London 1651: the Three Books of Occult Philosophy translated by «J. F.»

For more than a century De occulta philosophia circulated only in Latin, the language of the learned. In 1651, in London, a complete English version finally appeared: Three Books of Occult Philosophy, written by Henry Cornelius Agrippa, printed for the bookseller Gregory Moule. The translator signed himself only with the initials J. F. That volume, published in the turbulent years of the Commonwealth, would become the gateway to Agrippa for almost all English-speaking readers until the twentieth century.

Who was J. F.

The initials are traditionally expanded to the name of John French, an English physician and chemist who lived roughly between 1616 and 1657, author of a treatise on distillation, The Art of Distillation, published in the same year, 1651. The identification is accepted by most scholars, although it is not proven by any explicit statement. French had Paracelsian and alchemical interests and knew the chemical literature of the Continent well.

The translation is faithful on the whole but not free from errors, especially in the technical passages on Hebrew letters, magic squares and planetary seals, where the Latin editions already contained variants and misprints. Some tables were corrupted or badly reproduced by the London engravers, and these defects later passed into the works that, in the following centuries, plundered the English text without consulting the Latin original. The volume opens with an engraved portrait of Agrippa and with the author's dedicatory letters.

The context of the English Revolution

The years around 1650 saw an extraordinary flowering in England of printed Hermetic, alchemical and astrological texts. With the collapse of ecclesiastical censorship during the civil war, booksellers and translators made available to the public works that had previously circulated only among a few. In the same period appeared English versions of Paracelsus, of Jacob Böhme and of the Corpus Hermeticum, the last translated by John Everard and published in 1650.

In this climate Agrippa was read by physicians, astrologers, experimenters and the merely curious, often in the belief that ancient wisdom could contribute to a general reform of knowledge, of medicine and even of society. Not everyone shared the enthusiasm: for many Puritan theologians, and later for several members of the nascent Royal Society, magic remained a danger to the soul or a relic of superstition to be overcome by the experimental method.

J. F.'s volume also belonged to a new book market, made up of readers who knew no Latin but wished to reach the great texts of the tradition. Popular astrologers such as William Lilly, author of Christian Astrology in 1647, had already shown that there was a wide public for works of this kind. Agrippa, with his encyclopaedic ambition, offered those readers a complete map of the magical cosmos.

The Fourth Book and Robert Turner

In 1655 another translator, Robert Turner, published in London Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. This was a text that had appeared in Latin in 1559 and was attributed to Agrippa, but Johann Weyer, his pupil, had already declared it spurious. Turner added other magical writings, including the Heptameron attributed to Peter of Abano and the Arbatel. The Fourth Book, far more practical in content, helped to blur the image of Agrippa with that of a compiler of grimoires.

The two translations, that of J. F. and that of Turner, were the basis of almost everything the English-speaking world knew of Agrippa for two and a half centuries. Only in the twentieth century did critical editions of the Latin text, based on the 1533 printing and the Würzburg manuscript, make it possible to distinguish clearly between what Agrippa actually wrote and what was attributed to him.