The soul, the divine furies and prophecy according to Agrippa

At the summit of the De occulta philosophia stands man, and in particular his soul. In the last sections of the third book Agrippa asks what the soul is, where it comes from, how it is united to the body and how it can, in certain exceptional states, know what the senses do not show. His answers interweave Plato's Timaeus and Phaedrus, Ficino's commentaries and Christian theology, and lead to the themes of divine fury and prophecy.

The parts of the soul

Agrippa describes the human soul as made up of three parts or powers. The highest is the mind, which contemplates divine things and shares in the angelic intellect; in the middle stands reason, which reasons and judges; at the bottom the idolum, a faculty linked to imagination and the senses, which gives life to the body through the spirit. The soul, he writes, is the image of God, and for this reason man occupies a unique place among creatures.

This dignity of man had been celebrated a few decades earlier by Pico della Mirandola in the Oratio, which opens by quoting a Hermetic saying: «Magnum, o Asclepi, miraculum est homo», a great miracle is man. Agrippa takes up this inheritance and roots it in his cosmology: man is the knot of the world because he contains within himself all the levels of being.

The four furies

In the Phaedrus Plato had distinguished four forms of divine madness: the prophetic, inspired by Apollo; the ritual or mystic, linked to Dionysus; the poetic, a gift of the Muses; and the erotic, which comes from Aphrodite and Eros. Ficino had commented at length on this passage, making it the foundation of a theory of inspiration. Agrippa takes it up in the third book, describing the furies as states in which the soul, freed from the bonds of the body, unites with higher realities.

Alongside these forms, the first book deals with a fury linked to melancholy. Agrippa draws on an ancient text attributed to Aristotle, the Problemata, which asks why all exceptional men, philosophers, statesmen, poets and artists, are melancholic. In the Renaissance reading, melancholy, linked to Saturn, can lead to madness but also to genius, when the soul is raised towards the highest things.

Dreams, oracles and prophecy

The third book finally gathers a great many examples of prophecy: the oracles of antiquity, the sibyls, the biblical prophets, the prophetic dreams narrated by historians. Agrippa interprets them as manifestations of a capacity of the soul which, when it withdraws into itself or is illuminated from above, can know the future and hidden things. Sleep, for him, is one of the states in which this capacity is most easily set free.

These ideas belong to a long tradition, running from Cicero's De divinatione to the medieval treatises on dreams. Agrippa does not set them out as techniques, but as part of a theory of the soul whose ultimate aim is the knowledge of God. Among the ancient sources on the subject was also the treatise on dreams by Synesius of Cyrene, a philosopher and bishop who lived between the fourth and fifth centuries, which circulated in Ficino's Latin translation.

The doctrine of the furies had a great fortune. We find it, with different accents, in Giordano Bruno's Eroici furori, published in London in 1585, and in the artistic imagination that associated melancholy with genius. Twentieth-century scholars such as Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, in their book on Saturn and melancholy, brought to light Agrippa's role in this story.