The Renaissance Magic Path
From Florence’s rediscovery of Hermes to Agrippa’s encyclopedia of magic.
In the late fifteenth century Florentine scholars recovered the Hermetic texts and Neoplatonic philosophy, and a learned magic grew from them: natural magic that worked through sympathies, celestial magic of images and music, and an angelic magic that reached toward the divine.
This path follows that current from its philosophical beginnings to its great systematic statement in Agrippa and its later explorers.
Who This Path Is For
Readers who want to understand the learned magic of the Renaissance from its sources, not from later occult summaries.
The Syllabus
Introductory text
Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on the mystics of the Renaissance give a readable, if personal, orientation to the period’s spiritual temper.
Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought, Including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and Others
Rudolf Steiner
Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought, Including Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, Giordano Bruno, and Others
Rudolf Steiner
English · Christian Mysticism
The Hermetic revival
The Hermetic writings as the Renaissance read them: the texts that convinced Ficino’s generation of an ancient theology older than Plato.
The philosophy of the magus
Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Conclusions joined Plato, Hermes and Kabbalah; Of Being and Unity shows his philosophical method.
The great synthesis
Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy: natural, celestial and ceremonial magic organised into one system. The central text of the path.
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
Natural magic and the art of memory
Della Porta’s Natural Magick shows the experimental side; Bruno’s Cantus Circaeus the magical art of memory.
Angels and hieroglyphs
Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica and Trithemius on the planetary intelligences: the period’s most ambitious speculations.
