ABSTRACT
Haunting these scholarly enquiries and the mythopoetic history of statuary itself is Ovid's unforgettable telling in the Metamorphoses 10.243–297 of the myth of Pygmalion. The Cypriot king and sculptor who, having rejected consorts of flesh and blood, was granted the power by Aphrodite to infuse life into an ivory statue which he had carved and with which he had fallen desperately in love. However, there is another dimension entirely of statue magic that has a major bearing on theology and philosophy but little, it would first seem, to do with Pygmalion or the Hermetic Asclepius. Frances Yates was one of the first modern scholars both to underscore the role of statues, and of statue magic and statue animation in the Hermetic treatise, the Asclepius 2324, 37–38, and to speculate about the invasive force of its impact – and with it of Augustine's notable condemnation in the City of God 8.23–26. – specifically on Renaissance mages such as Ficino, Agrippa.
