Reading Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s encyclopedic study of magic is like stumbling into a vast cabinet of curiosities, where toad bones boil water, witches transmit misery through optical darts, and numbers, arranged correctly, can harness the planets’ powers.
Agrippa was a Renaissance polymath, His occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.
When I was reading an article on publicdomainreview.org by Anthony Grafton who is the author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, and Inky Fingers, in order to write another essay about a different Agrippa, I was intrigued by this man. I encountered him many years ago as an undergraduate and had a very superficial understanding of his ideas.
Below are some excerpts from the Grafton text.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s manual of learned magic, De occulta philosophia (1533), explicated the ways in which magicians understood and manipulated the cosmos more systematically than any of his predecessors.
He attempted to map the entire network of forces that passed from angels and demons, stars and planets, downward into the world of matter. Agrippa laid his work out in three books, on the elementary, astrological, and celestial worlds. But he saw all of them as connected.
It includes a massive taxonomy of magical animals, plants, and stones, with ample instructions for their preparation and use.
Though I read them once thinking I would uncover some ancient secrets, most of the information means nothing to us today, other than being curiosities.
Would you want to cure a sore throat by touching your neck to the hand of someone who had died prematurely? I have an early winter cough this week, but I don't think I will be putting my spit in the mouths of green frogs and then letting them escape.
A natural history cabinet or “cabinet of curiosities”.
Grafton says "Any reader could find something of interest in this paroxysm of parataxis, a good bit of it taken directly from Pliny and none of it explicitly verified by anything resembling a test." Agrippa gave his readers anecdotes and practices.
He also thought knowledge of mathematics was required to do magic. For example, the Pythagorean number patterns that gave the universe structure.
Magical seals, characters, and numerical grids from
a 1651 English translation of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia
The therapies in Agrippa’s book often required the invocation of celestial or angelic powers, either to awake the slumbering, hidden forces of the magical things he wished to manipulate or to protect magus and clients against the more frightening sorts of supernatural powers.
Magic squares originated in the Arabic world, long before Agrippa’s time. Often they had their top row of cells filled with the letters of a divine name or with the first letters of a verse from the Koran, and the lower rows with permutations on them. Since Arabic letters, like Hebrew, have numerical values, each magic square automatically forms a mathematical figure, and it was in this form that they became most popular in the West.
All the stars have their own natures, properties, and conditions, and through their rays, they also produce signs and characters in inferior beings as well, in the elements, in stones, in plants, in animals and their members. Agrippa’s book not only became the manual of magical practice, but it also made the formal claim that magic was a kind of philosophy in its own right.
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