Esoteric Coffeehouse

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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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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Until recently, the field of Western Esotericism, like other academic fields, has had an “Iron Curtain” of its own, staying away from Eastern Europe or Russia. In many ways, this omission was not intentional, but resulted from the lack of access to documents trapped on the other side of the Wall. It was then salutary that at this ESSWE conference in Strasbourg (of which you can read more in my previous post) there were presentations on the esotericism of Russia, the Czech Republic and Romania. In many ways, Eastern European countries are an unearthed treasure-trove that demands recovery.

My presentation focused on the town of Sibiu (also called Hermannstadt or Nagyszeben) in Transylvania, a historical province of Romania. Sibiu was named in 2007 as one of the two European capitals of culture, and Sibians are still very proud of this honour, the first one bestowed to an Eastern European city. Sibiu is by many standards a peculiar place, as it was for almost a millennium inhabited mainly by ethnic Germans, locally called “Saxons”, in a province dominated by a Romanian majority and a Hungarian minority. The Germans came here around 1100s, invited by the Hungarian kings to protect the border of Transylvania from Tartar and later Turkish raiders. The Germans occupied a land they called “Siebenburgen” (the seven cities) out of which Sibiu was the most important and best fortified. It was so well fortified that the Pope once praised it for being one of the foremost bastions of Christianity, successfully withstanding Moslem attacks. In 1526, however, Hungary fell to the Turks, and Transylvania (together with Sibiu) became a vassal of the Turks. This was not as bad as it sounded, because the principality was virtually independent, paying a formal tribute to the Ottoman Empire. Hence, when the Austrian Empire tried to take over Transylvania in the 1600s, there was strong local resistance. Eventually, the Austrians did occupy the principality, which became part of the Empire until 1918. Since then, Transylvania (and Sibiu) was part of Romania. However, after 1945, most Germans began to leave the country, with the result that now there are only 3% of them left in Sibiu (albeit the mayor of the town is a German).

From my investigations, Sibiu appears to have a rich esoteric background, focused particularly on alchemy and freemasonry. The key alchemist figure here was Melchior Cibinensis, a mysterious author which composed a famous alchemical work in the 1500s called “the Alchemical Process in the form of a Mass”. This was an audacious piece that made an analogy between alchemy and the Catholic Mass. In the 20th century, Carl Jung used this work to describe his theory of the correspondence between the lapis philosophorum and Christ.

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I have decided that, from time to time, I should talk about the practical applications of esotericism, since, after all, the esoteric perspective combines theory and practice. What better way to start this than to talk about one of the most ‘practical’ of esotericists, Rudolf Steiner, whose teachings are still highly relevant today?   

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of Anthroposophy, can be considered as one of the most brilliant minds of esotericism. His system was not necessarily the most original or insightful, but his genius rested in the ability to create not only a coherent philosophical system but a practical framework as well. By comparison with the mostly theoretical theosophy, whence it drew its roots, anthroposophy has spawned a great number of practical applications. Amongst Steiner’s contributions, the most successful ones have been the Waldorf schools of education, eurythmy (an art of dancing) and biodynamic agriculture. For the purpose of this article, I wish to briefly focus on Steiner’s biodynamic (BD) farming approach.

Steiner’s outspoken interest in agriculture came only late in his life; however, the roots must be sought in his childhood and youth. Steiner grew up in various village communities of the Austrian empire and developed a love of nature and agricultural pursuits. When Steiner was only 21, he met a medicinal herb gatherer, by the name of Felix Kogutski, who imparted to him a new, spiritual perspective of nature (1). Kogutski appeared to have a profound effect on Steiner and was the one to introduce him to his first ‘master’. Steiner’s continuing interest in plant life and dynamics attracted him to the study of Wolfgang Goethe, a revolutionary philosopher of nature. Goethe believed in the existence of an Urpflanze, an archetypal plant form which was an intermediate link between the spiritual realm and the objective reality. Steiner was influenced by Goethe’s views of plant morphology and dynamics in his own speculations (2).

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I have spent my last few weeks researching the German theosophist Jacob Boehme, and I thought – why not write an introduction to this esotericist who has influenced so much of modern thinking, including Romanticism, Hegel or Schopenhauer?

Boehme (1575-1624) is mostly known and revered today as the forerunner of modern theosophy, a major esoteric movement made famous by Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti (the latter two in their early years). As conceived by Boehme, theosophy was an eclectic mixture of Christian theology, natural philosophy and mysticism. He perceived the Bible as containing esoteric knowledge about God that he felt he had a duty to reveal.

It all started with a mystical revelation. In 1600, at age 25, Boehme was a rather prosperous shoemaker in the eastern German town of Gorlitz. He had just married, acquired his license to practice shoemaking, and all was set for him to become a respected and average citizen of Gorlitz. But, the legend goes, Boehme was not a happy man; he was depressed and often fell into melancholy. One day, however, as Boehme was sitting at home, he suddenly saw the light of the sun reflected in a tin dish. In one flash, Boehme experienced a mystical vision of God which changed his life forever.

Moved by such a powerful revelation, Boehme began to write his first book, Aurora, which he only finished twelve years later. He never abandoned his ‘day-job’, so to speak: he continued to work as a shoemaker until l613, when he began a yarn business. Yet his mystical-esoteric side got him into trouble with the local Lutheran church, which pronounced him a heretic and forbade him to write. That, of course, did not happen; his Aurora became very popular in several influential circles and subsequently Boehme wrote more than fifteen thick books, which expanded on the first revelations of Aurora.

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