Volume 6, Number 3 · March 3, 1966
The Magic Christian
By Frances A. Yates
Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought
by Charles G. Nauert Jr.
University of Illinois, 374 pp., $7.00 (paper)
Renaissance and Revolution
by Joseph Anthony Mazzeo
Pantheon, 349 pp., $6.95
Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-circa 1535), German occultist and mystic, played an important part in the Renaissance by popularizing in the North those magical practices and attitudes inherent in the Neoplatonic movement that was initiated in Florence by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. The Renaissance ideal of the Magus, the 'divine' man with powers of operating on the cosmos and achieving universal knowledge and power—adumbrated in Pico's famous Oration on the Dignity of Man—found its theorist in Agrippa who wrote a text book on how to become a Magus. His De occulta philosophia was the best known manual of Renaissance magic, incorporating both the Ficinian magic deriving from the Hermetic revival, and the Cabalist magic indicated by Pico and further developed by Reuchlin and the hosts of Renaissance Cabalists. A few years before the publication of the final version of the De occulta philosophia (1583), Agrippa published his De vanitate scientiarum in which he attacked all sciences as vain and useless, including the occult sciences which he was about to expound enthusiastically in his next book. Which of these two sensational works represents the true mind of Agrippa, the one which teaches the techniques of Renaissance magic and promises to lead the student to Pisgah heights of illumination, or the one which casts doubts on those techniques, and indeed on all human hope of valid knowledge of any kind?
Review, 2388 words
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