Transcription
The Renaissance is rightly praised for the legacy of arts and culture it has bequeathed to modernity, from the arts and sciences, classical learning, humanism, and so much more. This period of time was a decisive crucible in European and human history. Of course, too much can be made of just how much this period was a break rather than a continuation of developments from centuries prior, but by any estimation, the world of Da Vinci, Petrarch, Copernicus, Raphael, and Prunus Shelly is still a source of inspiration for those that study and admire it.
But beyond the achievements just mentioned, the Renaissance also produced another truly inspirational figure: the Hermetic Magus. The Renaissance mage, like developments in other fields of art and technology during this period, saw the re-introduction of Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts from pagan antiquity. This would provide a world in which the medieval necromancer would give way to that of the Hermetic mage and to Christian Kabbalah. This would prove to be the theater of a new form of magic, developed by and in practice by luminaries such as Ficino, Pico, Giordano Bruno, Cornelius Agrippa, and John D. While these figures have gone on to enduring fame or enduring infamy, one might wonder, how did one become a Hermetic mage during the Renaissance? What line of study would one take up to become a scholar magician?
Curiously enough, a popular volume appeared in 1497 and would go on to many editions through the early modern period, which I think would have served as a kind of one-stop shop for the budding Hermetic philosopher and mage. In this episode, I want to explore a collection of Neoplatonic and Hermetic texts, specifically selected and printed for their discussion of magic, sacrifice, daemons or spirits, the power of language, and late classical pagan philosophy, all of which would have been necessary reading for the would-be mage of the 16th century. Make sure to subscribe, check out my other content, and consider supporting my work of making scholarly and free content on topics, and as an esotericist, as I'm here on YouTube for free by checking out my Patreon, a one-time donation via PayPal, or perhaps with a Super Thanks that you can find just below the video.
But now, let's turn to this wonderful and portable library of ancient sources that form the foundation for Renaissance and modern occultism. I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and welcome to Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.
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Along with new techniques in art, architecture, painting, and even war, the Renaissance also saw new developments in religious life generally, but even in the practice of magic more specifically. The recovery of works from the late classical world, especially the religious philosophical texts of the ancient Corpus Hermeticum and the late classical pagan spirituality that we now call Neoplatonism, along with the translation of works of Kabbalah, together with the continuation of the medieval grimoire magical tradition, all would come together to form the core of Renaissance and early modern occultism. I've covered a host of those very grimoires in other episodes and even dedicated an entire episode to one of the most important figures in the transmission of Kabbalah into the Christian world by Yochanan Alemanno. You can find those episodes above in the cards and in playlists that you can find on the channel, and those episodes all make great compliments to this episode if you want to check those out.
But in this episode, I want to focus on the inheritance of ancient and late classical pagan religious philosophy, specifically aspects of that philosophy concerned with magic, sacrifices, occult forces, the power of language, and the world of the daemons or spirits, although at this time also broadly construed to include angels and demons. By focusing in on a single volume produced with just those subjects in mind, in fact, that volume, and this is my copy from 1577, I'd like to argue that this is just the kind of text that you would have wanted to pick up if you wanted to become a Hermetic mage during the Renaissance or the early modern period. Further, I think this anthology is still very instructive for anyone interested in either the theory or practice of magic in the occult, both for the academic trying to understand and grasp the world of the material culture of the time, especially the spread of these ideas via print, but but also interested in the spread of Hermetic and late pagan spirituality in the Renaissance and early modern Christian occultism, but also for the contemporary practitioner, for whom many of the ideas from these texts found in a volume very much like this one are directly imported into virtually all schools of modern and contemporary occultism, despite the fact that many of these works are hardly if ever studied these days in that way. This little volume is like an archaeology of modern occult spirituality and Hermeticism, but also it gives us a glimpse into a kind of reading list or study guide for the aspiring Renaissance mage.
But before turning to the contents of this little Hermetic volume, let's talk a little bit about the history of this collection and specifically about this volume from 1577. So here we have the star of the episode, this little Hermetic reader. Our Neoplatonic anthology is printed, or was printed, in 1577, bound around the same time. In fact, this binding, this pigskin binding, is contemporary to that to the volume. Now, you may be wondering, is it okay to be handling a volume like this with your bare hands? And the answer seems to be, from what I've studied, what I've been told in the rare book industry, is that according to conservation science and the Library of Congress, holding and handling books like this, it's actually recommended that you use clean, dry hands as opposed to something like nitrile gloves or white gloves, and that that is the standard of the day. In fact, if you go to a rare book library or a rare book dealership, you'll be handling almost all of the books there with bare hands. And when I was in New York just recently, a few weeks ago, looking at the rare book fair, that was a situation where I was looking at books that are an order of magnitude, several orders of magnitude, far more valuable than this little volume, and even those volumes were handled with bare hands. So clean, bare hands is the way we typically handle books of this type.
But as you can see, it is bound, as I said, in this. This is the original pigskin binding. And we can look around the volume. We can see here it has Iamblichus written along the edge. And here along the inside, you can see places for the clasps where they would originally go. In fact, the finishing on this hide is relatively rough. You can see the the hairy marks where the animal's hair used to be here on this edge right here, coming across this side, you get a sense of this. And of course, the volume here says Iamblichus de Mysteriis along the spine, telling us at least the major work that's going to be included in this volume. Of course, there's several more works included here besides just Iamblichus de Mysteriis. If you're curious about the relative size of this volume, it is 12 by 8 millimeters or about two and a half millimeters thick here, or that's about four and a half by three and a half inches and about an inch thick. If you want a more general sense of what that is, if you have a copy of The Book of the Law, which is, I think, anyone watching this channel probably has this somewhere, or the other, you get a sense of it. The Book of the Law is pretty small, and this is a pretty standard copy here. The Book of the Law. If you want another little red book to compare it to, you could probably compare it to, well, The Little Red Book, and you get a sense that it's just about the same size as The Little Red Book. So a little tiny volume, this is relatively small, all things told. All right, move these two little red books out of the way. I'm pretty sure both those guys are rolling in their grave being that close to each other.
So if we open the volume up, we can see that the paste-downs that are holding it together are not in great shape. So I'm not going to open it up too much more than this, but I think if I get a little closer to the zoom, you can see that the paste-downs there are actually older books. This is maybe even incunable level. I don't think it's actually a manuscript. It does look printed to me up close. And here you can see on the back side, the paste-downs there, you can see that older books have been used to stiffen up this, this the paste-down to give it a little bit of extra strength, but even that over the course of hundreds of years has a given way. So I don't want to open it up much more than I have it here, but it is neat to know that inside of this volume, there are pages from far earlier works.
And opening it up here, we get as much as the front of this piece. This is the frontispiece. This volume is a relatively inexpensive little volume, at least compared to other things that would have existed at the time. So there's no really dramatic frontispiece, but we do get a cool ouroboros, so I'll talk about in just a second. But the title here, right, is Iamblichus is the Mysteries, which again, remember we have that actually along the spine. But of course, the Iamblichus is the Mysteries is just one of the texts to be found in this really neat little Hermetic reader. It's kind of in a Hermetic or Neoplatonic anthology. So Iamblichus is the Mysteries, of course, again, I'll be going over all of these texts in detail here in just a few moments. So if you don't know what these books are, these little volumes or excerpts, I'll be coming back to them in just a minute. Again, Proclus, we also have his commentary on Plato's Alcibiades, which is a fundamentally important piece of Platonic literature, even if Plato really didn't write it, who knows, but it's still very, very important for reasons I'll talk about later. And even more important than that, at least in the theory of magic as it develops, is his text on the sacrifices and magic, which again, I'll get to in just a minute, but is of decisive importance in the development of contemporary theories of magic. Going down from there, we have Porphyry, the student of Plotinus, and his On Gods and Demons, or our own De Demonibus, or De Deities and Demons. But this is a little bit of Renaissance clickbait, because that section is actually on the Sentences of Porphyry and has virtually nothing to do with deities or demonics or spirits or demons. So a little bit of clickbaity, but uh, still interesting. Of course, we're not totally clickbaited out. We have to have Michael Psellus's On the Operation of Demons, the Operatio Daemonum, by Michael Psellus, which I've covered in a future, a previous episode, rather, which I've covered in the future episode, that would be weird. And most famous of all, probably, we have Hermes Trismegistus and the Poimandres and the Asclepius. This is the entire Corpus Hermeticum in Ficino's translation. In fact, everything in here is in Ficino's translation with the exception of the Asclepius.
Zooming in a little closer, we have this really cool dual ouroboros, and that's the printer's mark of the printer here in Lugundi, which is, or Lugduni rather, which is Lyon. This is printed in France, in Lyon, and we have the date here of 1577. Now, what's important to know about these print marks and these dates is that they're not always accurate. Often they're accurate, most of the time they're accurate, but sometimes people do lie. For instance, if you're publishing an especially racy book, you know will be banned or has already been banned, you're not going to print that you printed it, and you're not going to tell the date. You're going to dissimulate. And so often it'll be the case that there'll be no print mark here for an especially controversial book. I have a couple books here by Agrippa that have no print information at all, so we don't even know when they were printed or where. And sometimes you have false print marks. For instance, Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise, when it was first printed in 1677, I think we have a situation where he actually says the printer says it was printed in Hamburg, when in fact it was printed in Amsterdam. And interestingly enough, it actually even says that the, um, the printer was Heinrich Kunrath, who was a known mystic and esotericist, Kabbalist, and alchemist living about a century before Spinoza. But that's a good example, a classic example, where the printer didn't quite tell the truth because the printer didn't quite want to die for printing a book that he knew would end up on the Index Prohibitorum, on the list of banned books.
So if we open the volume up, we have an introductory letter written by Marsilio Ficino. This is in his collected letters, and basically is an introduction to all the things that make all these things very interesting. So it's why we should study all of these pagan writers and noting that they are extraordinarily interesting and, uh, worth studying. So this is actually the introduction and the dedication to Iamblichus's De Mysteriis, and that launches us, and of course, into the Iamblichus De Mysteriis. Nice initial letters here. This is after the time period where they would just make a normal little time run Roman A and it would be filled in with a hand-painted miniature. That's no longer being done at this point. Here we just have a nice printed large A. And what we have here is basically all of Iamblichus's De Mysteriis. So all of this here is the Iamblichus De Mysteriis, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians. Jumping over after the De Mysteriis, we get to a section here on Alcibiades. This is again, Proclus's commentary on pseudo-Plato, maybe Plato's text, the Alcibiades, and specifically this is the excerpted sections dealing primarily with the nature of the soul and the soul's ascent to the divine. Moving on from our friend Proclus, who's one of my favorite philosophers of antiquity, by the way. I really do enjoy Proclus. His Elements of Theology, I think, is the most, is the most important and least understudied text of late antiquity. I find Proclus's Elements of Theology to be fascinating. It's like if you combined a Neoplatonic philosopher and Spinoza, assuming you don't think Spinoza is himself a kind of Neoplatonic philosopher, you just get the most interesting stuff. It's fascinating. All right.
And we now come to Proclus's very famous text, and probably the most important and decisive text for the theory of magic in all of the Renaissance and pretty much all of modern occultism. This is the tiny fragment of Proclus, De Sacrificio et Magia, which is On Sacrifices and Magic. This is part of Proclus's longer text. This is only a fragment of a much longer text that dealt with his religious philosophy that would also combined with things like his commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, which is sadly missing. But this text, as I'll talk about in a minute, is crucially important for the idea of the microcosm-macrocosm relation and the idea of occult sympathies. So a core important text cited by almost everybody through the Renaissance. This is a super important text in the development of magic, although just a few pages, as you can see here.
We come to Porphyry's, this is actually Porphyry's Sentences, although Ficino gives it a slightly different title, and we have all of the, all of the, the first set of Porphyry's Sentences. Porphyry's Sentences are actually 44 sentences in total. The manuscript that Ficino was working with didn't have all 44, it was missing about a dozen, but we have all of them translated here. This is basically a thesis by thesis summary of Plotinus's Enneads, by Plotinus. So there's all kinds of neat things in here, and I'll be, again, I'll be discussing all of these at length here once we finish with this, this book tour. In fact, I feel like I'm channeling, or what's the right word, channeling or doing my best impersonation of Foolish Fish at this moment. Foolish Fish, as folks may know, Denis over at Foolish Fish does these fantastic occult book reviews. And so I'm channeling Denis. Denis, if you're watching this, thank you so much for your wonderful book reviews. And for folks who I really love occult books, beautiful books in general, you actually have to go over to Foolish Fish and subscribe to his wonderful content. So Denis, I hope you're, I hope you're honored by my intima, my impersonation of you, or my channeling of you, maybe it's even that.
Again, here a little bit more from Porphyry. This is his De Abstinentia, which is his argument against blood animal sacrifice and his argument for why one should abstain from eating meat. This is an argument for what like one might call mystical or Hermetic or Neoplatonic vegetarianism. And so a really, again, a really fascinating argument against sacrifices and for vegetarianism. Coming here from Porphyry, in fact, it's a letter to a friend of his who fell off the wagon, so to speak, and began eating meat again. And Porphyry arguing that for spiritual reasons, it's very important not to eat meat. But at least again, these sections primarily deal with arguments against sacrifice. And that makes a lot of sense, as I'll mention a little bit, because Christianity, insofar as these ideas are being taken back up into Christianity, Christianity is going to be super keen on sacrifices, animal sacrifices, blood sacrifices, given that, you know, Jesus has kind of already worked that out. So as you might imagine, that's not going to be a thing in Christianity again, who come here to our text of Michael Psellus, On Demons, which I've done an episode about already. So this is Demons, but more Daemons. This is to say, spirits that exist in the world. This book is really interesting because it is a classification of various kinds of spirits in dialogue form, and also some of the things that demons are afraid of, or daemons are afraid of, and how to interact with demons in various kinds of situations. So again, if you're going to be interacting with spirits or demons, this is a, again, core text, repeatedly quoted by everybody through the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance in terms of dealing with, dealing with the daemons.
We continue on past Michael Psellus's On Daemons, and we get to perhaps the piece de resistance of the volume, again occupying not a small amount, not as much as the Mysteries, but a pretty substantial chunk of the text. This is the Marsilio Ficino translation of Hermes Trismegistus. This is the Corpus Hermeticum. So this is the very beginning of the Poimandres, and this is in many ways the piece de resistance of all. I mean, it's where we get the term Hermeticism from. And this is the entirety of the Ficino translation of the Poimandres, along with the Asclepius. So this is really what, uh, sparked the prairie fire that was the rage over Egyptian material Hermeticism, the idea that there was ancient recoverable wisdom well before even the Bible. And this is one of the core texts of that Hermetic revival. The Corpus Hermeticum, again, the Ficino translation is defective. We, we know that now. It was probably wasn't so much that it was defective, he just didn't finish it, and it was printed without his approval. And so, I went so far as his printed web approval, we we don't have a great edition of it. And in fact, the Ficino manuscript that he was working with for the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum was incomplete. It only had the first 14 of the logoi of the Corpus Hermeticum that survived from antiquity. There are 17 in total. The Ludovicus Locellius edition would actually, uh, correct that and add all 17. But for reasons that are complicated, that edition never became terribly popular. And it was the Ficino edition that was printed and reprinted and pre-printed. I think it was first printed in 1474, but this edition, already now 200 years after that, or 100 years after that, 1577, is still being reprinted with, um, with Ficino's commentary. Here you can see this is Ficino's commentary following after a couple of his very brief little commentaries at the end of the day, but still interesting commentaries nonetheless. As we go on, this is again, the Corpus Hermeticum, along with the Asclepius. I think here begins the Asclepius. So again, very famous text, perhaps the most famous text in all of Hermetic history, it is the Corpus Hermeticum. And that, folks, rounds out this little volume. It's interesting, and we'll get to all these texts in just a minute when I get back over there in the studio, which is a chair literally six feet from me, a couple meters, but we'll get back to that in just a second. But I think this is an interesting insight into what, uh, oh, you have a cool bookmark here, the printer's mark at the end, which is pretty neat looking.
So we have again, in this little volume from 1577, an insight into what you might have gone to the bookseller to get if you wanted to be a Hermetic philosopher, and what you might have gotten if you wanted to be a Hermetic mage. All right, book tour done. Let's talk about the contents of this volume. As I noted, this edition is an ancestor of the original 1497 edition, actually published a couple years after Ficino's death, even more specifically aimed at topics and what would become Renaissance and early modern occult philosophy, specifically, as I noted, the nature of the daemons or spirits, the power of language, sacrifices, late pagan religious philosophy, etc. So what's included in this anthology? Now, I'm not going to be able to be exhaustive of each of these texts, but hopefully a little introduction of each will prove useful, especially for you on your own study of this kind of material. Though I've actually done episodes, entire episodes dedicated to several of these texts already, and I'll point them out as I go.
Well, the anchor text, as I noted, is On the Egyptian Mysteries, attributed to Iamblichus, a third/fourth-century Neoplatonic philosopher. This text is, without exception, the single greatest articulation of Neoplatonic philosophy as it intersects with late classical pagan spirituality to have survived from antiquity. Here we have the entire text in the Ficino translation. On the Mysteries details the nature of the soul in relationship to the gods, divine inspiration or epiphany, theurgic rituals, the power and place of ritual sacrifice and theory, the nature of individual daemons or spirits and demons more generally, and discussions of Egyptian symbolism, although it's quite Hellenic discussions of Egyptian symbolism. For the aspiring mage, this text is like a time capsule to the world of 4th-century pagan religion, ritual, and philosophy. I'm sure, sure, I'll be circling back to this text for at least an entire episode at some point soon, but it's clear why this text is the anchor for this volume.
Next in the collection is a rather obscure work, at least these days. While Plato's dialogues are now appreciated as foundational in Western philosophy, what was once considered the most foundational and thus the first read and most studied of the dialogues goes practically unread by students today. There's even still continued doubt that it was even written by Plato. That dialogue is Alcibiades I, named for the Athenian general and statesman and lover of Socrates. The Alcibiades was considered by the ancients to be the single best introduction to Platonic philosophy, and it's where ancient students started their philosophical journey, making their way to the Phaedrus and finally into the dizzying, dizzying heights of the Parmenides. I still don't know what the Parmenides is about. Curiously, the Republic is actually missing from Iamblichus's ancient curriculum. I'll talk more about why in just a minute. But since Schleiermacher in the 18th century argued that the Alcibiades was basically an ancient forgery, the text has gone unread by most students. In fact, I got this PhD in philosophy, I took several seminars in ancient philosophy, and was never required to read it at all, and I think that it was actually only ever mentioned because I brought it up. Regardless, if you want to read Plato like an ancient Neoplatonist, you can do so in this order: first the Alcibiades, then the Gorgias, the Phaedo, the Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, then the good stuff: Phaedrus, Symposium, Philebus, and Timaeus, and then of course, finally, the completely perplexing Parmenides. Again, the Republic is missing, as you probably noticed, but it's probably just because of how long the Republic is, not because of its lack of importance. It was certainly part of the curriculum, but not part of the standard student curriculum.
But the text we have here in our anthology actually isn't Alcibiades I. I'm sorry for that Alcibiades detour. It's actually the fifth-century pagan philosopher Proclus's commentary on Alcibiades I, along with a little introduction by Ficino. Specifically, in keeping with our theme, these excerpts of Proclus's commentary focused in primarily on his theories of the daemons or the spirits, specifically the guardian spirit of Socrates, and how our soul both relates to these daemons, but also how we can resist the forces of evil to allow our soul to reunite with the divine. Of course, the unification of our soul with the divine is the core concern of Renaissance Hermeticism and occult philosophy, from Ficino to Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and there can be no doubt that this material is core to animating that discussion. Now, if you're reading along in the modern edition of Proclus's commentary, like the one put out by O'Neill, you'll want to start it around section 75 at passing. In fact, this is one of the only texts, and I'm covering in this episode, for which there is no public domain translation. That is to say, there's no translation of it by Thomas Taylor. Also, just FYI, I've listed all of these texts in the order they appear in the anthology with links to read them in the description below. That is to say, public domain translations and also academic, modern academic translations. I've also linked the original 1497 edition, along with a very similar edition to my own from 1459, if you'd like to consult either of those as I'm working my way through this anthology.
But that occult philosophy of Agrippa, just mentioned, wasn't just philosophy, it was also deeply magical. The next text in the collection is the absolutely decisive fragment of Proclus, known variously as On the Hierarchic Arts or here as On Sacrifices and Magic. This relatively small fragment, stemming from Proclus's now lost works of religious philosophy, including a lost commentary on the Chaldean Oracles, which just makes me profoundly sad that that's missing. He also had a whole commentary on the works of Homer. Anyway, it lays down the foundation for the groundwork of a core conception in magic: the occult sympathy and the idea of the microcosm-macrocosm relation. In these few pages, Proclus argues that all of reality is suffused with divinity and occult forces, which, because the microcosm and the macrocosm mirror one another, can be manipulated through various ritual practices or magic, specifically sacrifices. Further, these sympathies can also be manipulated through the rule of affinity because a metaphysical bond exists between entities in the lower ontological realm and entities in the upper ontological realm, including the celestial and the purely spiritual realms. It's profoundly difficult to understate just how much power this fragment had on Renaissance magical imagination and its power into contemporary conceptions of magical theory and practice.
Next, the collection comes to the student of Plotinus, Porphyry, and his Sentences, here called De Divinis et Daemonibus, which is a bit of false advertising, as Ficino simply has it as De Occasionibus, though this text doesn't have much to do with gods and daemons, but it is interesting nonetheless. I think that they may have called it On Gods and Demons as something like Renaissance clickbait. At any rate, Porphyry's Sentences are actually a thesis by thesis summary of sorts of his teacher Plotinus's philosophy, as found in the famed Enneads, the sounding work of what we now call Neoplatonic philosophy. These theses, however, can be notoriously obscure without a solid background in the Plotinian philosophy, but they are certainly stimulants for the mind, especially for that mind seeking to escape the confines of Aristotelian scholasticism. Sadly, the manuscript that Ficino was working with to render them didn't contain all 44 of the sentences, it was about a dozen short, but those that it does contain and those rendered here are still rather dizzying discussions of the One, the Soul, the Intellect, and the Non-Corporals, and certainly still a fine primer in Neoplatonic metaphysics. I mean, you get sentences like, "Deus est ubique quia nusquam est," "Locus est ubique animae divinae," "et ubique est, quoniam est." God is everywhere because nowhere, and this is also true of the intellect and the soul, for each of these is also everywhere because each of these is also nowhere.
Okay, our anthology continues with further selections from Porphyry's attack on eating and sacrificing animals. This is an interesting attack on sacrifice. These selections from his book On the Abstinence from Killing Animals mostly deals these arguments as to why animal blood sacrifices are both unjust to the animals and unworthy of the gods, and that abstinence, complete abstinence from animals as food, must in fact be part of the spiritual preparation to ascend to the realm of the divine. Now, these selections clearly made a very strong impression on many Hermetic mages of the period. In fact, Ficino himself was a vegetarian, and probably served just as much as an argument against any return to animal sacrifices as part of this renovation of magic and Christian Hermetic spirituality. Again, while these texts are pagan, the magic being developed was fundamentally Christian, with the exception of Giordano Bruno, which is kind of an exception to everything, even not being burned alive. And of course, Christianity has long argued that animal sacrifices are redundant or anathema, or both, following the ultimate sacrifice of Christ as atonement for human sin. Regardless, this is still a fascinating text on analyzing, debating the role of blood sacrifices as part of Neoplatonic spiritual piety in relationship to its uptake, at least through editing into the development of Neoplatonic Christian Hermetic Renaissance occultism and magic.
Next up, of course, the Christian world abounded in demons, in both the sense of spirits more generally, but also evil spirits and fallen angels more specifically in the Christian context. And the next text was probably the most popular discussion of such beings in medieval and Renaissance literature: Michael Psellus's De Operatione Daemonum, or On the Operation of Demons. Now, I've actually made an entire episode on this wonderful text, if you want to check it out in the card above. But it's basically an analysis, a taxonomy, and a how-to when dealing with such entities. For instance, why so many instances of sorcerers have been depicted with swords? Well, we're told here that daemons or demons are terrified of iron, specifically sharp iron, because they come back together like water after being cut up, and it still pains them greatly to be packed up. In fact, because of their ethereal nature, they're even easier to cut than water. Regardless, this text was considered the standard work on demonology, not demonology, demonology of the time, and if you're going to be dealing with such beings, Michael Psellus's On the Operation of Demons, what's necessary reading, hence it's in our anthology.
The final text of the anthology also serves as a kind of secondary anchor and bookend. It's nothing less than the Corpus Hermeticum, at least the 14 of the 17 logoi of the Corpus Hermeticum, translated by Ficino, along with his short commentaries and the Latin Asclepius. This is the only text in the anthology, I think, not directly translated by Ficino himself. Now, as you might imagine, I've done a few episodes on the Corpus Hermeticum and other Hermetic fragments. Without any doubt, this translation, despite being incomplete and at times garbled and unauthorized for publication, probably unauthorized because it was incomplete and garbled, is in many ways what started the fire of the Hermetic revival in the Renaissance and really the occult revival in Europe. Thought to contain primeval wisdom, the Corpus Hermeticum would seek the most profound secrets of metaphysics in the pre-Christian, even pre-biblical world of the pagans. Here, the sage prophet Hermes Trismegistus was seen as the teacher of Moses, whose wisdom stretched back to utter remote antiquity, and thus back to the very divine source of wisdom itself. For centuries, the Corpus Hermeticum was heralded as the ancient foundation upon which an entirely new spiritual philosophy would be built. And while its star did dim after powerful arguments for its not-so-remote antiquity were made in the 17th century, this text remains both literally and, I think, even more so symbolically, at the heart of much of post-Christian religious spirituality and philosophy. Thus, the Corpus Hermeticum, coming at the conclusion of this anthology, is absolutely fitting. This is exactly the kind of text a Renaissance mage would want to have access to. First printed in 1497, and then in numerous editions, including my little copy from 1577, this collection of ancient philosophy, religious and spiritual practice, is a fascinating glimpse into how Renaissance philosophy and spirituality sought to fuse late classical paganism, Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy into the emerging world of Hermetic Christianity and post-Christian spirituality and occultism. From the translator's pen of Marsilio Ficino, it's no doubt that just such a collection would have passed through the hands of those that went on to forge Hermetic Christianity, the magical cult philosophy of folks like Cornelius Agrippa and John D, in the post-Christian world of modern occultism. In some ways, the stage set by Bruno. Thus, this anthology remains instructive, absolutely instructive for understanding the world of the Renaissance and engagement with late classical paganism, but also how that synthesis paved the way and informed much of theosophy and modern occult philosophy, for that matter. It reveals what they took to be important and popular Hermetic reading of the day. In that way, I think this volume could well be reprinted, I mean, not not in Latin, but reprinted as a window onto the world of syncretistic Renaissance spirituality, but also as the foundation of much of the contemporary post-Christian spirituality. In fact, in many ways, this is kind of the cornerstone for that movement beyond Christianity, at least in literature.
With that in mind, I've included links in the description below to each of the texts excerpted, anthologized, and discussed in this episode, in the order they appear in this Renaissance volume. The only exception is Proclus's commentary on Alcibiades I, for which there is no public domain translation, at least not one that I could find. I mean, we can't rely on Thomas Taylor for for everything. They are all wonderful texts in their own right, and read in this light, and read in the light of this curious little anthology, which was again, continuously printed in some form from the late 15th all the way through the 17th century, this gives us an interesting glimpse into the foundational world of Renaissance, late classical pagan, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic spirituality and philosophy, as they were all taken up into the development of the occult philosophy. Until next time, I'm Dr. Justin Sledge, and thank you for watching Esoterica, where we explore the arcane in history, philosophy, and religion.