ABSTRACT
The reputation of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) has been a survival from the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which he figured prominently as a prince of black magicians and sorcerers. The black magician of the ages of superstition became, in enlightened times, the absurd charlatan unworthy of serious attention. The same process occurred in the case of John Dee with the same result, that a figure of great historical importance disappeared in clouds of nineteenthcentury ridicule, from which the scholarship of the twentieth century has slowly begun to rescue him. In the case of Agrippa, his De occulta philosophia is now seen as the indispensable handbook of Renaissance ‘Magia’ and ‘Cabala’, combining the natural magic of Ficino with the Cabalist magic of Pico in one convenient compendium, and, as such, playing a very important part in the spread of Renaissance Neoplatonism with its magical core.1
