The Renaissance recovery of antiquity had a decisive religious dimension. In 1462, Cosimo de' Medici commissioned the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate a manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of Greek philosophical and religious texts then believed to be the work of the ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus and older than Moses, ahead of Ficino's own translations of Plato. Ficino's Latin version, printed in 1471, launched a wave of Christian Hermeticism that read the Hermetic texts as compatible with, and even prophetic of, Christian revelation, a reading that shaped esoteric thought across Europe until the philologist Isaac Casaubon redated the Corpus Hermeticum to the early centuries of the Christian era in 1614, after the Renaissance proper had closed.
Ficino's younger contemporary Giovanni Pico della Mirandola extended this synthesis by drawing on Jewish Kabbalah, arguing in his Oration on the Dignity of Man and his nine hundred theses that Kabbalistic texts, read correctly, confirmed Christian doctrine, and founding the tradition of Christian Kabbalah that later esoteric writers continued. This climate also supported practical magic and astrology as serious intellectual pursuits: Ficino wrote on astrological medicine and talismanic magic as natural philosophy rather than heresy, and the Swiss physician Paracelsus, active in the Renaissance's later decades, built an alchemical and astrological medicine that broke sharply with the medieval Galenic tradition. Hilary Gatti's study of Giordano Bruno and Walter Pagel's study of Paracelsus both treat this esoteric current as inseparable from the Renaissance's better known humanist and scientific achievements rather than as a separate, marginal history.