Animals, plants and stones: Agrippa's bestiary and lapidary

Through the pages of the first book parade lions and cocks, eagles and owls, gold and lead, jaspers, sapphires and corals. Agrippa was no naturalist and did not personally observe the animals or minerals he wrote about. He was a tireless reader who gathered information from books, and his catalogues are a mosaic of ancient and medieval quotations. Understanding where this information came from helps us read the De occulta philosophia as a document of the bookish culture of the Renaissance.

Pliny, the great reservoir

The main source is once again the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder, whose thirty-seven books cover animals, plants, medicine, metals and stones. The last two books, devoted to stone and gems, supplied a repertory of marvellous properties that the Middle Ages had copied and enlarged. From Pliny Agrippa takes, for example, the report of the eagle stone, said to be found in the nests of these birds, and many other beliefs about minerals.

Pliny himself, after all, had collected information from hundreds of Greek and Latin authors, often in a detached tone that signalled his doubts. In the passage to Agrippa these doubts fade: the reports are rearranged no longer by subject but by the planet or element to which they are assigned, and they become pieces of a cosmological system.

The lapidaries and the books of secrets

Alongside Pliny, Agrippa draws on the medieval tradition of the lapidaries. The Liber lapidum of Marbod of Rennes, written in Latin verse at the end of the eleventh century, had described dozens of stones with the virtues that tradition attributed to each. Albertus Magnus, in the thirteenth-century De mineralibus, had discussed the origin of these virtues in a philosophical spirit. Even more widespread was the so-called Liber aggregationis, a book of secrets attributed to Albertus but not his, which circulated in numerous printed editions.

From these texts derive the associations between stones and planets that Agrippa presents in his lists. Jacinth and chrysolite are called solar, selenite lunar, because according to tradition it contained an image of the Moon that waxed and waned with it. The historian recognises here a second- or third-hand knowledge, in which direct observation plays a minimal role.

The animals of the planets

The same method applies to animals. Under the Sun stand the lion, king of beasts, the cock that announces the dawn, the eagle that according to the bestiaries could gaze at the Sun without being dazzled. To the Moon go creatures linked to water, to night or to change. To Saturn are assigned animals considered solitary, nocturnal or melancholy, such as the mole and the owl. Each attribution rests on a trait of behaviour or appearance interpreted as a sign of the planet's nature.

In this way the medieval bestiary, which read moral and religious lessons in animals, turns into an astrological bestiary. The lion is no longer only a symbol of Christ or of strength, as in the Physiologus, but a true bearer of solar virtues, linked by a hidden sympathy to gold, to the plants that follow the Sun and to people of solar temperament.

These pages should not be read as knowledge of nature, but as evidence of a way of thinking. The virtues Agrippa attributes to stones and animals were beliefs of tradition, not verified properties. Their historical interest lies in showing how the Renaissance sought to order the variety of nature within a web of cosmic correspondences, before the experimental method changed the rules of knowledge.