Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim - Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Acknowledgments

This book has been a labor of love and an obsession that has occupied more than ten years of my life. I would like to thank Christopher Warnock for being a major cheerleader in this project and helping get this ball rolling in its initial stages. For the many people who have taken my questions, put up with my months of solitude, listened, and supported me, Id like to thank Jeff Purdue, Janelle Clark, Marcus McCoy, Catamara Rosarium, Stian Kulystin, Tai Fenix Kulystin, Jenn Zahrt, Joel Hutchinson, Ruth Hutchinson, Austin Coppock, Kaitlin Coppock, Maria Miles, and Thomas Brown. This book couldnt have happened if it wasnt for a community, and if Ive left anyone out, I apologize.

Thanks to Robert Fitzgerald and Daniel A. Schulke at Three Hands Press for their editorial work on the manuscript and to Jim Dunk for his work in preparation of the graphics.

I make special mention of Odun de Arechaga, my deceased mentor, padrino, and friend, who introduced me to Agrippa and The Picatrix at a time when there was little material on astrological magic and fewer specialists of this art. Now, thirty years later, I still havent found the end to the rabbit hole he introduced me to.

ERIC PURDUE

Publishers Preface

All philosophy has been revealed. It is a construction of the mind. Ideas that are made up of words are deconstructed in an effort to divine meaning. Science has subsumed philosophy as the virtuous pursuit of knowledge. Modern science needs empirical evidence, a quantity to be measured, and a conviction that those measurements will yield the true nature of reality. These are the beliefs of those who worship in the church of progress. They cannot conceive of an occult philosophy. Yet, after nearly four hundred years, Three Books of Occult Philosophy have been newly translated into English for the first time. Why?

Today, as in the past, the magician requires access to the three worlds in order to collect their virtues. Professer Agrippa asks in his opening note to the reader:

If they avert evil events, destroy black magic, cure disease, banish spirits, preserve life, and give honor and fortune without offense to God or injury to religion, are not these things useful and necessary to men?

We, the descendants of Agrippa, answer through the centuries with a resounding Yes! This wise and learned savant knew that we would be enriched by the ideas contained in his Three Books.

Agrippas library contained the texts that offered the accumulated wisdom of the ancients. Along with books from the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods, Agrippa drew upon the traditions of the ancient Hebrews, Persians, and Indians to synthesize and present his occult philosophy. These three books have sustained the occult tradition for centuries and are responsible for its revival in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No other work in the Western tradition has had a greater influence on our understanding of the occult mysteries.

In his letter to Trithemius upon the presentation of his 1510 manuscript of The Occult Philosophy, Agrippa stated his purpose:

I would restore the reason that adorns magic itself, the ancient disciplines of all wise men, purge from it impious errors, and vindicate it from injury and misrepresentation.

I leave it to you, gentle reader, to discern whether he has succeeded.

Occult philosophy is the antidote to what a contemporary poet called The War on the Imagination. It is in our ability to enter the imaginal realm that the secrets of the ancients may be discovered. One strand of our DNA contains more information and computing power than the entire World Wide Web. At the end of every telescope, no matter how powerful, is an eye looking out trying to discern meaning.

It is the relationship between the intelligence that creates this strand of genetic material and a knowledge and understanding of how, in an embodied state, this intelligence interacts with the natural world, the celestial world, and the angelic world that is the subject these pages.

Agrippas is an experimental and experiential philosophy:

Hence from the virtues of the elemental world, magicians search through mixtures of various natural things through medicine and natural philosophy. Then, with influences from the rays of the celestial world, according to the rules of astronomers and mathematic disciplines, they connect with the virtues of the heavens. Next, they strengthen and confirm all manner of powerful intelligences through sacred religious ceremonies.

That Agrippas seminal work, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, has survived the cultural wars, land wars, and wars on the imaginative process for so many centuries is a tribute to its great worth. For Agrippa:

This is the most perfect and highest science, the highest and most sacred philosophy. Finally, it is the absolute consummation of the noblest philosophy.

It is this higher purpose that has given Agrippas voice longevity. It is our privilege to help restore this voice to its original clarity with this new translationa voice that provides knowledge necessary to the magicians craft and its operation in our world today.

EHUD C. SPERLING

Foreword

Christopher Warnock

You hold in your hands the summit of the Western esoteric tradition: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippas famed Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Seemingly dashed off in relative youth, this monumental work is a virtual one-stop shop of traditional Western esotericism; from the time of its writing in the high Renaissance to this day, it is unsurpassed in its breadth, depth, and encyclopedic treatment of the philosophy and practice of the hidden magical and astrological arts.

Famous and often notorious in the Renaissance, Three Books of Occult Philosophy was never out of influence. The seventeenth-century J.F. English translation kept it at the forefront of what limited esoteric tradition continued in English after the onslaught of modern atheistic materialism. In the eighteenth century, Francis Barretts occult encyclopedia, The Magus, quoted extensively from Three Books without attribution. In the nineteenth century, Three Books was a sourcebook for groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Modernly, there is considerable controversy over whether Mormon founder Joseph Smith possessed a Jupiter talismanthe design of which is right out of Three Books. In its J.F. 1651 English translation, Three Books was a bright spot of esoteric light in the darkness of a society that had largely turned away from esoteric knowledge and its own traditions.

But as useful as Three Books has been, its easy availability and wide circulation ironically prejudiced many modern students of esoterism against it, following the assumption that esoteric knowledge must be hidden to be useful. But Three Books is an arcanum, hidden in plain sight, obscured by its very accessibility and by the myriad problems with J.F.s translation. Cloaked by the loss of traditional magical and astrological techniqueas well as an unconscious modern worldview that rejects magic, spiritual beings, or spiritual causalityAgrippas text languished for centuries. Yet, Three Books of Occult Philosophy contains the concentrated essence of the wisdom of myriad esoteric traditions. As Agrippa says in his letter of dedication to Book Three:

I am also indebted to the divine and ceremonial mysteries of magic... of those ancient Isiac priests of the Egyptians, the ancient Chaldean prophets of the Babylonians, and divine wise Hebrew kabbalists. I am also [indebted to] the Orphics, Pythagoreans, and Platonists, profound Greek philosophers, Indian Brahmans, Ethiopian Gymnosophists, and our undefiled religious theologians.