Ficino, Translator of Hermes: the Corpus Hermeticum and Careggi

Around 1460 a monk in the service of Cosimo de' Medici, Leonardo da Pistoia, brought to Florence from Macedonia a Greek manuscript containing a series of dialogues attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Cosimo, by then an old man, had recently entrusted the young Marsilio Ficino with a Latin translation of the whole of Plato. Faced with the new codex he changed his priorities: Plato could wait, Hermes could not. From this decision came one of the key texts of Renaissance magic and philosophy.

A Manuscript That Jumped Ahead of Plato

The codex contained fourteen treatises of the so-called Corpus Hermeticum, written in Greek in the imperial age but then believed to be extremely ancient. Ficino translated them quickly and finished in 1463, in time for Cosimo to read them before his death in 1464. The title chosen was Pimander, after the divine intelligence that in the first treatise reveals to Hermes the origin of the world and the destiny of the soul.

The translation circulated for a long time in manuscript and was first printed at Treviso in 1471. In the following decades it went through many editions and became familiar to theologians, philosophers and artists. One sign of this is the pavement of Siena Cathedral, where around 1488 a large figure of Hermes Trismegistus was inlaid, presented as a contemporary of Moses.

The Ancient Theology

For Ficino Hermes was the first link in a chain of sages who had glimpsed the truths later revealed by Christianity. This prisca theologia passed, in his reconstruction, from Hermes to Orpheus, then to Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus and finally Plato. In other writings Ficino also places Zoroaster at the head of the series. The idea made it possible to read pagan philosophy as a preparation for the Gospel rather than as its opponent.

The consequences were enormous. Texts such as the Asclepius, already known in Latin in the Middle Ages, and the new dialogues of the Pimander seemed to offer an original wisdom in which theology, cosmology and magic were still united. Later authors, from Lazzarelli to Agrippa, invoked Hermes as an authority almost equal to the prophets. Yet there was a reason for caution: Saint Augustine, in The City of God, had already condemned the Asclepius passages on statues animated by gods, and Christian readers knew it well.

Careggi and Ficino's Circle

Cosimo had given Ficino a house near the Medici villa of Careggi, in the hills north of Florence. There the philosopher worked for years on his translations: the complete Plato was printed in 1484, Plotinus in 1492. Around him gathered a circle of friends, pupils and patricians that tradition calls the Platonic Academy. Modern historians stress that it was more a circle of discussion and friendship than an institution with rules and fixed sessions.

The dating of the Hermetic texts was corrected only in 1614, when Isaac Casaubon showed on linguistic grounds that they had been composed in the first centuries of the Christian era. For more than a century and a half, however, Ficino's translation had given Hermes immense prestige. Agrippa's Occult Philosophy bears its imprint in every book, and without the work done at Careggi Renaissance magic would have had neither its legendary founder nor its genealogy of wisdom.