Victor Frankenstein reads Agrippa: magic in Mary Shelley's novel

Among the most famous pages of the Gothic novel is a minor, almost hidden episode that concerns Agrippa directly. In Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published anonymously in London in 1818, the protagonist relates that his fatal passion began with a book found by chance. That book was a volume of the works of Cornelius Agrippa. Mary Shelley made it the starting point of a path that leads from Renaissance magic to modern science, and from there to catastrophe.

An inn near Thonon

Victor relates that, at the age of thirteen, during a family excursion to the baths near Thonon, on Lake Geneva, bad weather forced them to stay shut up in an inn. There he happened upon a volume of Agrippa and began reading it with growing enthusiasm. When he showed it to his father, the latter dismissed it with a few scornful words, calling it «sad trash», without explaining why.

Victor observes that if his father had explained that Agrippa's principles had been entirely superseded by modern science, he might perhaps have thrown the book aside. Instead, contempt without argument kindled his curiosity. The boy thus moved on to Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, and for years dreamed of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, convinced that those authors guarded forgotten secrets.

Ingolstadt and modern science

At the university of Ingolstadt, in Bavaria, Victor meets two professors. The first, Krempe, a teacher of natural philosophy, mocks him for having wasted his time on systems centuries old. The second, Waldman, a professor of chemistry, is more understanding: he acknowledges that the ancient masters promised impossibilities, but asserts that the moderns, while promising little, have truly penetrated the secrets of nature.

It is precisely the combination of the two that proves fatal. Victor keeps the boundless ambition of the alchemists, the dream of conquering death, and joins it to the methods of the chemistry and physiology of his time. The creature is born of this meeting: of the Renaissance desire to master nature, supported for the first time by effective tools.

Why Agrippa

Mary Shelley's choice was not accidental. In the circle in which she wrote the novel, during the summer of 1816 spent near Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the themes of alchemy, galvanism and the limits of science were topics of conversation. Percy Shelley himself, as a boy, had been passionately fond of reading of this kind, according to what his biographers reported.

Agrippa was moreover the ideal symbol of the ambiguity the novel set out to explore: a scholar who had aspired to total knowledge and who, at the end of his life, had written a book on the vanity of the sciences. The educated reader of the time knew his reputation as a magician and perhaps also the legends of his black dog and of students punished for their curiosity.

In the 1831 revision Mary Shelley retouched and expanded these chapters, stressing the role of destiny in the protagonist's ruin. Agrippa remains the first link in the chain. In this way one of the most widely read works of the nineteenth century handed the name of the philosopher of Cologne to millions of readers, as an image of the ancient knowledge that seduces and prepares the modern tragedy.