Marsilio Ficino

Cosimo de' Medici had commissioned Ficino to translate the complete works of Plato into Latin, the first time that had been done, and in 1462, with the work underway, a manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum arrived from Macedonia and Cosimo told him to stop and translate that first.

The instruction is the single most revealing fact about Renaissance Hermeticism. The Hermetic texts were believed to be Egyptian and older than Moses, and therefore closer to the source of a prisca theologia, an original revelation given to the gentiles and transmitted through Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras and Plato to the Christian present. Plato could wait, because Plato was downstream. That chronology was wrong by well over a millennium, as Casaubon showed in 1614, and the entire structure of the Florentine revival was built on it.

Ficino's own contribution is De vita libri tres (1489), and the third book, On Obtaining Life from the Heavens, is the founding text of Renaissance natural magic. It is a physician's book, written for scholars whose melancholy he took to be an occupational disease of Saturn, and its prescriptions are correspondences put to therapeutic use: eat, wear, look at, smell and above all sing things that belong to the beneficent planets, and the celestial influence they carry will reach the spiritus, the subtle vehicle between body and soul. The Orphic hymns he sang to his own lyre were the operative part.

He was careful about what he was claiming, and D. P. Walker's study is the standard account of just how careful he had to be. His magic is presented as natural, the manipulation of a real physical sympathy running through creation, involving no spirits and therefore no demons and no idolatry. Whether the line holds is doubtful, and Ficino knew it was doubtful: a priest drawing down planetary influence by hymn and talisman is doing something the church had condemned. He was investigated for magic around 1489-90 and survived it through powerful friends and a prompt apologia.

In 1489 Ficino published De vita libri tres, three books on the life of the learned, and it is the place where his translations stop being philology and become practice. The first two books are a regimen for scholars, whom he diagnoses as natural melancholics, born under Saturn as he was himself: diet, sleep, walks, music, and the management of the black bile that makes study possible and destroys the student. The third book, On Obtaining Life from the Heavens, is the dangerous one.

Drawing on the Picatrix, on al-Kindi's rays and on the Asclepius, it teaches how to draw down beneficial planetary influence through materials, scents, colours, talismans and above all music, songs fitted to the planets whose performance tempers the spirit. Ficino is anxious throughout to keep the operation natural: the influence is carried by the world spirit through sympathies in things, not begged from demons, and he protests, a little too often, that he describes rather than approves the talismans. The anxiety was warranted; he was delated to the papal curia in 1490 and needed influential friends to quiet the matter. The book became the most read manual of natural magic of the Renaissance, and its portrait of the scholar's saturnine temperament, curable by Jupiter's music and the greenery of Venus, is the distant ancestor of every later attempt to make melancholy a mark of genius.