The De occulta philosophia of 1510: the first manuscript version

Before becoming the famous volume printed in Cologne in 1533, the De occulta philosophia was a youthful manuscript. Agrippa composed it between 1509 and 1510, when he was little more than twenty, and sent it to Abbot Trithemius of Würzburg with a dedicatory letter. This first version has survived and allows us to compare the thought of the young humanist with that of the mature author, who twenty-three years later would profoundly transform the text.

The Würzburg manuscript

The 1510 version is preserved in a manuscript at the University Library of Würzburg, which very probably came from Trithemius's circle. For a long time scholars knew only the printed version, until in the twentieth century a comparison of the two versions revealed the extent of the changes. In 1992 the scholar Vittoria Perrone Compagni published the critical edition in Leiden, setting the two texts side by side and documenting their sources.

The manuscript is considerably shorter than the printed book. It already contains the division into three books and many of the main themes, but in a more compact and less learned form. Numerous quotations are missing, along with whole sections that Agrippa added in later years, especially during and after his Italian stay, when he read Ficino, Christian Kabbalah and the ancient Neoplatonists more deeply.

The young Agrippa's project

The purpose declared in the dedication was to restore to magic its ancient dignity. Agrippa distinguished a true magic, understood as perfect knowledge of nature and of its hidden bonds with the heavens and with God, from a false magic made of superstition and deceit. He appealed to the Persian magi, the Egyptian sages, Pythagoras and Plato, figures who in the Renaissance represented ancient wisdom.

The world appears in it divided into three levels: elemental, celestial and intellectual. To each there corresponds a book and a form of knowledge. The central idea is that higher virtues descend through these degrees and that the sage, knowing the correspondences, can climb back up the same ladder. It is a philosophical conception of Neoplatonic origin rather than a practical manual, and that is how its first recipients read it, regarding it as a work of speculation on nature.

Sources and limits of the first version

Among the sources of the first version stand out Pliny the Elder, Albert the Great, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico, on which Agrippa had just lectured at Dole. Kabbalah is present in a still elementary form, as a mysticism of divine names and Hebrew letters. The young author drew widely on the reading available to him, without yet the vast range of references that characterises the mature work.

The 1510 manuscript thus shows a confident Agrippa, convinced he could found a unified science of the cosmos. He did not publish it, perhaps partly in keeping with Trithemius's advice of discretion, but he went on working on it for more than twenty years. Comparing this version with the printed one means observing at close range the growth of a mind and the formation of one of the most influential books of the European occult tradition.