The Occult Philosophy

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim was born in Cologne in 1486 and died in Grenoble in 1535. He was a jurist, physician, theologian and historiographer in the service of Margaret of Austria, and lived moving between Germany, France, Italy and the Low Countries. He is remembered above all as the author of De occulta philosophia, the great synthesis of Renaissance magic, but he also wrote De vanitate scientiarum, a sceptical critique of all branches of learning.

De occulta philosophia is divided into three books. The first deals with natural magic: elements, the occult virtues of things, sympathies and antipathies. The second with celestial magic, based on numbers, harmony, geometry and the planets. The third with ceremonial and religious magic: divine names, Kabbalah, angelic hierarchies and the soul. A first manuscript version was dedicated to Trithemius in 1510; the complete edition was printed in Cologne in 1533.

In the Renaissance the adjective «occult» meant hidden, not perceptible to the senses. Occult philosophy was therefore the study of the hidden virtues of nature and of the invisible links between things, between earth and heaven, between man and the cosmos. It combined elements of Neoplatonism, the Hermetic writings, astrology and Kabbalah, and its authors considered it the crowning of natural philosophy.

It is the very ancient idea, central to Renaissance thought, that the human being is a small world, a microcosm, reflecting in its own structure the whole universe, the macrocosm. Each part of the cosmos would correspond to a part of the body or soul, and vice versa. From this analogy come the correspondences between planets, organs, metals and plants found in Ficino, Agrippa, Paracelsus and Robert Fludd.

It is a collection of Greek treatises attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, actually composed in the first centuries of the Christian era. In 1463 Marsilio Ficino translated fourteen of them into Latin at the request of Cosimo de' Medici, published in 1471 under the title Pimander. The Renaissance believed them extremely ancient, contemporary with Moses; in 1614 Isaac Casaubon demonstrated their late date with philological arguments.

In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, published in 1818, Victor recalls finding a volume of Agrippa at an inn when he was thirteen and being fascinated by it, despite his father's scorn. He then moves on to Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus. Shelley uses these authors to show the origin of his ambition: the Renaissance dream of unveiling the secrets of nature, carried over into modern science.