Agrippa's three worlds: elemental, celestial and intellectual

Anyone who opens the De occulta philosophia of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa immediately meets an architecture. The first chapter of the first book begins with a programmatic sentence: «Cum triplex sit mundus, elementalis, coelestis et intellectualis», since the world is threefold, elemental, celestial and intellectual. Each lower level is governed by the one above, from which it receives its powers. On this idea, as old as Neoplatonism, Agrippa built the entire work, published in full at Cologne in 1533, assigning to each world a book and a form of knowledge.

A ladder that descends and ascends

In Agrippa's vision, powers descend from above. God, the archetype of all things, communicates his power to the angels and intelligences; these pass it on to the heavens, the stars and the planets; the celestial bodies in turn pour it into the elements and earthly creatures. This is the great chain of being that the Renaissance had inherited from Plotinus, Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius, reworked in the Florence of Marsilio Ficino.

The wise man, whom Agrippa calls a magus in the ancient and noble sense of the word, travels the opposite way. Starting from visible things, he seeks to climb, step by step, to invisible causes. Knowledge thus becomes an ascent, and magic appears as the summit of all the sciences, the discipline that sums them up and crowns them. Agrippa insists that it presupposes a solid grounding in natural philosophy, in mathematics and in theology.

Three books for three kinds of knowledge

The correspondence is strict. The first book deals with natural magic, which concerns the elemental world and rests on physics: elements, qualities, the hidden virtues of stones, plants and animals. The second book is devoted to celestial magic, also called mathematical, because the heavens are known through numbers, measures and proportions. The third book addresses ceremonial magic, tied to the intellectual world and therefore to theology, religion and the divine names.

This tripartition was not an isolated invention. Pico della Mirandola had already distinguished a natural magic, worthy of the philosopher, from a superstitious one, and Ficino, in the third of his Libri de vita of 1489, had explained how the soul of the world and the cosmic spirit link heaven to earth. Agrippa gathered these materials and arranged them in a single, almost encyclopaedic system, something no one before him had attempted on such a scale.

Man at the centre of the structure

Beside the three worlds Agrippa places man, the little world that sums them all up. In the human body we find the elements, in the vital spirit the harmony of the heavens, in the mind the spark of the divine intellect. This is why the second book devotes pages to the proportions of the body, inscribed in circles and squares, and the third investigates the nature of the soul. The ancient doctrine of the microcosm, dear to the Hermetic writings and to the Platonists, becomes the bridge between the three parts of the work.

Understanding this architecture is the key to reading everything else. Every chapter, from the virtues of the magnet to the names of the angels, finds its place along the ladder of the three worlds. The De occulta philosophia is not a disorderly book of recipes, as it has sometimes been imagined, but the attempt of a young scholar to order the whole learning of his time according to a unified vision of the cosmos.