Agrippa's Cabinet of Curiosities

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. 

A Destitute King With No Country

I had a dream last night about Orson Welles, who I have written about here several times before. In the dream, he was doing a magic trick. He asked me to give him a coin. I placed a quarter in his gloved hand. He closed his hand and then opened it to reveal a key. He said, "This is what you were looking for, isn't it?"

I went downstairs, made my coffee and went online and did a search on his name. I thought that perhaps this was the day he was born or had died. It is not either of those. I searched on "Orson Welles magician" and it brought up links to the documentary about him by that name. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a film I had not seen. I had tried last year unsuccessfully to find it on some streaming services.

But there it was, on YouTube, for free - perhaps not legally, but I watched it this morning. If it is still available and you have an interest, watch the version below (but go full screen).

And there is a brief scene in the film that is pretty much my dream. Somehow, that bit of film was in my head, and now I have rediscovered it.

If the embedded video isn't working, the film is available for purchase.
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles and many of his films as actor and director that are referenced in the documentary.

Orson Welles: Charlatan Extraordinaire

Who was Orson Welles? He was an actor, director on radio, the stage and in films. He became a celebrity, a favorite of TV talk shows. He became known as a trouble maker on sets. He was difficult, so that no one would give him money to make films. He made poor films, did commercials and narrated things in order to pay the bills. He was a magician. By his own admission, like all actors, he was a charlatan.

A charlatan is hardly a compliment to lay upon oneself. They are a swindler, someone practicing quackery, deception, a confidence trick, usually to get money but also to achieve fame. Welles did all that to make films.

The word is French. Once, a charlatan was a seller of medicines who might have used music and magic to attract a crowd. Not unlike filmmakers.

Welles radio drama, The War of the Worlds, was certainly a grand deception that worked so well that it got him the chance to make Citizen Kane at the age of 23. That would be the only film of which Welles had full creative control

His much less known film, F for Fake, is certainly a charlatan at work. The subject is fakery, art and authorship. It was his final directorial project. In it,  Welles tells the story of the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory and also the story of a hoax-biographer Philip Irving,

I think for Welles, this film was not quite a documentary. It was intentionally fiction, fact about fictions, and filled with film tricks.

It was also self-referential. Francois Truffaut said that he believed Welles made the film as a “reposte” because of the controversy created by the overrated film critic Pauline Kael who wrote that Welles had not written a single line of Citizen Kane. This was later shown to be untrue.




The Film Institute at Montclair State University held an event on "Welles at 100" in 2015 and has posted a few short videos about Welles.





One topic discussed then was how the charlatan side of Welles emerged.




In the video below, Welles shares his views on cinema and movie-making with French film school students. He applauds actors as the most important element. He praises the French for allowing for a director to be the true author of a film, but he is no fan of the director being the most important person on the set. He compares them to orchestra conductors and stage directors - in both cases the orchestra and acting company can perform quite well without a director once the pre-work has been done. Prepare and then get out of the way.


 


Like Herman Melville with Moby Dick (Welles would have been a great Ahab. Instead, he only played Father Mapple. See more about that here.) Welles will always be best known for Citizen Kane.
When I taught film courses and showed that film I was careful not to say it was "the greatest film ever made." It gets that title sometimes and it certainly is great, but a) I hate best-of, and greatest lists of anything, and b) that's the worst intro you could give to students about any film.

It was a critical success and a box office disappointment. The latter is due to William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire boycott and outright attempts to kill the film. Yes, the film is largely based on Hearst, but that is hardly the point of the film.

Welles wanted his first film to be about people who are "larger than life," He was thinking Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli scale. One of his influences was supposedly Aldous Huxley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan'' which is a novel supposedly also based on Hearst's life. Welles' ex-wife Virginia was part of Hearst's social circle and Hearst was a friend of his father.

Welles claimed that he took from Bible the idea of using different points of view on the man and "witnesses" testifying, sometimes contradicting, about Kane's character.'

In Citizen Welles, a biography by Frank Brady, I loved reading about young Orson as film apprentice screening John Ford's Stagecoach  forty times trying to learn cinematic techniques.

Not unlike others, from Napoleon to Bob Dylan, Orson Welles was a very good con artist who proved adept at self-promotion and self-invention.

The magician in him said that ''everything in this world was phony, worked with mirrors.''

That was true of his best and worst work.

Welles' film work made me think more about the technical aspects and possibilities of cinema. He also made me think about how we perceive the world in the light and shadows of a flickering projector and outside in the sunlight, shadows and moonlight where thing often don't appear as they are in what we call reality.

Welles editing F is for Fake

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WORTH WATCHING