Divine names and Christian Kabbalah in the third book

In 1509, at Dole in Franche-Comté, an Agrippa barely past twenty gave public lectures on the De verbo mirifico of Johannes Reuchlin, a treatise on the power of the divine names. The lectures won him the favour of some listeners, but also the accusation of a Franciscan friar, Jean Catilinet, who denounced him as a judaizing heretic. The episode reveals how central Kabbalah already was to his interests. In the third book of the De occulta philosophia this passion becomes one of the pillars of the work.

The birth of Christian Kabbalah

Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical and exegetical tradition that developed above all between Provence and Spain from the twelfth century, with texts such as the Sefer ha-Bahir and the Zohar. At the end of the fifteenth century Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, helped by Jewish scholars and converts, made it an object of Christian study: in his Conclusiones, published in Rome in 1486, he maintained that no science confirms the divinity of Christ more than magic and Kabbalah. The thesis was among those condemned by Pope Innocent VIII.

The German Johannes Reuchlin continued along this path with the De verbo mirifico of 1494 and the De arte cabalistica of 1517. In the first he argued that the name of Jesus, written in Hebrew, was the Tetragrammaton with one letter added, and therefore the completed revelation of the name of God. Agrippa absorbed these ideas and reworked them in his own system.

The ten sefirot and the names of God

At the centre of Kabbalah lies the doctrine of the ten sefirot, the emanations or attributes through which the infinite God manifests himself and acts in the world. Agrippa lists them with their Hebrew names and associates with each a biblical name of God, such as Ehieh, Iah, Elohim, El, Adonai and Shaddai, an angelic order and a celestial sphere. In this way Kabbalah is grafted onto the structure of the three worlds and onto the hierarchies of angels.

Special veneration was reserved for the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name that in Jewish tradition is not pronounced. Agrippa also deals with the name called Shem ha-Mephorash, the explicit name, which kabbalists derived from three verses of Exodus, each of seventy-two letters, obtaining seventy-two angelic names. For him these names are not mere words but signs in which divine power has made itself present in language.

Letters, numbers and interpretation

Kabbalah also offered techniques for reading the sacred text. Gematria calculated the numerical value of words, since every Hebrew letter is also a number; notarikon interpreted letters as the initials of other words; temurah permuted letters according to fixed rules. Agrippa describes these techniques as tools of biblical interpretation and links them to his theory of numbers, showing how language itself can reflect the order of the cosmos.

The underlying idea, that the world was created through the word and that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the original forms of creation, goes back to texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation. Agrippa adopts it and turns it into a theory of the power of words, which occupies several pages of the first and third books.

Thanks to the De occulta philosophia, Christian Kabbalah reached a far wider public than that of learned Hebraists. Often simplified and mixed with astrology and magic, it became a stable part of European esotericism, but its origin lies in medieval Jewish tradition, which Agrippa knew only indirectly, through the Latin works of his predecessors.