8 - Agrippa of Nettesheim

Summary

Three Books of Occult Philosophy 1.1–2, translation James Freake

The German Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (b. 1486; d. 1 535) was an itinerant scholar who wrote on various subjects. He is most known for his De occulta philosophia (written in 1509/1510, published during 1531 to 1533), a kind of summa of occult thinking, in which the concept of “natural magic” (magia naturalis) was of paramount importance. In this extensive work, Agrippa subsumed a vast variety of practices and conceptual patterns brought forward by Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and others under the concept of “magic” (see the Introduction to Part I) – such as Ptolemaic astrology, alchemy, divination, the Plotinic idea of a world soul, “Hermetic” ideas such as the correspondence of the upper and the lower, “Kabbalistic” speculations about the occult property of words, letters, numbers and signs, and reflections on the order and names of intermediary beings. However, Agrippa avoided the term magia in the title of the work, probably in order to prevent problems with church authorities.

We present Chapters 1 and 2 from the first book of De occulta philosophia. In the first chapter, Agrippa claims that there is a “threefold world”, referring to an “elementary” world (in Ptolemaic terms, this is the sub-lunar sphere, mainly corresponding to human life on the earthly surface), a “celestial” world (the super-lunar sphere – i.e., the celestial bodies), and an “intellectual” world (the human mind and soul, higher beings such as angels and demons, God and the world soul).