Блейк-Словарь (Деймон)/Агриппа

AGRIPPA von Nettesheim (Heinrich Cornelius, 1486–1535) was one of the brilliant men of his generation. He was secretary to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, who sent him to Paris on a diplomatic mission in 1506, and again in 1510 to England, where he was the guest of Dean Colet. Later he was archivist and historiographer to the Emperor Charles V. He was also physician to the mother of Francis I. As a theologian he attended the council of Pisa in 1511. He was in trouble with the Church three times. In 1509 he was obliged to resign his lectureship at the University of Dole because of his lectures on Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifice; in 1515, he was forced from the University of Pavia for his lectures on the Divine Pimander of Hermes Trismegistus; and in 1518 he was forced to resign as syndic at Metz because he persistently defended a woman accused of witchcraft. The Inquisition prevented the publication of his De occulta philosophia (1510), which he wrote probably under the influence of his friend the Abbot John Trithemius; but it finally was printed at Antwerp in 1531. It was a system of world philosophy, a synthesis of Christianity, Platonism, and Kabbalism, in which he defended magic as a means for understanding God and Nature. It gave him his popular reputation of being a magician. His De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (written 1527, pub. 1531) was a satire in which he renounced all the occult arts except alchemy. Blake in his early days, when searching for significant names for his characters, took “Tiriel” and “Zazel” from the tables of the planets in the Occult Philosophy II, xxii. The mysterious “Mne Seraphim” in the first line of The Book of Thel was apparently an alteration, in the interest of gender, of “Bne Seraphim” (“Sons of the Seraphim,” the intelligencies of Venus) which occurs in the same tables.