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The Renaissance Encyclopedia of Magic

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The Renaissance Encyclopedia of Magic

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.

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