Esoteric Coffeehouse

At the foundation of Christian Kabbalah stands one man: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the original enfant terrible of the European Renaissance. At the tender age of 23, in 1486, Pico wrote and sent to the Pope 900 Theses of theology and philosophy which he proposed to debate with anyone that wished to do so. To these he attached an introductory Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has become a classical statement of the Renaissance worldview. It is regrettable that today he is mostly remembered for this statement of human dignity rather than his other groundbreaking work.

Unfortunately for Pico, church officials were not in a mood for a debate with the young and dashing count, and instead proceeded to analyse the 900 Theses against the Catholic dogma. They found 13 propositions suspicious of heresy, and out of these, one in particular: “There is no science that assures us of the divinity of Christ than magic and the Cabala”. Pico agreed to retract the condemned theses, but later he published an Apology which pretty much re-affirmed all his ideas. This, of course, set the Pope on fire, and Pico had to flee to France to avoid imprisonment. After many other adventures, Pico settled back in Florence, where he died at only 31 years of age, apparently poisoned by a member of the famous house of Medici.

Pico has been called the disciple and pupil of the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. They shared an interest in Neoplatonic, Hermetic philosophy and magic, but Pico didn’t think those were enough. He was attracted to the mysterious art of the Kabbalah, whom Hebrew scholars were talking to him about.

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Today I want to talk about Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), the most famous (or infamous) Renaissance magician. He is the author of one of the well-known compendium of Renaissance esotericism, On the Occult Philosophy (or De Occulta Philosophia), which is still admired by people interested in magic today.

Agrippa was a German wanderer, much like his contemporary, Paracelsus. He traveled almost all his life between Germany, France and Italy, and switched professions just as easily as he switched countries. He was a theologian, a lawyer, a physician and a hired soldier. He claimed to have acquired both a law and medicine degree In the meantime, he wrote revolutionary treatises on Renaissance magic, the vanity of knowledge, the status of women in society and Virgin Mary. Most of these he refrained to publish until late in his life.

Agrippa was an unconventional scholar; for instance, in an era when women were seen as inferior and even instruments of the devil, he affirmed that they were in fact superior to men and more spiritual than them. His defense of the female sex caused quite a sensation in the period. In his De Vanitate Scientiarium, On the Vanity of all Sciences, he rejected all forms of knowledge as empty and purposeless. Even today scholars of Agrippa’s works are baffled by his universal rejection of knowledge. He was certainly an unusual iconoclast, an unique character that built and destroyed all at once.

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Not many people liked Paracelsus during his lifetime, and even after his death his somewhat shady reputation followed him into the modern era. He was not a shy Copernicus who only published his discoveries after his death, or a reluctant Galileo who admitted his faults in front of the Inquisition. It was only too lucky for him that the Inquisition was not in full force then. As it was, he lived his life as a perpetual gypsy, until he found his untimely and somewhat mysterious death in Salzburg, now Austria.

Nowadays, when chemistry, biology or medicine look back at him, they find themselves at odds on how to integrate this pivotal figure in their textbooks. It is clear that Paracelsus was instrumental in changing the nature of medicine and ‘chemistry’ (then it was simply alchemy), but he did so in his idiosyncratic ways. Paracelsus was not a scientist, nor could he have been in that age; science as we now call it dates from the late 17th or even the 18th century. His methods and intentions were far too different to those of the later science, and no attempt at ‘recuperating’ Paracelsus for science would actually work. Hence, most scientific textbooks either avoid him or mention him for having destroyed the Galenic-Aristotelian worldview.

This was no mean feat in itself, and only Paracelsus’ ambiguous image probably prevented him from being hailed as a revolutionary of the likes of Copernicus, Galileo or Newton. Surely, the astronomical revolution was spectacular through its change of the paradigm of the earth as the centre of the universe. However, Paracelsus’ efforts of challenging the view of the composition and structure of the universe were also grandiose projects.

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There is hardly a more controversional figure in the history of ideas than Paracelsus, by his real name Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim (1493-1541). He was many things to many people: a hero to some, a quack to other, a devil’s doctor, a German nationalist or a drunkard. Perhaps he was all these things, because, by comparison to most other historical figures, he was impossible to frame. In fact, Paracelsus created a world of his own and a mythology that has never ceased to fascinate since his premature death at 47.

Inevitably, any scholarly analysis of Paracelsus is bound to reduce something from his larger-than-life self. Scholars simply do not have the tools to tackle his complexity. The same is the situation of his works. He wrote a wondrous amount, and another wondrous amount was added unto him by his faithful followers. Like a religious figure, he created a veritable ‘tradition’ of writings that were attributed to him. This huge compendium is still awaiting a contemporary analysis, despite efforts in this direction (notably Kurt Goldammer).

Paracelsus was a religious figure of sorts; many people called him ‘Lutherus Medicorum’, the Luther of physicians. He didn’t like it; even though he lived during the turmoil of Luther’s Reform, he remained a faithful, if unorthodox Catholic. Instead, he proposed his own version of the world, a peculiar mixture of natural philosophy, alchemy, magic and Christianity. He was in fact the quintessential representative of the Renaissance; a man convinced of his mission of reforming people’s views of the world and of Christianity. He believed there was no inherent contradiction between the analysis of the natural world (we now call this ‘science’) and religion; in fact, Christianity was the very basis of this analysis.

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It’s autumn, the leaves are yellowing and I am back. I’m happy to say that my MA dissertation in Western Esotericism is off and I will be starting my PhD in Western Esotericism. Yup, I can’t get enough of it.

In case you’re wondering (and even if you are not), my thesis was called “The Impact of Jan Baptista Van Helmont’s Theory of Love, Desire and Universal Sympathy on his ‘Christian Philosophy’”. I hope it sounds heavy enough. I will try to write an article on Van Helmont some time soon; he was a physician and an alchemist in the tradition of Paracelsus who lived at the beginning of the 17th century.

For now, I would like to write a bit on the Renaissance love philosophy and its relationship with magic. The story begins with the first Renaissance philosopher, Marsilio Ficino (end of the 15th century). Today he is remembered mainly as the translator of Plato’s treatises from Greek into Latin. History has not been very kind to him, even as he was in many ways the reason the Renaissance ever existed. Ficino re-introduced Plato, the Neoplatonists and Hermetic thinking in the discourse of his contemporary age and hence ignited a revolution of consequences.

I will not go into the depths of Ficinian philosophy now except in so far as he was the creator of a pervasive love philosophy in his era. Of course, if you asked Ficino, he would never recognize that he created it (back then originality was not well regarded). Perhaps he really didn’t. He simply tried to restore the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages, whose chief representatives were Francesco Petrarch, Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti. He also looked farther back to Plato himself for inspiration.

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