CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

'Tis Magic, Magic that hath ravished me. Then, gentle friends, aid me in this attempt; And I . ..

Will be as cunning as Agrippa was, Whose shadows made all Europe honour him. —Christopher Marlowe

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim ( 1486-1535), as befits a great magician, left behind him a number of mysteries for posterity. In two letters to his friends, in which he discussed the progress of his great treatise on magic De occulta philosophia libri tres1 [Three Books of Occult Philosophy, hereafter D OP], Agrippa wrote of a "secret key" to the occult philosophy, a key which would be revealed only to his closest friends.2 In the latter half of the sixteenth century, it was commonly believed that this "key" referred to a text of black magic spuriously attributed to Agrippa,3 thus lending credence to the legends of Agrippa the black magician, which in turn led to Agrippa's importance as a source for the Faust legends. But if the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy was certainly a spurious work, what was Agrippa's secret key to the occult philosophy? Agrippa, one of the most influential magical thinkers of the Renais• sance, was for the next two centuries continually cited (positively or negatively) along with Paracelsus as a founding thinker of the magical

1 De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 15 31 /33) ; see Abbreviations (page ix above) for complete details of references to DOP. 2 "Clavis reservare." Epistolae, 3, 56 (22 January, 1524), 759-60; and 5, 14 (24 September, 1527), 873-75. See also Marc Van der F'oei, Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and his Declamations (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997), 81-2. 3 Henrici Cornelii Agrippae liber quartus de occulta philosophia, seu de cerimoniis magicis. Cut accesserunt, Elementa magica Petri de Abano, phihsophi, Marburg, 1559; in Opera 1, 527-61 this is De Caeremoniis Magicis liber, sed, utputatur, spurius: qui Quartus Agrippae de Occulta Philosophia habetur. 2 CHAPTER ONE schools of thought. Despite this, modern scholars have had great difficulty uncovering anything of value or importance in his greatest work, DOP. After a lifetime of work on Giordano Bruno and John Dee, Dame Frances Yates finally settled on Agrippa as the touchstone, if not the key, to the mysteries of Renaissance magic. In an earlier work, she had apologized for devoting a chapter to Agrippa despite the fact that DOP "does not fully give the technical procedures, nor is it a profound philosophical work, as its title implies. . . ."4 In one of her last published articles, however, she commented: The extraordinary strength of the influence of Agrippa's De occulta philosophia has not yet been fully realized. It was an influence which operated in diverse ways with differing results. It encouraged Dee's Cabalistical angel-conjuring. It encouraged Bruno's magical mnemonics. It was central not only to the spread of Renaissance magic but also to the reaction against it.5 This apparent change of heart conceals a crucial point in modern assessments of Agrippa: while it is undeniable that he was influential, modern scholarship has been unable to explain why he was influential. The onus of the present analysis of DOP is to give an explanation for this importance by demonstrating the philosophical complexity and interest of a great magician's work. Thus this is a search for Agrippa's "secret key" in the text of DOP itself.

Theory and Method

While Agrippa is most directly relevant for scholars of Renaissance intellectual history and history of science, this work is not directed solely to such scholars. Indeed, I want to show that the methods and ideas of other disciplines can contribute to the analysis of Renaissance magic. In particular, I hope to use Agrippa's work to reopen some central definitional questions in the discipline of the history of religions. Finally, I intend to demonstrate the important contiguity of Renaissance magical

4 Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 130. 5 Frances Yates, "Renaissance Philosophers in Elizabethan England: John Dee and Giordano Bruno," in Lull & Bruno: Collected Essays, volume 1 (London: Routledge and KeganPaul, 1982), 221.