Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance – Edgar Wind

INTRODUCTION

THE LANGUAGE OF MYSTERIES

Edgar Wind and the Renaissance Echo Chamber

A Beezone Commentary on Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance

Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance is a celebrated and frequently cited work in modern intellectual and art history. His central achievement lies in showing how Renaissance artists and thinkers—especially those influenced by Neoplatonism—recast ancient religious language into philosophical metaphor and symbolic form. Wind brings this Renaissance imagination to life, revealing how mystery was not discarded but transformed into a cryptic idiom of intellectual elevation and sacred concealment.

But we should not mistake Wind’s brilliance for completeness.

For all his insight into the afterlife of the mysteries in Renaissance thought, Wind largely skips over the mysteries themselves. That is, he passes too quickly over the living religious roots of mystery cults in ancient Greece—Eleusis, Dionysian initiation, Orphic rites—and likewise gives only passing notice to the depth with which figures like Plutarch sought to integrate ritual, myth, and philosophy. These are not minor omissions. The Renaissance reappropriations Wind describes are echoes—often literary, sometimes ironic—of an original experience that was bodily, communal, initiatory, and sacred.

To understand what Renaissance thinkers were echoing, we must first understand what they inherited, and often misunderstood.

Wind’s focus is not on ritual religion but on the symbolic life of ideas. His “mysteries” are often metaphors, literary devices, or intellectual exercises. As such, his book is less about pagan mysteries than about the mystery of how the Renaissance reimagined them. That is valuable—but only when paired with a deeper inquiry into what those mysteries originally were.

The real task remains: not just to decode the language of Renaissance esotericism, but to trace it back to its sacred origin—and then forward again, into art, poetry, and the unfolding of spiritual imagination.

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ny attempt to penetrate the pagan mysteries of the Renaissance should perhaps begin with the admission that the term ‘mysteries’ has several meanings, and that these already tended to become blurred in antiquity, to the great enrichment and confusion of the subject.¹ For the purpose of this introduction it may be useful to distinguish roughly between three meanings.

The first and original meaning of mysteries, which is exemplified by the festival of Eleusis, is that of a popular ritual of initiation. In it the neophytes were purged of the fear of death and admitted into the company of the blessed, to which they were bound by a vow of silence. But since the sacred rites were administered to a multitude without regard to individual merit,² philosophers inclined to look upon them with a certain disdain, which Diogenes expressed with characteristic bluntness. ‘He was never initiated, they tell us, and replied to someone who once advised him to be initiated: “It is absurd of you, my young friend, to think that any tax-gatherer, if only he be initiated, can share in the rewards of the just in the next world, while Agesilaus and Epaminondas are doomed to lie in the mire.’”³

Although this combination of truculence and common sense would not have pleased the ‘dark’ Heraclitus, his judgement of mystical initiations did not differ much from Diogenes’: he dis­missed them as fit for the vulgar;⁴ and a similar attitude is reported also of Anaxagoras, of Socrates, and many others.⁵ Plato, however, whose words on the subject were to exceed all these in historical resonance, was far too ironic and circumspect to be satisfied with a simple rejection of mysteries. It is true that he rarely spoke of them without mockery;⁶ and in the Seventh Letter¹ there is a scathing remark on the social damage that may result from an uncritical sur­render to communal feasts of initiation.^[8] Yet instead of disclaiming for his philosophy any kinship with such rites, Plato declared on the contrary that philosophy itself was a mystical initiation of another kind, which achieved for a chosen few by conscious inquiry what the mysteries supplied to the vulgar by stirring up their emotions. The cleansing of the soul, the welcoming of death, the power to enter into communion with the Beyond, the ability to ‘rage cor­rectly’ (op9w; uaivra6ai),^[9] these benefits which Plato recognized were commonly provided by the mystical initiations were to be obtained through his philosophy by rational exercise, by a training in the art of dialectic, whose aim it was to purge the soul of error.^[10]

The mysteres cultuels (which is Fcstugierc’s term for the ritual initiations) were thus replaced by mysteres litterairesfo that is, by a figurative use of terms and images which were borrowed from the popular rites but transferred to the intellectual disciplines of philosophical debate and meditation.^[11] In a half-serious, half-playful appraisal of himself the philosopher took on the attitude of a new hierophant, and addressed his disciples in solemn words which sounded like the noble parody of an initiation: ‘And what is purifi­cation but the separation of the soul from the body …, the habit of the soul gathering and collecting herself into herself on every side. .. ? And what is that which is termed death, but this very separation of the soul from the body? … And the true philosophers, and they alone, are ever seeking to release the soul. … Then, Simmias, as the true philosophers are ever studying death, to them, of all men, death is the least terrible. . .. And I conceive that the founders of the mysteries had a real meaning, and were not mere triflers when they intimated in a figure long ago that he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below will lie in a slough, but he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods. For “many”, as they say in the mysteries, “are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the bacchoi” – meaning, as I interpret the word, the true philosophers.’^[1]

Introduced thus by Plato with a note of irony, but then thoroughly systematized by Plotinus, the adoption of a ritual terminology to assist and incite the exercise of intelligence^[2] proved exceedingly useful as a fiction, but ended, as such fictions are likely to do, by betraying the late Platonists into a revival of magic. As a pedagogue Plotinus was beguilingly tolerant of what he called ‘the lesser spectacles’.^[14] Always indulgent to religious needs, he did not dissuade his pupil Amelius from sacrificing to the gods although he declined it for himself: ‘ The gods must come to me, not I to them’,^[15] and the Enneads close with a withdrawal into the purest solitariness (^[16] he always admitted the importance of tangible symbols for those who are still outside and yearn to enter. On one occasion, when his school assembled to celebrate the birthday of Plato, his disciple Porphyry recited an enthusiastic hymn on the kpds yapos, the ‘sacred marriage’, which was a token of divine communion in the popular mysteries; but his performance was not well received by the fastidious audience. ‘Porphyry,’ they said, ‘is off his head.’ Plotinus, however, rose to his defence: ‘You have shown yourself a poet, a philosopher, and a hierophant.’^[17]

In this gracious remark the word ‘hierophant’ still had a figurative meaning. The performance in question was not a ritual act but a poetic rhapsody, composed ad hoc to edify a group of philosophers who were only too ready to debate it. But it is possible that the irreverent critics of the chant had more foresight than Plotinus. If the soul could be induced by a certain kind of poetic hymn to rise to a state of philosophic enthusiasm in which it would commune with the Beyond, then a similar force might be claimed also for the magical skills of incantation, for the art of invoking sacred names or numbers, of fumigating with sacred herbs, or of casting spells by drawing figures or by manipulating magical tools. All that bewitch­ing hocus-pocus, apparently so incompatible with dialectical exer­cises, was gradually readmitted as a handmaid of philosophy and soon rose to become her mistress.¹⁹ And the ceremonies performed by these solemn triflcrs, whom Cumont called ‘les disciples infideles de Plotin’,²⁰ again went under the name of ‘mysteries’ – theurgorum mysteria sive potius deliramenta.²¹ Before entering on a discussion of pagan mysteries in the Renaissance, it would seem important there­fore to make clear in which of these three senses the term ‘mysteries’ is to be used: the ritual, the figurative, or the magical.

The question should not be answered dogmatically, because in the literature transmitted to the Renaissance the three phases were already thoroughly mixed.²² However, it is possible to bring the problem into focus by observing the attitude that prevailed among the great Renaissance antiquaries, since it is they who were chiefly responsible for reviving the study of the subject. While they differed widely from each other in the degree to which they promoted, tolerated, or resisted a magical or ritual re-enactment of mysteries, they were unanimous in regarding the figurative understanding as basic.^[18] Whenever ‘the mysteries of the ancients’ were invoked by De Bussi, Beroaldo, Perotti, or Landino, not to mention Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, their concern was less with the original mystery cults than with their philosophical adaptation. Good judge­ment alone did not impose the restriction; it was largely a case of good luck, for it derived from a historical misconception: they assumed that the figurative interpretation was part of the original mysteries. As indefatigable readers of Plutarch, Porphyry, and Pro- clus, they saw the early mystery cults through the eyes of Platonic philosophers who had already interlarded them with mysteres litteraires. Thus Plato appeared to them not as a critic or transposer of mysteries, but as the heir and oracle of an ancient wisdom for which a ritual disguise had been invented by the founders of the mysteries themselves. And the philosophical cunning thus imputed to those early sages was ascribed also to the Neoplatonic magicians – les – disciples infideles de Plotin – whose elaborate prescriptions for work­ing charms and spells were regarded as amplifications or disguises, rather than betrayals, of the Platonic discipline.^[19] ‘In Porphyry you will enjoy, ’ wrote Pico della Mirandola, ‘the copiousness of matter and the multiformity of religion; in lamblichus you will revere an occult philosophy and strange foreign mysteries (barbarorum mysterid) … not to mention Proclus, who abounds in Asiatic richness, and those stemming from him, Hcrmias, Damascius, Olympiodorus,… in all of whom there ever gleams … “the Divine”, which is the distinctive mark of the Platonists.’^[20]

The enjoyment Pico derived from occult authors was vicarious and poetical; they exercised his imagination in the employment of outlandish metaphors. It never occurred to him, as it did to less speculative minds, that the turgid lore of the dialectical magi might be put to a more nefarious use than amplifying the Platonic mysteres litteraires. Black magic, in the sense that it appealed to Agrippa of Nettesheim, he rejected as a vile superstition.^[21] But the comparative study of sacred images and incantations, and the extraction from them of a philosophic wisdom, of which the hidden sense remained the same through all its verbal transformations, seemed to him eminently worthy of a follower of Plato and Plotinus, because both had persistently stressed the basic lesson: that even though language is deceptive and remains ‘unserious’ (as Plato explained in the Phaedrus and the Seventh Letter),^[1] it is the only instrument available for a serious philosophical discipline. ‘He that would speak exactly,’ wrote Plotinus, ‘must not name it [the ultimate One] by this name or by that; we can but circle, as it were, about its circumference, seeking to interpret in speech our experience of it, now shooting near the mark, and again disappointed of our aim by reason of the antinomies we find in it. The greatest antinomy arises in this, that our understanding of it is… by a presence higher than all know­ing. … Hence the word of the Master [Plato], that it overpasses speech and writing. And yet we speak and write, seeking to forward the pilgrim upon his journey thither….’^[2]

In attempting to mark the disparity between verbal instrument and mystical object, Pico made his own language sound at once provocative and evasive, as if to veil were implicitly to reveal the sacred fire in an abundance of dense and acrid smoke. The sources of the contrived and ‘conceited’ style of Pico, and of the brusque oratory he developed in it, have not, to my knowledge, been suc­cinctly traced. His persuasive power as a mystagogue certainly owed less to the judicial manner of the Schoolmen, whom he ostensibly imitated in the Conclusiones ²⁹ than to the parabolic fervour and tenebrosity he had found in the late-antique Platonists and the early- Christian Fathers.³⁰ In his book Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, Marrou gave an excellent description of the odd blandish­ments of their secretive style: ‘L’obscurite de 1’expression, le mystcre qui entoure 1’idec ainsi dissimulee, est pour celle-ci le plus bcl ornement, unc cause puissante d’attrait…. Vela faciunt honorem secreti.’³¹ And Festugicre remarked on the same subject: ‘Cette notion de mystcre, d’obscurite, est un complement de celle d’auto­rite. Plus une veritc est cachee, secrete, plus elle a de force.’³² Al­though these remarks refer to late-antique writing, they could be taken for descriptions of a neo-barbaric fashion in Renaissance diction. ‘Learning on its revival,’ to quote David Hume, ‘was attired in the same unnatural garb which it wore at the time of its decay among the Greeks and Romans.’ The Platonic revival, in particular, was suffused with that ‘Asiatic richness’ which Pico en­joyed so abundantly in Proclus. His first essay in the philosophy of myths was deliberately couched in exotic language. ‘If I am not mistaken,’ he wrote proudly to a friend, ‘it will be intelligible only to a few, for it is fdled with many mysteries from the secret philo­sophy of the ancients.’³³

It would be a mistake to belittle this cryptic pomp as mere youth­ful affectation: for Pico adhered to it in all his writings, and these were regarded by his contemporaries as models of how to adum­brate an ineffable revelation through speech. To Pico it would have seemed both frivolous and illogical to discuss mysteries in plain language. He knew that mysteries require an initiation: Hine appel- lata mysteria: nee mysteria quae non occulta.³⁴ But secrecy was not only part of their definition; it contributed also to the respect they in­spired. The fact that these sublime revelations were not easily accessible seemed to heighten their authority. And yet, if their authority was to be felt, it was not sufficient to keep the mysteries hidden; they must also be known to exist. Hence Pico contrived, when he wrote about mysteries, a style of elliptical vulgarization which enabled him to hint at the secrets that he professed to with­hold: si secretiorum aliquid mysteriorum fas est vel sub aenigmate in publicum proferre.³³ The proper manner for an official mystagogue, he suggested, was to speak in riddles, in words that are ‘published and not published’, editos esse et non editos.³⁶ The phrase recalls the verbal juggling of Apuleius when he described his experience as a neophyte in the rites of Isis: ‘Behold, I have conveyed to you what you must not know although you have heard it’, ecce tibi rettuli quae, quamvis audita, ignores tamen necesse est.³⁷

A consummate Renaissance master and critic of the art of cryptic expression was the Ferrarese humanist Celio Calcagnini, whose re­flections on the use and abuse of mysteries deliberately alternated between attack and defence. ‘You believe,’ he wrote to his nephew, ‘that mysteries cease to be mysteries when they are promulgated. .. . But I hold the opposite view. … You think that treasures should be buried? That is the opinion of avaricious men. . ._: For what is the use of hidden music? … Mysteries are always mysteries, so long as they are not conveyed to profane ears.’³⁸ Yet the last reservation, that mysteries must be protected from the vulgar, merely restated the initial problem. Calcagnini was aware that ‘published mysteries’ would be a contradiction in terms, but the withholding of knowledge seemed to him vain and ignoble. An essay entitled Descriptio silentii contains his shrewd solution of the dilemma.^[24] Although the essay was inspired by an image of Harpo­crates^[25] and ostensibly composed in praise of silence, he managed nevertheless to pour forth in it a veritable catalogue of arcana,^[26] which he concluded by praising the virtues of speech: ‘For it is as Hesiod said: speech is man’s best treasure.’ But, he added, the treasure must not be wasted: a ‘prudent man’ should always ‘observe the proper alternation between speech and silence’. The verbal ciphers and hieroglyphs, however, with which Calcagnini adorned his argu­ment, show him admitting still a third possibility – the prudence of speaking in riddles. By a judicious use of enigmatic words and images it was possible, he thought, to combine speech with silence: and that was the language of the mysteries. ‘All those who are wise in divine matters,’ wrote Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘and are interpreters of the mystical revelations prefer incongruous symbols for holy things, so that divine things may not be easily accessible.’^[42]

Had the cult of the incongruous produced nothing but monsters, it would have only a limited, anthropological interest. We could then be content to survey the Hieroglyphica of Pierio Valeriano, and marvel at the ingenious piety of the author in evading the divine splendour he professes to worship.^[43] But in great Renaissance works of art, which often draw on the same sources as Valeriano, the splendour shines out through the disguise, and gives to the veil itself a peculiar beauty. Egidio da Viterbo, the celebrated Augustinian preacher who extolled the pagan mysteries as models of elegance in religion,^[44] emphatically stressed, in an attempt to translate for his Renaissance audience Dionysius’s praise of incongruity, the beauty achieved by mystical adumbration: ‘As Dionysius says, the divine ray cannot reach us unless it is covered with poetic veils.’^[45]

It has been observed that in a great work of art the depth always comes to the surface, anil that it is only because of their irresistible oratory that great works survive the capriciousness of time. ‘Dans le grand naufrage du temps,’ says Gide, ‘e’est par la pcau que les chels-d’cruvrc flottent. … Sans 1’inegalable beaute de sa prose, qui s’int^resserait encore A Bossuct?’ Our interest in Renaissance mys­teries might indeed be slight, were it not for the splendour of their expression in Renaissance art. But the fact that seemingly remote ideas shine forth through a surface of unmistakable radiance is per­haps a sufficient reason for pursuing them into their hidden depth. For when ideas are so forcefully expressed in art, it is unlikely that their importance will be confined to art alone.

Although the chief aim of this book will be to elucidate a number of great Renaissance works of art, I shall not hesitate to pursue philosophical arguments on their own terms, and in whatever de­tail they may require. The question to what extent any Renaissance painter, even one so renowned for his intellect as Botticelli or Raphael, would have cared to master a philosophical system is per­haps less awkward to answer than it might seem: for we must not confuse our own labour in reconstructing their knowledge with their relatively effortless way of acquiring some of it by oral instruc­tion. Calcagnini, who knew him well, remarked that it was Raphael’s greatest pleasure in life ‘to be taught and to teach’, doceri ac docere.^[46] But if the Renaissance painter could thus avail himself of a royal road to knowledge through learned dialogue, by what method can his knowledge now be reconstructed historically?

The process of recapturing the substance of past conversations is necessarily more complicated than the conversations themselves. A historian tracing the echo of our own debates might justly infer from the common use of such words as microbe or molecule that scientific discovery had moulded our imagination; but he would be much mistaken if he assumed that a proper use of these words would always be attended by a complete technical mastery of the underlying theory. Yet, supposing the meaning of the words were lo: t, and a historian were trying to recover it, surely he would have to recognize that the key to the colloquial usage is in the scientific, and that his only chance of recapturing the first is to acquaint himself with the second. The same rule applies to an iconographcr trying to reconstruct the lost argument of a Renaissance painting. He must learn more about Renaissance arguments than the painter needed to know; and this is not, as has been claimed, a self- contradiction, but the plain outcome of the undeniable fact that we no longer enjoy the advantages of Renaissance conversation. We must make up for it through reading and inference. Iconography is always, as Focillon observed with regret, un detour, an unavoid­ably round-about approach to art. Its reward, in the study of Renaissance mysteries, is that it may help to remove the veil of obscurity which not only distance in time (although in itself sufficient for that purpose) but a deliberate obliqueness in the use of metaphor has spread over some of the greatest Renaissance paintings. They were designed for initiates; hence they require an initiation.

Aesthetically speaking, there can be no doubt that the presence of unresolved residues of meaning is an obstacle to the enjoyment of art. However great the visual satisfaction produced by a painting, it cannot reach a perfect state so long as the spectator is plagued by a suspicion that there is more in the painting than meets the eye. In literature, the same sort of embarrassment may be caused by Spenser’s, Chapman’s, or even Shakespeare’s verse in a reader who has been advised to surrender himself to the music of the poetry without worrying whether he understands every line or not. But it is doubtful how long that attitude, however justified as a preliminary approach, can be sustained without flattening the aesthetic enjoyment.⁴⁷

I hope therefore I shall not be misunderstood as favouring the doctrine of mysteries I am about to expound. The axiom proposed by Pico della Mirandola, that for mysteries to be deep they must be obscure, seems to me as untrue as the pernicious axiom of Burke that ‘a clear idea is another name for a little idea’. But there is no evading the fact, however unpleasant, that a great art did flourish on that impure soil. In studying the subject I shall strive for clarity, an objectionable aim from the point of view of the Renaissance mystagogucs themselves. Yet the understanding of these disturbing phenomena is not furthered by succumbing to them, any more than by ignoring their existence. As Donne observed, disguise is one of the great forces of revelation: ‘ For as well the Pillar of Cloud, as that of Fire, did the Office of directing.’

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and Agrippa of Nettesheim. On Lazzarelli’s dramatic conversion in 1484 by the Hermetic prophet and hierophant Giovanni ‘Mercurio’ da Correggio, see P. O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (1956), pp. 221-57; also t).P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (1958), pp. 64-72. Lazzarelli’s poem De gentilium deorum imaginibus was written at least thirteen years before his conversion, since one of the two manuscripts in the Vatican Library (Cod. Urb. lat. 716) carries a cancelled dedication to Borso d’Este as duke of Ferrara, a title conferred on Borso in the year of his death, 1471 (see F. Saxl, Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters in romischen Bibliotheken, 1915, pp. 101 f.). The illustrations of this poem are disappointing. With the exception of four, they are copied from the Tarocchi engravings (cf. A. M. Hind, Early Italian Engraving I, 1938, p. 232).

 

Rosicrucian conventicles, as G. F. Hartlaub inclines to do, ‘ Giorgione und der Mythos der Akademien’, Repertoriumfiir Kunstwissenschaft XLVIII (1927), pp. 233-57, a restate­ment of Giorgiones Geheimnis (1925). On the other hand, the notorious case ofLodovico Lazzarelli, who called himself Enoch after his Hermetic conversion (see above, page 7 note 22), shows how easily an erudite poet laureate, who consorted with the Roman and Neapolitan academies, could succumb to the spell of necromancy.

[22] Phaedrus 275-8; Epistles VII, 344c. Ficino recognized the connexion between the two passages. * Confirmantur eadem in Epistolis, ’ he wrote in his commentary on the Phaedrus, Opera (1561), p. 1386.

[23] Enneads VI, ix, 3-4; tr. Dodds, Select Passages, p. 57. On concealment as an essential feature of Truth, cf. Boyance, Le culte des Muses, pp. 162 f. with further Neoplatonic references.

29. ‘… in quibus recitandis non Romanae linguae nitorem, sect celebratissimorum Parisiensium disputatorum dicendi genus est imitatus.’ Opera (Basle 1557), P- 63. His eloquent defence of the ‘barbaric’ style, in a letter to Ermolao Barbaro, ibid.,pp. 351- 8, has been re-edited by Garin, Filosofi italiani del Quattrocento (1942), pp. 428-45, and translated by Q. Breen in Journal of the History of Ideas XIII (1952), pp. 384-412. With deliberate paradox the letter is composed in an elegant style and should warn us against mistaking Pico (as in A. Dulles, Princeps Concordiae, 1941) for a thoroughgoing scholastic.
30. On patristic sources of Renaissance Platonism, see E. Garin, ‘La “dignitas hominis” e la letteratura patristica’, La Rinascita I, iv (1938), pp. 102-46; P. O. Kristeller, ‘Augustine and the Early Renaissance’, The Review of Religion VIII (1944), pp. 339-58; E. Wind, ‘The Revival of Origen’, in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene (1954), pp. 412-24; also ‘Maccabean Histories in the Sistine Ceiling’, in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed. E. F. Jacob (i960), pp. 324 ff; ‘Typology in the Sistine Ceiling’, The Art Bulletin XXXIII (1951). p- 45, with reference to the Patristic Renaissance.
31. (1938), pp. 488 ff. 32. Revue des dtudesgrecques LII (1939), p. 236.
32. L. Dorez, ‘Lettres inedites de Jean Pic de la Mirandole’, Giornale storico della – letteratura italiana XXV (1895), pp. 357 f., referring to Pico’s commentary on Beni- vieni’s Canzona d’amore.

34. Heptaplus, prooemium, ed. Garin, p. 172.
35. De hominis dignitate, ed. Garin, p. 130.
36. ibid., p. 156. See also below, page 13 note 42, page 190 note 37, page 236 note 1.
37. Metamorphoses XI, 23.
38. Celio Calcagnini, Opera aliquot (1544), p. 27. On the uselessness of ‘hidden music’, cf. Erasmus, Adagia, s.v. occultae musices nullus respectus.

[39] Calcagnini, Opera, pp. 491-4.

[40] On Harpocrates as a god of mystical silence see Politian, Miscellanea I, Ixxxiii; Gyraldus, op. cit., syntagma i (Opera I, 57 £.); Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (1575), fol. 26i^r; and again Calcagnini, ‘De profectu’, Opera, p. 333 (after Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 68, Moralia 378c). His typical gesture of lifting a forefinger to his lips – quique premit vocem digitoque silentia suadet (Ovid, Metamorphoses IX, 692) – was transferred by Achille Bocchi, SymMicae quaestiones (1574), no. Ixiv, from Harpocrates to Hermes the mystagogue (our fig. 23) who guides the souls from outward appearances back to the inward One: Silentio deum cole – Monas manet in se; cf. Ficino, In Mercuritim Trisme- gistum xiii: ‘Mercurii … de impositione silentii’, Opera, pp. 1854 ff.; referring to Poimandres XIII, 16, 22, cf. Corpus Hermeticum, ed. Nock-Festugiere II (1945), PP- 207, 209. For a good-natured joke on Harpocrates with his characteristic gesture, see Alciati, Emblemata (1542), no. 3: Tn silentium’. Valeriano, however, was serious in his belief (Hieroglyphica XLIX, fol. 363 V, s.v. ‘Pietas’, after Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 75, Moralia 381B) that the Egyptians worshipped the crocodile as a token of divine silence because that animal had no tongue (elinguis). Calcagnini, Encomium pulicis, jocosely praised the flea for that virtue: ‘silentium servat, quale ne Pythagorici quidem.’ On Pythagoras as magister silentii see below, page 53 note 4.

I, 56 f., s.v. ‘Angerona et Tacita’) and by the remarkably numerous casts of a bronze statuette, pseudo-archaic in style and perhaps purporting to reproduce an ancient image (W. Bode, The Italian Bronze Statuettes of the Renaissance I, 1908, p. 37, note to pl. 93; L. Planiscig, Die Bronzeplastiken, Kunsthistorisches Museum in Wien, 1924, p. 19, nos. 25 f.). A drawing by Francia of Angerona with her forefinger raised to her lips fAshmolean Museum, Oxford, Italian Schools no. 10) may refer to a commission Francia received from Isabella d’Este for her Camerino (cf. Wind, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, 1948, p. 24): her celebrated emblem of silence, a musical notation confined to rests (pause}, is preserved on ceilings of the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua.

[42] De coelesti hierarchia II, 5. The same argument in Julian, Orationes V, 170A-C; VII, 222c. Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 21 (Moralia 404c), quotes Heraclitus (= fr. B93, Diels) on the Delphic prophecies of Apollo: ours Myei ours kputttei aAAa equalvsi, ‘he neither tells nor conceals but gives a sign’.

[43] In the dedication to Duke Cosimo de’ Medici: Tn nova vero lege novoque instrumento cum Assert or noster ait, “Aperiam in parabolis os meum, et in aenigmate antiqua loquar”, quid aliud sibi voluit, quam “hieroglyphice sermonem faciam, et allegorice vetusta rerum proferam monumenta”?’ Hieroglyphica (1575), preface, fol. 4^V.

44. cf. Calcagnini, Opera, p. 101, praising Egidio’s literary genius ad eruenda totius vetustatis arcana; also Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, fols. I23^r, 3oo^r, 322 ff. He inspired Sannazaro to write De partu Virginis and occasioned Pontano’s dialogue Aegidius. In a letter to Bembo, Sadoleto refers to him as ‘quern ego et tu saepe soliti sumus in sermonibus nostris clarissimum huius seculi tamquam obscurascentis lumen appellate ’ (Epistolae XVII, xx; Opera omnia II, 1738, pp. 165 f.). On Egidio’s circle at Sant’ Agostino in Rome, cf. below, page 187. See also F. Fiorentino, Il risorgimento filosofico nel Quattrocento (188$), pp. 251-74; G. Signorelli, Il cardinale Egidio da Viterbo (1929); G. Toffanin, Giovanni Pontano fra Vuomo e la natura (1938), pp. 15-35; Garin, Filosofi italiani, pp. 532 f.; Wind, ‘The Revival of Origen’, in Studies in Art and Literature for Belle da Costa Greene (1954). PP- 416 ff- witli further literature in note 20. A useful summary in F. X. Martin, ‘The Problem of Giles of Viterbo: a historiographical sur­vey’, Augustiniana IX (1959), pp. 357-79: X (i960), pp. 43-60, to which must now be added F. Secret, Les kabbalistes chretiens de la Renaissance (1964), pp. 106-26: ‘Le cardinal Gilles de Viterbe’.

[45] In Ubrum primum Sententiarum commentationes ad mentem Platonis, Cod. Vat. lat. 6325, fols. 13 f. An edition by Eugenio Massa of this important work is in preparation.

[46] Letter to Jacob Ziegler, Opera, p. 101.

47. In recent years, esoteric studies of Donne, Herbert, Blake, and Yeats have raised the question of their poetic utility. While it is certain that readers repelled by recondite meanings are likely to miss some magnificent poetic metaphors, on the other hand those addicted to esoteric studies may lose sight of the poetry altogether. But the danger of these studies does not lessen their importance. In each instance their relevance is a question of poetic tact; that is, it cannot be settled in the abstract, but depends on that altogether indefinable but unmistakable sense of pitch which distinguishes a pertinent from a rambling interpretation. But this is not meant to discourage the ramblers.

 

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