Occult Philosophy: Ficino, Pico, Agrippa and the Magical Cosmos

Occult philosophy was the learned synthesis of Neoplatonism, Hermetism, Kabbalah, astrology and magic developed by Renaissance scholars between the late fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Its central figures were Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whose De occulta philosophia (1533) gave the tradition its name. They pictured the universe as a living hierarchy bound together by sympathies and spirit, in which a learned and pious magus could understand and use the hidden powers linking earth, heavens and God.

What "Occult Philosophy" Meant§

For Renaissance writers, "occult philosophy" did not mean a secret cult. It meant philosophy concerned with the occult, or hidden, causes of things: the powers by which stars affect bodies, words affect spirits and the soul ascends towards God. Agrippa used the phrase as a respectable name for magic itself, which he defined as the most perfect and highest knowledge, embracing natural philosophy, mathematics and theology. The term signalled an ambition to rescue magic from its association with demons and restore it as the wisdom of the ancient sages.

Behind this ambition lay the idea of the prisca theologia, the "ancient theology". Renaissance scholars believed that a single divine wisdom had been revealed to Moses and passed through Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, Orpheus and Pythagoras to Plato. If the Hermetic and Platonic writings preserved that wisdom, then their teachings on the cosmos and on magic deserved the attention of Christian philosophers.

Ficino: Hermes, Plato and the Spirit of the World§

The movement began in Florence. Around 1462 Cosimo de' Medici gave the scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) a Greek manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum and asked him to translate it before turning to Plato. The Latin version, finished in 1463 and printed in 1471 under the title Pimander, became one of the most widely read philosophical books of the age. Ficino went on to translate Plato, Plotinus and later Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus and Proclus, transmitting the theory of theurgy discussed in our article on Neoplatonism and theurgy.

Ficino's own contribution to magic came in the third book of De vita libri tres (1489), "On obtaining life from the heavens". Drawing on Plotinus and on astral magic, he argued that a subtle spiritus mundi, the spirit of the world, carries celestial influences into matter, and that the human spirit, made of the same fine substance, can be tuned to beneficial planets through music, odours, colours, foods and images. A melancholy scholar born under Saturn might attract the gentler influences of Jupiter, Venus and the Sun. Ficino was careful to present this as natural medicine, but his discussion of talismans and planetary songs drew on the Arabic tradition represented by the Picatrix. The broader history appears in astral magic.

Pico della Mirandola and Christian Kabbalah§

Ficino's younger contemporary Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) added a new element. Having studied Hebrew and Kabbalistic texts with Jewish teachers and converts, Pico included among his 900 Conclusions (1486) a series of theses on magic and Kabbalah, claiming that no science gives greater certainty of Christ's divinity. Thirteen of the theses were condemned by a papal commission in 1487. His speech prepared to open the planned debate, later known as the Oration on the Dignity of Man, celebrated the human being as a chameleon able to rise or fall through the scale of creation.

The German humanist Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) developed Pico's Christian Kabbalah in De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalistica (1517), arguing that the name of Jesus, rendered in Hebrew as a five-letter name, completed the four-letter divine name of the Old Testament. Christian Kabbalah gave occult philosophy its theory of sacred names and letters, discussed further in Christian Hermetic Qabalah.

Agrippa's Synthesis of the Three Worlds§

The abbot Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim (1462–1516), author of the cryptographic Steganographia, was the mentor to whom the young Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) sent the first draft of his De occulta philosophia around 1510. The work circulated in manuscript for two decades before Agrippa published it, much enlarged, at Cologne in 1533. Its plan is simple and powerful. Book One treats the elemental world and natural magic; Book Two the celestial world, with number, geometry, music and astrology; Book Three the intellectual or divine world, with Kabbalah, divine names, angels and religious ceremony.

Agrippa's books became the standard encyclopaedia of Renaissance magic and the source of countless later grimoires and correspondences tables. Paradoxically, he had also published De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1530), a satirical attack on the vanity of all human learning, magic included, a tension scholars still debate. The full 1651 translation can be read as Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and the work is analysed in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy.

Paracelsus, Bruno and Dee§

The Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493/4–1541) gave occult philosophy a medical and alchemical turn. He replaced Galenic humours with the tria prima of salt, sulphur and mercury and spoke of the physician reading the "signatures" stamped on plants and minerals. Works attributed to him, genuine and spurious, were collected after his death; seventeenth-century English versions include the Archidoxis and Of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature.

The Dominican philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) pushed occult philosophy towards an infinite universe animated throughout by a world soul, and wrote treatises on magic and the art of memory. He was burned in Rome in 1600 for heresy, though the precise charges remain debated. In England, John Dee (1527–1608/9) combined mathematics, astrology and alchemy in his Monas hieroglyphica (1564) before turning to the angelic conversations later published by Meric Casaubon as A True and Faithful Relation (1659).

Seventeenth-Century Heirs: Fludd, Vaughan and the Rosicrucians§

The anonymous Rosicrucian manifestos of 1614–1616 announced a fraternity possessed of a reformed, universal knowledge rooted in occult philosophy, and set off a European debate; the English translation is in our reading room as The Fame and Confession of the Rosie Cross. The English physician Robert Fludd (1574–1637) defended the brotherhood and produced vast illustrated cosmologies; his Mosaicall Philosophy argued that true natural philosophy was to be found in Scripture. In the 1650s the Welsh writer Thomas Vaughan, in works such as Anthroposophia Theomagica, restated Agrippa's vision for a new generation.

Meanwhile Isaac Casaubon's redating of the Hermetic writings in 1614, which showed that they belonged to the early Christian centuries rather than the age of Moses, slowly undermined the prisca theologia. Occult philosophy lost its academic standing, but it passed into Rosicrucian and Masonic circles and later, through Lévi and the Golden Dawn, into the occult revival.

Yates and the Modern Study of Occult Philosophy§

The modern study of the subject owes much to the Warburg Institute in London. D. P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (1958) reconstructed Ficino's theory of spirit, and Frances Yates's Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) argued that a "Hermetic tradition" of magic had helped inspire the Scientific Revolution. The "Yates thesis" stimulated decades of research but was criticised for overstating the unity of Hermetism and its role in science. Later scholars, among them Brian Copenhaver, Christopher Lehrich and Wouter Hanegraaff, have studied occult philosophy as part of the wider history of Western esotericism, stressing the diversity of its sources and its place within Christian theology.

Frequently asked questions§

Who coined the term "occult philosophy"?§

The phrase was made famous by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, whose De occulta philosophia libri tres was printed at Cologne in 1533. Earlier writers had discussed occult qualities and magic, but Agrippa used "occult philosophy" as the name for an integrated system of natural, celestial and divine magic.

Did Renaissance occult philosophers think they were practising witchcraft?§

No. They sharply distinguished their learned, pious magic from the demonic magic attributed to witches and necromancers. Ficino presented his methods as medicine, Pico and Reuchlin as Christian theology, and Agrippa as the highest form of philosophy. Critics, however, often doubted whether these distinctions held.

What is the Yates thesis?§

The historian Frances Yates argued in 1964 that a distinct Hermetic tradition, launched by Ficino's translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, shaped Renaissance magic and contributed to the rise of modern science. Most historians now consider the thesis overstated but acknowledge that it opened up the serious study of Renaissance magic.

Sources and further reading§

• Three Books on Life — Marsilio Ficino, 1489
• Three Books of Occult Philosophy — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, 1533
• Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella — D. P. Walker, 1958
• Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition — Frances A. Yates, 1964
• The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age — Frances A. Yates, 1979
• The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy — Christopher I. Lehrich, 2003
• Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment — Brian P. Copenhaver, 2015