 28), chs. 11–13; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), vol. I, ch. 1 (1831 edition, ch. 2). The report that Agrippa’s De vanitate was among Goethe’s youthful readings (Dichtung und Wahrheit) has not been verified for this entry.
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Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (as in n. 28), ch. 8; Nicholas H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1988); Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Yates, Giordano Bruno (as in n. 38); Zambelli, White Magic, Black Magic (as in n. 43), part III; Newman, “Thomas Vaughan” (as in n. 44); José Vieira Leitão, “A Very Handsome Book: A Case Study on the Reception of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Portugal,” Melancolia 5 (2020), 54–80; Francis Barrett, The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer (London: Lackington, Allen, 1801), whose biography of Agrippa cites Giovio, Del Rio, Thevet and Weyer; Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris, 1854–1856) and Histoire de la magie (Paris, 1860); Regardie (as in n. 84); Aleister Crowley, 777 (London, 1909); Hanegraaff, Occult World (as in n. 46): “the history of the reception and appropriation of Agrippa’s works dwarfs the history of his influence”. The uses made of Agrippa by Fludd and Kircher are generally asserted in the literature but have not been checked in detail for this entry.
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Thorndike, Walker, Nauert, Yates, Zambelli, Bowen, Korkowski, Keefer, Perrone Compagni, van der Poel, Brann, Lehrich, Hanegraaff, Valente, Klaassen, Putnik, Gurashi, Hoorens and Renders, and Grafton, as cited in the notes above and in the Bibliography; Nauert’s articles are “Magic and Skepticism in Agrippa’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 18:2 (1957), 161–182, and “Agrippa in Renaissance Italy: The Esoteric Tradition,” Studies in the Renaissance 6 (1959), 195–222. Valente’s Brill entry structures the three books as natural magic and the elementary world, number, music and astrology and the celestial world, and Christian-Kabbalistic angelology and the intellectual world, and quotes Agrippa’s aim “to restore magic to its former state of the purest kind of religion”. Putnik’s 2007 thesis observes that Nauert’s developmental scheme “has been rejected or revised by most present-day scholars”. The attribution of the Brill entry to Valente rests on Hanegraaff’s own citation of it (“Better than Magic,” n. 15) and on Putnik’s reference list; the printed byline should be checked.
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The three formulations draw on Yates (transmission), Hanegraaff and Perrone Compagni (the magus as reborn mind), and Keefer and Putnik (the coexistence of magic and doubt), as cited above.