Chapter 105. Hermes Trismegistus, Christian Kabbalah and Renaissance Magic: Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, Dee

Between 1463 and 1614 a small group of humanists, priests and physicians built a Christian magical philosophy. It rested on three supposedly ancient revelations: the writings of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, the Neoplatonic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Hebrew Kabbalah. Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition remains the library’s main interpretation of this movement. Yates argues that the “Hermetic-Cabalist” synthesis produced the Renaissance magus and was undone only when Isaac Casaubon dated the Hermetica [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, Preface]. This chapter reads her account alongside the primary texts the library holds and the later scholarship that qualifies it.

The Corpus Hermeticum and Ficino’s Pimander

Yates describes the Hermetica as a collection of fifteen Greek dialogues, the first of which is the Pimander (Poimandres), together with the Latin Asclepius. The Renaissance took them as the work of an Egyptian priest older than Moses. Yates holds that they were in fact written by “various unknown authors, all probably Greeks,” and contain “popular Greek philosophy of the period, a mixture of Platonism and Stoicism,” with “some Jewish and probably some Persian influences” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. I]. Their reputation was such that in 1463 Cosimo de’ Medici told Ficino to put aside the Plato manuscripts: “mihi Mercurium primo Termaximum, mox Platonem mandavit interpretandum.” Ficino finished in a few months “whilst the old Cosimo, who died in 1464, was still alive.” Yates comments: “There are the complete works of Plato, waiting, and they must wait” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. II].

The Poimandres is a visionary dialogue. In the English Divine Pymander the divine Mind declares: “I am that Light, the Mind, thy God, who am before that Moist Nature that appeareth out of Darkness, and that Bright and Lightful Word from the Mind is the Son of God.” The text then describes the creation of the archetypal Man: “the Father of all things, the Mind being Life and Light, brought forth Man, like unto himself, whom he loved as his proper Birth”. This Man “would needs also himself Fall to Work, and so was separated from the Father” [Hermes Trismegistus, The Divine Pymander, #51557, Book I; cf. Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum, #40797, CH I]. The regeneration treatise (CH XIII, Everard’s “Secret Sermon in the Mount”) teaches that “no man can be saved before Regeneration,” and that “this Wisdom is to be understood in silence, and the Seed is the true Good” [Hermes Trismegistus, The Divine Pymander, #51557, Book VII]. To Ficino and his readers such passages read like Genesis and the Gospel of John foreseen by a pagan. Yates argues that this is why the magical Asclepius, which Augustine had condemned, was “rehabilitated” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. II].

Ficino’s natural magic and the Picatrix

Ficino was a priest and a physician. His Libri de vita (1489) was a medical treatise, and its third book, De vita coelitus comparanda, was translated by Yates as “On capturing the life of the stars.” It taught a scholar how to “draw down the life of the heaven” through planetary music, scents, colours and talismans [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. IV]. Yates follows D. P. Walker’s suggestion that this magic was “probably mainly subjective… he used it chiefly on himself,” working through the imagination [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. V].

Yates names the Arabic Picatrix as a likely source. It is “an extremely comprehensive treatise on sympathetic and astral magic, with particular reference to talismans,” written in Arabic “probably in the twelfth century” by an author “under strong Sabean, that is to say, Hermetic, influence” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. III]. Quoting the Latin Picatrix (Sloane MS 1305), Yates summarises its doctrine of the spiritus, which “descends from the above to the below and resides in the place where it is caught (ubi captus est),” because “the virtues of the superior bodies are the form and power of the inferiors” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. III, citing Picatrix Lib. I cap. 7 and Lib. IV cap. 1]. She finds Ficino’s healing image of “a king on a throne, in a yellow garment, and a crow and the form of the Sun” strikingly close to an image in the Picatrix [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. IV]. The library’s English translation from the Arabic, by Hashem Atallah, describes it as an eleventh-century manuscript. It defines magic as “everything that absolutely fascinates minds and attract souls by means of words and deeds,” a discipline whose subject “is a spirit within a spirit” [Ghayat al-Hakim, Picatrix, #53503, Book I ch. 2]. Its catalogue of planetary images draws on earlier sources. For Saturn, it says, The Interpretation of Spiritual Talismans gives “the image of a man whose face is a face of a crow and his legs are similar to the legs of a camel… holding a cane in his right hand and a lance in his left hand” [Ghayat al-Hakim, Picatrix, #53503, Book II ch. 10 “Planets’ Stones and Picture Drawings”].

Pico, Reuchlin and Christian Cabala

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola joined Hermetic magic to Kabbalah. In 1486, Yates writes, he “went to Rome with his nine hundred theses” from all philosophies, offering to prove them reconcilable in public debate. Yates holds that he “was the founder who first united the Hermetic and Cabalist types of magic” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. V]. Alexandrian says Pico learned Hebrew and Chaldaic from the convert Flavius Mithridates. His Conclusiones contained forty-seven theses drawn from Jewish Kabbalists and seventy-one of his own. In Pico’s view the Kabbalah clarified “the incarnation of the Word, the Trinity, the divine origin of the Messiah… the angelic hierarchies, original sin” [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675, “Începuturile Cabalei filozofice”]. The most notorious thesis held that “there is no science which gives us more assurance of Christ’s divinity than magic and the Cabala” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. V]. Alexandrian records that thirteen theses were denounced to Innocent VIII as heretical, “especially those in which he declared that magic and the Kabbalah are means of proving the divine origin of Christ.” Pico signed a retraction on 31 March 1487 [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675]. Yates adds that the Borgia pope Alexander VI absolved him after 1492. The Spanish bishop Pedro Garcia, who had sat on the commission, wrote a long refutation holding all magic “evil and diabolical” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. V].

Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), “Pico’s most important follower,” wrote De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalistica (1517). He divided history into three ages marked by the divine names Shaddai, the Tetragrammaton and a five-letter name, YHShVH, read as “Jesus.” This was an attempt “to read the name of the Christian deity into” the unpronounced name of God [Wikipedia: Christian Kabbalah]. Yates notes that through Reuchlin, “Pico’s Cabalist magic leads straight on to the angel magic of Trithemius or of Cornelius Agrippa” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. V]. Nesta Webster reads the same transmission differently. She traces it to Jewish Cabalists who by 1450 “had penetrated into the intellectual circles of Florence” [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, ch. IV].

Pseudo-Dionysius and the three worlds

The Christian magus needed his angels to be orthodox. Yates’s chapter VI shows how Pico’s Heptaplus joined the Kabbalists’ division of the universe into “the elemental world or terrestrial world, the celestial world or the world of the stars, and the supercelestial world” with the nine angelic orders of Pseudo-Dionysius. “Between all these worlds there was continuity of influences” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. VI]. Yates shows that Ficino treated Dionysius as the summit of Platonism and the pillar (“columen”) of Christian theology. She also notes R. Roques’s comparison of the Dionysian orders with Gnostic cosmic religion [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. VI].

Agrippa’s systematisation

Cornelius Agrippa (born Cologne, 1486) finished De occulta philosophia by 1510 but published it only in 1533. That was after his De vanitate scientiarum (1530) had declared all sciences vain. Yates calls the earlier book on vanity “a safety-device of a kind” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. VII]. Alexandrian credits Agrippa with inaugurating “occult philosophy” as a named discipline. He records that the Inquisition had the printing halted in Cologne in January 1533 and that Agrippa got the book out in July [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675, “Căutarea secretului secretelor”]. Agrippa’s first chapter sets out the plan of all three books: “Seeing there is a three-fold World, Elementary, Celestiall, and Intellectual, and every inferior is governed by its superior… Wise men conceive it no way irrationall that it should be possible for us to ascend by the same degrees through each World.” Accordingly magicians “seek after the vertues of the Elementary world, through the help of Physick, and Naturall Philosophy,” then those “of the Celestiall world… according to the rules of Astrologers, and the doctrines of Mathematicians,” and then confirm them “with the powers of divers Intelligencies” [Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, #6700, Book I ch. 1].

John Dee: the Monad and the angels

John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica (Antwerp, 1564) was dedicated to Emperor Maximilian II. It reduces the cosmos to one glyph through twenty-four theorems. Its first reads: “It is by the straight line and the circle that the first and most simple example and representation of all things may be demonstrated.” The third makes the central point “the Earth, round which the Sun, the Moon, and the other planets follow their respective paths” [Dee, The Hieroglyphic Monad, #51052, Theorems I–III]. Dee also recorded angelic séances, part of which Meric Casaubon published in 1659 as A True and Faithful Relation [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. VIII]. The library’s edition of De Heptarchia Mystica calls that system “possibly the only true example of a complete magical system to be found in the Dee papers.” Its prayers ask God for “the Holy and friendly conversation” of his “Mighty, Wise and Good Spiritual” ministers [Dee, The Heptarchia Mystica, #64714, Introduction and text]. Yates connects Dee to what followed. In 1589 he met “that famous Hermetique Philosopher, Dr Henricus Khunrath,” whose Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom reproduces the monas. Yates sees in Khunrath the joining of “Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia” into “a religious philosophy which promises a new dawn,” the language of the Rosicrucian manifestos [Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, #62112, ch. 3].

Bruno, the critics and Casaubon

Yates’s central claim concerns Giordano Bruno. Ficino had cited Augustine’s condemnation of the Asclepius and then practised a timid magic anyway. Bruno instead took “the bolder course of maintaining that the magical Egyptian religion of the world was not only the most ancient but also the only true religion, which both Judaism and Christianity had obscured and corrupted” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. I]. In England he styled himself “doctor of a more abstruse theology” and proclaimer of “a general philanthropy.” Yates reads this as a “Hermetic reform” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. XII]. On Kabbalah, she argues, he knew little Hebrew and took his Sephiroth and angelic orders “direct from his bible, that is to say from the occult philosophy of Cornelius Agrippa” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. XIV]. Bruno was imprisoned by the Holy Office from 26 May 1592. He was sentenced “as an impenitent heretic” and “burned alive on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome on February 17th, 1600” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, ch. XIX]. This reading of Bruno as Hermetic missionary rather than martyr of science is Yates’s own.

Opposition came from two directions, theological and humanist (Yates, ch. IX). The decisive blow was philological. When “Isaac Casaubon in 1614 pointed out for the first time” that the Hermetica “cannot have been written by any such person,” he “assumed that the works… were fakes by Christians.” Yates calls this “a watershed separating the Renaissance world from the modern world” that “shattered at one blow” the prisci theologi and “the whole position of the Renaissance Magus” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, chs. X, XXI]. The tradition continued in Robert Fludd, whose controversies with Mersenne and Kepler Yates treats as “a conflict between a late revival of the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition and the seventeenth-century scientific movement” [Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, #42768, Preface, ch. XXII].

Later readings: Hanegraaff and Hall

Wouter Hanegraaff (2022) takes the Hermetica on their own terms rather than as a lost prisca theologia or a Christian forgery. His subtitle, “altered states of knowledge in late antiquity,” states the thesis. Hermetic practitioners “believed that the horizon of human consciousness could not just be expanded but could be transcended altogether, resulting in… gnōsis.” Hanegraaff adopts “radical methodological agnosticism,” neither affirming nor denying “the ultimate truth of Hermetic beliefs.” He refuses the usual scholarly move of treating gnosis as “an irrational illusion” [Hanegraaff, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination, #63731, Prologue].

Manly P. Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages, subtitled “An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy,” treats these currents as one esoteric wisdom. In Hall’s account, Hermes entrusted “the sacred Book of Thoth,” the “Key to Immortality,” to “his chosen successors,” and its surviving volumes are known “to only a few initiates of the secret schools” [Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, #45649, “The Life and Teachings of Thoth Hermes Trismegistus”]. This is Hall’s synthesis. Yates’s history, by contrast, is built on dates and on Casaubon’s correction of them.

Key points

• Cosimo de’ Medici had Ficino translate the Hermetica (1463) before Plato, believing them older than Moses. Yates and modern scholars date them to the post-Christian Greek world.
• Ficino’s astral natural magic in De vita coelitus comparanda drew on talismanic sources such as the Arabic Picatrix.
• Pico’s 900 theses united Hermetic and Cabalist magic. Thirteen were denounced as heretical, including the claim that magic and Cabala best prove Christ’s divinity. He retracted in 1487.
• Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalistica (1517) made the Christian Cabala a system. The pentagrammaton YHShVH was used to read Jesus into the divine name.
• Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533) organised magic by three worlds: elemental, celestial and intellectual.
• Dee’s Monas (1564) and angelic system passed, according to Yates, through Khunrath into Rosicrucian language.
• Yates presents Bruno, burned on 17 February 1600, as a missionary of Egyptian Hermetic religion. Casaubon’s 1614 dating ended the Hermetica’s claim to antiquity.
• Hanegraaff reads the Hermetica as records of altered states. Hall treats Hermes, Kabbalah and Rosicrucianism as one Masonic-esoteric philosophy.