Cornelius Agrippa

Wrote the foundational textbook of Western magic, then published a book declaring all human knowledge worthless — including magic — and nobody has settled which he meant.

Who they were

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535) wrote De occulta philosophia libri tres — the Three Books of Occult Philosophy — the single most influential work of Western magical theory, and the source from which nearly all later ceremonial magic descends.

He also wrote a sustained attack on the possibility of any human knowledge whatsoever, published before it, and the relationship between the two has occupied scholars for four centuries.

Where they came from

Born near Cologne, he lived the life of a Renaissance intellectual for hire: soldier, physician, legal advocate, court secretary, university lecturer, and repeatedly unemployed. He worked in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries, was patronised and dismissed by a series of nobles, and was chronically short of money.

He completed the Three Books in 1510 at twenty-four, circulated them in manuscript, and did not publish until 1531–33 — with substantial revisions, and after his more sceptical work had already appeared.

Two episodes deserve recording.

In 1519 at Metz he defended a woman accused of witchcraft, arguing successfully against the inquisitor that the charge rested on nothing — her mother had been burned, and the case against her consisted of that inheritance. He won her acquittal. It cost him his position in the city.

And in 1509 he wrote the Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, published 1529 — an argument that women are not merely equal to men but superior, drawing on scripture, history and natural philosophy. Its tone is partly that of a rhetorical exercise, which was a recognised genre, and it is still a startling document to find in 1509.

He died at forty-eight, poor.

What they taught

The three-level cosmos, which organises the Three Books and everything after them:

Natural magic — the elemental world, and the occult virtues of stones, plants, animals and substances, operating by sympathy and antipathy
Celestial magic — the mathematical world of number, proportion, astrology, magic squares and talismanic images
Ceremonial magic — the intellectual world of God, angels, intelligences and names, approached through purification, prayer and invocation

The ascending structure is Neoplatonic, and the whole system is a synthesis of Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Christian Kabbalah, Arabic astrological magic and Christian theology.

And then there is the other book. De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium — On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts (1526) — argues that every branch of human learning is uncertain, contradictory and vain, and that only faith in scripture offers anything solid. It attacks magic explicitly, and it attacks Agrippa's own earlier work by name.

He published it five years before the Three Books. Then he published the Three Books anyway.

Explanations offered: that he genuinely recanted and published the earlier work only under pressure or for money; that the Vanity is a rhetorical performance in a recognised genre of learned scepticism, not a confession; that both are sincere and he held a fideist position in which human knowledge including magic is worthless and worth studying. Scholars have not settled it, and the appendix he added to the Three Books addressing the problem does not resolve it either.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the influence is enormous. The Three Books are the template for Western ceremonial magic, used by the Golden Dawn and by everyone downstream of it. The correspondence tables in modern occultism trace back here.

We can say the legend outgrew him substantially. He became a model for the Faust figure, was credited with a demonic black dog, and acquired a reputation for necromancy that the historical record does not support.

We can say the spurious Fourth Book, published in 1559 after his death and containing operative grimoire material, is not his — which did not prevent it shaping his reputation for centuries.

We cannot say what he believed. That is not evasion: a man who wrote the century's greatest defence of magic and its most thorough denunciation, and published them in the wrong order, has left a question the documents do not answer. It is one of the more interesting unresolved problems in this section, and it is worth noticing that the tradition's foundational author may not have been sure.

Who they were

Where they came from

What they taught

What we can and cannot say

Further reading