Renaissance Hermetic Traditions

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Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 4 of 13

Renaissance Hermetic Traditions
Marsilio Ficino and the Platonic Academy of Florence
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 24, 1986

Transcript:

We’re in the fourth lecture and I can see from the numbers we’re still not being esoteric enough. I was taught that if you lecture without publishing, without establishing a name, it should be only 15 people. If there are less you’re not doing a good job. If there’s more you’re hyping. So I’m guilty of being too lax. So we’ll try and make this even more scholarly and intellectual and esoteric and recondite all those things.

If I’m capable dressed as I am, our investigation on the Hermetic tradition is an attempt to take a long strategic look at the major tradition in the West. We’ve been approached heavily in our lifetime by the major traditions of the East and they’re beginning to wear thin. The Krishna consciousness people are packing pistols and packing them against each other. The Rajneesh people are guilty of attempted murder here and there and so the guru scene is looking a little less enticing than it did 25 years ago when we thought that, ‘gee some sanity should come into our country’.

But the Western tradition, the Hermetic tradition is honorable. But the difficulty with the Hermetic tradition is that it has almost always been esoteric. And when it has surfaced, because it has had to survive very difficult conditions, it has always disguised itself. So when it surfaces in Florence in the 15th century, it surfaces with a characteristic flourish of a bouquet of interesting objective presentations and all the time bringing its classical self underneath.

The main concern in Renaissance Hermeticism, which begins with Ficino (Marsilio Ficino), the main emphasis is that somehow the classical trinitate idea of verities which was unum verum en bonum, one truth and the good, is somehow changed so that truth and goodness are left, but beauty, the idea of beauty, becomes a controlling factor. And that the overwhelming conviction that unity is a verity drops into the background, not out of sight, but a unitary universe is assumed by the Renaissance Hermeticist without being talked about. But the idea of beauty which presents it is talked about all the time. And so the accessibility of beauty becomes for Renaissance Hermeticism the most characteristic change and really is the high watermark of distinguishing medieval Hermeticism from Renaissance Hermeticism. And because the idea of beauty comes into play the emphasis on theology which is God-centered changes to a humanistic theology which is man centered. And so the Renaissance has this tandem of beauty and man. Human beings are interesting because they are the avenue by which or the avenues by which we can approach the idea of beauty and understand in this way the other verities of truth and goodness.

The man behind Marsilio Ficino, one of my favorite characters in history, Cosimo de Medici. And Cosimo, one of the wealthy young men in the 1420s, 1430s, in Florence. A banking family with international connections and because of the political intrigues of the families especially with the family called the Albizzi. Cosimo was exiled from Florence. These were beautiful times and they didn’t kill you but they banished you for a month or a year or a lifetime or something like that. And when Cosimo was banished from Florence as he rode out of the city all of the country people turned out with colorful clothes on and pom poms and made a pageant out of it. And Cosimo rode casually with a couple of young friends to Padua. And in Padua made contacts with some friends in Venice. And he went to Venice and he said let the Albizzi fill my cup. When the time is right I’ll come back and drink it. Which he did. And while he was in Venice one of Cosmo’s little exercises that he entertained himself was building a library. And he got interested in the fact that with the decline of the monastic communities a lot of old libraries were coming up. And he made contact, in particular, with a wonderful old man named Nicolo Nicolini. And Cosimo and Nicolini became the two great book collectors in the 1430s and in the 1440s. And they began putting together the idea that somehow you could reach back into the roots of Italy and you could refresh and refurbish the sense of command of the individual. That what had distinguished the Roman Italians was their ability to administer an empire, but that the key to the Roman ability was a Greek personality – that all the great Romans had understood that the fluidity of the Greek personality, the mercurial element in the Greek mind, was essential.

So one was to cultivate the stern Roman character with the Greek mobile spirit and add onto it a third element – the Florentine family with its millions of cousins and connections, and the family that extended on to people who owed you favors, and to people whose mortgages you had and to people whose contacts were invaluable to you. In other words, the original Mafia is not so much a Sicilian outfit but a Florentine banking good sense policy. And Cosimo was the best at this that anybody has ever seen. He was– he was stupendous because he identified with himself that everything that concerned him generally was for the good of all of the people and getting rid of his enemies was helping most of the people because most of these enemies were not sensitive to all the other people. And so Cosimo on one hand was a great politician, very smooth. And to balance this out he used his particular peculiar personality which loved esoteric things. He loved to find the exact key. The exact incident on which to balance his personality. In fact when he came back from Venice, from exile, and he was riding in between a huge crowds of peasant people again dressed in pageants as he rode past the empty villa of the Albizzi he simply stood in his saddle in silence and waved to the crowd and gestured to the empty windows of his vanquished foes.

Cosimo was this kind of an individual. The year that he was in Venice beginning his library – 1433 – was the year that Marsilio Ficino was born in Figline just outside of Florence. And all the time that Ficino was growing up Cosimo was exercising his tremendous capacity his great affinity with human beings his great capacity to engender power based upon understanding and understanding based upon human beings so that the humanism of the Florentine Renaissance owes a lot of its character to the personality of Cosimo who was what we would call an ace at picking the right people.

His physician was the father of Marsilio Ficino and the young Ficino was brought in from time to time as you would do for the Don of an Italian family. And all the time while he was an adolescent certain favors were granted to Ficino’s family. He was given a very fine education. He was looked after and when he was of a certain age, he was sent to Bologna to learn Greek – to learn it perfect. And at 19 Cosimo finally called him in and he said: I have something for you. This is 1452. He said, I have amassed the complete collection of the dialogues of Plato for the first time since antiquity and we’re going to bring it into our language and we’re going to take this language and teach it to all of our people so that our crowd is going to have the benefit of the backbone of the platonic mind which was the key to the mobility of the Greek spirit in its heyday.

And Ficino began translating, and in fact he worked up before Cosimo died, the first decade, the first ten dialogues. And we’ll get to the 10th dialogue – the Philebus. But while he was working on this and did a couple of the dialogues got his hand in, Ficino called him in again and he said I have another manuscript which I have just gotten and you’ve got to set Plato aside. And that manuscript was the complete collected hermetic dialogs – the Corpus Hermeticum. And the old wily Cosimo said this is more important, this is more important. We’re going to do Plato. We’re going to bring the platonic backbone of the Greek spirit into our people. But we need this esoteric fluid that flows in that backbone. And that’s what these hermetic dialogs are all about because they teach us about the mobility and transformative capacity of consciousness. And we have to have that. We have to be able to change because if we cannot change we cannot take ourselves with any kind of freedom in the exercise of this spirit even if we understood it. And if we can’t understand the exercise of the spirit, all of our discipline is going to jail us and implode upon us and make us stodgy like the Romans who couldn’t hold the Empire together finally. And then our families are going to die.

And so in a very practical way Cosimo laid it out. And he said, By the way I know I’m laying a lot on you and so I want to make it easy for you to do it. So I have bought a villa for you in Careggi up on the hillside here. You can look out over Florence and you can live there and take care of things. And to make it a write-off we’ll call it the Platonic Academy.

There is a wonderful volume in Italian called The Stories of the Italian Academy, The Platonic Academy by Della Torre. All the characters were there. Botticelli and Michelangelo used to hang out there and just everybody. And Ficino ran the place. And one of the characteristics of Ficino was that he was a lover of human beings for esoteric reasons but also because he was just very jovial, he was sun-like in his personality which he knew as always the the kind of Ernest Hemingway type character who was ready to live life on its terms. For instance he celebrated Plato’s birthday every November 27th with a huge bash. All kinds of food, all kinds of drink and wine. He loved the idea that one should have balance and harmony. And not drink too much wine, but if you didn’t drink a lot at some times you wouldn’t know the value of keeping.

So Ficino was this kind of a humanist and he loved music of course and he could play a few instruments. And so the Villa Careggi of course became the center of this. And because the idea of beauty had come in, the visualization of imagery was one of the central disciplines. Not to visualize in a meditation looking at a blank wall a la the 1960s but to look at a blank canvas and resent the fact that it was blank and to fill it with mythological forms which were arranged beautifully so as to call out to evoke from oneself those interior constellations which they knew were there. And in a kind of an intuitive way Ficino reintroduced into Florence – in the 1560s, 1570s, 1470s, 1480s – the whole intuitive notion that we retain inside of ourselves all that has gone before but that the forms that they are contained in are what we would call transcendental. They’re largely inaccessible in our normal stodgy everyday life so that we have to change ourselves. We have to make ourselves mobile so that we can not only turn inwardly but that we can make ourselves transparent so that these images when they rise in us play out through us, through our hands, through our eyes and build the buildings and make the paintings and create the sculptures and write the books and create the city and make the man. And it was this emphasis, this fulcrum, that Ficino brought back in.

He in fact– I’m going to give you a little quotation. This is a book called The Planets Within: Marsilio Ficino’s Astrological Psychology, published in London not too long ago. Here’s a quotation from the chapter on the Sun:

“As we study the various planets in search of their psychological significance, we will be particularly interested in distinguishing the kind of spirit they represent, in Ficino’s imagery, the kind of rays that they shine into our lives.”

And these– these rays, these spiritual rays don’t just touch us but they evoke from us a response and our response to that, our capacity to respond to that is what makes them effective. If we’re dull there’s no influence. And if we’re not trained then the influence is kind of wobbly and ambiguous. And the ambiguity, when it begins to refine itself into paradox and irony is exactly the time when instruction then can refine that so that there’s clarity so that the response is perfect. And when man responds perfectly to the universe he is then a microcosm. Then everything in him responds in turn, and he thinks universally, and he looks with an eye of comprehension. And Ficino says, this man is beautiful who does this. But the sun, you see the sun, central image for him, symbol really.

“Each planet [is] seen to depict a distinct spirit, but the sun, in addition to having unique distinguishing features, represents spirit itself.”

So it’s double in this way. It has its distinct qualities but also is spirit itself.

“So we can say that Ficinian psychology is above all solar in character on account of its emphasis on the role of spirit in the care of the psyche.”

And you can see what is central here, in Renaissance Hermeticism, is that man must care for his psyche. His spirit, like the unity of God, is unquestionable. You don’t have to worry about that. But what you have to worry about is that problem of consciousness being caught between polarities which become unbalanced, and multiplicities which cannot be integrated. And then consciousness tries to juggle too much. It tries to keep pushing the world into shape and keep one’s temperament in balance at the same time. And you can’t do both. But the cared for psyche, when it’s balanced, does both naturally because it extends itself beyond. It extends itself back through the polarities, into the unity of the universe within, and extends itself through the multiplicities of the world to the complementariness which is there, which is capable. And then man’s consciousness becomes a center – then he is a microcosm.

“Ficino develops this idea in [a book that he wrote called] The Planets, [and he writes here]: ‘Our soul, besides maintaining the particular powers of its members, promotes the common power of life all through us, but especially through the heart, source of the intimate fire of the soul. Similarly, the World Soul flourishes everywhere, but especially through the sun, as it indiscriminately unfolds its power of life.’ “

And so that the man is a microcosm has a sun-hearted psyche, and he responds by living beautifully. But in living beautifully, one of the major problems, in fact the major problem, is what do we do with ourselves? What do we do with especially the false ideas that we have? With the passions that are unintegrated? And with the fact that the passions and the intellect seem to come into polarize warfare and play out a kind of a light show on the multiplicities of the world and may become confused?

Ficino was told that before Cosimo died, after he finished the Hermetic Corpus translating it, that he should translate Plato’s Philebus. Philebus is the name of a person that if you translated it literally into English it would mean somebody like Mr. Love Body. He’s a hedonist. He’s a sensualist. He believes in pleasure. That that’s the most important thing in life. There may be other things but pleasure is the most important thing in life. And on his deathbed Ficino read his completed translation of the Philebus to Cosimo. And the old man kept laughing and laughed his way into his grave.

It’s very difficult for us to come with university educations to even pick up the Philebus, much less consider reading it, much less on our deathbed. That is until we have the hermetic diamond-cutter consciousness to come in and cut these facets the way Plato did and the way Ficino did and the way the Hermetic tradition does. Then we see, that’s very interesting.

In The Philebus, Socrates is going to be talking to Philebus and then Philebus goes out of the picture and a young man comes in named Protarchus and he’s going to speak for Philebus. And Socrates says, “So, Protarchus, consider the thesis you are poised to take over from Philebus, and the one advanced by me against which you are about to argue – that is, if you don’t agree with it. Would you like me to summarize them?

And Protarchus says, “Yes.” He even says, “please.”

And Socrates says, “Well, Philebus says that for all living creatures the good is enjoyment, pleasure, delight and whatever is [comparable] with them. But my contention is that they are not the good, but that reason, intellect, memory – not to mention their cognates, correct belief and true calculation – are far better than pleasure for all creatures capable of attaining them; they offer the greatest benefit for all those who, now or in the future, are able to attain them. Isn’t this, Philebus, more or less what each of us [are] saying?”

And this is the issue laid before us and before Cosimo and before Ficino and before the Hermetic Renaissance. And the question becomes interesting. As the dialogue goes along, is it reason or pleasure that most benefits us? And Socrates says,

“[Now] Protarchus… we’re not concealing the diversity within my good and within yours, but [we] are bringing it out into the open,” – the diversity, the multiplicity – “let’s persevere to see, when our candidates are being examined, [that] they may somehow reveal whether pleasure or reason or some other third thing must be declared to be the good. I mention the possibility of some third thing because I assume that we’re not just involved in a contest for the victory of one of our sets of candidates; [but that] …we must champion the absolute truth.”

And as the dialogue goes along it finally, glacially, inevitably, comes around that in fact the integrated life, neither pleasure nor reason, but that the integrated life is indispensable. And one of the qualities of the integrated life that makes it indispensable is the quality to believe what you know. To believe what you are and to be able to live through that belief. To go from day to day, from hour to hour, from week to week. That if you were exiled either into pure mentation, or into pure sensuality, the one would have no memory, and the other would have no contact. So that the integrated life is– becomes more and more obviously the central issue, the most important thing. But that the integrated life is not an isolated context, out of context phenomenon but that the integrated life in fact has to rest upon a matrix. That that life which is integrated is integrated because it contains within its contact and its purview a mobility throughout a whole matrix. And in this matrix the structure of it is the intellect. The structure of it– that pleasure or any of the senses are unable to keep track of that structure. And it’s like our only access to the whole horizon of life is through keeping this skeleton, this mobile skeleton or highway system of mobility, throughout our life capacities alive. And it turns out in the Philebus that this becomes a very very central issue.

Socrates says then, “Some god, or some man of divine stature – the Egyptians say that it was Thoth –” (the original Egyptian Hermes) “once saw that vocal sound [of itself] is indeterminate. He was the first to perceive [that] the vowels in that,” indeterminacy had individual existence and that there was not one of them and not an incountable– uncountable number of them, but a distinct variation in number of them and that the key to symbolic language, the key to the map of the intellect to the integrated life, is that the intermediate stages between an undifferentiate unity – the one – and an incredibly complex multiplicity is that there is a median ground which can be understood; that it’s finite, that it is limited, and in fact its limitation is rather small. It can come within the compass of a single view of a human being if they are trained. But the mind to be trained to this requires a lot of discipline, because what gets in the way all the time is the ambiguity of the world and the polarity of the psyche. Because the psyche in its normal functioning polarizes all the time. And the world in its normal functioning generates multiplicity all the time. So that the mind has to be trained to excerpt itself from the world and from the psyche. And it needs help in doing this. It needs in fact a third realm and for Ficino this third round will be the world of art, the world of beauty, the idea of beauty, because it’s there that man can get outside of himself and not be lost in the world. But in that realm of art he can slowly train his mind to the basic structures of the determinant real in between the one and the many. And in this way condition himself to experience in his own life that integration. And so it is with expressive mediums, like a language, a language of vowels and consonants as he is talking about here, language of colors he will talk about later, language of sound – all of this is going to be understandable.

Socrates says in the Philebus that Thoth is the first to remember that there are several vowels then and not just one. “He also realized that there are other letters which do not consist of sound as such, but nevertheless do make some noise,” – like consonants – “and noted that they also have some [finite] number; and he distinguished a third class of letters, which we,” Socrates says, “nowadays call ‘mutes’.” They’re perhaps an aspirate, or they’re not sounded particularly. “Next [Thoth] divided these noiseless, mute letters until he reached each unit; and he divided the vowels and the intermediate letters in the same way until, once he had seen their number,” – the specificity of them. He then gave designations to them and said these are the letters to each unit.

Notice now that Socrates is talking here about a transformation of language, he’s talking about an alphabetized language coming out of a hieroglyphic matrix. That this is a very arcane transformation going on. That out of a pictorial matrix of hieroglyphics one translates out a numerical matrix of letters which are much more limited. How many Egyptian hieroglyphics– different hieroglyphs are there? There are thousands. How many letters? In the Greek alphabet there were 24.

The control of reality comes within purview of man’s trainable mind. He begins to have a handle by which he can then extend his comprehension out and begin to transform the world in that way. He gave to each letter a specificity and saw that none of them could stand in isolation from the rest but all of them had to work together as it was. So that a central– central hermetic concept is here. The exact specificity of individual phenomena. They are incredibly real in their existence because they are exactly that. But the exact existential quality is complemented by the fact that they exist in a matrix of relations which is whole. So that you could change the specificity of something from one number to another, from one element to another, from one arrangement of letters to another arrangement of letters, if you worked with the matrix as a whole. But that affinity with the unity of things only comes from man in Ficino’s understanding in Renaissance Hermeticism if we have through the idea of the accessibility of beauty a control over the integration of ourselves and man as a microcosm then can work with this universe, then he plays for real, and what he plays with comes into being. Then he may make whatever he wishes to make.

So in the Philebus you can see, not such a bad little dialogue to read, perhaps not your favorite deathbed material, but just the same. Interesting, interesting. There’s more of it and I’ll come back to it. But later on it turns out, if you’re keeping score on these things, that pleasure does not come in second, it doesn’t come in third, it comes in fifth on a list that they generate which seems pretty low down.

Ficino, in his commentary, makes sure that we understand that we’re not throwing pleasure out. In fact, we should skip over to reinstate Ficino a little bit and not make him too ascetic. His commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love was translated in 1944, I think originally, by this man at the University of Missouri. I don’t know why a man in the Second World War at the University of Missouri would translate Ficino on Plato’s Symposium but he did and I used to have a copy of it. The– The Jung Spring Publications in Dallas, Texas just reprinted it in 1985. It had been out of print forever. I got a copy once through the old Fields Bookstore in San Francisco about 30 years ago when you could still get things like that. But this– this translation, and it’s available, it’s in print now, 1985. He writes in here about a peculiar quality of love that we have to keep in mind as human beings. As esoteric hermetically informed human beings that there is a particular quality of love that is indispensable, that without it we have no access to the idea of beauty. Without it our consciousness never balances the polarities and the multiplicities, and never has the experience of being at one in this world.

He writes in this way that in a certain way all of this “seems [again] amazing. For after I have lost myself, if I recover myself through you, I have myself through you; if I have myself through you, I have you before and more than I have myself, and I am closer to you than to myself, since I approach myself in no other way than through you as an intermediary.”

And this sounds very strange at first when we hear this. But let’s follow him a little bit and let’s watch how this is– mellows into simplicity. This is the– This is why Renaissance Florentine Hermeticism was so gorgeous because it starts out to– to seem so unwieldy. Like the first time you see Botticelli’s Primavera – what does it mean? And then after a while there’s nothing but the beauty. Ah, there it is. Let’s watch Ficino, how he writes,

“In this certainly, the power of Cupid differs from the violence of Mars.” That’s why Raffaello used to put all those little putti up on the buildings because they were the little cupids. Yeah because everybody was thinking of Mars. And if you think of Cupid then you have a whole different relation. Here’s how Ficino writes it, “...the power of Cupid differs from the violence of Mars. Certainly dominion and love differ thus. The ruler possesses others through himself; the lover recovers himself through another, and the further each of the two lovers is from himself, the nearer he is to the other, and [approaching] dead in himself, revives in the other. But in reciprocal love there is only one death, [between them and] a double resurrection.” This is pure hermetic esotericism. “For he who loves dies in himself once, when he neglects himself. He revives immediately in the beloved when the beloved receives him in loving thought. He revives again and when he finally recognizes himself in the beloved and does not doubt that he is loved. O happy death which two lives follow! [O wondrous that he is loved.] O wondrous contract in which he who gives himself up for another has the other, and does not cease to have himself! O inestimable gain, when two become one in such a way that each of the two, instead of being only one, becomes two, and, as if he were doubled, he who had one life, [and] only one death intervening, now has two lives. For a man who dies once and revives twice has acquired [a single life] for a single life a double, [and] for a single self two selves.”

And so, in reciprocal hermetic love is this incredible transformation. And so Ficino then says that there is in fact a very peculiar relationship going on that in the sun and the earth and that kind of a relationship that there is a medium with the moon coming in and that the solar relationship produces a kind of a masculine and the earth a kind of a feminine, but that the moon is a bisexual. The moon goes both ways. And that in this astrological sense then, he writes,

“The astrologers think that there is a special reciprocity of love between those at whose birth there was an interchange of the lights, that is, of the sun and the moon. That is, if [my in] my birth the sun were in Aries and the moon in Libra,” – Ficino was a Libra, October 19th – “and at yours the sun were in Libra and the moon in Aries.” Which is what I have. “Or those for whom the same or similar sign… [similar sign or–] ...the same or similar planet was in the ascendant. Or [for those] whom favorable planets looked on the angle of ascendance in the same way. Or those for whom Venus was situated in the same house of birth and in the same grade. The Platonists add, or those whose life the same or certainly a similar [spirit] governs. The natural and moral philosophers say that likeness of complexion, [or] nourishment, [or] education, [or] habit, or opinion is the cause of like affection.”

But Ficino emphasizes that beyond all of this is the more lasting permanent love that comes when human beings recover through the integrated life through their refinement through the ambiguities of their psyche and recover their spiritual microcosm then of two such human beings meet; whatever they do together occurs in love and in this way a whole new dimension occurs in human life. A whole new dimension in tape recording occurs.

We’ll take a break.

We’re back to all this. Ficino lived from 1433 to 1499 and his patron early was Cosimo and after Cosimo for a couple of years Piero de Medici and then the great Lorenzo. And when Lorenzo died in 1492, of course, the Florentine situation became unbalanced and a great religious reformer named Savonarola came in – 1494 I think. And for a while everyone thought well it’s time to clean up our act. And then Savonarola’s went the way that dictators usually go, when you get too much power, and people begin not being exiled but being killed, burned and so forth. And so all of a sudden there was a complete dourness that set over the Florentine scene. And after that there was never again recaptured that pristine flower of the High Renaissance.

By the time the 1500s comes in there’s a different tone that comes in. And as the– as the 16th century goes on more and more there’s the flamboyance of giants like Leonardo or Michelangelo. But there’s no more the– the the lyrical hermeticism of a Donatello or a Botticelli or a Pico della Mirandola. There’s something like quicksilver about those individuals in their heyday. And afterwards, in order to maintain that kind of a balance, one has to become almost like a giant and that becomes almost unbearable. And we see, we admire so much the titanic, and we have to use those terms those the titanic genius of Michelangelo and we see the Sistine Chapel and we think what incredible Neoplatonic hermetic understandings and all this. But if you let your gaze go to the back, wall not on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but to the back wall there’s the Day of Judgment. And right in the center at the very top God is looking out, not to touch man, but God is holding what’s left of a man like a pelt and it’s Michelangelo doing his self-portrait. Because the energy that’s needed to sustain by sheer willpower that kind of integration, only giants can do that, only titans. Human beings can’t live that way.

And so the Renaissance Hermetic tradition by the 1520s already is heading underground. And we’ll see in this series that the last great hermetic genius who was open on the surface is Paracelsus. And he’s very much aware of the fact that he’s closing the windows. He’s putting the covers over the furniture and he’s going to close the doors because there’s not going to be anybody able to live in that house for who knows how much longer. That had been 1000 years. And so he puts everything that he can out into the world that can be worked with. And everything else he puts into esoteric visions and books and buries it in complete esotericism.

So we’re dealing with a very special aperture in human history and capacity. And Ficino is the center because it’s his– it was his duty, his privilege, to flower it in this way, to have it happen. And for instance one of the most popular things that Ficino ever– ever did and it’s been translated 1980 here, The Book of Life by Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life. Often we have an unfortunate prejudice in our time. We think that the occult tradition is– stodgy, or that its mysteriousness lies in kind of like an offbeat asceticism. And all of that is sham, none of that is so. There are times to be ascetic for– for purposes and there are lives that have to be ascetic to be lived for purposes. But there is a gorgeousness to the integrated life to the spiritual discipline which is here and Ficino writes this – and he’s dedicating this book to his good friend and patron a,

“Dedicatory letter for The Book of Life by Marsilio Ficino, Florentine doctor and philosopher, to the magnificent Lorenzo de Medici, guardian of his country. [My pal Lorenzo] Poets sing of Bacchus as the greatest master, the high priest, the twice-born. Perhaps they mean that it is necessary for the future priest, once he is initiated, to be reborn, or that he now seems reborn after becoming totally drunk with the God in his mind. Or perhaps, in a more humble sense, once a sprig produces the wine of Bacchus on the vine, like Semele, its clusters ripe under the sun, the lightning reproduces the wine in its barrel, like the foetus in Jove’s thigh. But we must not speak of the sacred mysteries here, where our intention is to help with physical strength those who are weak.”

And so Ficino’s Book of life is to help get people through the night to help them to understand that there are special problems for those who are sensitive to trying to develop themselves. And for instance, “Chapter 25, Remedy for a dull memory and for forgetfulness”:

“It sometimes happens that students, either because they read and write with their heads so seriously bent, or because they become stiff too quickly, get a thick cold phlegm, and melancholy seizes them weighs down their heads, making them dull… Their heads must be freed from this burden with the following remedies, in addition to the other good things… that we have described elsewhere.” – Music, wine, dancing, art – “If they did not [suffer], take recourse in Indian and cocchea pills and hieralogodion. Diacoloquin…” – and all these other medicines – “...But if you prefer more familiar things, [why not mix a little] ginger mixed with a little incense, which is great for the senses and for memory, especially when you add…” a little bit of vinegar or amber or perhaps some musk, and you keep these suspended in the mouth for a little while like a mouthwash, or even dab some in the nostrils, or perhaps around the ear, or some marjoram, some fennel, nutmeg, rue. These spices are good. Remember, however, that you should not neglect the proportions for these. Perhaps some oil of elderberry or even castor oil rubbing the arms and legs and neck strenuously and so forth.

Some of these simple remedies seem to us odd in a book dedicated to Lorenzo de Medici at the very height of the Renaissance. And yet it gives us the practical flavor that these individuals, very much like ourselves, were not just fooling around with entertainments, but they wanted to know – how can we do this? We want to live this through and we want to be specific about it. We want to understand it. We want to be conscious about it.

He writes in the beginning about guides for those who need to take care of their health because they’re going into this sort of work:

“Whoever begins [this] bitter, arduous and long journey which leads with assiduous labor to the highest temple of the nine Muses, finds [that] he needs nine guides for the journey. The first of these are the three in heaven who lead us, [and] then the three in the soul, and finally the three on earth. In heaven, Mercury [or Hermes] either compels us or exhorts us, making us begin the journey by inquiring about the Muses. Mercury is in charge of all [this] inquiry.” And of course the nine Muses are like the– the nine arcs– the nine capacities that– that man has to express himself in a beauty. “Then Apollo lights up with a rich splendor both the souls that seek and the things that are sought, so that we find wherever we seek carefully.”

Notice now that in the soul is Apollo that the Hermetic archetype is a celestial archetype. The human psychic archetype is Apollo, the sun, you see, the heart energy. But that there’s a curious interplay here that what is lit up is not just ourselves our own heart but the world is lit up the same as we are so that there’s affinity there’s harmonia that occurs there. I’m thinking now of an incident that happened just yesterday. Going over to the Impressionist exhibit at the L.A. County Museum and seeing the crowds of people around all these Russian Impressionist paintings and going up and looking trying to get through the glass and everything. And go into one room and there’s nobody within fifteen feet of Matisse’s Harmony in Red because the radiation from it grabbed everybody. And you see a canvas of that scale and that impression it’s like this. It’s like the– the Apollo in the soul hermetically not only lights us up but lights up the world so that it calls out to us as we are affinitizing ourselves to it. And there’s that kind of flow that is beauty. That is what beauty is.

But that beauty is accessible only through love. Only through love. And love in order to do the guiding for us, the teaching for us in this uses the arts as a governor. And so we have to apprentice ourselves then to the arts so that Ficino writes,

Then we must “explain in what way [love] is the master and governor of all the arts. That he [certainly is] the master of the arts we shall understand if only we shall consider that no one can ever discover or learn any art unless the pleasure of learning and the desire of discovering move him, and unless he who teaches loves his students, and the students thirst very eagerly for that learning,” then love is a governor, teaches these arts.”

And this is deepening. Ficino’s deepening the old Socratic dictum as it comes down to us from Plato. Plato says that Socrates used to constantly counsel the young individuals around him that before we can learn anything we have to be companions together. We have to care about each other. We have to learn that our cleverness at discourse will only keep us apart; that only our willingness to listen to each other with understanding brings us together.

And so when we have established a companionability between ourselves then we can begin to learn. So that the first circumambulation of any real learning is just getting to learn to swim together. And that the arts do this for us best. And that love is the governor of these arts.

“For whoever greatly loves both works of art themselves and the people for whom they are made [then is able to execute] diligently and completes them exactly,” in their own life rapport.”

And so we become not just an audience for an artist via the medium of the work, but that rapport which threads through all of us together, links us. And in that linking what comes out from us, increasingly, what is evoked, are these celestial archetypes first of all the idea of beauty, then the idea of the good, then the idea of truth. And with those three we are able then to understand the unity of the divine. Because we are led through very easy geometries into finally those larger crystalizing of the whole.

And Ficino says, “The difficulty is to think that because one has acquired a great facility of analytical discourse like Socrates young men who are incredibly capable at and wielding sophistic ideas but they don’t understand that all this is like the action of Aries with a sword, that discrimination, but that the arrow of Cupid is different, works in a different way. And then it’s not so much the argument but the ardor of the quest that becomes important. And later on from this when Renaissance Hermeticism takes a Rosicrucian turn in the early 17th century the saying will be, “the life lived is the doctrine received” – mente vita regitur.

Ficino in his commentary on the Philebus writes, when he’s writing this to Cosimo, “We want to know especially whether this universal world which can be seen with the eyes comes from itself or rather from a higher cause.” Obviously it– it doesn’t come from itself. “For everything that does come from itself is necessarily then indivisible. It’s unity for everything that makes and creates from itself is incorporeal for no action is appropriate to a body insofar as it is just a body. A body in fact composed of matter and quantity possesses from matter the ability to receive from somewhere else and from quantity the fact that it– it can be divided.”

But what is important here is– is existence. And so Ficino will say that we become attuned to the existential reality of the specificity of the world through our harmonious attentiveness to it and in particular what occurs to us as more and more real – aside from the flowers and the songs and the paintings and the sculpture – is the fact that other human beings are indelibly as real as we are. That their characters are every bit on the same level of veracity that we are, and that interchange in the highest levels of the universe happen between human beings. And when they’re able to evoke from each other, or from among themselves, these deepest structures and qualities what comes up to the fore in this loveliness and through this idea of beauty, is that harmony of mankind as a whole that we are as a whole the face of the divine, the only face that could be seen, that can ever be seen, for any face other than that is invisible as it should be.

All of this development hinged upon its being able to be taught. Because the whole enterprise was not to develop some esoteric school for just the upper one tenth of one percent, some elite. But to somehow bring into everyday life for the people these qualities. And so language, like Latin or like commentaries and so forth, was really not the mode that could approach, but it was the visual iconographic horizon of imagery. Images which were held together by symbols synthesizing symbols so that anyone could admire the beauty of the imagery, the pageantry of the color, and when they learn to tune themselves to the color, and the forms, they would increasingly become affined to the perspective. And as the perspective, the geometries, of that range of perception begin to operate freely in them the symbols would evoke out from the deepest levels of themselves those universal harmonies. And so from Ficino comes two disparate art movements: 1) the movement of the art that we now see in museums and galleries the world around – Renaissance art; the other is the selecting out of an image base that integrates very very quickly into a synthesizing symbol. And of course that image-base that we’re going to use next week is the tarot deck because the tarot deck is a specifically selected image-base which allows for an integration very, very, very quickly around that old hermetic symbol which is not so much a visual image but a mode of living not an analytical but a mystical harmonizing. And we’ll see next week how that worked. And we’ll see with a couple of Renaissance tarot decks how that worked out. And I’ll bring a reproduction of Mantegna’s great tarot card where the premium mobile is a dancing maiden beautifully holding up a circle of absolutely nothing and she is able to smile while she shows us this.

So we’ll see that next week.