Agrippa's black dog: the rise and refutation of a legend

Few legends have followed Agrippa as stubbornly as that of his black dog. According to the story, the animal was not a mere companion but a demonic spirit in canine form, which followed the philosopher everywhere and left him only at the hour of death. The tale is interesting not because it is true, but because it shows how the reputation of a magician was built in the sixteenth century.

Paolo Giovio's account

The most influential version appears in the Elogia virorum literis illustrium of the historian Paolo Giovio of Como, published in 1546, about ten years after Agrippa's death. Giovio writes that the philosopher kept a black dog with a collar marked with magical characters. On his deathbed, in Lyon, Agrippa supposedly removed it with words of cursing, and the animal threw itself into the Saône and vanished for ever.

The story spread quickly. In the following decades demonologists and polemicists took it up and embellished it, adding other episodes, such as that of a student who supposedly died after secretly reading his master's books. Later the Jesuit Martin Del Rio, in his Disquisitiones magicae published between 1599 and 1600, helped to consolidate the image of Agrippa as a diabolical magician.

Johann Weyer's refutation

Johann Weyer, a Dutch physician who in his youth had been Agrippa's pupil and had lived in his house, stepped in to defend his memory. In De praestigiis daemonum, published in Basel in 1563, Weyer wrote that he knew the dog well: it was called Monsieur, it was an ordinary animal, and he himself had walked it on a lead. Agrippa, he explained, was fond of it, as happens to those who live alone with their studies.

Weyer is best known for arguing that many alleged witches were elderly, sick or deluded by their own imagination, people to be treated rather than sent to the stake. His work was one of the first systematic critiques of witch-hunting and provoked violent reactions. The defence of his old master was therefore part of a wider battle against the credulity of the judges and demonologists of his time.

Bodin and the controversy

The refutation was not enough. The French jurist Jean Bodin, in his Démonomanie des sorciers of 1580, fiercely attacked Weyer and called Agrippa the greatest sorcerer of his time, seeing in the pupil's defence a proof of complicity. By then the legend of the dog had become an argument in a theological and legal controversy.

Agrippa's dog outlived both his critics and his defenders. Many readers recognise an echo of it in the black poodle of Goethe's Faust, and the figure of the magician's familiar animal long remained in European literature and folklore. The episode is a reminder that Agrippa's fame was shaped as much by the stories that grew up around him as by his books, often told by people who had never read them.