Agrippa's sources: Ficino, Pico, Reuchlin and Pliny

The De occulta philosophia is a book made of books. Agrippa did not claim to have discovered new truths, but to have gathered and ordered the wisdom of ancients and moderns, and he said so openly. Modern scholars have patiently reconstructed his sources, discovering that whole pages reproduce, sometimes word for word, earlier authors. Four names stand out above all: Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin and Pliny the Elder.

Ficino and Florentine Platonism

Marsilio Ficino, born at Figline in 1433 and died at Careggi in 1499, was the great translator of ancient Platonism. Commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, he translated into Latin, in 1463, the treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, published in 1471 under the title Pimander; then the whole of Plato, printed in 1484, and Plotinus, in 1492. He also translated Iamblichus, Proclus and other Neoplatonists, making a whole philosophical continent accessible to the Latin West.

For Agrippa the decisive text was the De vita libri tres of 1489, and in particular its third book, De vita coelitus comparanda. From here come the theory of the spirit of the world, the doctrine of planetary influences, the re-evaluation of Saturn and many reflections on music and images. The first book of the De occulta philosophia owes much of its theoretical structure to Ficino.

Pico and Reuchlin

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who died in 1494 at the age of thirty-one, was the first to unite natural magic and Kabbalah in a single philosophical project. His nine hundred Conclusiones of 1486 and the Oratio meant to introduce their public discussion offered Agrippa the model of a universal wisdom capable of reconciling Plato, Aristotle, Hermes, Kabbalah and Christianity, as well as the distinction between licit and illicit magic.

Johannes Reuchlin, a German humanist and great Hebraist, supplied the tools to develop the kabbalistic part. The De verbo mirifico of 1494 and the De arte cabalistica of 1517 were read closely by Agrippa, who used them for the chapters on divine names, letters and numbers. Through Reuchlin, Jewish Kabbalah entered the third book in an already Christianised form.

Pliny and the other sources

For natural magic, on the other hand, the main source was the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder, who died in 79 during the eruption of Vesuvius. From this work Agrippa drew hundreds of reports on animals, plants, stones and metals, often without citing it. Alongside Pliny stand Albertus Magnus, the medieval lapidaries and the books of secrets, which made up the common naturalist heritage of his age.

The list could go on at length. Agrippa drew on the Picatrix and the Arabic astrologers for images, on Pseudo-Dionysius for the angels, on Trithemius for certain themes, and in the final revision also on the De harmonia mundi of the Venetian Franciscan Francesco Giorgi, published in 1525. The result is a work of synthesis rather than invention.

It is precisely this compilatory character that makes the De occulta philosophia a precious tool for the historian. Reading it, one crosses, in a single volume, the entire magical and philosophical library of early sixteenth-century Europe, with its ancient, Arabic and Jewish roots and its humanist reworkings. Many of those sources, moreover, had been in print for only a few decades, and the very possibility of gathering them into a single work was an effect of the printing revolution.