Cornelius Agrippa: the Renaissance Magician and Faustian Hero
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.
Opposed to De Vanitate, De Occulta Philosophia is the constructive product of Agrippa’s thought. The Occult Philosophy was Agrippa’s grand project of reviving and reforming magic as an acceptable pursuit of knowledge. Of course, magic had been an interest of the learned class for a long time. Medieval magic included such champions as Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully and Peter of Abano. Yet it had always been under suspicion of heresy or witchcraft, and Agrippa believed it was the time that magic would be rescued from its lowly position. In this, he found inspiration in the work of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, who similarly tried to redeem parts of magical practice (the ‘natural’ magic rather than the demonic one). Yet Agrippa was not as careful as Ficino in supporting magic; he mixed the natural magic with demonic one, and as such he exposed himself to attacks and denigration.
In Agrippa’s system, angels and demons could not be avoided. Agrippa divided the world into three component parts: the elemental world, the celestial and the intellectual world. This was still essentially a medieval world, where the earth stood at the bottom of the ladder, while angels lived beyond the celestial heavens. Divine influences always came down this hierarchical ladder, from God to the elements.
To each world, a certain type of magic is suitable. In the elemental world, Ficino’s natural magic was necessary: the power to manipulate material objects. To this type of magic Agrippa dedicates his first book. The second book deals with celestial magic, which involves astrology, numerology and mathematics. The third book, however, ventures in the realm of intellectual or angelic magic, a subject which Ficino avoided at all costs. Yet for Agrippa, intellectual magic had a very powerful ally: the Jewish Kabbalah, which had recently been ‘Christianized’ by Pico della Mirandola and another famous scholar, Johannes Reuchlin. Kabbalah represented for Agrippa a powerful form of magic that was in accord with the Christian faith.
Contrary to his posthumous reputation, Agrippa was not persecuted during his lifetime; his age was still one of relative tolerance. It was after his death that legends of him being a devil’s servant emerged. The source was a gossip book by a historian called Paolo Giovio, who transcribed a legend according to which Agrippa had a familiar demon in the form of a black dog, which jumped into the river at his death. The story of the ‘black dog’ became such a powerful folklore that it was co-opted by Goethe in his Faust three centuries later. The proponents of the witch-hunts of the late 16th century used Agrippa’s figure to attack adepts of magic, be it learned or popular. That is how Agrippa became synonymous with the charlatan or demonic magician, an association which made his figure morph into that of the Faustian hero.
References:
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich. (1997). Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. by J. Freake (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn).
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich. (1996). Declamation On The Nobility And Preeminence Of The Female Sex. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich. (1676). The Vanity of Arts and Sciences. J. C. for S. Speed. Available full on Google Books.
Nauert, Charles. (1965). Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lehrich, Christopher. (2003). The Language Of Demons And Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. Brill.
Tags: agrippa, faust, ficino, magic, magician, magus, occult philosophy, Paracelsus, renaissance
