Agrippa and Occult Philosophy in Four Books

Transcript (PDF)

Hermetic Tradition (New Series)
Presentation 10 of 13

Agrippa and Occult Philosophy in Four Books
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 4, 1986

Transcript:

The old Hermetic teaching was that the earth is solid, the material realm is solid, but that the psychic realm is polarized, is not solid, it is extraordinarily dynamic and fluid and unstable and has reverberations. And that the spiritual realm is a unity but to move through to the intellect one needs a vehicle. That in the intellect, not the intellectual realm, but that in the intellect the purity of the intellect does not occur in the psychic realm. It's invisible to it. So that the soul is the vehicle by which we leave the realm of mentalities and are able to go to the mind and is in the mind that we recognize the divine. So mind is a capital M. But mentalities in the psychic realm is filled with patterns that any movement whatsoever produces a counter movement and that the movement and the counter movement produce patternings. And the patternings evoke other patterns. So that the realm of understanding that's unpurified is like a net of oceanic molasses where everything is connected and one cannot move in that realm without disturbing all of it. But that the elements nearest you that are disturbed, are in one's own person, one's own undisciplined untutored mind. So that the whole effect of this oceanic net of molasses upon you can be broken only by achieving purity of soul within yourself. So that that net of circumstances no longer affects you and you are free to go. That the achievement of mind as a spiritual capacity is just that.

But the difficulty is that when one is in a horizon of the mentalities there is no way to conceive of mind. So Agrippa says, towards the end of his life, that he's come to realize that the Hermetic tradition is not a matter of understanding anything, but is a matter of living understandingly. And so he recants his writings from his earlier years. Not that they're incorrect, not that they're just immature, but that in a very real sense he has come to understand that they're vestigial of a condition which he has finally outgrown by virtue of having developed his soul.

Unfortunately he only lived to be forty-nine years old and it was just near the end of his life that he was– he was able to have that kind of clarity. Had he have lived longer he would have written incredibly fine things. What's important about Agrippa is that he publicly lives out the whole catastrophe of immaturity and exemplifies the dangers of trying to develop oneself in the tradition, but without a teacher. Because Agrippa's only real teacher, Trithemius, was largely his teacher by correspondence. And when it's a matter not of understanding but of living understandingly you have to have that contact, that life contact with the teacher to experience how it's done. How do you get up in the morning and go through a day? How do you do this week after week, and year after year? Yes you're concerned with all of these things, you have to do this. Are these– is this incommensurate with that? Not so, not so. But if you learned it through correspondence what comes into play is not living understandingly, but living imaginatively. And the imagination loves to play in this psychic realm. When the imagination is quieted, when it no longer plays, when it's quieted and focused, then the transcendental purity occurs not in any imagination, but as the classic saying is in its suchness.

So Agrippa is a wonderful example of what not to do. He belongs in the Hermetic tradition but he's like the little skull and crossbones that this is rather a poisonous kind of endeavor. He is a contemporary of Paracelsus and we'll see why Paracelsus is really the new man. And Paracelsus has just as much of a vitriolic temperament as Agrippa. But Paracelsus has the long contact with the teacher. He has the– the– He has the hermetic discipline of having the give and take, not so much of the psychic realm of the mentalities, but of coming into the play of the teacher who has his spiritual integrity. And so Paracelsus is able to do the task that is there before him. Whereas Agrippa understands the task and he is sometimes eloquent because he realizes again and again in his life that he is– he is the exact right man in the exact right spot to– to tell the truth and to make it known. But he understands the truth and so he speaks from an understanding which is true and right, but he hasn't lived understandingly. And so what he evokes is not the purity of the spirit but the reviling of the compensation among the ignorant people around him.

The monks hate him. The Reformation people hate him. Everybody hates him. He has lifelong friends who understand him and they revere Agrippa. He is almost a divine man. But as Erasmus says, he just never learned how to live. He's born in Cologne, on the Rhine, Germany, September 14th, 1486. So a week from Sunday will be the 500th anniversary of the birth of Agrippa. There are no worldwide commemorations for him. His family were royal, somewhat, von Nettesheim – Henriques Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. Cologne, in Roman times there on the Rhine, was a Roman military encampment which was very close to the designs that Marcus Agrippa set up the great friend of Caesar Augustus. And so the name Agrippa is honorific, and honorific in its bestowal upon him because he had a military background, a military family. They were in service not as courtiers but as soldiers, as generals, as fighters, soldiers of fortune, mercenaries. And the social set was that here we have a bunch of a collection of kingdoms and principalities and they from time to time have need of services of talented individuals. Sometimes they need a theologian to get divorced like Henry the Eighth. Sometimes they need a soldier to organize a body of men to go and punish this group of people down in Catalonia.

Maximilian the first had a friend who had some problems with brigands in Catalonia and he hired the twenty-one year old Agrippa to organize the mercenaries and go down and carry out the military adventure. And Agrippa almost lost his life, but he knew how to do it because it was a family tradition. And so he was a soldier. He was a soldier sociologically, genealogically. But it happened that he had a brilliant mind, he has extraordinary intellect. And he had the facility to learn languages. He eventually learned and was literate in eight languages. And here we note the interest that Trithemius had in him, because Trithemius was interested in the universal language. He was interested in what, in the 20th century became comparative linguistics. Trithemius would have loved to live in the 20th century. At last we can do what he single-handedly tried to do. We've actually done.

So Agrippa learning all these languages, and also having an affinity with the occult with the hidden very very early on. In fact, he, at the age of twenty-two, was invited to an area of Burgundy, a little university town of Douai, and he lectured there. He got there and he realized that here he is – he's only twenty-two, maybe almost twenty-three years old – this university is stodgy, the faculty are stodgy, the students are stodgy. He's going to wake them up. So he picks the most outrageous book that he could to lecture on. Fairly new still. He picked John Reuchlin’s The Miraculous Word, a Kabbalistic work. And he gave a brilliant series of lectures on it. He smashed them. They went out mopping sweat off their brows. They gave him an honorary degree. Wherever Agrippa lectured during his life with serious intent they always gave him honorary doctorates. I mean the man was incredible. He looked– in the woodcuts he looked like Gregory Peck only with a short beard, broad handsome features, probably a very deep voice commanding military presence and extraordinary intellect.

A Franciscan monk named Catalinet took umbrage at the dashingness of this man coming into this country terrain and showing off and so he instigated the whole beginnings of the smear against Agrippa. That the man is not a philosopher but that he is a sorcerer. And that what he's really talking about is black magic. And so the kind of bad press that starts with this Franciscan monk carries all the way so that when we come to lives of Agrippa, in the 20th century, we read his name is connected with the practice of black magic in its gloomiest and most repellent forms. The tales which purport to describe his secret doings are not even painted in the colors of romance or surrounded with the glamor of inalienable to the forbidden arts. Fantastic and evidently the result of the grossest superstition these stories represent Agrippa as having plumbed the depths of diabolism. The name of this great man, one of the most illustrious scholars and lofty thinkers of his time, a figure who towered above his contemporaries is associated with exploits which in their wild improbability recall those of the enchanters of medieval romance. And indeed they do. By his free and fearless denunciation of their gross ignorance at every opportune time which was every day he was castigated and there were reports, for instance, they assured congregations that he slept nightly in the moon and nude in the moonlight and that on completing a lecture at Freiburg he was able to commence one moment later at another point in Switzerland. That the very dogs of which he was fond were construed as diabolical familiars and one of them it was said haunted the sage's dying bed ready to spring upon his soul as it quitted his body. Et cetera et cetera.

This is bad press. This is very difficult. What is happening here? What's– What's going on here? This is in 1509, 1510. Let's back up just about fifteen years. Remember last week we were talking about Pico. Pico was also flamboyant like Agrippa. Pico towards what turned out to be the end of his life had a complete religious conversion. He went for the fundamentalist fire and brimstone monk Savonarola. In fact, Walter Pater in his little essay on Pico, in his book on the Renaissance, writes in here that his end, Pico's end, came in 1494 when amid the prayers and sacraments of Savonarola he died of fever on the very day which Charles– on which Charles the Eighth entered Florence – the 17th of November. And the French, with their fleur de lis insignias, fulfilled the prophecy that a woman had uttered that Pico would die young among lilies of another group of– of power. He was buried in the conventional Church of Saint Mark in the hood and white frock of the Dominican Order. So the flamboyant beautiful boy of the Italian Renaissance, just before he died was converted to a Dominican monk and buried as a saved soul from all of this hermetic hullabaloo.

So fifteen years later there's still this in the air. Why is this in the air? How does it get in the air? Because it's in this reverberatory polarity. It reads like a medieval romance because it is not just a medieval romance. It's a classical romance. It's the kind of imagery that reoccurs constantly. The feeling toned complexes in the psyche are eternal patterns. They're like little fairy tale skits that play themselves out again and again. And if they're evoked, like quote ‘magical phrases’ they play themselves out. People start acting those parts the scenario comes together and the tape loop of the psyche plays through. Always happens that way. Always then evokes other complications. And if one were able to exercise intelligence, one could see that there is a deep skeletal structure underneath this surface play of complexes and imagery and romance and figures and so forth. This archetypal structure always reoccurs, always holds up and supports that psychic drama. So that intelligence when it's been trained to see this, penetratingly, able to see the archetypal skeletal structure one no longer looks to see the bruised flesh but the broken bone. That's really the problem. But it's deeper even than that because it's not a problem of flesh and bone, but a problem of the mind – that it's in the mind. And that the mind cannot extricate itself from the psyche in terms of the psyche. That the symbol for that is infinity, that there's no end. There's no end to that.

So that one has to be able to stand back from the entire complexity of the mind not only in its dramas its complexes, but also in terms of its archetypal structure in toto. That's quite a tall order and the Hermetic tradition always is teaching man how to do this and that. He does this by creating harmony because all of these reverberations have to occur in pairs. They have to occur. The polarities have to occur together. They can never occur in any kind of a razzle dazzle original way. They always occur in exactly the identifiable, old, old story. So that if one knows how to deal with harmony, harmonia, if one can harmonize the spheres so that all the spheres come together in a circle is made so that the reverberations stop happening and the circle is made, the soul then with its geometrical certainty can see that since harmony is able to do this harmonia is a principle, is able to leave the whole skeletal structure archetypal as it is of the psyche. It slips out not through the harmony of the notes, but through the silent interval that is not subject to the notes and is free. And so man realizes he is a spirit and not a structure however complex or beautiful. No matter how terrifying or how edifying. He's not that.

But Agrippa does not learn that until very late in life. He's a fighter. He's a struggler. He thinks that if you're tough enough, if you're able to be brilliant enough, if you're able to contact all the right people and take from them what you think you need, that's all that is required. And in this he is wrong. You can't do that. For one thing the spiritual teacher never gives you what you think you need. What you think you need is irrelevant, it's extraneous because you're thinking at best in terms of a psychic situation. You may be brilliant and be thinking in archetypal terms. That's still extraneous. It's still not it. So that it's not what you understand, but it's the life lived understandingly that is the way out. It's the cordless thread that leads to freedom.

So someone like Erasmus, who could appreciate Agrippa's genius, but constantly saying this– it does no good to fight these people. They are not enemies. That the fighting itself creates the enemy ness that there is another way. And so in 1510, corresponding with Trithemius, Trithemius says to Agrippa, what you need is a little contact. Don't come and see me here at Würzburg at Saint James Abbey in Würzburg, go to England. And Trithemius contacts Maximilian the First. And Maximilian makes up a little envoy cover for Agrippa to go to England. But when he goes to England he goes and stays with John Colet and he stays about six or seven months with John Colet’s. And while he's there Colet tries to refine him; tries to smooth some of the rough edges. And the only way that Colet can get to him, can can help him, is to encourage him to externalize, through language, what it is that he understands so that he can get out of himself what he thinks he understands. And when he gets it out on the page he will be able to see that everything that he understands is there on the pages, but he is not those pages. This is the way the book frees one. It's not the book, but it's that you finally can get everything out there into that book and you're not there. You're still out here. You're hovering like this infinity sign over the mind which you're able to express. And this way language like nature has its alchemical transformation and freeing man and showing him that he doesn't belong in any of the forms including the form of the all of that media. He doesn't belong, even though he is at home in nature, he doesn't belong in nature. He is supernature. Even though he can use language or many languages he doesn't belong in the language of the mentality, but he belongs in the pure silence of the transcendental mind.

So Colet is the one who encourages Agrippa to write and Colet, being very much a fine hermetic teacher, says it doesn't matter what you write. Go ahead and write exactly what you feel. And so Agrippa writes his huge tome On Occult Philosophy in three books and it gets him immediately into trouble because he sends a manuscript to Trithemius, and Trithemius can see what is going on and understands it, but writes to Agrippa and says, “Take care now. Don't speak publicly about all of these magical things to people on the street because sometimes you get trampled.”

And of course Agrippa will not hear of this. Their ignorance is an offense to me, and the offense is a challenge to my manliness, and my manliness says I can draw a sword on anybody. Oh he was extraordinary. When he was in court one time– How does he speak here? How does he speak? Here's an example of Agrippa's rhetoric in court when he's cornered. Brilliant but garish. He was being accused at this time of being a– a magician and he was thrown into a situation where he wasn't paid for a long time and then he was grabbed for being a debtor. His employer was Emperor Charles Fifth, wouldn't pay him for a long time. So he says here, “I have Caesar for my debtor – it's a translation from Agrippa – Wherefore do you let your eyes blink at his avarice? He who allows his pensioners to go ragged for their pay and be vexed with the terrors of a jail. What equity is this of yours? What justice? Except the Emperor is my bail.” You can't say that even now, much less five hundred years ago with impunity. They mark you down. They– they circle your name on the list. You're a trouble causer.

All of Agrippa's life he could have been a very successful soldier. He could have been a very successful physician. He was a very talented doctor. He was a Renaissance man. He understood how to practice medicine. He, like Paracelsus, was trained to deal specifically with plague. He lost two of his three wives to plague and several of his seven children. Plague was everywhere like Russian roulette at this time. He could have been a soldier. He could have been a physician. He could have been a university professor. He could have taught theology. He was extremely learned in all of these things. But he had the attitude that the royalty of the world owes people like him a living. And so he would constantly look for a position at someone's court and they would always employ him and never pay him.

He was employed at one time. He was the– the private physician to the Queen mother of Francis the first, King of France. And he was castigated by the King of France for badmouthing his mother. And so never paid him a dime for two and a half years of service as the private physician. This is the kind of personality that Agrippa had. He spent seven years in Italy, from 1511 to 1518. So he's in Italy in northern Italy at a time when the High Renaissance is– is really in power. There you have people like Leonardo, Michelangelo, you have the Venetians with Titian and so forth. You have a tremendous rise in capacity and it's just starting to flower and the 16th century courageous individual is starting to step outside of the whole medieval pattern of forms. Because you see, in the adventure of life, the– the Hermetic Spirit has its effect on life. And so there were beginning to be individuals whose personalities were being freed from the complexities of a psychic order. And the psychic order at that time was the medieval church. They would have stepped outside of any psychic order, but the one that was really strongest at that time was the medieval church. The medieval church with its archetypal scholastic philosophy, with Aristotle-Aquinas, that tandem, as the structure. And so it's not so bad that not so much that they're the bad guys but it's that that's the foil of the time against which the individual had to free themselves. And Agrippa is exactly that kind of individual who is able to do this. And he does this again and again.

He in fact, writes, he says that, Luther is an unconquered heretic but that he still denounces not only those that Luther is denouncing but Luther himself. He says, in his Apology, “I am denounced as a heretic and a magician. As for my magic I confess that I have done wonderful things but none that offend God or hurt religion. Many things are done by the powers of nature which ignorance or malice will attribute to the demons rather than to nature or to God.”

And he writes in there that he is quite capable of finding his own way in this world. He says that he needs no particular context in which to become a man. That he needs none of the arts and none of the sciences. He needs none of the religion. That he can come by himself to an understanding of– of his own soul. And this he declares his freedom from the whole context of human life. But what Agrippa does not free himself from is his own mind. It's not so much in a harmonia that Agrippa is able to declare this but in a tension. And to bring the opposites into attention is not harmony. And because you arrange them in a dynamic tension does not free one, but rather electrocutes one. One remains splayed out and flayed against the psychic structure and becomes an exemplar of the most primordial quality of that psychic structure.

One of the difficulties of course – referring here to the diagrammatic emblems on the board – one of the difficulties that we can see, strategically when we lay it out like this, is that from inside the psyche the world of the spirit and the world of matter are a polarity in terms of the psyche. One of the difficulties of the psyche is it can never see anything as it is. It has no singular eye as they say. To the psyche if it tries to see singularly it becomes cross-eyed; it goes out of focus. It says I'm dizzy or I'm mad or whatever it is. And the mind says, oh, damn it, we've overdone it, we've over honed ourselves. We've over refined ourselves. We better get involved in things again and get spread out again. Get articulate again. So the polarities are more comfortable. They're very uncomfortable when they're brought in like that. They have to be splayed out.

To see the material world in its exactness is a real science. That's real science. Scientific knowledge and the development of science goes along with the development of the spiritual individual. They happen together because the only way to extricate oneself from this kind of psychic net is to do it in tandem that way. To have– to have science develop and have the individual as a spiritual freedom develop. That's why the Hermetic tradition culminates in the person of Benjamin Franklin. When this country is founded on this whole esoteric development in nature what is seen psychically is a projection– a projection of– of the various contours upon nature. So it's not seen. So that the trick in alchemy, to transmute nature, was to dissolve it out of its contradictoriness in nature itself. Everything is inscribed, as it were, with a secret code. This is the Hermetic tradition. At this time it was thought that Kabbalah was that secret code. It's in the very holy nature of the most sacred language, and that the hierarchies, the relationships, are exacting, their architectural. And they are inscribed invisibly into the structural nature of everything. It's rather like we see atomic structure now or we see the genetic code now. This is just how the Kabbalists, five hundred years ago, saw. And their chance to advance in science was to be able to read what it is that anything is made up of. That the quanta of nature, the materia of nature, are not just objects but that they're composites of the various same elements in different proportions. Everything has fire in it. Everything has air in it. It's in different proportions. The formula for the proportionality. For the ratios. For the rationality of nature, was in the sacred language. But it was with people like Trithemius who were a little dubious that it may not be in Hebrew, it may not be in the Hebrew language, it may be in some as yet undiscovered universal language which is beneath every human language.

And of course Trithemius’s insight is monumental. It eventually culminates in Newton and Leibniz developing the calculus, higher mathematics, as the universal language of the spirit in which it works and that the key to the material world is in the spiritual language which then projects from the spirit down into nature not from the psychic realm. So that man, by the sophistication of his mind, is able to call out the exact ratios of what reality is. We think the same way. We think hermetically today all the time. We look at a table of elements and we see the elements are divided into structures and families according to the electron, proton, neutron– neutron ratio. And we understand that. It was just beginning here, just beginning.

What was so difficult about this time is that no civilization had ever done this. The great heyday of sophisticated Alexandrian science and mathematics in the third century AD was right on the verge of it but never made it, never did it. In China in the ninth century the Chinese genius was right on the verge of it, never did it. These people had the only passage through that gateway that anybody has ever had there. And that's why Asia doesn't go and develop its own mathematics but uses Western mathematics, uses Western science. That's the way, and that's being born here. But at the same time what is being born is the idea of the autonomy of the individual. That in order to see nature as it is scientifically he has to have integrity as a person. If he's caught up in any kind of a doctrinaire structure it not only colors what he sees, but how he sees. That is his own nature. The clearing up of the nature of the individual and the ability to scientifically analyze the– the real nature, go together, go in tandem. So that symbolically, when one is speaking esoterically, nature is able to be unfolded. One has the six-part cross by unfolding the square of nature by seeing it not as a square but as a cube which when it is opened, opens in that way, has that capacity. And this is just a– this is just a two dimensional.

There's a trigonometric way of seeing this as nine cubes. Salvador Dali's great painting of the crucifixion. The ninth cube is the body of Jesus. The eight cubes reveal the ninth which is the transfiguration of man into his cosmic purity. All of this is there, but it's not there to be understood symbolically at this time. They were trying too hard to understand it symbolically at this time. You can only understand it symbolically in an effortless way, through a harmony, through a harmonia. They were trying to understand it through a– through attention. The greatest example, the greatest image of the age, the old Michelangelo, the old hermetic artist himself painting the Last Judgment on the back wall of the Sistine Chapel. Not on the ceiling. That was for the Pope. But the back wall was for him. He has the exhausted artist himself, Michelangelo, being held in the hand of the vengeant Lord on the last day of judgment is like– like a pelt, man is exhausted. He can't– He can't as man hold that tension of the universe in himself. He's not a microcosm in that sense. He has to give himself up. He has to be a threshold through which he goes and leaves this behind.

When we come to Agrippa, when we read what he wrote under the urging of Colet and Trithemius – Get it out, get it out. What does he write? Here's how he writes. He's writing from this kind of staggering tension being projected down onto the material world. It's not science at all. But we can understand what it is from the kind of presentation I'm giving you tonight and it's– it's exactly what we still have to do. We have to get out this outrageousness and see it for what it is and learn how to harmonize it.

This is page 127 of Philosophy of Natural Magic, Agrippa. It was written in 1510. It was published towards the end of his life in 1531 in Antwerp. It caused a scandal when it came out. It was the first of three books. It was going to be a philosophy of the elementals where magia is in this kind of sympathetic magic realm. Then there was going to be a celestial realm where mathematics took over, and then there was going to be an intellectual realm where theological magic takes place. And that what happens is that magia transforms through all three spheres And it is so, it is so. But not from the perspective that Agrippa is able to write from in 1510. Here's how he writes in translation:

“Now I will show you what some of the Sorceries are, that by example of these there may be a way opened for the consideration of the whole subject of them. Of these, therefore, the first is the catamenia, which, how much power it hath in sorcery, we will now consider; for, as they say, if it comes over new wine it will make it sour, and if it doth but touch the vine, it spoils it forever; and by its very touch, it makes all plants and trees barren, and they that be newly set to die; it burns up all the herbs in the garden and makes fruit fall off from the trees; it darkens the brightness of a looking-glass, dulls the edges of knives and razors, and dims the beauty of ivory.”

It goes on and on, and it doesn't matter to us at all what it is, what catamenia is. It's extraneous. It's like a piece of chalk we just throw away. We don't need to know because we're not stepping in those pails. We're not even looking at the room where the pails are. We're going outside and we're trying to understand the whole landscape of how this happens to to occur here. We're working on a huge strategic level now. Page 141:

“Of Magical Rings and Their Compositions.”
“Rings” – You can just imagine some kind of Petruchio you know – “Rings, also, which were always much esteemed of by the ancients, when they are opportunely made, do in like manner impress their virtue upon us, inasmuch as they do affect the spirit of him that carries them with gladness or sadness, and render him courteous or terrible, bold or fearful, amiable or hateful; in as much as they do fortify us against sickness, poisons, enemies, evil spirits, and all manner of hurtful things, or, at least, will not suffer us to be kept under them. Now, the manner of making these kinds of Magical Rings is this; When any Star ascends fortunately, with the fortunate aspect or conjunction of the Moon, we must take a stone and herb that is under that Star, and make a ring of the metal that is suitable to this Star, and in it fasten the stone, putting the herb or root under it – not omitting the inscriptions of images, names and characters, as also the proper suffumigations; but we shall speak more of these in another place, where we will treat of Images and Characters.”

And then he goes on to tell us more of this. Page 146:

“Of Light, Colors, Candles and Lamps, and to What Stars, Houses and Elements Several Colors Are Ascribed.”
“Light also is a quality that partakes much of form, and is a simple act, and also a representation of the understanding. It is first diffused from the Mind of God into all things; but in God the Father, the Father of Light, it is the first true light; then in the Son a beautiful, overflowing brightness, and in the Holy Ghost a burning brightness, exceeding all Intelligences; yea, as Dionysius [the Areopagite] saith of Seraphims, in angels it is a shining intelligence diffused, an abundant joy beyond all bounds of reason, yet received in diverse degrees, according to the nature of the Intelligence that receives it. Then it descends into the celestial bodies, where it becomes a store of life and an effectual propagation; even a visual splendor.”

And then it descends further and further and further. And so one can know the pecking order. One has to know the ratios. Then there is the person who knows this. The magical powers that one has. For instance the power of fascination:

“Of Fascination, and the Art Thereof.”
“Fascination is a binding, which comes from the spirit of the witch, through the eyes of him that is so bewitched, and [enters in] to his heart. Now [that] the instrument of fascination is the spirit, [in other words,] a certain pure, lucid, subtile vapor, generated of the purer blood by the heat of the heart.” And then this vapor comes up and goes through the eyes and contacts and that vapor is and so on and so on and so on.

Of divination, various kinds; of the forming of man; passions of the will. There's only one section of passions of the will, but there are many sections on passions of the mind. How passions of the mind may change the proper body by changing the accidents and moving the spirit. Scholastic talk; accidents. “How Passions of the Mind Can Work of Themselves Upon Another's Body (page 200):

“The passions of the soul which follow the fantasy when they are most vehement, cannot only change their own body, but also transcend so as to work upon another body; so that some wonderful impressions are thence produced in elements and extrinsical things, and they can thus take away or bring some disease of the mind or body. For the passions of the soul are the chiefest cause of the temperament of its proper body. So the soul, being strongly elevated, and inflamed with a strong imagination, sends forth health or sickness, not only in its proper body, but also in other bodies.”

He's understanding the soul psychically. He's writing– He's writing from that perspective, which is why, twenty years later, he recants all this. Because he realizes that– that all that is like grade school stuff and that its usefulness is only to train the mind to see that that's not it. That its only use is that – to be discarded with confidence, with certainty, and with preciseness. But that's not it. That's its only use. But he goes on and on. And finally towards the end he gets around to language; finally language.

“Of Speech, and the Occult Virtue of Words.” And he goes into the occult virtue of words and doesn't stay there very long before he comes into the structure of not just words, but how many words are joined together so that one has sentences, that these sentences are the charms, and the charms have a lot of power because they– they knit words together. But one can't stay there. One has then not only charms and phrases of words, but one has bringing phrases together, so that one has enchantments – the wonderful power of enchantments. Whole verses. Oh! But then there is the complete proportion correspondency and reduction of all letters. The whole structure of a language to celestial signs and planets according to various tongues and then tables of this, which he includes, and so on and so forth.

This is his book – This is the first book: Of Natural Magic. He will write towards the end of his life, a little book. Some of the book is excerpted here in this Modern Library book: Renaissance Philosophy, volume two, The Transalpine Thinkers. Selections from his book, The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, published in 1531 in Antwerp, the very place and the very time that he publishes Natural Magic – Occult Philosophy, the first book Natural Magic.

The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, chapter one, “On the Uncertainty of Our Knowledge,” entitled, “Of the Sciences in General.” Reading:

“It is an old opinion, and the concurring and unanimous judgment…” Notice how different all this is: the syntax, the vocabulary; everything is different. The man is mature. “It is an old opinion, and the concurring and unanimous judgment of almost all philosophers, that every science adds much of a sublime nature to man himself. According, indeed, to the capacity and worth of each person, the sciences often enable them to transport themselves beyond the limits of humanity – even to the celestial seats of the blessed.”

Can you see what a different maturity is there? But he only lives a couple of more years. They seize him– They seize him, ostensibly, for debt. He's brought out almost immediately but he's mistreated and he goes to Grenoble and he dies there very shortly after being released. Why? Because when you write like this in Natural Magic, you're a good foil for the Inquisition. They love to have you around. Makes you– Makes them feel important and they have a real good patsy. But when you write like this, you're really a threat because when you think fine enough to be able to argue against this, you think finally enough to realize that this is pretty good, and that the man is starting to make sense. And when Agrippa's, Vanity of the Arts and Sciences, comes into play one sees that the hermetic tradition is still effective. It's still mature spiritual persons. It wasn't meant to be a mental game, a discipline of the psyche so that it could have occult powers, but it was meant to demonstrate to man he is a spirit and he is free and need not be jailed by his own super capacities. He can leave all that.

“…According, indeed, to the capacity and worth of each person, the sciences often enable them to transport themselves beyond the limits of humanity – even to the celestial seats of the blessed. It is this which has inspired those various and innumerable encomiums on the sciences in which each author endeavored, accurately and at great length, to praise, and, as it were, to extoll those arts and mysteries beyond the heavens themselves; with painstaking effort the writer would display in these orations the strength and vigor of his ingenuity or invention. I, however, persuaded by reasons of another nature, truly believe that there is nothing more pernicious, nothing more destructive of man's well-being, nothing more damaging to the salvation of his soul, than [to be preoccupied by these] arts and sciences. Therefore, quite contrary to what has been hitherto maintained, my opinion is that these arts and sciences, far from deserving such lofty plaudits and panegyrics, are rather for the most part to be scorned and vilified. Indeed, as I see it, there is not one which does not justly merit reproof and censure; nor is there a single one which, in itself, deserves any praise or commendation. Such praise as it may be entitled to derives from the ingenuity and virtue of its creator.”

So Agrippa, toward the end of his life, finally maturing and finally setting his sights, but is taken from the scene. He lives to be 49; Paracelsus lives to be 48; Pico lived to be 31. So you can see the difficulty in the beginning of getting traction. Who lives? Ficino, Trithemius, Ruchlin, these individuals who take themselves out of the fray, out of the psychic realm. They go off by themselves. It's not going to the monastery. It's not going to the libraries. It's not going to the Villa. It's not getting caught in this frame frazen medium. They're the ones who build the structure. But the difficulty is– is that their students don't really learn. Some of the students learn like Colet and so forth. But the students don't really learn. They don't learn that there's nothing to understand but that one must live understandingly. So the Rosicrucian motto is, “the life lived is the doctrine received.” And all during the 16th century, increasingly it's not understood until towards the end of the 16th century. All of a sudden in universal geniuses like Shakespeare and Cervantes, the understanding is– is that character is a hermetic medium by which man matures to his spiritual freedom. And that will be the– the moving edge as we will see when we get into the furtherance of– of this whole development.

And when it's understood in Antwerp, a hundred years after Agrippa, it's understood not in the writings of some philosopher but in the paintings of Rembrandt. He doesn't have to say one darn word. And who is he portraying? Portraying the artist, patiently, during the whole life. The young Rembrandt with his antique yard long wine glass toasting his lady Saskia to the old Rembrandt who's looking directly on through the canvas to infinity with his personality intact. And it's at that maturity, when that is mature in the late 1660s, that a hermetic educational program is finally made, and will be made, by John Amos Comenius of how to mature human beings. And it will be the program that will train the generation which will see that they can't stay in Europe because Europe is structured in this psychic reverberation way, all the way back. They have to go to a new world. They have to go to some utopia, wilderness, new place. And so they conscientiously come to the United States in the 1690s and in the turn of the 1700s. And they come quite consciously like colonists from another planet; colonists from a spiritual planet. Not for religious freedom as a doctrine, but to practice the old Hermetic art of transmutation in its new realm. Not to make gold, but to make human beings who are spiritually free and to do it by the millions. Really grand strategy.

Well next week we'll see the compliment to Agrippa – Paracelsus – who is able to overcome not so much by tension but finally by Harmonia. But unfortunately again he dies before he's 50 and is unable to do too much.

Thank you very much.