Fascination: the gaze that binds in the first book

«Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos», laments a shepherd in Virgil's third eclogue: I know not what eye bewitches my tender lambs. The line shows how old the conviction was that a gaze could do harm. Agrippa adopts it in the first book of the De occulta philosophia, where he devotes a chapter to fascination and defines it as a bond which, starting from the spirit of the one who looks, passes through the eyes and reaches the heart of the one who is looked at.

The spirit that travels with the gaze

Agrippa's explanation is physiological before it is magical. According to the medicine of the time, the purest blood produces in the heart a subtle vapour, the spirit, which spreads through the body and carries the faculties of the soul. The eyes, transparent and luminous organs, were thought to be the privileged path by which this spirit leaves the body, like a ray. When it meets another person's eyes, it enters them and strikes that person's spirit, imprinting on it the disposition of the one who sent it out.

Agrippa does not invent this theory, but takes it almost word for word from Marsilio Ficino. In his commentary on Plato's Symposium, the De amore, composed in 1469, Ficino had explained falling in love in just this way: the spirit of the beloved enters through the lover's eyes and transforms him, like a contagion. What in Ficino is a theory of love becomes in Agrippa one of the basic mechanisms of natural magic, capable of producing attraction as well as harm.

The testimony of the ancients

To support his thesis Agrippa piles up classical testimony. Pliny the Elder, in the Naturalis historia, reported distant peoples among whom certain individuals, endowed with a double pupil, were said to have the power to harm with their gaze. Plutarch, in his Table Talk, had devoted a discussion to the evil eye, asking whether it was possible and how it might be explained by emanations from the body. Aristotle, in a short treatise on dreams, had maintained that a gaze could even stain a mirror.

Alongside these sources stood the basilisk, the legendary serpent that according to the bestiaries killed with its eyes. For Agrippa and his readers the basilisk was the extreme case of a force that in human beings acted more weakly but on the same principle. All these reports were treated as evidence of a natural law, not as superstitions, and served to lend authority to a belief widespread throughout the Mediterranean.

Imagination and passions

In the first book fascination is linked to the power of the imagination and of the passions. Agrippa maintains that a soul strongly stirred by love, anger or envy can alter not only its own body but also that of others, because the spirit carries the impressions of the soul outward. This is why in tradition envy was considered the most dangerous passion: the evil eye was often described as the gaze of the envious.

This doctrine had a long line of descendants. In the sixteenth century physicians and philosophers argued at length over whether fascination was a natural phenomenon or the work of demons, and the debate flowed into the treatises on witchcraft. Popular belief in the evil eye, alive in many regions of Italy until recent times, belongs to an older cultural layer, but Agrippa's text remains one of its most influential learned formulations.

Reading these pages today allows us to grasp a fundamental idea of the Renaissance: body and soul were not closed in on themselves but open to the influence of others through the spirit. The gaze, in this vision, did not merely receive images but acted on the world, and fascination was its most feared manifestation.