Trithemius and Agrippa: the Master of Würzburg and the Letter of 1510

In the winter of 1509 to 1510 a young scholar from Cologne, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, knocked at the door of the Scottish monastery of Saint James in Würzburg. There, for some years, lived Abbot Johannes Trithemius, who had left Sponheim in 1506 after disputes with his monks. From their conversations about magic, alchemy and Kabbalah came the plan for the book that would make Agrippa famous.

An Abbot Surrounded by Legends

Trithemius was then one of the best-known scholars in Germany, but also one of the most talked about. It was said that he had summoned for Emperor Maximilian the shade of his late wife, Mary of Burgundy. It is a legend without documentary basis, probably born of the Steganographia's reputation. More concrete were his writings for the emperor, such as the Liber octo quaestionum, devoted to theological questions raised by Maximilian himself.

Curiously, Trithemius also left us one of the earliest testimonies about the historical figure of Faust. In a letter of 1507 to the astrologer Johann Virdung he describes with contempt a wandering charlatan who called himself Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus the younger, and boasted of extraordinary magical powers. The abbot considered him an impostor and a vagrant.

The First Draft of the Occult Philosophy

After the visit, Agrippa wrote within a few months a first version of De occulta philosophia, in three books, and sent it to Trithemius with a dedicatory letter. In it he explained that he wished to restore dignity to magic, which ordinary people confused with superstition and witchcraft, by showing its philosophical and religious roots. A manuscript copy of this first draft is still preserved in Würzburg today.

The youthful version differs in many respects from the one printed in Cologne in 1533, which Agrippa expanded considerably over more than twenty years. Comparing the two versions allows scholars to follow the growth of his thought and the addition of new sources, above all Kabbalistic and Neoplatonic ones. The three-book plan, devoted to the natural, celestial and intellectual worlds, was however present from the start.

The Master's Advice

Trithemius replied with a letter dated 8 April 1510, which Agrippa later printed at the opening of the work. The abbot praised the work and encouraged the young man to continue, but recommended a precise rule: to share common things with everyone and the highest secrets only with a few trusted friends. The maxim is summed up in an image that became famous, “Da foenum bovi, saccharum psittaco”, that is, give hay to the ox and sugar to the parrot.

The advice reflected Trithemius's own experience, for he had paid with his reputation for spreading his projects too widely. Agrippa followed it only in part: he kept the book in a drawer for many years, but when he published it he made it accessible to a vast public. In the same edition, after all, he warned readers that many things were said in veiled form and had to be sought with patience.

The bond between the two did not last long, for Trithemius died in December 1516. Yet without that master of Würzburg the Occult Philosophy might never have been born. Even today, opening the 1533 edition, the reader first meets the letters of this exchange, almost a symbolic threshold to the whole work.