Her Trippa: Agrippa in Rabelais's satire

In 1546 François Rabelais published the Tiers Livre, the third book of the adventures of Pantagruel. At the heart of the story is an apparently simple question: should Panurge, the giant's companion, marry or not? To find out he consults sibyls, poets, theologians, physicians and philosophers. In the twenty-fifth chapter he turns to a sage called Her Trippa, in whom readers of the time had no difficulty recognising Cornelius Agrippa, who had died little more than ten years earlier.

The name and the portrait

Her Trippa is a transparent play on words. Her recalls the German Herr, lord, and Trippa distorts the name Agrippa, adding a vulgar allusion to tripe, that is, entrails. Rabelais presents the character as a scholar living near L'Île-Bouchard, in Touraine, who knows all the arts of foretelling the future. The portrait is comic but not without precision: Her Trippa is learned, vain, full of quotations and convinced he can answer any question.

Rabelais was a physician and humanist, and he knew the world of Lyon well, having worked at the hospital there from 1532, in the very years when Agrippa's fame was at its height. We do not know whether the two ever met, but Rabelais had certainly read his works, and the chapter shows familiarity with the De occulta philosophia and the De vanitate scientiarum.

The list of divinations

The most famous part of the chapter is a very long list of divinatory arts that Her Trippa proposes to Panurge. It runs from pyromancy, divination by fire, to aeromancy, by air, from hydromancy, by water, to chiromancy, by the lines of the hand, and on to dozens of other, rarer practices, some of them probably invented by Rabelais for the love of paradox and of piled-up words.

The list parodies the chapters that Agrippa and other authors devoted to the various forms of divination, with their learned classification based on the elements and instruments used. Panurge, tired and irritated, rejects every proposal and in the end insults the sage. The comedy springs from the contrast between Her Trippa's immense erudition and the practical uselessness of his advice.

The sage who cannot see in his own house

Rabelais adds a sharp detail. According to the court servants, Her Trippa can read the future in the stars and in other people's hands, but fails to notice that his own wife is deceiving him. It is an ancient motif, that of the soothsayer blind to what is close at hand, which Rabelais maliciously applies to the famous author. It has no value as biographical information, but it expresses well the irony with which some humanists viewed the claims of magic.

The Her Trippa chapter should be read as a fragment of cultural history. It shows how well known Agrippa was in the mid-sixteenth century, so much so that he could be recognised in a caricature, and it vividly documents the distrust many intellectuals felt towards the divinatory arts. Curiously, Rabelais's satire comes close to the spirit of the De vanitate, in which Agrippa himself had called those very arts vain and deceptive.