The 1533 printing: how the De occulta philosophia libri tres came to be

The De occulta philosophia known to readers is the one printed in 1533, in three books, after a long and troubled publishing history. Agrippa had already obtained an imperial privilege for publication in 1529, and in 1531 the first book alone had appeared. The complete edition saw the light in Cologne two years later, overcoming the opposition of the religious authorities thanks to the protection of the city's archbishop.

The first book of 1531

In 1531 the first book, devoted to natural magic, was published in Antwerp and Paris. It was a prudent choice: the part on nature, on the occult virtues of things and on the sympathies between beings was the least exposed to theological censure. The book aroused interest, but in the same period Agrippa was under attack for the De vanitate scientiarum, and his enemies did not fail to point out the contradiction between the two works.

Agrippa replied that the occult philosophy was a youthful work and that readers should bear this in mind. It was a way of defending himself, but also a useful indication: the text he was about to publish in full was the fruit of more than twenty years of revision, and it preserved layers written at different stages of his life. In the preface to the reader Agrippa indeed asked that the work not be judged hastily and that it be regarded as a collection of ancient opinions, reported rather than endorsed.

The inquisitor's veto

When the printing of the three books began in Cologne, attributed to the printer Johann Soter, the Dominican inquisitor Konrad Köllin intervened to stop it, judging the work dangerous to the faith. Agrippa addressed the city council with a memorandum of protest, recalling the imperial privilege and the approval of authoritative readers. The matter was settled thanks to the support of Archbishop Hermann von Wied, to whom the volume was dedicated.

The printing was completed in July 1533. The book opened with the 1510 dedication to Trithemius and his reply, and it closed with a chapter of censure and retraction, taken from the De vanitate, in which the author declared that he submitted everything to the judgement of the Church. This cautious framing did not prevent the book from soon being regarded with suspicion.

A profoundly renewed text

Compared with the 1510 manuscript, the printed version is much longer. Agrippa had inserted long extracts from Ficino's De vita and from Reuchlin's De arte cabalistica, published in 1517, and scholars have also identified passages from the De harmonia mundi of the Venetian Franciscan Francesco Giorgi, published in 1525. The additions strengthen above all the religious and Kabbalistic component of the third book, devoted to divine names, the angelic orders and prophecy.

After the author's death a so-called fourth book of occult philosophy also circulated, devoted to ceremonial practices. Johann Weyer, who had known Agrippa closely, declared it spurious, and modern scholarship agrees in regarding it as an apocryphal addition. The true De occulta philosophia remains the three-book work of 1533, which in the following centuries was read, copied and plundered by generations of scholars and the curious.