D. P. Walker and spiritual and demonic magic from Ficino to Campanella

A few years before Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno, another scholar at the Warburg Institute had already opened the way to the serious study of Renaissance magic. Daniel Pickering Walker, born in 1914 and died in 1985, published Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella in 1958. It is a short, dense and cautious book that specialists still regard as one of the soundest starting points for understanding Agrippa's place in the history of ideas.

Spiritus and music

Walker's starting point is Marsilio Ficino's De vita, published in 1489, and in particular its third book, De vita coelitus comparanda, devoted to the means of drawing the favourable influences of the stars upon oneself. Ficino founded this magic on the concept of spiritus, an extremely subtle substance that in ancient medicine linked the soul to the body and which, in his view, also allowed contact with the spirit of the world.

Walker showed the importance that music, the singing of Orphic hymns, perfumes, colours and images had in this theory. Ficinian magic, in his reading, was above all an art of acting upon oneself, upon one's own spiritus and imagination, and Ficino strove to present it as natural, without any recourse to demons, in order to avoid the Church's condemnation.

Agrippa and the turn to demons

The problem, as Walker stresses, was that this distinction rested on a fragile balance. Once it was admitted that prayers, songs and images acted upon the cosmos, it was hard not to ask whether they also acted upon personal intelligences, good or evil. Agrippa, in De occulta philosophia, made explicit what in Ficino remained in shadow: the third book of the work deals openly with angels, demons, divine names and religious ceremonies.

For Walker, then, Agrippa represents a decisive passage from «spiritual» to «demonic» magic, or at least the moment at which the two dimensions are brought together in a single system. This also explains why his work was perceived as more dangerous than Ficino's, and why his reputation so quickly became that of a necromancer.

Campanella and magic against the eclipse

The book closes with Tommaso Campanella. Walker reconstructed an episode that became famous: in 1628, in Rome, Campanella reportedly performed with Pope Urban VIII a series of procedures to protect him from the harmful influences of an eclipse, which some astrologers had interpreted as an omen of his death. The information about this episode comes from contemporary testimonies and from a writing by Campanella himself.

Walker wrote other important books, such as The Decline of Hell of 1964, devoted to seventeenth-century discussions of the eternity of hell's punishments, and The Ancient Theology of 1972, on the Renaissance conviction that a very ancient religious wisdom had been handed down from Hermes and Zoroaster to Plato. In 1981 he published Unclean Spirits, on exorcism in France and England.

Walker's method, made of careful readings of the sources and measured judgements, has withstood later criticism better than others. His distinction between spiritual and demonic magic remains a useful tool for reading De occulta philosophia, and reminds us that Agrippa's legacy also includes the theological questions his work made inevitable.