ABSTRACT
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94) belonged to the brilliant circle around the Medici court in Florence which included another famous philosopher, Marsilio Ficino. Ficino and Pico were founders and propagators of the movement loosely known as Renaissance Neoplatonism. This movement was stimulated by the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists newly revealed to the West through the Greek manuscripts brought to Florence from Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople. Renaissance Neoplatonism was a rich amalgam of genuinely Platonic teachings with Neoplatonism and with other late antique philosophical occultisms. Prominent among the texts of this type which attracted Pico and Ficino was the Corpus Hermeticum, supposedly by ‘Hermes Trismegistus’, a mythical Egyptian sage whom the Florentines believed to represent an ancient wisdom which was the remote source of Plato himself.1 ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ was
believed to have lived at about the same time as Moses, or even before Moses, hence the Hermetic texts had a sanctity almost equal to that of Genesis, supposedly written by Moses.
