INTRODUCTION

AGRIPPA'S LEGACY

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) is both an historical fig• ure and a myth. To the modern reader, he is first and foremost the archetype of the Renaissance man, the pre-Enlightenment physician, the superstitious astrologer and black magician who tries to over• come the bonds of earthly existence. As such, Agrippa occupies his own small but significant place in European literature, as both a horrifying and an alluring figure. Thus, Mary Shelley (1797-1851) introduced Agrippa as the first guide in natural philosophy to her creation Victor von Frankenstein. Frankenstein first read 'the won• derful facts which he (Agrippa) relates' with enthusiasm at the age of thirteen. Soon he studied Agrippa, and later also Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, with great delight, even though his father warned his young son with visionary prudence against Agrippa with the words, 'Ah! Cornelius Agrippa! My dear Victor, do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.'1 Shelley presented some years later, in her charming short story The Mortal Immortal, the figure of Winzy, a one• time friend of Agrippa and assistant in the alchemist's workshop during the 1510s. Winzy, so Shelley's story goes, had acquired immortality by drinking a philtre prepared by Agrippa and, in 1833, he recalls memories of his former master on his three hundred and twenty- third birthday. Reflecting the contradictory reactions which Agrippa as a man with supernatural powers might evoke, Shelley presents Winzy both as an admirable person because of his ability to over• come the constraints of nature, and as a doomed one, because, hav• ing survived all his family and loved ones and being condemned to live in a world where he no longer understands anything, he is no longer a true member of the human community.2 All in all, Winzy is presented without indignation, as a pathetic victim of his own superstition. Mary Shelley's miraculous Agrippa is, of course, the

1 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (first published 1818), ch. 2, p. 38. 2 Mary Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories, pp. 219-230. 2 INTRODUCTION immediate descendant of the character imagined by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593); in his play on the life and death of the fa• mous alchemist Doctor Faustus, Marlowe had his hero Faust pro• claim that he 'will be as cunning as Agrippa was,/Whose shadows [i.e. the shades or spirits invoked by Agrippa] made all Europe hon• our him' (Act i, scene 1, 116-117). Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was, as is well known, the first in a long series of Faust plays in Western Euro• pean literature. Agrippa obtained the legendary reputation on which Marlowe and Shelley were building mostly because he was an avid student of occult philosophy, an occupation traditionally looked upon with great sus• picion by the Church. Already during his own lifetime, as Agrippa himself related, priests were denouncing Agrippa as a magus, an evil sorcerer, in their sermons.3 During the decades after Agrippa's death, oral tradition fabricated a number of tales claiming that the author of De occulta philosophia had in fact been an accomplice of the devil. The oldest known and most widespread of these legends is the fa• mous dog story coined or recorded by Paulus Jovius (1483-1552) in his biographical dictionary. Jovius tells his readers that Agrippa died in solitude, despised by many who suspected him of necromancy because he used to be accompanied by the devil in the shape of a dog. Shortly before his death, the story continues, Agrippa repented and, recognizing the dog as the cause of his ruin, untied its collar, which was inscribed with magical signs, and ordered it to leave him. Thereupon the dog, in spite of its lifelong fidelity to its master, ran away, leaving its master to face death in complete solitude. The dog was later seen to jump in the river Saône, and nobody ever saw it swim out again.4 This story was credible because it fitted into tradi• tional stories concerning sorcerers,5 and it gained further authority when it was repeated in popular works such as Andreas Hondorffius's (d. 1573) exemph collection (first edition 1574)6 and André Thevet's

3 Querela, fol. L ijr. 4 P. Jovius, Elogia doctorum virorum (...) illustrium (...), cap. xci, ed. 1557, pp. 223- 224 (first edition 1546). 5 It was a common belief in the sixteenth century that the devil could appear in the shape of a dog (see Allen Woods, The Devil in Dog Form. A Partial Type-Index of Devil Ugends, pp. 142-144). 6 A. Hondorffius, Theatrum historicum sive promptuarium illustrium exemplorum, ad honeste, pie, beateque vivendum cuiusvis generis (...), ed. 1607, p. 167 (exempla secundi praecepti, eh. 'de magicis artibus,, example 12).