ABSTRACT
The Renaissance impulse to restore ancient truths through the translation of authentic classical sources had a significant impact on the print and popular culture of the period, bringing into the public forum ideas that would have seemed unacceptably daring had they lacked the imprimatur of ancient authority. Such was certainly the case with Marsilio Ficino’s 1463 translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, a series of treatises ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, an imagined Egyptian sage whose ancient status lent legitimacy to a collection of writings on cosmology, the Creation and its lasting effects on the world, and magic.1 Philological attacks against the Corpus began as early as the sixteenth century, fueled by anti-Hermetic writers who hoped that attacking the legitimacy of the texts would undermine their standing and detract from the growing popularity of the subject matter.2 Their voices stood little chance against the rising tide of interest in magic that characterized both scholarly and popular culture. Isaac Casaubon’s damning 1614 philological critique of the text, which proved beyond a doubt that its ideas were the legacy of the third century and not the work of an Egyptian contemporary of Moses, came 50 years too late, after much of Europe and England had thrown itself with enthusiasm into writing, talking, and thinking about recovering the magical knowledge produced by the ancient world and lost in the interim.3 Renaissance natural philosophers were particularly motivated to explore the ideas raised by the Corpus Hermeticum about the relationship between the Godhead and humanity, especially in regards to the role of magic. This chapter analyzes the most significant ideas in the Corpus Hermeticum and then traces their realization and expansion in Agrippa von Nettesheim’s magical opus, De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (1531/1533). It argues that the Corpus Hermeticum lent Agrippa and his colleagues more than ideas; the Corpus Hermeticum’s status as an ancient text, though false, provided Agrippa and his peers with a form of permission to explore theories of magic and its relationship to divinity that went well beyond the limits of early sixteenth-century intellectual culture. While that ancient authority did not entirely insulate these scholars against criticism, as evidenced by Agrippa’s book being deemed heretical and burned, the Corpus Hermeticum’s fictional status as an ancient text pushed the boundaries of magical inquiry in hermetic directions.
