Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, contemporary of Ficino, though younger, began his philosophical career under Ficino’s influence and imbibed from Ficino his enthusiasm for magia naturalis which he accepted and recommended much more forcibly and openly than did Ficino. But Pico is chiefly important in the history of Renaissance magic because he added to the natural magic another kind of magic, which was to be used with the magia naturalis as complementary to it. This other kind of magic which Pico added to the equipment of the Renaissance Magus was practical Cabala, or Cabalist magic. This was a spiritual magic, not spiritual in the sense of using only the natural spiritus mundi like natural magic, but in the sense that it attempted to tap the higher spiritual powers, beyond the natural powers of the cosmos. Practical Cabala invokes angels, archangels, the ten sephiroth which are names or powers of God, God himself, by means some of which are similar to other magical procedures but more particularly through the power of the sacred Hebrew language. It is thus a much more ambitious kind of magic than Ficino’s natural magic, and one which it would be impossible to keep apart from religion.
For the Renaissance mind, which loved symmetrical arrangements, there was a certain parallelism between the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian Moses, and Cabala which was a Jewish mystical tradition supposed to have been handed down orally from Moses himself. In common with all Cabalists, Pico 84
firmly believed in this extreme antiquity of the Cabalistic teachings as going right back to Moses, as a secret doctrine which Moses had imparted to some initiates who had handed it on, and which unfolded mysteries not fully explained by the patriarch in Genesis. The Cabala is not, I believe, ever called a prisca theo- logia for this term applied to Gentile sources of ancient wisdom, and this was a more sacred wisdom, being Hebrew wisdom. And since, for Pico, Cabala confirmed the truth of Christianity, Christian Cabala was a Hebrew-Christian source of ancient wisdom, and one which he found it most valuable and instructive to compare with Gentile ancient wisdoms, and above all with that of Hermes Trismegistus who particularly lent himself to Pico’s essays in comparative religion because he was so closely parallel i to Moses, as the Egyptian law-giver and author of the inspired Egyptian Genesis, the Pimander.
Looking at the Hermetic writings and at Cabala with the eyes of Pico, certain symmetries begin to present themselves to our enraptured gaze. The Egyptian law-giver had given utterance to wonderful mystical teachings, including an account of creation in which he seemed to know something of what Moses knew. With this body of mystical teaching there went a magic, the magic of the Asclepius. In Cabala, too, there was a marvellous body of mystical teaching, derived from the Hebrew law-giver, and new light on the Mosaic mysteries of creation. Pico lost himself in these wonders in which he saw the divinity of Christ verified. And with Cabala, too, there went a kind of magic, practical Cabala.
Hermetism and Cabalism also corroborated one another on a theme which was fundamental for them both, namely the creation by the Word. The mysteries of the Hermetica are mysteries of the Word, or the Logos, and in the Pimander, it was by the luminous Word, the Son of God issuing from the Nous that the creative act was made. In Genesis, “God spoke” to form the created world, and, since He spoke in Hebrew, this is why for the Cabalist the words and letters of the Hebrew tongue are subjects for endless mystical meditations, and why, for the practical Cabalist, they contain magical power. Lactantius may have helped to cement the union between Hermetism and Christian Cabalism on this point, for, after quoting from the Psalm “By the word of God were the heavens made”, and from St. John, “In the beginning was the Word”, he adds that this is supported from the Gentiles. “For Trismegistus, who by some means or other searched into ahnost all truthj often described the excellence and the majesty of the Word”, and he acknowledged “that there is an ineffable and sacred speech, the relation of which exceeds the measure of man’s ability.”[1]
The marrying together of Hermetism and Cabalism, of which Pico was the instigator and founder, was to have momentous results, and the subsequent Hermetic-Cabalist tradition, ultimately stemming from him, was of most far-reaching importance. It could be purely mystical, developing Hermetic and Cabalist meditations on creation and on man into immensely complex labyrinths of religious speculation, involving numerological and harmonic aspects into which Pythagoreanism was absorbed. But it also had its magical side, and here, too, Pico was the founder who first united the Hermetic and Cabalist types of magic.
It was in i486 that the young Pico della Mirandola went to Rome with his nine hundred theses, or points drawn from all philosophies which he offered to prove in public debate to be all reconcilable with one another. According to Thorndike, these theses showed that Pico’s thinking “was largely coloured by astrology, that he was favourable to natural magic, and that he had a penchant for such occult and esoteric literature as the Orphic hymns, Chaldean oracles, and Jewish cabala”/ also the writings of Hermes Trismegistus. The great debate never took place, and theologians raised an outcry over some of the theses, necessitating an Apology or defence which was published in 1487 together with most of the oration on the Dignity of Man, with which the debate was to have opened. That oration was to echo and re-echo throughout the Renaissance, and it is, indeed, the great charter of Renaissance Magic, of the new type of magic introduced by Ficino and completed by Pico.
In the following pages I shall be using Pico’s theses, or Conclusiones, his Apology, and also the Oration.[2] My objects are strictly limited. First, I shall draw out what Pico says about magia or magia naturalis, endeavouring to determine what he means by this. Secondly, to show that Pico distinguishes between theoretical Cabala and practical Cabala, the latter being Cabalist magic. And, thirdly, to prove that Pico thinks that magia naturalis needs to be supplemented by practical Cabala without which it is but a weak force. These three objectives overlap with one another, and it may not always be possible to keep the different threads distinct. And I must add that, though I am certain that by “practical Cabala” Pico means Cabalist magic, I shall not be able to elucidate what procedures he used for this, since this is a matter for Hebrew specialists to investigate.
Amongst Pico’s nine hundred theses there are twenty-six Con- chisiones Magicae. These are partly on natural magic and partly on Cabalist magic. I select here some of those on natural magic.
The first of the magical conclusions is as follows:
Tota Magia, quae in usu est apud Modernos, & quam merito exter- minat Ecclesia, nullam habet firmitatem, nullum fundamentum, nullam ueritatem, quia pendet ex manu hostium primae ueritatis, potestatum harum tenebrarum, quae tenebras falsitatis, male dis- positis intellectibus obfundunt.1
All “modern magic”, announces Pico in this first conclusion is bad, groundless, the work of the devil, and rightly condemned by the Church. This sounds uncompromisingly against magic as used in Pico’s time, “modern magic”. But magicians always introduce their subject by stating that, though there are bad and diabolical magics, their kind of magic is not of that nature. And I think that by “modern magic” Pico does not mean the new-style natural magic, but mediaeval and unreformed magics. For his next conclusion begins:
Magia naturalis licita est, & non prohibita… .2
1 Pico, p. 104. 2 Ibid., loc. cit.
Oration are to the edition, with Italian translation, published by E. Garin (G. Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, Heptaplus, De ente et uno, e scritti varii, ed. E. Garin, Florence, 1942). An English translation of the Oration is included in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. E. Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, J. H. Randall, Chicago, 1948, pp. 223 ff. On the first version of the Oration, see Garin, Cultura, pp. 231 ff.
There is then a good magic, an allowable magic which is not forbidden, and it is magia naturalis.
What does Pico understand by magia naturalis? In the third conclusion he states that:
Magia est pars practica scientiae naturalis in the fifth that:
Nulla est uirtus in coelo aut in terra seminaliter & separata quam & actuare & unite magus non possit
and in the thirteenth that:
Magicam operari non est aliud quam maritare mundum.1
It is clear, I think, from these three conclusions that by the licit natural magic, Pico means the establishing of the “links” between earth and heaven by the right use of natural substances in accordance with the principles of sympathetic magic, and since such links would be inefficacious without the higher link of the talisman or the star image made efficacious with natural spiritus, the use of talismans must (or so I would think) be included in the methods by which Pico’s natural Magus “unites” virtues in heaven with those on earth, or “marries the world” which is another way of putting the same notion.
That Pico’s natural magic did not rest entirely on the arrangement of the natural substances is, moreover, proved from the twenty-fourth conclusion:
Ex secretions philosophiae principiis, necesse est confiteri, plus posse characteres & figuras in opere Magico, quam possit quaecunque qualitas materialis.2
This is a definite statement that it is not the material substances which have most power, not the materials of which an object used in magic is made, but the actual magic “characters” and “figures” which are the most operative. He does not here use the word imagines, the correct term for talismanic images, but characteres are those magic characters (illustrated in works like Picatrix) and which are used as well as the talismanic image on some of the talismans quoted by Ficino. I am not sure whether “figures” can ever mean “images”, or whether these too are in the nature of characters. But what is certain is that Pico is saying that it is the magical signs which are operative. Therefore his natural magic is more than the arrangement of natural substances and includes such magical signs.
1 Ibid., pp. 104,105.
2 Ibid., p. 105.
In his Apologia, Pico repeated the conclusions about the badness of bad magic and the goodness of his natural magic which is the uniting or marrying of things in heaven with things on earth, adding that these two definitions (about the “uniting” and “marrying”) underlie, or are implied in, all his other magical conclusions, particularly the one about the characters and figures. He emphasised that the good natural magic which marries earth to heaven is all done naturally, by virtutes naturales, and that the activity of the magical characters and figures used is also a “natural” activity. In short, he is, I would think, trying to make it very clear that the Magia which he advocates is not a demonic magic but a natural magic.[3]
Pico’s natural magic is therefore, it would seem, probably the same as Ficino’s magic, using natural sympathies but also magical images and signs, though on the understanding that this is to attract natural power, not demonic power. It is indeed possible that there are echoes of Pico’s apology for his natural magic in Ficino’s apology for the Libri de Vita, published two years later.
Another link between Ficino’s and Pico’s magics is in the latter’s recommendation of Orphic incantations, regarded as natural magic. In his second Orphic conclusion, Pico states as already quoted that:
In natural magic nothing is more efficacious than the Hymns of Orpheus, if there he applied to them a suitable music, and disposition of soul, and the other circumstances known to the wise.[4]
And in the third Orphic conclusion, he guarantees that this Orphic magic is not demonic:
The names of the gods of which Orpheus sings are not those of deceiving demons, from whom comes evil and not good, but are names of natural and divine virtues distributed throughout the world by the true God for the great advantage of man, if he knows how to use them.1
It therefore seems that the Natural Magus, as envisaged by Pico, would use the same kind of methods as the Ficinian natural magic, natural sympathies, natural Orphic incantations, magic signs and images naturally interpreted. Amongst these procedures would almost certainly be the use of the talisman as Ficino interpreted it. Pico moved in the same world of imagery as Ficino, as his commentary on Benivieni’s Canzona de Amore shows, and the Three Graces on his medal should perhaps be understood, at bottom, as in the nature of a Neoplatonised talismanic image against Saturn.2
In the oration on the Dignity of Man, which was to have opened the debate on the Conclusiones which never took place, Pico repeated all his main themes about magic: that magic is double, one kind being the work of demons, the other a natural philosophy3; that the good magic works by simpatia, through knowing the mutual rapports running through all nature, the secret charms by which one thing can be drawn to another thing, so that, as the peasant marries the vines to the elm, “so the Magus marries earth to heaven, that is to say the forces of inferior tilings to the gifts and properties of supernal things.”4 And this meditation on the marvellous powers of Man, the Magus, opens with the words of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius; “Magnum, o Asclepi, mira- culum est homo.”5 That was the text for the whole sermon, and one which puts Pico’s natural magic into the context of the magic of the Asclepius.
But, instead of muffling, like Ficino, the connection with the Asclepius under layers of commentary on Plotinus or rather misleading quotations from Thomas Aquinas, Pico in those opening words boldly throws down the gauntlet, as though to say, “It is the magic of the Asclepius that I am really talking about, and I glory in Man the Magus as described by Hermes Trismegistus.”
1 Ibid., loc. cit.
2 In the commentary on Benivieni’s poem (Pico, p. 742; De hominis dignitate, etc., ed. Garin, pp. 508-9), Pico does not actually equate the Three Graces with the three “good” planets, but, as a disciple of Ficino, he would certainly have known of this.
3 Pico, De hominis dignitate, etc., ed. Garin, p. 148.
4 Ibid., p. 152. 5 Ibid., p. 102.
However, natural magic, according to Pico, is but a weak thing, and no really efficacious magic can be done with it, unless Cabalist magic is added to it.
Nulla potest esse operatio Magica alicuius efficaciae, nisi annexum habeat opus Cabalae explicitum uel implicitum.1
So runs the fifteenth of the magical Conclusiones, a severe and uncompromising statement which really knocks out Ficino’s magic as fundamentally ineffective because he did not use the higher forces.
Nulla nomina ut significatiua, & in quantum nomina sunt, singula & per se sumpta, in Magico opere uirtutem habere possunt, nisi sint Hebraica, uel inde proxime deriuata.2
This twenty-second magical conclusion is hard on a poor magician who is weak in Hebrew, like Ficino who only knew a few words of that language.
Opus praecedentium hymnorum (i.e. the Orphic Hymns) nullum est sine opere Cabalae, cuius est proprium practicare omnem quanti- tatem formalem, continuam & discretam.3
Even the Orphic singing, Ficino’s pride and joy, is no good for a magical operation without Cabala, according to this twenty-first Orphic conclusion.
These cruel statements by the better-equipped young magician are at least, I think, an absolute guarantee that Ficino’s natural magic was not demonic, as he claimed. Too pious and careful to attempt to use planetary or zodiacal demons, and too ignorant of Cabala to understand angelic magic, he was content with a natural magic which was harmless but weak. The Magus who combines natural magic with Cabala will be in a different position, for, as Pico explains in the Apology, there are two kinds of Cabala, and one of them is “the supreme part of Natural Magic”.
1 Pico, Opera, p. 105. 2 Ibid., loc. cit. 3 Ibid., p. 107.
4* 91
The Cabala[5] as it developed in Spain in the Middle Ages had as its basis the doctrine of the ten Sephiroth and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The doctrine of the Sephiroth is laid down in the Book of Creation, or Sefer Yetzirah, and it is constantly referred to throughout the Zohar, the mystical work written in Spain in the thirteenth century which embodies the traditions of Spanish Cabalism of that time. The Sephiroth are “the ten names most common to God and in their entirety they form his one great Name.”[6] They are “the creative Names which God called into the world”,[7] and the created universe is the external development of these forces alive in God. This creative aspect of the Sephiroth involves them in a connection with cosmology, and there is a relationship between the Sephiroth and the ten spheres of the cosmos, composed of the spheres of the seven planets, the sphere of fixed stars, and the higher spheres beyond these. A striking feature of Cabalism is the importance assigned to angels or divine spirits as intermediaries throughout this system, arranged in hierarchies corresponding to the other hierarchies. There are also bad angels, or demons, whose hierarchies correspond to those of their good opposites. The theosophical system of the universe on which the infinite subtleties of Cabalist mysticism are based is connected with the Scriptures through elaborate mystical interpretations of the words and letters of the Hebrew text, particularly the book Genesis (on which large parts of the Zohar are a commentary).
The Hebrew alphabet, for the Cabalist, contains the Name or Names of God; it reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world and the creative language of God. Creation from the point of view of God is the expression of His hidden self that gives Itself a name, the holy Name of God,4 the perpetual act of creation. In contemplating the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their configurations as constituents of God’s name, the Cabalist is contemplating both God himself and his works through the Power of the Name.
The two branches of Spanish Cabalism are thus both based on the Name or Names; they are complementary to each other and intermingled. One branch is called the Path of the Sephiroth[8]; the other the Path of the Names.[9] An expert practitioner of the Path of the Names was the thirteenth-century Spanish Jew, Abraham Abulafia, who developed a most complex technique of meditation through a system for combining the Hebrew letters in endless varieties of permutations and combinations.
Though Cabala is primarily a mysticism, a way of trying to know God, there is also a magic which goes with it, which can be used mystically or subjectively on oneself, a kind of self-hypnosis, as an aid to contemplation, and G. Scholem thinks that this was how Abulafia used it.[10] Or it can be developed into an operative magic,[11] using the power of the Hebrew language, or the powers of the angels invoked by it, to perform magical works. (I am speaking, of course, from the point of view of a mystical believer in magic, like Pico della Mirandola.) The Cabalists evolved many angelic names unknown to the Scriptures (which mention only Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael) by adding to a root term describing the angel’s specific function a suffix, such as “el” or “iah”, representing the Name of God, and such angelic names invoked or inscribed on talismans had power. Abbreviations of Hebrew words, by the method of Notarikon, or transpositions or anagrams of words by the method of Temurah, were also potent. One of the most complicated of the methods used in practical Cabala, or Cabalist magic, was Gematria which was based on the numerical values assigned to each Hebrew letter involving a mathematics of extreme intricacy, and by which, when words were calculated into numbers and numbers into words the entire organisation of the world could be read off in terms of word-numbers, or the number of the heavenly hosts could be exactly calculated as amounting to 301,655,172. The word-number equation is, like all these methods, not necessarily magic and can be purely mystical; but it was an important feature of practical Cabala through its association with names of angels. There are, for example, seventy-two angels through whom the Sephiroth themselves can be approached, or invoked, by one who knows their names and numbers. Invocations must always be made in the Hebrew tongue, but there are also silent invocations to be made merely by arranging or displaying Hebrew words, letters, signs or signacula.
Amongst the eager activities which Pico undertook for his total synthesis of all knowledge—made at the age of twenty-four—was the learning of Hebrew which he seems to have known quite well, or at least much better than any Gentile contemporary.[12] He had a number of learned Jewish friends, of some of whom we know the names—Elia del Medigo, for example, and Flavius Mithridates. These and others supplied him with the necessary books and manuscripts, and he had probably read the Hebrew Scriptures in their original language, together with many commentaries, including Cabalist commentaries and works. He seems to have had some knowledge of the Zohar and of the mystical commentary on the Song of Solomon. And G. Scholem has pointed out that he seems to refer to Abraham Abulafia’s techniques of letter-combinations.[13] The pious and enthusiastic young man above all valued his Hebrew and Cabalist studies because he believed that they led him to a fuller understanding of Christianity, and certified the truth of the divinity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. His seventy-two Cabalist Conclusiones are introduced as “confirming the Christian religion from the foundations of Hebrew wisdom”.[14] The sixth conclusion states that the three great Names of God in Cabalist secrets, within the quaternary Name (the Tetragramma- ton), refer to the Three Persons of the Trinity.[15] And the seventh conclusion affirms that “No Hebrew Cabalist can deny that the name of lesu, if we interpret it according to Cabalistic principles and methods, signifies God, the Son of God, and the wisdom of the Father through the divinity of the Third Person.”[16]
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