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. 

If Only I Had a Babel Fish Who Could Read to Me

I wrote recently on another site about The Embassy of the Free Mind which is collection of pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects.

These books have been, and still are being, digitized under a digital education project called “Hermetically Open.”

A donation from author Dan Brown - who certainly has an interest in these areas and has used them to great advantage in his own novels - has enabled much of this work to be done.

Amsterdam’s Ritman Library has a sizable collection of pre-1900 books on occult subjects. Currently, the first 1,617 books from the Ritman project have come available in their online reading room.

If you are interested in having full access to hundreds of rare occult texts, you might want to check it out.

One caveat: these books are written in several different European languages, especially Latin, the scholarly language of Europe throughout the Medieval and Early Modern periods.
Other books appear in German, Dutch, and French.

This makes me want a Babel fish. The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like creature that feeds on human brain wave energy. After absorbing all unconscious frequencies, it can then "excrete" telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain.

That means the babel fish when stuck in your ear allows you to instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

The only problem is that it was made up by writer Douglas Adams for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book series.

It would be amazing if we had this universal translator that neatly crosses the language divide between any species.

Adams says that the Babel fish could not possibly have developed naturally, and therefore it both proves and disproves the existence of God.

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man.

Is there the secret, the answer, to what we have been seeking in those texts? Maybe this is more than just the stuff of novels and movies.