Agrippa's Occult Philosophy: Faith, Celestial Influences and Spiritual Transformation

Our spirit works wonders through faith, which is a firm attachment, a fixed intention and a strong application of the operator to the cooperator, which strengthens what we intend to accomplish so that the imagination of the virtue that must be received and the thing that must be done in us by us is formed in us. Book I Chapter LXVI Through fixed intention, concentration of mind, faith, imagination, the human mind thus vibrates with celestial influence to such an extent as to conform and adapt to it and will fill its soul with its virtue obtaining a transmutation: [...] whoever wishes to attract the influence of the solar, must contemplate the Sun not only through external light, but also through inner light and no one can do this without ascending to the spirit of the Sun itself and without becoming similar to it and without understanding and perceiving with the eye of understanding its intelligible light as with the bodily eye one perceives its sensible light. This will thus be filled with its splendor and will receive within itself the light which is the hypotyposis communicated by the superior sphere and, clothed by it, having become similar to it, will truly obtain, at its pleasure, the same sovereign clarity and the aid of forms that participate in the star. Having drawn the light of the sovereign degree, the soul will then approach perfection and become similar to solar spirits and will draw from the very sources of supernatural virtue and will use its power to its degree, if the first author wills it. Book II Chapter LX Agrippa therefore, like Paracelsus, uses numerical seals relating to individual planets, however unlike the latter he integrates these practices and doctrines with Kabbalistic speculation probably borrowed from Abbot Trithemius. The Kabbalah proves to be the perfect instrument to allow the individual to go beyond simple astral influences and reach the celestial intelligences themselves that correspond to the planets, but which are not the planets being hierarchically superior spiritual realities. Through the Hebrew language and the celestial signs borrowed from it, man can rise and establish contact no longer with the effects, i.e. celestial influences, but directly with the causes, i.e. the intelligences that caused them. Magical astrology thus becomes no longer a tool useful exclusively for obtaining material goods or healing the body, but a discipline useful for achieving spiritual goods for the healing of the soul. This new vision of Astrology made explicit by Agrippa will be taken up and refined by subsequent authors, who will increasingly lead to a spiritualization and internalization of astrology which until that moment had had a predominantly material character and aimed at obtaining and receiving influences and goods of a material nature. The Occult Philosophy and De Vanitate In this period, in 1526 Agrippa writes one of those texts destined to create considerable perplexity among historians of this historical period: De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum. The book, written in 1526 and published in 1531, declares the uncertainty and vanity of human sciences including those more properly occult such as magic, astrology and alchemy. For example, the warning he declares in this writing to alchemists is famous: "In the end, after having wasted the time and money you have spent on it, you find yourselves old, laden with years, covered in rags, hungry, with a perpetual smell of sulfur and dirty and stained with zinc carbon, paralyzed from having manipulated quicksilver too much... and so unhappy that you would gladly sell your life and even your soul." With this book Agrippa seems to make himself known as the most irreducible of skeptics and those disillusioned with science. Yet after less than a year he publishes the first edition of a book totally devoted to magic and astrology that he had begun under the tutelage of Abbot Trithemius, which he had kept private for more than twenty years and which precisely in those years he had decided to organize and complete with the addition of a third book: De Philosophia Occulta which came out in its first edition in 1533. Agrippa's apparently schizophrenic attitude aroused the curiosity of historians for a long time, who attributed this double publication to an attempt by Agrippa to guard against attacks that would come from the publication of the subsequent book, namely the Occult Philosophy. This can certainly be true, but it is not a conclusive fact. In reality, as Yates has illustrated, the two works are not in antithesis, indeed once examined in depth they are the one logical consequence of the other. The failure to understand this continuity and therefore also Agrippa's personality was dictated by a failure to understand and evaluate De Vanitate Scientiarium. In De Vanitate, Agrippa affirms the vanity and uncertainty of all human sciences, both occult and classical ones. The list of vain sciences includes: grammar, art, poetry, the art of memory, dialectics, arithmetic, music, geometry, cosmography, architecture, astronomy, magic, Kabbalah, physics, metaphysics, ethics, medicine, alchemy and jurisprudence. Having reached the ninety-ninth chapter, Agrippa thus appears to us as the prince of skeptics, for whom everything is vain. But having reached the hundredth chapter, we discover the meaning of the entire work. Everything is vain, except one thing: the Word of God. Human science is vain, uncertain and illusory, only Divine Science, the Word of God is real. This is the meaning of Agrippa's writing, so that in his subsequent writing De Philosophia Occulta, without any break in continuity, he illustrates how to access, through a "more effective philosophy," such divine science and real wisdom. In this sense we understand the real essence of the magic described by Agrippa, that is, what was the meaning of all those particular practices that seem funny to us: the seals, the colors, the perfumes, what was the meaning of all these things? These have no meaning in themselves, they are only instruments that