Cornelius Agrippa | Magus #12

This month on Magus, for our penultimate episode of the series, we're exploring the life and work of the father of Western esotericism, Cornelius Agrippa!

Born into a Europe wracked by wars, he attends university in Cologne at thirteen, earns his MA by sixteen, and then he abandons the Holy Roman Empire for France.

There, under the noses of the House of Valois, he begins to establish a hidden brotherhood of occult learning stretching from England to Catalonia to Italy and Switzerland.

Influenced by Erasmus and Martin Luther, and mentored by the court necromancer of Emperor Maximilian I, Agrippa then pioneers a new, coherent, rational model of the universe which bridges the gap between Medieval and Renaissance thinking, combining esoteric learning from the ancient world with cutting edge humanist philosophy.

Was he really accompanied everywhere he went by a demonic magical hound that aided him in his research?

Were his writings cursed such that if an unwitting person read from them alive they risked being strangled by demonic spirits?

Also, how did Agrippa not realise that embarassing the Inquisition, and then insulting your patrons in print, might be hazardous to the health?

We'll be answering these questions and many others - but fair warning going in: these are knotty concepts that Agrippa himself would argue should not really be known to common people like thee and we...

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