They believe they are able to deal with Everything, solve every problem, interpret every text...rushing
in with their absurdities, their vulgarities, their rubbish and quarrelsome disputations...Everything in spirit and faith
that is simple, lucid and pure they have made complicated, polluted and confused...they have built something which is neither
a divine nor human theology, but a sordid, hateful, pedantic and devilish vainglory. - Agrippa, De originali peccato
(Original Sin, 1517), written on the evils of scholasticism and the Fall of the Angels.
Born of
Nettesheim on 14 September, 1486, at
Cologne, descended from a
noble family of modest means; he died at Grenoble
or Lyons in 1534 or 1535. Described as a "
knight,
doctor, and by common reputation, a
magician", Agrippa constantly
angered his more
conservative contemporaries, challenging the faulty assumptions of
Medieval Scholasticism . He began
humbly as a poor student at
Cologne in 1499 (matriculated 'minorennis', or under age) and later the
University of Paris
(1506), earned a degree in
theology, then went into military service to
Catalonia under the emperor
Maximillian I, first
as secretary and later as a spy. After a
shadowy assignment in southern
Spain he wandered up to
Barcelona,
Naples,
Avignon, and finally Dôle (1507-08). In that town he studied
medicine and
jurisprudence and then acts as a teacher of
Hebrew (1509). That year, according to legent, he also establishes a
laboratory for the
alchemical production of
gold
and to gain favor with Princess Margaret, one of his patrons, writes a small book of flattery for her (
On the nobility and
excellence of the feminine sex); a few months later he gives public lectures on Johann Reuchlin's
De verbo mirifico,
which gets him busted by a local
Franciscan for its
Talmudic influence.
~
He returned to England (1510) after earning his doctorate, about which time he finished his first major work
De occulta
philosophia
(published in
Antwerp, 1531), a mixture of
Neo-platonism and the
Cabala. He returned for some time to the
service of
the Emperor
Maximilian I, who rewarded his bravery by making him a Ritter or
knight, before turning again to other
pursuits. He began research in the fields of
medicine,
Hebrew,
alchemy,
theology, and finally devoted himself fully to "
Cabalism" under the influence of the infamous
wizard Raymond Lulli
(q.v.).
During later life, he lived and taught abroad, from 1511-18, living in northern
Italy (where the Franco-Italian Wars are well
underway) earning a living as an
alchemist while trying to secure a university position, especially at
Pavia (where he
expounded
hermetic writings and lectured on
Plato's
Syposium in 1515) or
Turin (where he lectured on
the Bible while
studying law). He lived free with his wife and child in
Casale thanks to the generosity of a fellow
Cabbalist,
Marchese del Monferrat. Finally between 1518-20, he landed a '
real job' as a public
advocate and
defense lawyer in
Metz.
During this period, as Reginald Scot outlines in his
Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), he managed to defend a woman
accused of
witchcraft by the local
Dominican and
Grand Inquisitor, Nicholae Savin.
µ His successful defense
(in 1519) of the alleged
witch results in his exile from the town. He travels next to Geneva to work as the town physican,
making excursions to Paris and England while also frequently visiting his friend Abbot
Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim in
Würzburg (Trithemius had also been driven out of town by his intellectual peers, so they had things in common). By 1527, he
moved to Mecheln, the town where
Queen Margaret (the same lady he'd had the schoolboy crush on) had her court, and worked as
court
historian but by 1531 he was put in
debtor's prison (or jailed on a charge of
sorcery, or
blasphemy depending
which history you read). Cardinal Campeggio, Cardinal Lamarck, and Count Wied, the Lutheran archbishop of
Cologne, helped
him to escape and he fled to Cologne to the court of the archbishop.
ƒ He soon was under pressure by the
The
Inquistion to leave Europe (who are also now leaning on
Cologne printer/publisher Johannes Soter not to publish his
De
philosophia occulta). Agrippa dies soon after in 1535 at Grenobles.
His numerous works, chiefly philosophical, have a strong bias toward "
occultism", and run counter to the received opinions
of
his time in
theology and
scholastic philosophy. At the time, there was little comprehension of "natural
magic" which he
advocated- seeking nature the natural and spiritual in the spirit. This is why the Abbot
Johannes Trithemius of Sponheim
advised him to communicate his views as a
secret doctrine to those able to rise to a similar conception of nature and
spirit,
for "
one gives only hay to oxen and not sugar, as to songbirds." Agrippa did not let his three volume
Philosophia
occulta appear until 1531, though it had been written for 20 years, as he considered it to be immature. In it, he embraces
astrology, divination, numerology and the power of gems and stones; it was also rumored he practiced necromancy as way of
consulting the spirits of the dead.
Source:
1. Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich Cornelius, 1486?-1535.
Three books of occult philosophy or magic
by...Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim...
Book one-Natural magic; which includes the early life
of Agrippa, his seventy-four chapters on natural magic, new notes, illustrations, index, and other
original and selected matter, Ed. by Willis F. Whitehead. By direction of the Brotherhood of magic:
The magic mirror, a message to mystics, containing full instructions on its make and use... (Chicago :
Hahn & Whitehead, 1898)
2.
Cornelius Agrippa, the humanist theologian and his declamations / by
Marc van der Poel. Leiden
The Netherlands ; New York : E.J. Brill, 1997
Notes:
µ This pretty much secured Agrippa's
infamy in the eyes of the
Roman Catholic Church. The priest he argued
against was already notorious for the use of
torture and illegal searches, but
The Inquisition would rather things run
smoothly. According to the entry in the
Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft, after
Agrippa
himself died, a
ersatz grimoire entitled the
Fourth Book of Agrippa served as a popular textbook for country
witches which became the classic handbook for witches on how to avoid witch-hunters, even through Agrippa never actually penned such a work.
~ This got him run out of town by the local monks on the charge of being a 'judaising heretic', as they apparently
didn't like the way Agrippa made
Hebrew scholastic practice look just as legitimate as
medieval Church thinkers. The
work itself by Reuchlin was a
Neoplatonic tract published in Basel in 1494. It caused quite a stir for its eludication of
the
Pentagrammaton and insistance that
true knowledge comes through
revelation, not mere
observation.
ƒ This was on account of they being free-thinking
Lutherans who, understandably, found the
Mother Church could
be a bit
doctrinaire by times.