Pico Della Mirandola

Transcript (PDF)

The date is March 8th, 1983. This is the second lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on The Origins of Hermetic Science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Pico della Mirandola: On the Christian Kabbalah, The Dignity of Man.

This is the second lecture in the series. This is on The Origins of Hermetic Science. And tonight we're going to look at Pico della Mirandola. And last week we began with Ficino, Marsilio Ficino. The outline of this course is very difficult to conceive of for the mind that has not spent years and years and stirring around in this information so that the shape of the syllabus is probably somewhat unfamiliar to most of you. It was pointed out to me by several individuals who knew this area at least passingly well that half of the individuals listed there have very little information about them and this is true. But fortunately I've been in a position in the last year researching out of the vault at the Philosophical Research Society on a book which will be finished this year and perhaps published by the end of this year. The title of the book is Some Hermetic Roots of America. And in stirring around to find the occult origins of this country I found that there was a misunderstanding, generally, on the directions and the origins of the Hermetic tradition in Europe. In the last 10 to 15 years there have been a few writers who have addressed themselves to this problematic field. Foremost among them was Dame Frances Yates who passed away a couple of years ago who was at the Warburg Institute at the University of London. And Dame Frances at six feet tall and flaming gray hair was quite an impressive lecturer. I took her in once when she came up to Canada where I was teaching and it was quite a fine experience to see someone of this caliber.

The beginnings in Italy in northern Italy in the small communities each of them priding themselves in their own medieval heritage and priding themselves in the family traditions that went into making up these cities like the Medici in Florence or the Sforzas in Milano. Many small communities which almost are dwarfed by the huge Italian cities of today were at that time quite famous and capable of supporting a sense of civic pride and intellectual excellence which hardly seems possible today. The small community of Urbino had a wonderful career at that time and so to a very small community known as Mirandola about 30 miles west of Ferrara, Italy had at that time a family. The scion of that family born in 1463 was Pico della Mirandola, the Count of Mirandola. And he was sent at the ripe age of 14 to the University in Bologna not too far from Ferrara. A little bit further to the east in the Po River valley and there like all young students of the time he was still only 14 or 15 years old. He was started into a series of studies that would have led either to medicine or to canon law. It was sort of a prep course in Aristotelian thought with the fundamentals of Galen thrown in and of course the basic learning in the scriptures so that after two years one could then branch into either medicine or canon law, go into the ministry become a priest. These were the normal channels. Young Pico was a phenomenon in languages and by the time that he was 16 or 17 years old he realized that he had one of these minds for whom learning languages was a snap. In fact in his lifetime he learned most of the difficult languages of the world. He learned to read with great perfection Hebrew. He could read fluently in Arabic. He could read in Aramaic because he had learned that it was the ancient language of Jesus. He learned Greek and Latin and of course French and Italian, a little bit of German and Spanish. So he was somewhat of a prodigy and the fact that he only lived 31 years almost gives us a false impression of the individual because by the time he was 16 or 17 Pico was already in possession of a tremendous intellect and he had been trained rather well at the University of Bologna so that he was well grounded in the Aristotelian classics. But he couldn't see his way to becoming a priest and he couldn't see his way into going to medicine. He had some sort of an income from his father and after two years at the University of Bologna he simply went traveling. He went to Paris and he studied there. In fact it was there outside of the University of Paris - he never enrolled formally as a student - that he began some of his Hebraic studies - learning the Hebrew language and grammar and so forth. He had three teachers of the Kabbalah at that time. I have their names written down for you if you're keeping records on this. One of them was scarcely older than himself. A man who only lived to be 35 himself, his name was Elia del Medigo. Elia del Medigo. His other two teachers in Hebrew were Leon Abravanel and Johannan Alemanno. Pico, after spending seven years traveling around Europe mostly in France, some in Switzerland and southern Germany, northern Italy, decided that he was ready as an intellect to take on anyone in terms of intellectual debate. So he found himself in the city of Rome, he was 23 years old and at his own expense he had printed out a long list of 900 questions, 900 Theses. And he had these posted in Rome at various open places challenging any scholars anywhere in Europe to come and debate him publicly in Rome on these issues. And then he waited for the fallout. Well such a flamboyant character of course drew the attention of Pope Innocent the eighth. And Innocent the eighth took umbrage at least 13 of these 900 Theses saying that they skirted some very dangerous ground indeed.

In fact one of the theses that Pico had tacked up was that Christ was misunderstood by the traditional church that indeed the Christ did save individuals but in quite a way different from the one that had been taught. And in fact if they would be willing to listen p-ko would set them straight. Well a character like this of course also drew the attention of our wonderful man Ficino up in Florence. And Ficino, like a true, a wonderful teacher, sent envoys down to Rome to observe the happenings. Pico stayed for a year in Rome and instead of having the great debate which he had hoped for he was increasingly busy fending off the papal authorities. In fact he found himself quite busy in hightailing it back to France and in Paris he was seized by papal authorities and arrested and put in prison. Not for very long. He was a cheerful tall handsome intelligent youngster popular with the ladies, popular with all the friends, the men who would love intellectual problems and love the camaraderie of high intelligence so that Pico found himself released. And in fact it seems that our friend Ficino who had contacts with the papacy had contacts with Lorenzo de Medici the Sforza family in Milano and almost every known scholar of the time. Ficino made sure that such a valuable human being was not left to waste in a prison. And of course when Pico was released he made his way to Florence and stayed with Ficino at the Platonic Academy in the hills northeast of the city, up around Carreggi and Ficino's farm up in that area. Montevecchio, that was the name of the farm. When Ficino welcomed Pico in. Pico had just finished publishing an apology, an apologia to the Pope. Recounting that perhaps he had been a little hasty due to his age and his exuberance of learning and that he would be very glad to perhaps not tone down his theses so much as to explicate them at length. If the Pope would allow for it. There was a little bit of to do in the background. And finally Pico was able to publish what has become a little minor classic the Oration on the Dignity of Man. And in the Oratio, Pico displays in a broad tapestry his cosmic scale of learning. He is a name dropper par excellence and you find some 75 to 125 names of all the greats of all time in every tradition. And not only that, Pico is very flamboyant in the sense of showing that all of these thinkers knew about each other progressively so that there were grand traditions in the world. And in fact he makes sure that all those roads lead up to himself. And Pico was quite able to defend the fact that it was not his Intelligence so much as the fact that he had been a joyful recipient of all of these great learnings and traditions, but he was eager to point out that while his great friend and benefactor and perhaps teacher Ficino had translated the entire corpus of Greek learning, including the Corpus Hermeticum, the Complete Dialogues of Plato, the soon to be completed Plotinus, and Dionysius the Areopagite, the Orphic Hymns, etc. etc. he had left out of his learning the very important phenomenon of the Hebrew language. And as Pico goes on in the Oratio since it had been known for quite some time that the old mosaic tradition predated the Greek learning and that already the savants of Roman Alexandria - and incidentally I'll be giving a lecture this Saturday on Roman Alexandria at the Philosophical Research Society - Pico pointed out that the savants of Roman Alexandria had already assimilated all of the Greek learning not so much to Christianity although that had been done but that first all of the Greek learning had been assimilated to Jewish thought and that the Jewish community in Alexandria highlighted very early on by the genius of Philo who was born about 30 BC and lived on until the reign of Claudius probably 45 AD or somewhere in that vicinity. That already there was a great synthesis and part of that synthesis was that Scripture was shown not to be a literal creation but an allegorical palace of learning and that the real occult understanding of sacred scripture was in fact accessible only through a special understanding of the capacities of the Hebrew language. And further that it was not simply a learning of the old rabbinical notions that had been codified in the Talmud etc. but that there had been discovered progressively by human intelligence a key to the language. And that key was the Kabbalah. And in fact that the Kabbalah had been progressively refined beginning somewhere around the 800s and finally into the 1200s, late 1200s, there was a wonderful teacher who had perfected a system of Kabbalistic interpretation of the scriptures and that Pico now, almost alone in the Christian world, was able to expound this sacred meaning. And the name of the Kabbalist that he pointed to as being the great integrator of Kabbalistic thought was Abraham Joseph Ben Abraham Gikatilla who died in 1305 and was born in 1247. So he was roughly contemporaneous with Raymond Lull and the latter part of the life of Roger Bacon. Gikatilla had emphasized in his great synthetic works on the Kabbalah that there were really three basic occult perceptions which should be trained by the Kabbalist. The first of them was called Gematria. G-E-M-A-T-R-I-A. And I'll give you a quotation here from a book called The Christian Interpretation of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance. Joseph Leon Blau. Gematria.

He writes it involved the use of the fact that in ancient languages including Hebrew the letters of the alphabet that also represented numbers. This suggested that when the sum of the numerical equivalents of the letters of two or more words was the same when their numerical equivalents were the same the words were capable of being interchanged so that a whole labyrinth of possibility in interpretation was opened up. Not only that. Without restriction as to language since both Latin and Greek were susceptible of this same treatment as well as Hebrew the Christian Kabbalist could produce virtually any interpretation they desire. So how are you going to keep track of such a wild card possibility? But there was a second interpretive possibility that was pointed out and Pico made a great deal of this. It was called Notarikon named after Notarius, a Latin scribe. Notarikon was an acrostic system that is one could take the first letter and the last letters of a phrase and put those first and last letters together and make a sacred word. And not only that since the vowels were not written in Hebrew since they were all the consonants one would then have a very precarious mental juggling in order to carry through Kabbalistic interpretation to its Nth degree. One could have for instance a sacred word which would be almost undecipherable to anyone not presented with this complex Kabbalistic learning. But not only that the third possibility was called Themera - Themera. And in Themera which actually goes on to say means a transposition that one could have letter substitutions. And since there were 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet there were 21 codes possible for any given letter. That is there were 21 possibilities of transposition so that one was presented with almost an infinity of possible usage so that people emphasized that only by a man having intact this unbroken lineage and tradition from Moses to the present day could one have any possibility of using such a powerful tool? So it emphasized that man's mind, great as it is, was almost incapable of deciphering the infinite possibilities so that he had to rely upon the ancient tradition and that that ancient tradition implied specifically that the original impetus of understanding must have come from God and not from man. How could man have ever on his own found the way in such a labyrinth? So that there was the divine revelation given by the tradition and that within that tradition there were specific stages and steps by which the learned occult genius of man was instructed. The word genius here incidentally is a specific term. In the Renaissance it meant Guardian spirit. And we'll get to that when we see it comes from Plotinus singled out by Ficino and spread everywhere by Pico and soon everyone was talking this way. They meant genius in the old way. That one had a guardian spirit at birth. One's genius, one's guardian spirit, was as important in Hermetic astrology in the Renaissance as your birth chart as your rising sign so that one had to maintain a constant contact with your guardian spirit in order to have this supercelestial shepherding of you through this enormous maze. You're beginning to get to sense now that there was literally an ocean of learning that was presented. This of course was in complete contrast to the very simplistic kind of education that took place in the Middle Ages and right up into Ficino's time and part of the Renaissance part of the rebirth of man's mind and capacities was the fact that he was finally presented with this incredible array of very powerful tools but that he had very little chance to use it unless he was instructed. And thus you find in the Hermetic tradition there's always the emphasis, where did you get your learning? Who taught you and who taught them? So that one of the keys, always, in a hermetic document was not just this name dropping but the assuring of your students that you had it on very good report, you had so and so as your teacher here and so and so there and they go back so and so so that someone who was learned in the tradition could trace back and see that indeed you were part of the living vine as it were and therefore credible and therefore one could learn with great pride.

Ficino of course was the great master of this and as long as Pico was with Ficino he was in rather good shape and good company. In fact, under Ficino - because of his tremendous learning in Hebrew - Pico was encouraged to write a great commentary on Genesis. And he did. And the name of the book, I'll spell it for you, H-E-P-T-A-P-L-U-S, Heptaplus, Hepta is seven. It was a seven-pronged interpretation of Genesis and it was to be the first of a two-part work. The second part never got written. And I think I must explain this to you here that in Jewish learning especially in Jewish mysticism especially in the kabbalistically informed Jewish mysticism there are two distinct paths that one could take. One can either go to the mah bereshit. That is the way of Genesis, of going to origins. How do things begin? We go to the origins and find out from there and then we can trace them. Or we go to what became Merkavah Mysticism which is to the end to the final step, to the heavenly Jerusalem, especially as it was formulated by the vision of Ezekiel. So that one can either go bereshit to the origins to the Genesis or one can go to the merkaba to the end the final phases. Why was it the vision of Ezekiel? The King of wisdom in the Jewish tradition is David who passes his kingdom on to Solomon, his son, where it receives its fullest glory. But in between David and Solomon are held in a shape of revelation sent by God because before David there was the prophet Samuel and it was because of Samuel's divine inspiration that David could mature. And after Solomon there was Ezekiel and it was the fruition not of Solomon's learning so much - great as that was - but it was the vision of Ezekiel that were the final things so that Merkavah Mysticism went to the heavenly city. And we will find later on in the Hermetic tradition when we get into the Rosicrucian learning that one of the most difficult problems that faced the mystics in Germany was the resolving of the two heavenly Jerusalems - the one presented by Ezekiel in the Old Testament and the one presented by Saint John and the Apocalypse of the New Testament - because they had to be brought together. And in fact it was a problem of synthesis that plagued the Hermetic tradition right up into the 19th century. One of Eliphas Levi's great works is a study of the visions of Ezekiel and Saint John, their heavenly Jerusalems. I think it was just reprinted in English a year or two ago.

But anyway you get some sense here that the Hermetic tradition which had had its heroes and its maguses on and off throughout the ages all of a sudden proliferated almost beyond imagination in this one generation in Florence Italy at the Platonic Academy. It was no wonder that Ficino and Pico were known all over Europe. There wasn't anybody in any country that you could go to within ten years of the setting up of the Academy that people did not flock to those individuals who had seen the place for themselves. As I mentioned last week when Lorenzo de Medici died, about 1492, the city of Florence was literally taken over by a monk, a priest named Savonarola, whose extreme Puritanism had many positive benefits. It set up the first real representative democracy in the world, but it also curtailed all of the great effervescent speculations and many of the leading spirits of the Florentine Renaissance actually were converted by Savonarola to his puritanical ways and Pico was one of them, Botticelli was another. In the last ten years of Botticelli's life we have no great paintings but unfortunately for Pico it was only a year before he would die of a fever in Florence. So his conversion to Savonarola did not last very long. His works were collected together by his famous nephew Giovanni Francesco della Mirandola. In fact there's a book of his that was translated about 30 years ago called On the Imagination which in itself is quite interesting. But in 1496 his nephew Giovanni Francesco published the collected works of Pico and these were given quite a play in Europe. In England the man who translated the biography of Pico and many of his works was Sir Thomas More about the same time that Sir Thomas began to work on his Utopia. And of course the genius behind Sir Thomas More translating Pico as we'll see was the even greater genius of John Colet who is almost unknown in the English speaking world and a shame on us because he was one of the real hermetic giants of this period. He had studied with Ficino he had studied with Pico. He was a master of many aspects and when we have a lecture on him I'll barely have enough time to even list his achievements. He was really quite somebody.

But I think I need to emphasize for you the fact that Pico was what we would call today a flash in the pan. He was effervescent. He was brilliant, totally capable. But much of his influence came within the crucible of Ficino's overriding genius. So that, I would like to go back to Ficino for just a little bit to bring the context into clearer focus.

Ficino realized that the world of antiquity did not simply end with Plato nor with Aristotle nor with Alexander the Great. That there had been a tremendous period some six centuries of synthesis in ancient Alexandria where the commentaries were just as erudite as scholars today could make them. And Ficino knew that there had been great syntheses made and that when Alexandria had fallen, not so much by the Arab conquest in the mid-7th century, but when the Serapeum was destroyed under Theodosius in the 360s around 364, 365. Many of the learned savants of Alexandria, realizing that they would have to go underground, collected for themselves the epitome of the documents of the ancient wisdom and literally tore pages out of various books and pasted them together into a little papyrus flaps which they tucked into their togas and went across Lake Mareotis and into the desert and finally made their way down to the Nile River. We know that that happened. We know that those documents somehow filtered through the ages and produced, from time to time when they were rediscovered, fantastic blossomings of intelligence. One of the individuals who stands out like a rock pinnacle in the midst of the mediocrity of the ninth century was John Scotus Eriugena who could read Greek as well as anybody. One of the few men of his time who could. And when he discovered the extent of man's learning and capacity he was lionized by the Emperor Charles the Bald and received and set up schools and so forth. And we had a brief flourishing of the Carolingian Renaissance. But very soon there was no one who could carry on and everything fell down again and we went into an even darker period of learning.

Ficino realized that in order to ensure that never again should the light of learning the lamp of tradition go out that he was trying to bring together as many persons as he could and trying to put into modern languages not only the complete works of Plato but all the works that were necessary to formulating the grand synthesis of Alexandria. And in that grand synthesis one of the most poignant issues that had been always set aside and even today is set aside - the books are locked up. What few books there are they? Discussions of them are hushed, hushed so very few people can get to them. The subject is magic, not magic as in legerdemain, but in magic in how the magician maneuvers the phenomenal world to shapes consonant with his higher understanding and that nature is permeable to man's understanding and permeable to his spirit especially to his soul which is the mobile hermetic messenger all creation capable of ultimate mobility because man saw that first movement in the creation is able to go up and down all of the realms of creation. Not only that, as Pico would urge us in the Oratio on the dignity of man that we should not waste our time on the lower levels. That there isn't enough time in a human life that we should raise our sights and aspiration to the highest levels. And he says in fact we know from reading the great Dionysius the Areopagite in his celestial hierarchies that the three highest levels close next to the divine himself are the seraphim the cherubim and the throngs and that we should seek to take our intelligence and to project our souls up to these levels so that at the top of the celestial hierarchy we bring ourselves into contact closer and closer to the Godhead. And in fact we'll see that Ficino makes a great deal out of this. And always the symbolism given again and again in the Hermetic literature is that of a marriage. It's almost as if the soul was ready to be wedded to the divine and feels the elation and the encouragement that coming closer and closer to the divine so that one is like an expectant bride for the divine and ready to make one's life elegant and to make one's intelligence spry and excellent because there was this possibility of this celestial marriage. Always capable.

One of the ways in which man tutors his higher sense is through understanding the working of magic. This particular Egyptian magical book is from the early fourth century Alexandria. It was found about a hundred years ago just around the turn of the century translated into English. It was a document where half of it was in London in the British Museum and half of it was in Leiden, Holland. And some chance scholar who had studied the Leiden document was at the British Museum and he noticed that it was the same kind of handwriting as he had just been looking at the previous year and sure enough the document went together and they published a translation. And what we would find in here is exactly what we would expect. Only we read it on a mundane level. We read it as if they were magic charms or love potions or something like that. But this language is very sophisticated late Alexandrian synthetic wisdom and they're presenting allegorically and symbolically the integration of a whole 600 year development of ancient wisdom. So that for someone like Ficino he needed to have a key, he needed to have a teacher for whom the ancient synthesis was transparent. So while Pico and Ficino and Botticelli and Michelangelo and people like this were having supper at the villa every weekend, the conversation finally came around to the fact who in antiquity was the great master and genius of the Alexandrian synthesis. And the name that came up again and again was Plotinus the Grand Master himself. The eye at the pinnacle of the pyramid of learning - the great Plotinus. And so it was that Ficino under the encouragement of Pico began that most difficult task of translating the entirety of the Aeneids. 600 pages of the most difficult Greek imaginable. Why so difficult? For one mundane reason Plotinus was not educated in the regular academies. He didn't care about the traditional learning. By the time he was 28 years old and discovered philosophy on the wharves of Alexandria he was far too brilliant and too old to go for this schoolmarm stuff. Excuse the expression but it gets across the importance. So he never learned to write properly. He never learned grammar. He never learned composition. So Plotinus's Greek is sort of a cribbed and cramped style of penmanship, a cribbed and cramped style of articulation filled with symbolic synthesis on every phrase. And then of course his mystical genius was just of the highest level so that you have this private little crib notation and very very poor grammar raised to the highest mystical level perhaps that the world has ever seen. So Plotinus began to affect the imagination and the life of Ficino and Pico and as it affected them like all great questions they began to look for the heart of the matter. Where in this tremendous mountain range of erudition was the core? Where was the central focus where one could emphasize and sink one's intelligence and one's sense of accumulated penetration into so that Plotinus would become balanced and alive and usable as a template to understand the great Alexandrian synthesis? We saw last week where in the writings on the soul formed the first investigation point for Ficino and that the fourth book, the third book of Plotinus on the soul was used but very very quickly. Ficino in his wonderful sense of erudition remember he had translated all the Hermetic writings. He translated all of Plato. He had read in Greek Proclus and Iamblichus. He began to sense that Plotinus had in fact given the core in the sense of explaining about how the divine comes into and penetrates the world of our phenomenal reality. That God meant to create the phenomenal realm - not to leave it at the noumenal ideational realm - and that somehow here in the phenomenal scope was the key to the origin of all things. And it's interesting because in Plotinus the word for transformation is in Greek genesis, bereshith, the beginnings. And so when they would run across in these conversations about going to the bereshith tradition to the origins to explicating Genesis and then they would run across that term in Plotinus again and again Ficino finally said, My God it must be there. And so they brought out the Greek manuscripts that the Medici had scoured Europe for, and they brought in Plotinus and opened him up and there we have quite an interesting exposition.

Plotinus is busy in this tradition in the fifth book of the Aeneids to talk about the divine, the divine being. In particular he's talking about the way in which we know - the Greek word for knowing is episteme, epistemology, the study of knowing. Not scientia, but episteme. So that the core here was an epistemology and in the epistemology was that hypostasis of knowing and the core of all that was in a section of Plotinus in book five centering around the beginning of the third chapter and the end of the fourth chapter. And I think I should give this to you intact. And if you have the cassettes, maybe we should turn them and start them over so this is intact.

So just like Ficino and Pico and Botticelli and the whole gang there we go to Plotinus and what we're trying to set ourselves to is to attenuate our sensitivity to get a key a clue as it were to the entirety of the complex of the world. And Plotinus tells us, he says, “are we to think that a being knowing itself must contain diversity, that self-knowledge can be affirmed only when some one phase of the self perceives other phases, and that therefore an absolutely simplex entity would be equally incapable of introversion and of self-awareness.” In other words he says, do we always have to have a condition where some superior part of us are this hidden part of us or some other part of us cognizes the other parts of us? Is it not possible for man as a simplex that is as a whole as a unity to gain self-knowledge? Must we always be fragmented to learn? And Plotinus says that the answer to this is an emphatic, “No.” We need not always be fragmented and that in fact, in fact a being that has no parts or phases may have this consciousness. In fact there would be no real self-knowing in an entity presented as knowing itself in virtue of being a compound. That in fact, this knowing, this capacity in man's intellect, the noose which is able to go to the genesis has a possibility on a very special what we would call mystical level of knowing the whole as a whole itself and that this was a very particular and special case. And Plotinus in his Greek uses the term nous choristos, not christos, but choristos C-H-O-R-I-S-T-O-S, nous choristos, and this is in book five, chapter three, parts one through five where he develops this. And in fact Ficino noted that along with Pico because Pico had had all this great Aristotelian training and Ficino had not translated Aristotle had sort of left him aside. But Pico pointed out and Ficino realized the significance of it that Plotinus here deferred to Aristotle's usage of describing the nous that in fact in Aristotle he points out that there is a special kind of relationship between the knower and the known and that the relationship is that the nous is compared to a writer. Our knowing intelligence is like a writer and that there is then his tablet upon which he writes the Greek word for it is the dianoia, dianoia, and that Aristotle points out that there is a possibility of man achieving a state of equanimity where the tablet upon which the nous writes is a blank sheet, a tabula rasa. And we will find later at the end of the course that one of the great achievements and realizations from the Hermetic tradition was the capacity to teach man to make of himself a tabula rasa so that God could write a clear message to him. So that Plotinus had seen this and Ficino had seen Plotinus see this with the help of Pico and suddenly a light was kindled that there was a special kind of knowing, a mystical hermetic knowing, whereby man achieving a unity of his soul knows himself in a very peculiar and particular way. He knows himself as divine and Plotinus then says that the training of this, the capacity for this, is a very special transformational phenomenon which occurs in nature in the phenomenal world all the time. So that we have to go to book five of Plotinus, chapter three, section 17. And we need to have this section. It's about a page a little bit over a page because we have to see the way in which Plotinus said this most delicate issue because it was the way in which Ficino finally understood what was the capstone for the Hermetic tradition to pass on. And this is it. Plotinus.

“But what can it be which is loftier than that existence? A life compact of wisdom untouched by struggle and error or than this intellect which holds the universe with all there is of life and intellect. If we answer the making principle there comes the question, making by what virtue? And unless we can indicate something higher there than in the made our reasoning has made no advance. We rest where we were, in the made.” Plotinus writes, “We must go higher if it were only for the reason that the self-sufficiency of the intellectual principle is that of a totality of which each member is patently indigent and that each has participated in the one and as drawing on unity is itself not unity. What then is this in which each particular entity participates? The author of being to the universe and to each item of the total.”

He's asking an ultimate question and he's asking also, how do we get there? Since it is the author of all that exists the phenomenal world it exists. He's the author of it. He wrote it. Where did he write it? That remains to be seen. Where is the tablet? Man's mind. “Since he is the author of all that exists. And since the multiplicity in each thing is converted into a self-sufficing existence by this presence of the one,” the one is present, everything. So that “even the particular itself becomes self-sufficing” even the particular itself becomes self-sufficing. Extent then clearly this principal author at once of being and of self-sufficing ness is not itself a being but is above being and above even self-sufficing. He is saying God is uniquely peculiar and he is saying man's capacity to understand can just barely formulate it on the edges of apperception but that we see that being gods must be beyond its an other.

So Plotinus says, “May we stop, content with that?” In other words we've gotten ourselves very close to an impasse very close to an infinite impasse. Should we stop there? Not Plotinus and not Ficino. Ficino very often says in his writings this is where the average learned intelligent savant stops, at the incomprehensibleness of the divine, but we have something important to do in this phenomenal realm therefore we shall proceed. Plotinus is our guide and Plotinus says, “May we stop with that content?” Plotinus says, “no”. No the soul is yet and even more in pain. Is she ripe perhaps to bring forth now that in her pangs she has come so close to what she seeks? We're hungry. In other words we want to know whatever it is we're ready now. We want to know. Lieutenant says she stopped there. No. We must call upon yet another spell. Another spell? If anywhere the assuagement is to be found perhaps in what has already been uttered. There lies the charm. If only we tell it over often. In other words, is there some way to make this if we can't get to it? Is there some way to make it manifest in the here and now? By some spell by some charm by a magia, by a magia. We need a new, a further incantation. The power of the word. We need a further incantation. Plotinus says,

“All our effort may well skim over every truth and through all the verities in which we have part. And yet the reality escapes us when we hope to affirm to understand. For the understanding in order to its affirmation must possess itself of item after item. Only so does it traverse all the field. But how can there be any such peregrination of that in which there is no variety?”

In other words we were trying to learn always piecemeal and we couldn't do it when it came to the divine. There was no way to make piecemeal the divine. And so we always failed. And Plotinus says, now we've got the question and the issue firmly in our sights. We know that we've been pursuing a wrong methodology. It would never have worked ever because it was incapable of producing the result. Man cannot use his fragmented mind to conceive of God. It sounds simple when you say it. So difficult to realize what that might entail. So Plotinus said says, and this is the end of it, “all the need is met by a contact purely intellective.” In other words we have to rise up to a purely intellective facility. “At the moment of touch there is no power whatever to make any affirmation. There is no leisure. Reasoning upon the vision is for afterwards.” In other words we may know in retrospect what we did but there's no way to preconceive it. We can't prefigure it. There's no way to prefigure it. So we have to step off into the unknown completely intact of our own selves. It's the only way to go. And it requires great courage because we have to bring everything up and give it all so that consciousness, shirked from this, it was willing to think any series of thoughts whatsoever but it was not willing to give its all to the unknown and it held us back. So Plotinus says, “So now we have got it within our sights. We may know afterwards what we did. We may know we have had the vision when the soul has suddenly taken light. This light is from the Supreme and it is the Supreme. We may believe in the Presence,” capital P, “when like that other God on the call of a certain man he comes bringing light. The light is the proof of the advent. Thus the sole unlet remains without that vision but lit, it possesses what it sought and this is the true end set before the soul to take that light to see the Supreme by the Supreme and not by the light of any other principle. To see the Supreme which is also the means to the vision for that which illumines the soul is that which it is to see just as it is by the sun's own light that we see the sun.”

And how is this accomplished? Cut everything away. So Plotinus laid it out. Closed the book - was the end of the book. And Ficino and Pico and the others there in Florence realizing that they had come half way on the great learning adventure that they had brought into manifestation all of these philosophies, all of these traditions had in fact surrounded themselves by an infinite ocean of capacity and now we're told by the master that the thing to do is to cut it all away and reduce back down to nothing. So they were faced by an almost incredible, almost insurmountable ironical problem. They had spent their entire lifetimes teaching themselves and now they were told that they had to unlearn it all and that that was the only possible way to achieve the soul's purposes.

So you can well imagine the young Pico with all of his flamboyant learning crunched. No wonder he was susceptible to the conversion tactics of the puritanical Savonarola. But Ficino was a great champion. He realized that in presenting this again as he would do he translated all of Plotinus and so exceedingly well that his translation is still read today in Italy still accurate. You still find European scholars saying that they accept the emendations of Ficino in this such and such a case and so on. 500 years later he was really somebody. But the important thing was that as he read this he realized that in order to convince man to let go of the world to let go of his fantastic learning man had to be convinced that it wasn't all that important anyway that the world is always in transition, very malleable. And as Joseph Campbell once said of one of the truths of mythology one of its basic functions is to convince us to exit from life with dignity not to dig our heels in because death is approaching, to go with grace and grandeur.

So too Ficino was faced with the problem. How do you once you have people sophisticated to this level how do you get them to let go of it? And one tried and true technique used by Plotinus and all the Alexandrians and brought back into light by Ficino and the Hermetic tradition from here on out was the inculcation of the magical view of the world. That it's transmutable and can be manipulated by sympathy and so forth and that all this is tied up with the nature of the soul and that there is an ultimate mystery to be understood there, and that it's not mere child's play and it's not mere occult play but there is in fact some great lesson to be learned. And the lesson of course is how to dissolve your prideful learning and get it out of your way so that you can become whole and commit yourself to the unknown intact without carping about whether you understand it ahead of time or not.

So in Ficino’s great book of life, he made special care and concern that in among his philosophy and his sense of humor that he explained why magic works and why the Hermetic tradition had always had magic as a element of its science and that astrology and all of the other Hermetic sciences were brought together and held by this magical linchpin.

Well, Ficino, just to refresh you about his personality just for about ten more minutes I think. Are we, is it 930? Did we get there? 9:15. So we have plenty of time. I guess my tape is not working.

Ficino exhorts the reader in the third Book of Life. It's sometimes called the Three Books of Life. Liber de Vita or De Vita Triplici. He says good health. Honored guest. Good health. To any of you who come to our doorstep hungry for health. I beg you the guest who is hungry to see how hospitable I am. For no sooner had you entered that I had already asked you about your health. This is the wonderful punning sense of intelligence that Ficino always exemplified. He always put these kinds of excellent. And in fact he says the laboratory of your Marsilio is somewhat larger than just the space you see bounded here. In other words he's working with the entirety of the world, in fact if one would know the truth he's working with the entirety of the cosmos and even beyond that. So Ficino's laboratory is somewhat larger than just the space you see bounded here. So he goes into, in the third book, right away the issue that man has a soul just like creation would expect us to believe and understand and that in fact every living entity has a soul and that in fact the world has a soul, the anima mundi, the world, this planet has a soul. He writes he says, “yet always remember that just as the power of our soul adheres to the limbs through the spirit.” And when he speaks of spirit he speaks of an élan vital, a life principle, which is carried by the blood to all the organs and to the brain and that this spirit is used by the soul to carry its messages. So that the Spiritus Mercurius is the messenger of the world's soul motion. And he writes here, “You must always remember that just as the power of our soul adheres to the limbs through the spirit. So the power of the anima mundi,” the world soul, “through the quintessence,” through the quintessence, “which everywhere flourishes as if it were a spirit inside the worldly body spreads out throughout all things that are under the anima mundi,” the quintessence. “It especially infuses its power into those which draw its spirit the most so that the soul of man as it becomes integrated and refined finds itself capable of drawing upon the anima mundi the spirit of the world.”

And even beyond that there is a spirit to the cosmos which man may draw on and even beyond that the supercelestial creator himself and beyond that. So that man's soul as it achieves a sense of internal, or we should use the word interior instead of internal. Interior is an architectural word. It means an interior architecture. Internal is simply something inside. Man's soul, as it achieves an interior. Equanimity sympathizes itself with the moving powers of creation and allows for him to participate in actual transformation. And of course the alchemist made a very great deal out of this gold among other things. He says Ficino this is Ficino writing in the Book of Life. He says “the fifth essence,” the quintessence of the alchemist, “The fifth essence however can be taken inside more and more by us if we know how to separate it from the other elements with which it is heavily mixed. Or at least if we know how to use those things which abound in it.” And he goes on to explain all the various classical theories of antiquity about herbs and precious stones and minerals and all of them having astrological correlations. And not only that, he'll go into the fact that the correlations extend to the world of music so that it's here in this book that Ficino develops his theory of astrological music - the music of the spheres - that all of the seven bodies have a certain tone and capacity and that in fact a lot of late Renaissance music are occult treatises of harmony because later on we'll see in the next generation, beyond Ficino, the term used instead of anima mundi is the harmony of the world. Francesco Giorgi will write a book of that title. Ficino goes on and he assures us that we need to pay attention to the way in which the ancients did things in terms of transformation and magic that they were not just fooling around with charms to protect one's self from imaginations, and they're not just going into psychological practices, although that too. But they were meaning what they said, and Ficino then later on says “Trismegistus,” Hermes, Hermes Trismegistus, “tells us of such things to which the Egyptians made out of certain things of the world in order to get strength.” He says, “they used to bring the soul of powers in to these” and he's talking about statues into these statues to do good effect including the soul of a Hermes ancestor Mercury in the same way they used to make the souls of Isis and Osiris for instance descend into statues of Isis and Osiris and that likewise when we understand in depth Prometheus snatched life and heavenly light into a certain figment of clay. And he goes further Ficino says “but like the Magi who were followers of Zoroaster in summoning spirit from Hecate use certain golden javelins marked with the characters of heavens on which a sapphire was inserted and a bull whip made of bull's hide was whirled around during which time they chanted but I will pass over their chance for the Platonist Berzelius disapproves of them and mocks them. The Hebrews. Can we come back now to the Hebrews when they were in Egypt learned how to set up a golden calf and as the astrologers thought this would bring the favor of Venus and the moon against the influence of Scorpio and Mars that were unsafe for the Jews they worshipped the golden calf.”

So Ficino is edging back and he's saying yes there are correlations. And that man with his soul capacity can transmute various aspects of the world into their sympathetic horizons of affinity and that the key to this turns out to be the use of language. For words which are used with great understanding, the magic words, the words of the magician, affect the transmutation so that one has to go increasingly back to a primordial language that there is an alphabet of creation and that by going back to a primordial language the magus, the mage, the sage learns how to form the world and further learns how to re-form the world. And in fact the ultimate purposes in the Merkavah mysticism the tradition of the final things of the heavenly Jerusalem is that the world shall be reformed and made into a Paradise by man. And Ficino says, for a long time now people in their wisdom have been turning their back on the world and saying it's no damn good. And he says, it is time now to face the capacities and the responsibilities of man that the world can be reformed, changed that the heavenly Jerusalem, expected from the times of Elijah and given to us again in the Apocalypse of Saint John, is all here in our grasp. And as soon as this message of the Hermetic Renaissance by Ficino was received you find all kinds of people like Thomas More writing Utopia and Tommaso Campanella writing The City of the Sun and Francis Bacon writing The New Atlantis and Valentin Andrea writing Cristianopolis. All of these new World realms of perfection that man will bring into manifestation with his recaptured capacities. And of course the ultimate utopia of them all is America. And increasingly as we look into the tradition they realize that it was right over there and all man had to do was to go there with the wisdom that he was bringing back together and it could be done. It was work, but then man had been at work for very little reward for millennia and here was a chance to do it completely and perfectly for once and for all. Well I think that's about as far as we can go. I think we'll go that far and that's it.