Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

Primary source

• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (Antwerp, 1530), in English as The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (London, 1676), 1530, chs. 30-48, "Of Astrology" through "Of Witchcraft"; the recantation at ch. 48The 1530 declamation against the whole body of learning, whose chapters on the occult arts run 30-48 and whose forty-eighth names the unpublished magic - "being young, I wrote three Books of Magick my self, which I Entitled, Of Occult Philosophy, in which, what Errors soever I then committed in my Youth, now grown more wary, I do publickly Recant". These are the chapters later appended to the 1533 magic book.
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne: Johannes Soter, 1533), 1533, Ad lectorem, sig. aa ii; Censura sive retractatio de magia, following Bk III; colophonThe 1533 printing ends with the Censura sive retractatio de magia, where Agrippa names his three books and recants their errors by a palinodia; the preface states the objection in the reader's voice - you wrote it young and retracted it old, so why have you published it? - and answers that corrupt copies were already circulating in Italy, France and Germany, adding that he did for the most part retract the book. The same preface says of the material: non probo, sed narro. The catalogue record attached to this scan separately notes that Book I was first printed alone at Antwerp by J. Grapheus in 1531, with a simultaneous Paris issue by C. Wechelus.
• Pseudo-Agrippa; English by Robert Turner, Liber quartus de occulta philosophia (Marburg, 1559); Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy (London, 1655), 1559The spurious Fourth Book itself, printed twenty-four years after Agrippa's death and presented as the key to the genuine three.
• Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis libri sex, sixth edition, 1583, Bk II, De magis infamibus (the Fourth Book; the dog Monsieur); Bk III, De lamiis (his teacher's charms judged empty)Agrippa's own pupil calling the Fourth Book an abominable little book lately published by an impious man and falsely ascribed to "Henrico Cornelio Agrippae, meo olim hospiti et praeceptori honorando, ultra annos quadraginta iam mortuo" - his former host and honoured teacher, dead now more than forty years; his rebuttal of the demon-dog legend, naming the animal a natural black dog called Monsieur with a bitch called Madamoiselle; and, in Bk III, his verdict on charms his master had recorded - with "praeceptoris venerandi Agrippae" good leave, they are "mere inania" and "adeoque ridicula", merely empty and indeed ridiculous.
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, trans. "J.F." (probably John French), Three Books of Occult Philosophy (London: Gregory Moule, 1651), 1651, Bk II ch. viii (the scale of five); ch. xxiii (geometrical figures); ch. xxvii (proportion of man's body); Bk III, appendix: "The Censure, or Retraction" (concerning Magick)The English text every later English-language occultist read, and the one that carries the retraction into English; the pentangle passage, the five-pointed figure having "a very great command over evil spirits"; and the scale of five, where "in time of the Law, the ineffable name of God" has four letters and "in time of grace the ineffable name of God was with five letters" - both names called ineffable.

Scholarship

• Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1965The standard English biography, and the reading of De vanitate as the record of a genuine intellectual crisis.
• Michael H. Keefer, "Agrippa's Dilemma: Hermetic 'Rebirth' and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia", Renaissance Quarterly 41:4, 1988, p. 618, as cited by Perrone CompagniThat the relation between the two books is a live scholarly problem rather than a settled one, and the case for reading it as upheaval.
• Vittoria Perrone Compagni (ed.), Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Leiden: Brill), 1992The critical Latin text, with the 1510 draft collated against the 1533 print - the authority for what Agrippa wrote and for what he changed between the two.
• Marc van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and His Declamations (Leiden: Brill), 1997The competing reading: De vanitate as a humanist declamation working within a known rhetorical genre, indebted to Erasmus, rather than a personal recantation.
• Vittoria Perrone Compagni, "Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 2017, substantively revised 2025), 2025That Agrippa made "no explicit recantation of his passion for occult sciences" in De vanitate, admitting only "that there might have been something wrong in his juvenile work on magic" (citing Keefer 1988: 618); that Grapheus also printed the enlarged Book I of De occulta philosophia in 1531; that Soter's printing of the three books was suspended by the Cologne Senate at the instance of the Dominican inquisitor Conrad Koellin; that the book finally appeared "accompanied by an appendix including the chapters of De vanitate which criticized magic"; and her own reading of the two works as "two coherent aspects of a single project". It does NOT supply this entry's chapter numbers: chs. 30-48 and the recantation at ch. 48 are verified against the 1676 English De vanitate, and the 1533 appendix itself runs chs. 41-48, "De magia in genere" to "De praestigiis".

The tradition itself

• Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres, 1533The esoteric reading given on this entry — whose three books are the three worlds

Linked entries

• Transmitted intoPentacleAttested

  Agrippa's Book II gives the five-pointed figure "a very great command over evil spirits" among the geometrical figures (ch. xxiii) and four chapters later sets it beside the proportions of the human body (ch. xxvii) - the pairing of star and microcosm that the 1651 English carried into the Golden Dawn and the C19 revival.

• Transmitted intoTree of LifeAttested

  Book III sets out the ten Sephiroth for readers with no Hebrew, rendering them as "numerations" and pairing each with a divine name and an angelic order - one of the main channels by which the Kabbalistic scheme entered non-Jewish European magic.

• Derives fromThe Corpus HermeticumAttested

  Agrippa quotes Hermes throughout, including the Asclepius on the animating of statues and its line "O Asclepi, magnum miraculum est homo" - the Latin Hermetica, not the Greek Corpus proper, was what a Renaissance reader actually had.

• Set againstThe GolemAttested

  Both turn on the power of Hebrew names, but Agrippa's Book II puts a five-letter name of Christ, YHShVH, in the scale of five: the ineffable name of God for the age of grace, where the age of the Law had the four-letter Tetragrammaton. That is a Christian Cabalist construction - the Tetragrammaton with a shin inserted - and not something Jewish sources supply.

• Set againstThe KybalionA modern connection

  The tables of correspondences that modern occultism calls ancient Hermetic wisdom descend from Agrippa's 1533 scalae, which rank each number against its divine names, angels, planets, stones and parts of the body; the Kybalion's 1908 "Principle of Correspondence" is New Thought at the far end of that chain, not a source at the near end.

• Set againstNeidanA modern connection

  Both systems work by correspondence rather than description; the neidan authors say so outright, Li Daochun holding that the alchemical terms are empty and only point at what they name. The difference is direction: Agrippa's correspondences reach out to stars and stones, neidan's all resolve inside one body.

• Set againstOne Hundred and EightAttested

  Agrippa's De occulta philosophia of 1533 assigns each number from one to twelve a settled virtue before anything is counted; 108 works the other way round, arriving as the product of a tally and collecting its meanings afterwards.