Francis Barrett and The Magus: Agrippa rediscovered in London in 1801

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the full age of reason, a book with a high-sounding title brought Agrippa back onto the shelves of London booksellers. In 1801 the publishers Lackington, Allen and Co. issued The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer, signed by Francis Barrett, who presented himself as a student of chemistry and of natural and occult philosophy. The work promised a complete system of natural, celestial and ceremonial magic. In reality it was largely a collage of older texts, but its influence was lasting.

A work built on Agrippa

Scholars have long shown that large sections of The Magus reproduce, often word for word, the 1651 English translation of De occulta philosophia and the pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book translated by Robert Turner in 1655. Barrett rearranged the material, abridged it and presented it as a unified treatise, without clearly indicating his sources. Thus one finds the chapters on the occult virtues of things, on planetary correspondences, on magic squares and on the seals of spirits.

The most original part of the volume consists of the engraved plates, some hand-coloured, depicting heads of demons bearing biblical and apocryphal names, magic circles, seals and talismans. These images, often reproduced in reprints and popular books of the twentieth century, did more than the text to fix in the nineteenth-century imagination the look of a book of magic, with its unsettling figures, its mysterious characters and its air of forbidden knowledge.

The author and his disciples

Very little is known about Barrett. His dates of birth and death are uncertain, and the biographical information in circulation should be treated with caution. In the book he invited interested readers to contact him for personal instruction, a sign that he had in mind a small circle of pupils. The volume closes with a section entitled Biographia Antiqua, a series of short lives of sages and magicians of the past, among whom Agrippa naturally appears.

Contemporary reviews were not enthusiastic, and many contemporaries regarded the book as a commercial venture aimed at a curious public. Yet The Magus was read, copied and cited by generations of enthusiasts, and became a reference text for those who had no access to the Latin editions or to the rare seventeenth-century printings. Original copies are now sought after by collectors, and the book has been reprinted several times in facsimile.

The bridge to modern occultism

Barrett's historical merit, if it can be called that, was to make the Agrippan synthesis available again in a single volume just when it seemed destined for oblivion. In the course of the nineteenth century The Magus was one of the books that fed the renewed English interest in magic, down to the initiatory societies of the end of the century. Novelists such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton knew this literature well and turned it into narrative material.

Today The Magus is of interest mainly as a document of reception. It shows clearly what survived of Agrippa in the popular culture of the nineteenth century: not the scepticism of De vanitate, nor the philosophical and theological subtleties of De occulta philosophia, but a repertoire of tables, names and symbols detached from its Renaissance context. It is an Agrippa reduced to a manual, far removed from the thinker who had corresponded with Trithemius, Erasmus and the humanists of his time.