From the 1510 manuscript to the Cologne edition of 1533

The De occulta philosophia took more than twenty years to mature. Agrippa, born in Cologne in 1486, wrote a first version around 1510, when he was little more than twenty, and saw it printed in full only in 1533, a few years before his death. Between those two dates lie journeys through France, Italy and the Low Countries, posts at courts and in cities, quarrels with theologians and an almost unbroken labour of revision.

The visit to Abbot Trithemius

Between 1509 and 1510 the young Agrippa visited Johannes Trithemius, abbot of the monastery of St James at Würzburg, famous for his learning and for his studies of cipher writing. After that meeting he sent him the manuscript of the first draft, together with a dedicatory letter. Trithemius replied with words of praise and a piece of cautious advice: share common things with everyone, but keep the higher and secret doctrines for trusted friends.

That first version has survived in a manuscript kept at Würzburg, published in a critical edition in 1992 by Vittoria Perrone Compagni. Comparing it with the printed text shows how much the work grew over time: the youthful core was already divided into three books, but it was much shorter, contained fewer quotations and gave far less room to Jewish Kabbalah and to speculation on the divine names.

The Italian years and new reading

From about 1511 to 1518 Agrippa lived in Italy, where he was caught up in the military and diplomatic affairs of the time and moved in humanist circles. At Pavia, in 1515, he lectured on the Pimander, the Hermetic treatise translated into Latin by Ficino. In those years he deepened his knowledge of Platonic philosophy, the writings of Pico and Christian Kabbalah, material that flowed into the revision of the work together with the many readings gathered in the following decades.

Back in the north, Agrippa served as advocate and orator of the city of Metz, where in 1519 he defended a woman accused of witchcraft, then as a physician in Geneva and Fribourg, then at Lyon in the service of Louise of Savoy, and finally as historiographer to Margaret of Austria, governor of the Low Countries. At each of these stages he went on annotating and enlarging the youthful manuscript.

Printing and resistance

In 1531 the first book alone appeared at Antwerp. The complete edition in three books came out at Cologne in 1533, dedicated to Archbishop Hermann von Wied. Publication was not easy: the Dominican inquisitor Konrad Köllin tried to stop it, and Agrippa had to defend his work by appealing to the city council. In the end the book saw the light, destined for a long European career of reprints, translations and condemnations.

Meanwhile, in 1530, Agrippa had published De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, a sceptical declamation against the claims of all the sciences, magic included. In the note to the reader of 1533 he presented the De occulta philosophia as a youthful work, referring to that book for his retractions. The relationship between the two works, one enthusiastic and the other destructive, remains one of the problems most debated by historians.

The publishing history explains many features of the text: the layering of sources, the repetitions, certain internal tensions. The book of 1533 is at once the work of an ambitious young man and of a mature one who had known courts, universities and tribunals. Reading it means crossing a quarter of a century of European culture, from the enthusiasms of the early sixteenth century to the anxieties of the age of the Reformation.