Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's De occulta philosophia libri tres is the great synthesis of Renaissance magic, organising the subject into three ascending kinds, natural magic (the elemental world of stones, plants and animals), celestial magic (the astral world of numbers, the heavens and the stars), and ceremonial magic (the intellectual or divine world of angels, divine names and religious rite), corresponding to a threefold cosmos.

Drafted around 1510 but published in full in 1531-33, it gathers and systematises the correspondences that later occultism would draw on for centuries. Its standing is complicated by the fact that Agrippa also wrote De vanitate scientiarum (1526), a sweeping declaration of the uncertainty and vanity of all human knowledge, magic included, and scholars still debate how far the Occulta philosophia is a sincere programme and how far a young man's compendium he later distanced himself from. Whatever his own final view, the work became the single most influential magical textbook of the early modern period, feeding the Solomonic grimoires, the later ceremonial revival and, through them, the Golden Dawn.

Agrippa's organisation is the reason the work mattered, and it is visible in the title of each book. The first treats natural magic, the world of the elements: the occult virtues of stones, plants, animals and metals, the doctrine of sympathies and antipathies, and what a practitioner can do by manipulating them. The second treats celestial magic, the world of the heavens: number, proportion, harmony, the planetary tables and seals that the atlas records under planetary magic, and the making of images under the stars. The third treats ceremonial magic, the intellectual world: divine names, angelic hierarchies, the soul's ascent, and religious rite.

That threefold ascent from matter through number to spirit is a Neoplatonic scheme, and by arranging the material inside it Agrippa turned a mass of inherited technique into something that could be presented as a philosophy. Every later Western ceremonial system inherits the architecture, whether or not it inherits the contents.

The books were written around 1510 and printed in 1531 and 1533, and the twenty year gap matters: Agrippa published in between a work arguing the vanity of all the sciences, including this one, and readers have argued ever since about which position he held.