Renaissance Magic
The magus as philosopher: learned magic of the sixteenth century.
Renaissance magic was a scholar’s art. Drawing on newly translated Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts, writers like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus reimagined magic as a natural philosophy that linked the stars, the elements and the human soul through a chain of sympathies.
This room holds the primary works and their later reception, above all Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801), which re-packaged Agrippa for the English occult revival and became a hinge between the Renaissance and the Golden Dawn.
Begin with Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the great encyclopedia of natural, celestial and ceremonial magic, and read Pico and Bruno as the philosophical frame behind it, with Paracelsus, Trithemius and Dee as its medical, angelic and mathematical neighbours. Della Porta’s Natural Magick shows the experimental, almost scientific side of the same culture. These authors wrote in Latin for learned readers and were often cautious about how openly they spoke; notes and introductions in the English editions help. The shelf rewards comparison: the same ideas of sympathy, harmony and the world-soul appear in medicine, music, astronomy and religion across the period.
On This Shelf (28)
Three Books of Occult Philosophy (Book I)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
Three Books of Occult Philosophy (Book II)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
Three Books of Occult Philosophy (Book III)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
Three books of occult philosophy or magic
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
The Philosophy of Natural Magic: A Complete Work on Natural Magic, White Magic, Black Magic, Divination, Occult Binding, Sorceries, and Their Power; Unctions, Love Medicines and Their Virtues; the Occult Virtue of Things Which Are in Them Only in Their Life Time, and Such as Remain in Them Even After Their Death; the Occult or Magical Virtue of All Things, etc.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
The Philosophy of Natural Magic: A Complete Work on Natural Magic, White Magic, Black Magic, Divination, Occult Binding, Sorceries, and Their Power; Unctions, Love Medicines and Their Virtues; the Occult Virtue of Things Which Are in Them Only in Their Life Time, and Such as Remain in Them Even After Their Death; the Occult or Magical Virtue of All Things, etc.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
English · Occult Philosophy
La Philosophie Occulte, ou la Magie, de Henri Corneille-Agrippa, divisée en trois livres et augmentée d'un quatrième, apocryphe et attribué à l'Auteur. Tome Second
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
La Philosophie Occulte, ou la Magie, de Henri Corneille-Agrippa, divisée en trois livres et augmentée d'un quatrième, apocryphe et attribué à l'Auteur. Tome Second
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
English · Occult Philosophy
The magus, or celestial intelligencer; being a complete system of occult philosophy. In three books: containing the antient and modern practice of the cabalistic art, natural and celestial magic, &c. ... : Exhibiting the sciences of natural magic; alchymy, or hermetic philosophy ... the constellator
Francis Barrett
The magus, or celestial intelligencer; being a complete system of occult philosophy. In three books: containing the antient and modern practice of the cabalistic art, natural and celestial magic, &c. ... : Exhibiting the sciences of natural magic; alchymy, or hermetic philosophy ... the constellator
Francis Barrett
English · Hermeticism
