17 Burst results for "Agrippa"
Evangelism on SermonAudio
"agrippa" Discussed on Evangelism on SermonAudio
"Said he, you will hear him. So on the next day, a grip and Bernie's came with great palm and they entered the audience hall with the military tribunes and the prominent men of the city. Then at the command of festus Paul was brought in and festus said, king Agrippa, and all who were present with us. You see this man about whom the whole Jewish people petitioned me. Both in Jerusalem, and here, shouting that he ought not to live any longer, but I found that he had done nothing deserving death. And as he himself appealed to the emperor, I decided to go ahead and send him. But I have nothing definite to write to my lord about him. Therefore, I have brought him before you all. Especially before you, king Agrippa. So that after we have examined him, I may have something to write. For it seems to me unreasonable and sending a prisoner not to indicate the charges against him. And we will board willing next time we gather for worship on the following lord's day here, Paul's defense and his response before king Agrippa. And we live in a culture that's full of influencers, so much so that it's even become a title. I mean, it used to be something we would just knew. We knew there were people who were able to influence the zeitgeist, the moment of the culture. We knew looking at even looking at history, we know that there are those who have power and are able to influence the movement of nations and cultures this set and the other. But today we even having seen this so much, we've given a title to it. And maybe it's a little bit of a self serving title because most of the folks who consider themselves influencers, most of the folks who have been dubbed such a phrase by our culture. These are folks on social media as it were. They're the ones who are pushing and driving trends, perhaps maybe is those who are walking and playing a little bit of a pipe and others are following them. Kind of like the pied piper. Regardless of what it is, they are pushing an influence in our culture. They are the ones who are bringing about changes that many are following in regards to fashion, morality, even the way that religion is done in our nation, the religions that are pursued, and those that are practice, and influencers push cultural trends, many people, some knowingly. They're happy. They want to get on board. They want to follow these influencers. There are others who unknowingly are just kind of caught up in everything. Following along what it is that they see among them and these folks who are influencing them are causing them to seek to do and these influencers we see today, and it's different, but they do seem to wield a similar power and when we were together in our previous passage and we saw the power that was brought together in the trial, the first trial sit down that Rome had there against Paul. We saw powerful people brought together much influence. It's a little different. Now we have folks that are on social media and they're spouting ideas and putting things together. But yet there is a similar power being seen in the impact of what they're doing, what they're promoting and we see somewhat of a similarity. And even though there's a difference between these Jewish religious leaders, these Roman civil leaders and the influencers that we see around us today. These influencers that lest you doubt and say, oh, that's silly, social media doesn't make that big impact. Oh, that's silly. So people make it some videos and post them something. They're not that impactful. And yet, and yet, this is the kind of the infantry, as it were, these are some of the mighty forces that have literally turned our culture upside down in such a way twisting reality that we as a people in a large part even deny the very creational orders that God has given. And we look at some of the most simple basic things and we say, how can we even know these things? We flip them around, turn them out and we have some very strange demonic zeitgeist that is controlling us. These influencers that bring these things. Most of these influencers think a little too more highly of themselves, just like those in history who have had power. They think more highly of themselves than they really are. We see the real reality that God is the one who is in control. So we look at this chapter, work our way through together this morning. What I want us to see and remember is that God, as the sovereign influencer of history uses his church to witness himself to the world. The God is the one who is in control, God is the one who is bringing all things together that he might witness himself to the world. We're going to look at three things. The influence of Paul's enemies, the influence of Paul's captor and the influence of Paul's God. The influence of Paul's enemies, the Jewish religious leaders, they're still plotting against Paul. It's been two years, as I mentioned earlier, as we left chapter 24, we come into 25, two years, Paul has been captive there in caesarea, has been in bondage and you'll remember it was two years ago, just a week to us, as we were looking at the assassination plot against Paul, these men who had vowed that they were going to kill Paul all cost. And two years later, they're still amongst the Jewish community. They were such a desire to kill Paul and silence him except his mood from a group of zealous men. Now it's the actual leadership. So those who are in charge, they are the very ones who are seeking to kill Paul. They are the ones that are coming together and conspiring that they might see Paul silenced and live no longer seeking to influence the Roman civil government to do their bidding. And to silence Paul forever in their minds. They are plotting and asking. They won't festus, the new guy who comes. They're trying to work on the fact that he obviously wants to keep peace in this area that's known for turmoil in the Roman Empire and so they're kind of giving him an idea. Hey, festus. There'd be some peace if you just help us. It was a favor. Get rid of this Paul. This troublemaker is causing all of these issues amongst us and you. But the Jewish religious
Truth For Life Daily Program
"agrippa" Discussed on Truth For Life Daily Program
"It does not make sense to live then in isolation, from those to whom we have been united. So they were formerly stateless, and he's going to tell them how they have now a whole new citizenship. They were friendless, but now they have a completely new family, and they were once alienated, but now they have been joined together. Now, all of this actually flows out of this one phrase this morning that I want us to pay attention to. And it's there in verse 13, but now in Christ, Jesus, in Christ Jesus. This actually is the most common description in the Bible of a follower of Jesus. That he or she is a person in Christ. You might be surprised to be reminded of the fact that neither Jesus nor Paul certainly in their recorded teaching are used the word Christian at all. In fact, Christian only appears in the New Testament three times. One look explains that the followers of Jesus were first called Christians in Antioch, and they weren't called Christians as sort of in a nice way. They were called Christians in a not nice way. You Christians. You Christian. It is also when Paul gives his testimony before Agrippa, and Agrippa system, do you really think you're going to make me one of these Christians in such a short time? And the other place, the only place that is actually used in any positive dimension is in first Peter chapter four where Peter is speaking about suffering and he says, you know, if you suffer as a Christian. And he's using it there simply as we most commonly use it, namely as a follower of Jesus. But you know, when you think this out, it makes sense that Paul and he does this over a 150 times in his letters. Over a 160 actually, not necessarily the exact phrase in Christ Jesus, but synonyms for that essentially. He comes to it again and again and again. He understands how vital it is that those who have professed faith in Jesus Christ understand that what has happened to them is that there have been united with Christ that they live in union with Christ that he is not an add on to their profession of faith. They are in him and it is on account of the fact of their union with him that everything else flows. So that, for example, when you tell somebody these days, if someone says you, what are you? And you say, well, I'm a Christian. Well, they will often come back and say, well, either what does that mean or what kind of Christian are you? And so on. And the term itself is not actually particularly helpful.
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Then ultimately, the three books is kind of very long description of that. Of this chain of correspondence, and I think if you think of this, I'm not saying that people have to be Catholic or Christian. I'm certainly not. But if you think in terms of this kind of ultimate source for things, whatever that source is, and having that just filter down, where by layer by layer by layer, even if it's not literally true, we know that there are other galaxies and solar systems, there are millions of these. But if you think of this visually poetically, it's a very powerful idea. And it's what the each is doing. You're using your imagination. Imagination is kind of degraded now as a term because we think of imagination as, you know, not having any kind of reality to it. But in the ancient world, you know, your imagination is what makes you act and that's the animating force behind magic. And applying that to the astrology is something I don't hear very much. I mean, there's this almost like a mediumistic component to astrology that isn't really acknowledged by a lot of people. We tend to think of things as rules and techniques and we follow this and you start speaking, but I think every stroller has had that experience where you say something, you don't know exactly where it came from. Came from the astrology, but you took that somewhere. Special and that's the sort of thing I think your grip was talking about and that's the sort of, I guess, place that I want to get to, more consistently. Yeah, that makes sense. And then one last thing, you just mentioned that made me think of something else to bring up, which is something he talks about different points or seems to talk about is magic as the sort of manifestation of the will or I don't know if that's implicit in just the basic premise of magic in the way that a lot of it's being used or conceptualized here. And something he does mention explicitly, which I almost feel like he's drawing on the picket tricks or similar lines of thought, but the necessity of belief and actually believing that what you're doing in some of these magical operations will work or that it can change or affect your will in some way. That that's like a prerequisite to it actually working and you being successful versus if you're somehow skeptical or doubting that this is actually a legitimate thing that that in and of itself will hamper your ability to actualize your will at that point in time. Yeah, so at a simplest magic according to Agrippa works by employing all three of the world. So I'll basically all three books. So the natural world, celestial world, and divine world. And the celestial world is a little complicated because I don't think it always means astrology specifically because it also includes a number. And alphabets and things like that. So there's a little bit more to it than just astrology. But you're employing all three of those worlds, but the thing that makes all three of those worlds become magical is the practitioner. It's the same thing with astrology. I mean, when you're doing a reading, the stars are just doing what they do. Or the planets are doing what they do, but when you're doing a reading, you're basically making something, you're making a different package out of that. To make it understandable to someone. And so the belief part of it is that the active agent in the magic. So it's the practitioner of the, and if you don't believe in it, you. Know, I think from a mundane standpoint, you really can't do anything unless you believe in what you're doing. You can't really cook unless you believe you can cook. Even if there might be a little bit of a doubt like whether or not I can do this, but you should have some sort of confidence in doing what you're doing. And the part that's kind of unstated there, I think, in that section, is that what a gripper calls the imaginative spirit of the magician is the sort of activating force. So it's the knowledge and belief and the purity and I think it all senses of the word. That's a big term. But the purity of the magician as well. Allowing all three of those elements to come together into one particular result. So if you don't believe in what you're doing, then you probably are going to be unable to enact anything. Because you don't lack the confidence to actually act. A key to the planet. Yeah, I mean, that really is interesting to me and I've been pondering that a lot lately how the intentionality of the practitioner of an astrologer can make a real difference in doing or accomplishing something and how that might be relevant for things like electional astrology where you're kind of doing something similar and that's something Austin and I talked about how electional astrology is the closest analog in terms of branches of astrology to magic because you're attempting to actualize and achieve some specific objective. You're trying to will something to happen by picking one moment to initiate it rather than another and in that way you're almost sort of manipulating the astrology to a certain extent, but it's ultimately coming from a place of attempting to achieve one outcome rather than another and doing it based on the notion that different moments in time will be more or less successful or more or less auspicious for that thing. It's a clarity.
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"What's happening right now, or what can we do with this information for the future kind of a thing? One of the examples I think of for my effort Cuban side of things is we have a divination and there are certain signs that come up in the divination that actually warn you that if something happens, there's one sign that says that if you hear something outside while this reading is going on, like an accident or a strange sound or something like that, not to investigate it. And so it's a very fascinating idea to me that yes we're doing the astrology. We sort of think of these readings as being this kind of I don't want to say clinical, but a sort of isolated entity, and to think that more holistically in this magical worldview that it's actually part of. I would love to see more of that. I think it's happening more than it used to. I noticed I think a lot of younger people coming into astrology aren't necessarily as constrained as some of the older people were about their approaches because there's just so much available now. And I think that with a lot of younger people, it feels like more of a given that astrology is part of this bigger, bigger world. I hope to see more of that. Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. And there's so much there that's interesting to explore and that takes us back to something that I think almost all cultures sharing common around the world no matter where that is, which is that almost every culture developed some form of divination and there's some sort of notion that through random seemingly random or chance like phenomenon, like the shuffling of cards or the throwing of coins or dice or what have you that it can actually send pertinent messages and describing the nature of what's happening in that moment and telling you something about what's coming up in the future. And the fact that that's shared in common among so many cultures is really interesting and ties into astrology because originally astrology was one of the later forms of divination that developed where you would look at what was happening in the movement of the planets and stars was seen as a little bit more random sort of like the shuffling of cards, but that it could convey things about what was happening in the moment, as well as what was coming up in the future. Yeah, I love how things are going because I feel like that when I started with or both of us, I mean, we started around the same time, I think. When we started studying astrology, you had these camps that never crossed, never crossed their boundaries. And. To some extent, still isn't taking very seriously by a lot of occultists, but the two worlds are starting to converge a little bit more. I've noticed it more in the last maybe ten years. But blending that magical thinking with the astrology, I mean, I think about that one episode you did with Rick Levine where the power went out. As soon as you're in this episode, yeah, yeah. I think you're in this episode. Things like that happen. Audio problems with this one. I'm not sure. Yeah, well, and just going back to that notion of astrology and that moment of the inception of something at the alignment of the planets at that moment has something special to say about the quality of what you're starting at that time and its future and that you can read that through the symbolism of the planets and the stars and the alignment of the cosmos at that moment. And just the basic premise that for some reason the outcome of something is built into its origins and at the origin or seed moment of something when you start something carries that potential so that it's not just paying attention to the stars and planets at that moment, but anything happening in your environment that really takes us back to very early. In ancient cultures that and the sort of universality of that of different cultures around the world I think can set it getting to something that's very deep and profound and important about something that's a basic property of the cosmos that maybe isn't well understood or articulated at this point. But here in Agrippa, we see how he's tying together all of these different threads of all of these different philosophical and religious and occult and divinatory practices in showing how all of those different pieces or at least attempting to show how all those different pieces can fit together in the model of the cosmos that he had at the time and in that way this work represents one of the best attempts at that. That anyone's made in history because of its attempt to bring everything together under one banner and in one set of books. Yeah, and I think one of the things this book did for me was one of the oldest arguments in astrology is how does this strategy work? And the modern era, we get a lot of things like, you know, maybe it's magnetism, maybe it's gravity, maybe it's light and maybe it's quantum physics or.
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Kept the structures. I had to break up the sentences later on because it would be unreadable. But I try to keep things very one to one translation ways. I tried not to become too poetic, and I didn't go outside the lines, and if there was something I wasn't sure about, I would footnote it with a Latin. So that way, if someone questions at least, they can look it up themselves and there are some very enticing things that I would love to learn the identity of, especially some of the plants that soon to be unknown. But yeah, I try to be very, very methodical about it. And the S logological sections were pretty easy to translate. Right. Because he was drawing on sometimes very old works like the work of pliny from the first century for some of the plants and stones and our knowledge even of which plants and stones that's referring to in the original Latin text of pioneer still ambiguous or unknown to this day. And I don't think your gripper would have known some of them. I think he was just copying some of these things. Sure. Let's see, one other thing I wanted to ask you about is sometimes I thought it was interesting. I was curious what terms you were translating because there's some terms that as an astrologer or somebody only familiar with astrological texts, I'm not familiar with because you don't see them in purely astrological texts, but they are common texts in magic or terms used in magic like the word operations that you're translating as operations and other words like binding, what are the Latin terms that you're translating for those two words? Operation is almost the same. It's like operatio. Which is means work. I left operation because it's common in a lot of magical texts because it's sort of implies. I don't like your compiling a lot of different elements together for a certain result. And binding the time, but I use binding because that's the common word that people would use. And so that's a very common magical practice where essentially you're just you're tying together either physically or through some other means to things together. So for instance, some love spell. You would bind a representation of one person with a representation of another person. Probably I literally tie in cases like that. But you could bind your will with something else too. There's a lot of different uses for it. But in a grip, it's pretty literal, so I can actually literally tying things together. He quotes some verses with that tying yellow thread, a certain number of times around something for a certain goddess, for instance. But it's combined to different elements together. Right. Forces or whatever you want to say. And then some of the astrological elections and versions of that, you're creating a talisman or you're creating an electional chart and then they're sometimes creating two different electional charts and images of those and then combining them together if you're trying to bind those two things. Correct. That's one thing you can do as well. Yeah. Some of these aren't explicitly astrological, but some of them can be astrological. You can make it as logical. Right. Okay. Are there any other terms like that that are terms that maybe somebody familiar with astrology who's picking up this book for the first time may not know, but somebody that's familiar with magic would be familiar with or where you're transiting it using terms that are understood by practitioners of magic? I tried to footnote a lot of these terms bindings I didn't footnote because he describes it pretty detailed, but one of the words like allegation is one word. Which is to something you hang around your neck? Another one is a factory, which is a magical protection like a shield or something like that. It's a lot of little things like that by footnote that kind of thing. I wonder how much lily kind of established our conventions for a lot of conventions for English and astrology. And I wonder to what extent the JF translation of Agrippa in 1651 established a lot of the conventions then they became common or used in English in magical circles after that point. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. Think about some of these terms like operation or binding or what have you? Yeah, and also this is coming in a time too when there's also a lot of chemical material coming out in English too. And some other explicitly magical things like the discovery of witchcraft is a famous one. That was all happening at this time. I think lily lily is one of the earlier ones though. 1647. Another thing connected with some of this is he talks about a section about paying attention to omens at the beginning of your magical operation. As well as chapters on this connected on auguries and just blending different types of divination and he has a discussions about a bunch of different types of divination. Yeah, that's fascinating. That's something that's kind of a lost art. A lot of people don't do this. So it's observing essentially nature. When you're about ready to do something. So if something unusual happens, like. A bird hits the window or something like that, you would pay attention to that or you would you're outside and you see the birds flying in a certain direction or you see a particular animal walking across your path could be good or bad. If you're out in the Woods and you suddenly see a pig, that might mean something.
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Pencil. No, okay. Library copies always have that. Yeah, so let's see other things that we meant to talk about. About this work or things that make it unique or important in terms of especially in astrological context and for astrologers, he drew a lot on the work of miss marsilio ficino, it looked like it was, of course, the famous translator of the corpus hermeticum, as well as the works of Plato, but marsilio ficino was also super into sympathetic magic and using electional astrology for different things, right? Yes, and Pacino was much more narrow focused compared to a group. Because if Pacino was kind of anti magic, in a lot of ways, except for S logological magic. That was okay because that's obviously obviously. As a divine influence, but a grip I had a wider definition, which I think which I think was to our benefit that he was able to widen that meaning about or focus. But yeah, Pacino was he definitely was influenced by the pico tricks. And he was probably the most major source. I think widely read source for astrological magic. Because pick a tricks was never printed. It was only in manuscripts. About Pacino was much more much more popular. He quoted directly from pick and fix quite a bit. Got it. And then there was another author. I know in some of the specific electional rules for certain type making certain types of astrological images that Agrippa gives, you said a lot of that is sort of word for word copied from an earlier Arabic author from the 8th or 9th century, right? Right. And that was in Latin. It was translated as translated in Latin by somebody. And I didn't realize that book was so. I guess popular is the right word, but I didn't realize it was that available. But Agrippa almost quoted the whole book. Yeah, because it's just a little short book. It actually, I think, sort of Warnock published a translation of it, right? He did, in fact, John echo gear did Greer did, I think those early translation and then John macro geared in another version and he put them both in the same book. And it's still pretty small. Okay. Yeah, so that gets incorporated into a grip is work. I think it's also incorporated into the pick a tricks. So it's interesting how some of these same works keep getting brought back and incorporated into different compilations or reincorporated a different points. Yeah, the famous Hermes on the 15 stars herb stones, et cetera. That's in pick a tricks. It's in ficino and it's in Agrippa. It's pretty much everywhere. Okay. Are there any other major sources astrologically that are relevant in terms of, I mean, I know at some point, he starts mentioning certain things like reception and he's talking about the conjunction being the most powerful aspect, but then the trying being next and being really positive, but that if you have a trying with reception, then it becomes as powerful as a conjunction, which I thought was really, really interesting. That is interesting. And I think that was a little bit of a surprise to me was I thought there would be but not somewhere in there because but not so ubiquitous. And but there's no but not. And so there's astrology comes from Pacino. A couple of books by Al kindi. Which were popular in Latin. And even kura and the book harmonia mundi. But he didn't have a lot of other sources, which I really expected to see that in there. The work on the sigils is from that's one of the only books I wasn't able to get a copy of. It's in a manuscript in England. That's a very obscure book. I think ibn Ezra has mentioned that one. Yeah. And also Leopold of Austria. Yes, I forgot about him. Yeah, so the work on the decades, and I think dimensions of the moon are a combination of pick a tricks, Leopold, and. Johann Angeles. Yeah, there's that too. But there isn't this huge white. I expected more grimoires too. And there were no grandmas as we would think of it. So it's interesting how he extracted that material. None of the election rules come from pick a tricks. Which I expected there to be. That comes from other sources. We'll see if the genome. Okay. I think I said direct. So part of the reason for this is important to bring it back to the present is that this is one of the works that when some early practitioners started getting into traditional astrological magic, for example, in the late 90s or early 2000s, like Christopher Warnock, this would have been one of the only works that was available to them that gave them some of these magical electional rules through that English translation from the 17th century and then it's only over the course of the past decade or two since that time that we've then subsequently had translations of some of the source texts that Agrippa was drawing on the pick a tricks or some of the different astrological texts, but this was initially one of the only things that was available. But it was in that flawed translation. And now we finally have an authoritative translation that correctly expresses the authentic original work of Agrippa. Yeah, I tried to be very, very careful about the.
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"It's a little bit before. And if I can believe he was gripper would have been a child probably when he died. But he died young. He was in his 30s. But he believed that he was one of the early people who believed, you know, like a group that there was this overarching oneness to all of knowledge. And so he attempted to bring in cabala with astrology, western esotericism, and he started that whole gene. And then Johannes reichman picked up where he left off. And that was hugely influential to Agrippa. But Agrippa would not have I don't think realized the youth of the Christian capitalistic movements. I think he believed that it was probably very when about thousands of years. To him. There was only less than 50 years old, probably. Right, but because of, I guess, the Christian context of him being in Europe and the historical belief in the historic curiosity of the Bible narrative, the notion that Hebrew and the Hebrew letters were like the oldest and the other languages were subsequently derived from that. It seems like for that reason he places Hebrew letters as being super central and important in a magical context due to the magical properties of both letters as well as numbers. Yeah, so the magical properties of the letters, the words, constructed from those letters. Even the construction of the alphabet itself has a magical component to it because according to him, they were constructed via celestial motions and have a numerical component to it as well. So it's not just a random, this is going to be the letter a, he believed that there was a great, a greater philosophical meaning behind the forms of the letters themselves. So it goes as deep as that, not just what we think it was just regular cabalistic thought. Okay. Yeah, so that's really important. There's also some Pythagorean numerology that plays an important role at different points, and there's this whole extended section. And one of the books where he goes through each of the basic numbers and talks about the symbolic and occult or metaphysical meaning of each of these numbers, starting with the number one, and then the number two, and three, and so on and so forth. Yes. And that's one of those areas of the book that there's some tables. For each of the numbers that summarizes all of this material. And not all of the elements in those tables are mentioned in those chapters. Since I have a PDF of my book, I can search for things really easily. And so it's interesting because I've had some people ask me where such and such in the table comes from. And I was able to Google it. And I found out, oh, it's mentioned in book three somewhere. And nowhere else. So those tables are actually very interesting. It's a really good summary. Okay. And you guys tried to reproduce the images and the symbols and glyphs used in the original manuscripts as faithfully as possible. And it seems like did a really good job in terms of that. So for those watching the video version, this is an image you sent me from one of the actual manuscripts of some symbols or sigils used for certain fixed stars like the pleiades or aldebaran and then what it looks like, I guess this is from your actual text, right? Right. Yeah. And then other symbols for different things like the planets. These are the geometric symbols. You just supposed to be constructed from connecting the dots of the geometric signs. Okay. And then there's other illustrations like images of a human being and the symmetry involved in the human body. Different symbols for the Jupiter so this is for symbols for Jupiter. Correct. And I didn't include it in the graphics because the layout is a bit strange, but I also found that the sigils for a couple of the sigils from mercury and the moon were flipped around in the JF version. Okay. So is that one of the ones, for example, that you were talking about with the supposed talisman that was found on Joseph Smith having like an error on it comes from some of the things like that? Yeah, so specifically the Jupiter so the intelligence of Jupiter that's on the screen, there's a gap in the top loop. That's only in specific editions. And that was just basically recreated, which I think is something that happens in magical books, some little oops by ascribe. It gets reproduced. Right. And so some of these are for the planets, for example, are tables that give different numerical values at different points in the table and these are supposed to be inscribed on the talismans or the images. That's one use that's also how the sigils were constructed. It's a relation with the letters and the numbers. So when you construct it in a certain way, you have a name of a particular social spirit. Okay. Another symbols and then here's the cover..
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Somehow a copy of the manuscript or an early draft of it leaked out and people were talking about it. And so a group took control of it and he said, okay, I'm going to do this my way and if I'm going to be accused of my sins, at least let them be my own sense. And so I think he died and this is speculation, but he was put in jail for debts that he owed. And he died after being released as a result of a probably a weakened system. Okay. So yes, so even though he originally wrote the initial version of the book in 1510, that version leaked out and he went on to have a long career doing other stuff. Including, I'm not sure what year that was. It was like in the 1520s, he wrote that skeptical work, which criticized many different fields of knowledge, and then it wasn't until 15 33 that he finally publishes, he goes back to this book, finishes it and publishes it, but there's some debate at that point about whether he was still a practicing occultist and whether he believed in all of that. Because he had written the skeptical work several years earlier and also because in the final version of this book, he seems to almost express some skepticism about it saying I think at the end that he wrote it when he was a younger man and his thought had matured or something like that. So there's some debate today about the extent to which the final publication towards the end of his life represented his actual views or whether he was just doing it in order to like you said get a handle on it because the earlier manuscripts that had errors had already leaked out. And so he wanted to fix the errors in his original writings. Yeah, that was one part of it. The book that you're describing has his famous retraction. And a lot of people sort of take this out of context. We don't know, can never know what he was thinking, of course. But the book that this came from, it was called on the vanity of the arts and sciences. And it was basically a chapters on every area of human learning. And the basic theme of the book is to show how human knowledge is actually quite frail and incomplete compared to God, for instance. And so that rich attraction is part of that. And when you think about this is a little bit of in three books too, where the grip is putting a primal emphasis on anything that's related to God directly. So the magic that we do has to relate to God and the knowledge that we do has to relate to God and as long as we keep God in that central position, that we're not going to veer too far off course. And so he was kind of lampooning scholars and church people who just really thought that they were the end all be all of knowledge. And that's where that retraction came from. But keeping in mind that he was most likely revising three books while that was happening while he was writing that. Okay, so the fact that he was still working on this occult book and getting ready to publish it for you, you take that to mean that it's more likely that you think that he still did have some belief in investment in this. And that's why he eventually did go on to actually publish this work towards the end of his life. Yeah, it was definitely to save his reputation a little bit. I think he wanted to have that sort of final stamp on things, but for what I'm gathering from the 1510 manuscript is the final version is a lot more nuanced. And so I think a lot of years have passed and he there were also some books that were published during the interim, which I think changed him a lot. You know, two of those are Roy Cohn's on the art of kabbalah, and another one is not a very well-known book today. It's by Francisco, Giorgio. Called the harmonia mundi or the harmony of the world. And that book is physically larger than three books. It's an immense book. But Giorgio was a capitalist Christian capitalist. And he attempted to do some of what Agrippa was doing to have this kind of overarching worldview with all the esoteric world, but it wasn't quite as esoteric as by our standards as a group it would be. He kind of stays away from what we would call magic today. He goes into a lot of astrology. He goes into kabbalah and that kind of thing. But a lot of Agrippa's astrological material and a lot of his material on kabbalah, ironically came from a book. Yeah, so that mentions brings up something that's really important that is a major factor in this book, especially I think in the third book, which is the incorporates a lot of capitalistic and a lot of kabbalah into his work and into some of the magical stuff and this ended up playing a major role in terms of bringing some of that stream into more into western occultism and sort of permanently imprinting some of the kabbalah on western occultism from that point forward. Yeah, what's fascinating about that is that Christian kabbalah was mostly formulated by pico. Who was a student of the chinos. And pico was young. He goes. Yeah, who famously wrote one of the largest and supposedly most scathing attacks on astrology ever to be written. I guess either contemporaneous or a few decades before this..
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"For him to do that because he's essentially bucking against not just people like Pacino, but he's bucking against And his seeming grace really was that he knew a lot of powerful people. And but the we don't know a lot about the secret organization and how much influence they would have had on him. And he was a young person in the group too. There were older people who put a grip, you know, put a grip of sort of in the central position in that group. In a lot of ways, he was kind of the person that members of the group. So it's interesting that this 20 something year old, I don't know when he started it. The group. Was, in some ways, being looked up to by people in their 40s 50s and so we don't know to what degree that group influenced the material in three books, but the fact that he was able just to do that, and it's coherent. It doesn't feel fragmented or incomplete or anything like that. It's remarkable. Yeah. Well, and he was kind of a polymath and a man of he was like an educated, talented scholar, but he wore also many different hats, right? He did. Well, like a lot of educated people at that time he was a doctor. But he worked for a lot of kings and noble people. He was, he did medicine. He did tutoring, he was a secret agent, allegedly. And he worked as he was in general, I believe in for one of the kings or lords. And so he was definitely respected as the scholars at the time, and there was an intrigue in the dictionary on western esoterica, the one edited by autograph. But the atria and Agrippa says that it's a shame that he's only known for three books of a cult philosophy because if he had never written that book, he would have been probably respected by academia as this great scholar. He wrote other books and other works that were semi important or influential, especially later in his life a book on skepticism. On skepticism, and that one's notable because of the famous retraction. But what a lot of people don't realize is he also wrote a book on almost like Proto feminism. By today's standards, it's probably not very feminist. But back then, it was an important thing because he was he was exalting the central importance of women in a way that most scholars and texts at the time just would not have touched that subject whatsoever. And they didn't take it very kindly either. But yeah, it's amazing that he was able to do what he did. He exonerated a woman being accused of witchcraft by exposing corruption in the system. And all these things did not make him very popular, but the fact that he was going in that direction I think is immensely important. And overlooked, I think, because people just know him as this writer of an occult book, but he was very forward thinking for the time. Yeah, and the doctor thing and the polymath or man of different paths thing as well as an educated scholar reminds me of somebody who would have been as contemporary, which is Nostradamus, who was a French physician, but also astrologer and had access to many different texts. He was reading and sort of polymath who did many different things. Yeah, exactly. And or someone like the genome. Except for Chino was more church based, but yeah, he's a remarkable figure. I mean, he's sort of the prototype of Faust. This sort of based on them a lot. Let me share what we talk a little bit more about his life. I did find birth data for him, I don't know how reliable this is. Holden gave it and there was a source in my notes, which said that it's dirty data, but that somebody quotes gadberry, John gadbury, for part of it. And yeah, so the date may be correct time may or may not be correct, but for whatever it's worth, what we've got is September 14th, 1486 at three 24 a.m. in cologne, Germany, with early Virgo rising. Mars up in Gemini in the tent house, which you remarked about and left yesterday when we first looked at this because of his kind of, he had some rough times in terms of his career and getting himself into trouble at different points throughout the course of his life. The sun is at 29° of Virgo and interestingly, if this is accurate he was born just after a full moon, the moon had just moved into Aries, there had just been a formula in Pisces, but the moon was in the Ares. Saturn and Sagittarius, Jupiter and Capricorn, mercury, and Libra, and Venus in Leo, and the degree of the mid heaven in late Taurus. So he, you know, he was interested in how all these different intellectual interests, but because of his interests in both the occult as well as theology and scholarship, it's under that he kept getting into trouble due to some of the throughout the course of his life, right? Several times, he had, my thought about him is that I think we all know this person, or we might be this person. Who is probably thinking correctly about things? But doesn't understand why other people don't believe the same thing. And so he would voice his opinions a lot, and he would just put himself in the hot water a lot. The example with the witch trial is a good example. Because in his mind, I'm sure he was thinking, okay, well, I'm exposing corruption. And they're accusing this woman who is innocent. So people are going to think me for exposing this situation. And then he ended up getting thrown out of town. And that happened over and over again for his defensive women. He was this happened about two or three times in his life. He was reported to the inquisition, and then they would. They would. Do this investigation in secret. Behind his back. And in some cases, he would know what's going on and other times he would just be far away while they're investigating him and then he would have to defend himself after the fact three letters. So it's just this ongoing pattern of people just. Not liking his ideas. Ironically, he wasn't really attacked for his cult practice until late in his life. While I was in production. Because copies had already had been leaking out for a while. That's actually the reason why he did this version of it.
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"His book, what is it that the secret teaching of all ages? Correct. Which was written in what the 1920s, and he was only in his 20s. He was like 20 two or 23 or something. He didn't really do mid 20s for sure. Yeah, so manly Palmer hall, this is in the early 20th century, but he was super young and he wrote this, you know, huge compilation of information of everything he was able to find from earlier called traditions that were available to him at that point as a huge compilation, but he was super young at that point. And this book, the three books of occult philosophy, Agrippa was on the 24 when he wrote the first version of this in 1510, right? Right. It was a little bit smaller than we have today. The order of the chapters were different. But it was recognizable. For sure. Yeah, so large part. So even though it was then 23, 24 years, before he eventually published the final version in what 1533, and then he died, sadly, two years after that, two years later, only in his late 40s, the fact that he wrote so much of the core of the text, which would still largely be the same as the final version when he was only 24 and 1510, it makes me think of that and just makes me think of me being in my 20s writing Wikipedia entries based on all the text that I had been reading going in college and going to Kepler college and also reading translations from project hindsight. And so much of what you do at a certain stage of your learning is at an earlier stage of your learning is just synthesizing and trying to work out all of the information of your teachers and your immediate sources and there's this impulse to want to write everything down that you're learning and get it all in a certain frame of reference that makes sense, almost like you're study notes in some sense. And that's still a task. It's not necessarily a negative thing. I just recognize that as a thing that sometimes certain students will do at certain stages. And it's pretty bold.
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"One of the, it's on the chapter on earth, so I don't know what chapter it is four or 5 something like that. He makes a throwaway statement that earth is entirely changeable. This is the J of translation. And then Donald Tyson makes a footnote saying, well, a group I did read is Plato. Properly. And I looked at the Latin. It's correct. It's supposed to be unchangeable like earth would be. So it's a lot of little things like that if you're not that you wouldn't necessarily notice if you don't know the Latin. Okay, that makes sense. And then also in doing this translation, you're actually able to take advantage of the fact that there was a critical addition of the Latin text of Agrippa that was published in 1992 or 1993, right? I think it was 90 one or two, is before Tyson came out with it. Okay. So this was done by an academic scholar who specialized in Agrippa's work and specialized in the study of renaissance texts and things like that and as well as editing and comparing of manuscripts and actually went through the different editions and reconstructed what the original text was, but then also did a lot of work identifying the sources that Agrippa drew on in different parts of his text, right? Yes, and that got me started. So because of the Internet, I was able to get access to a lot of these books, the exact books that the exact conditions of the grip are probably had in a lot of cases. And so the critical addition she first of all, I think it's interesting because since the three books was always printed except for the original manuscript in 1510, a lot of people assumed that there wouldn't be that many variations, but considering that it was all all the type of set by hand. There were a lot of variations, also with the graphics because those were redone by hand every single time. And so it got me started, but when I was able to get access to the books themselves, I actually made changes from the critical editions. Well, because I just found things that now are really easily available. And I also found a couple of errors in the critical edition because I was comparing it with the 1533 in the 1550 version as well, additions. So I cross compared those two editions with JF with Tyson. So I did all I compared all those texts at the same time. Right. And one of the things I thought was really interesting and one of your conclusions was that this text that he's constantly drawing on different ancient or contemporary texts throughout the entirety of the three books of occult philosophy so that Agrippa in some ways represents a compilation and a synthesis of a bunch of different philosophical and occult works that existed up to that point and while some people have assumed that he had access to secret texts because of possibly being involved in some sort of secret society in Paris, in fact, one of the things that you pointed out was he was basically just drawing on a lot of works that were available at that point in time in the 16th century. Yes, and I do think that secret group, the little secret society that he was part of, I think, that was a help because there are certain things I don't think he had a copy of pick a tricks. For instance. Even though he draws on it, seems to draw on it heavily in some places. To me, this is my opinion, but I feel like that those were from notes. So maybe someone that he knew had access to it, or he was able to see a copy of it. Because there aren't a lot of just one to one quotes from pick a trick. There's a lot of mixing quotes from picket tricks with other books as well to kind of flush it out more. And it's a very specific sections. He doesn't use pick a trix's material on elections, for instance. At all. It's only the decades, mansions of the moon, and then a couple of just throw away sentences. That actually aren't even astrology. Which surprised me. So that one, I think, was notes. I think there were a few that were like that, but for the most part, yeah, I mean, these were books that were easily available during the renaissance, you know, Pacino, Johannes Royce, people like that. And that's the majority of the book. You know, it was another one that he almost quotes half the book in there. Right. And that's one of the things that's cool and useful about your translation as you note in the footnotes every time he is drawing on sentences from some earlier texts that can be identified and in that way you're able to sort of demonstrate as you're reading through the book, just how much he's taking and incorporating sentences or entire paragraphs from different sources and then fusing them together in his own text. And what's even more interesting is certain sentences are made up of many, many quotes. Which is crazy to me. I mean, I can't imagine writing a book that way. I don't mean that in a moral way, but taking those of us with a lot of books. Imagine taking your library and doing nothing but taking quotes from books that you have and then formulating your own argument with those quotes. Yeah, I mean, it actually makes sense to me, because one of the things that this book really reminded me of was manly Palmer hall.
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"The margin notes. That's something I remember from Mike William lily and what you mean by that is you have the body of the text of the paragraphs, but then on the right side or the left side of the paragraph on the outer edge of the page, there's little notes, almost like in order to tell you what that chapter or what that section is about. Here's one from chapter 23, and there's just a little note in the margin on the right of the paragraph that says the circle is the most perfect figure. So it's like summarizing what that paragraph is about. Yeah, it's almost like renaissance highlighting. Yeah. That's where I look at it. Yeah, it reminds me of William Lilly's text where he does that as well about a century later because this book public was published in 1533 and lily published Christian astrology in 1647. One of the things I found really fascinating was that the only other English translation of Agrippa's three books was published in 1651 by some anonymous person. We don't know who it is. We just know the initial is published in the initials JF. But he published that in 1651, which is only four years after William lily's book Christian astrology came out, which ended up being the single most influential book. It was the first major book on astrology that was written in English, the first major textbook on astrology written in English because Lilly made the deliberate decision to write it in English for an English speaking audience rather than writing it in Latin so that it could only be read by people that knew Latin in 1647 and then just a few years later we have this book being translated into English at the time, which is pretty major in terms of also founding centuries of how that influenced the magical tradition. There was the only version until recently. Okay. So even the Donald Tyson version that everyone has is still that translation. Okay, so that's the one that was published by llewellyn that's like a single thick paperback book. And it says by Donald Tyson, but it's actually just sort of a commentary because he has a lot of footnotes and stuff, but it's largely just a reprint of that translation from way back in 1651. He did modernize the English, so he modernized a spellings. He added paragraphs, broke up the run on sentences that they liked to do back then. The GF characters interesting because there's two opinions, one is that it's someone named James freak who was just, I think it's just noted in some. Graphical material somewhere. But no one knows anything about him. Another opinion is that it's John French, who was alchemist. And that sort of seems to be the prevailing opinion, but what's interesting is the astrology is just so butchered. In that translation that it sort of makes me question that and because I don't have a good explanation why he would have made the mistakes that he did. Right. So part of your analysis and part of your motivation for doing your translation and why you thought it was necessary to re translate this text and publish a new edition of it as you have in the past few months is that this other translation going back to 1651 that everyone's using that the translator while I did a passable job, he made a bunch of errors and there's some things that he misunderstood about Agrippa's text, including a lot some of the technical astrological terms that were used. It was almost as if he wasn't an astrologer, it wasn't familiar enough with astrology in order to correctly translate some of those concepts into English. It's a very common terms back then, such as perfections. He consistently translated that as perfection. And then Donald Tyson, footnoted that as saying, okay, well that's a conjunction of the sun and the moon. Fuller new moon or something like that. So this is in a section where grippa is talking about different predictive tools he talks about solar revolutions. He talks about perfections, but then the footnote is, I would also solar revolution was noted wrong enticing as well. As meaning just simply someone's birthday, which technically isn't correct. Okay, so there were errors in the original 1651 translation and then some of those errors are then exacerbated or in some instances interpreted in an even worse way in the modern commentary in 1993 that everybody's using. So a large part of your translation, the advantage of your translation is that you've actually studied renaissance and medieval astrology so that you're familiar with the technical terminology. You're very familiar with the technical terminology and therefore when you go through this text and Agrippa starts throwing out technical terminology that he hasn't defined because it's not primarily an astrological manual. He's taking for granted that you already understand many of those concepts, you can translate those concepts and interpret them correctly as you render it into English. Yeah, and there was a lot more than I realized before. Things like the names of stones are sometimes suspect JF had a habit of translating a lot of stones as a jet stone, which I don't know why. There was one where it's supposed to be a ruby, any translates in his jet. Also, someplace where there's an instance recipe and it's an obscure word in Latin. And JF translated as again, which is unusual ingredient for the incense. And I found out later on it was amber, which makes a lot more sense. There's a lot of things like that. One of the funny ones.
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"But in the modern era, one of the issues is that it's interesting because I see a lot of astrologers not really taking magic very seriously. And then but the reverse is true, a lot of occultists don't take astrology seriously. They see it as two new age and whoo whoo for them. And I think that that attitude on both sides is changing a little bit over time. But when I started, it was too strict camps. And I dare not call astrology divination and things like that. And I see that a lot of modern occultists too, that just completely disregard astrology as meaningless. And I think that if you're doing some sort of a western magical system, it's good to at least take that into account a little bit. That doesn't mean you have to be a skilled astrologer, because that's not, that's not realistic, I don't think, for everybody. Sure. Does he require you to pay a stroll to do the elections for you? Yeah. Well, it's just interesting the extent to which it's integrated, at least in this author in high renaissance, somebody that's trying to write this comprehensive work on the philosophy and the practice of magic and the extent to which astrology is very much at the center of it for him. And an example of that is what would be an example of just some of the things he would take into account from a practical or a technical standpoint if he was trying to make something like a Jupiter talisman or something like that, for example. The basic idea is that Jupiter would have to be dignified in some way. So it's a sign of rulership or exaltation. In a notable place of the chart, usually the first are the tenth house. The moon has to be in reasonably good shape. Neither Jupiter or the moon should be receiving any negative influences from the malefic planet Saturn or Mars. And he goes a little deeper, which is actually pretty common. I think pick a tricks does this too. Where he doesn't want the. Plaintiffs for the operation to be even in the terms of Saturn or Mars. Even in certain degrees that are called dark pitted and dark pitted and what's the other one? Like, shadowy or something? Yeah. I can't think of the name right now. But there are specific degrees in each sign that are considered to be malefic. I don't see a lot of people paying attention to that today. That's a lot of, that's a lot to pay attention to, I think. But the idea is that you're really optimizing the planets as far as you could possibly take it. And a lot of these books at the time, they threw every single role possible at you. And that's another place for argument that a stroller has always had. Where they'll have 30 rules for something in the arguments, whether you do all 30 or the major ten, something like that. It's like William lily's considerations before judgment type of argument. But that's a basic idea. Okay. Yeah, and it is tricky with some of the elections because they're so highly specific for certain planets or certain types of elections that are like the ideal election that they only occur once in a decade or something like that. It reminds me of a lifetime. Right. Yeah, and so can be much more restrictive in terms of that if you were to always shoot for the ideal version of what it prescribes or the type of election that it prescribes, it reminds me of that famous story about benatti that I've told a couple of times before. And I read it and Holden and I think you'd say it's like lend thorndike or something for it and that it may not be a real story, but at least it was attributed to benatti of this notion of there's a guy that was down on his luck and broke and bernardi took pity on him the famous 13th century astrologer and he made him a wax talisman at a certain moment in time that captured the power of a specific planet like Jupiter or some really auspicious alignment and he made this wax figure for him as a talisman under that alignment and gave it to the person and the person suddenly grew rich and successful in his life changed, but that he ended up feeling bad. He had somehow he was doing something wrong and that this use of magic was against the church or against God or something like that and he went to pastor who told him to destroy the talisman. So he smashed it and got rid of it and then all of a sudden his fortune disappeared and he panics and then he goes to bernardi and asked him to make another talisman and bernardi exclaims you fool that alignment of planets won't recur for another century and there's nothing I can do for you and that's kind of like the end of the story. And I don't know if that's actually like a real story that happened, but certainly when it comes to certain electional charts and certain auspicious alignments in the notion of capturing those by initiating or creating something at that time that captures the power of that moment, there is something very tangible there that electional astrologers are familiar with in terms of certain things not being able to recreate them and being very spaced out. Well, and also, especially with house based talismans, some of the rules that Agrippa has.
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Right. So this is a person who's living basically during the height of what we consider to be the renaissance and he writes this huge tome initially relatively early in his life. He's only like 24 years old when the first draft draft is written, but he draws on and compiles a bunch of both ancient sources that he has disposal on both philosophy and magic and astrology, but also he incorporates interestingly a lot of contemporary sources and thinking that was present during the renaissance, including, like you said, large parts from the work of marsilio ficino, who was working what just a few decades prior to. Yeah, not far. Yeah. And from that, he's incorporating some of the things that we associate with the renaissance like the rediscovery of the works on the corpus hermeticum. And we find passages and influences from the corpus hermeticum coming up in his work. As well as some of the influence of some of the thinking of platonism and neo platonism. Right. So one of the big things though that you're influencing or emphasizing here that's really important is that this is not just three books on practically how to do magic, even though it has that in it, but also he tries to basically synthesize a bunch of the earlier magical and philosophical traditions and provide a rationale in a worldview that allows for magic within the 16th century context. Yes, and for him, it would have been important to show that it was part of a natural and divine process and not just simply demons or something like that. Because again, that was just that was a major concern because astrology is a good example where the church didn't necessarily condone astrology. But they had to acknowledge that it worked still. And they used astrology widely for medicine. And that was okay. By and large, so the question isn't whether or not it was real, the question is whether or not there was a way for it to be okay. So he's writing this in the renaissance and one of the things that's really important for my audience in terms of him not just developing a philosophy for magic, but one of the things I was really struck by was the very central role of astrology in his entire conceptualization of magic as being this core overarching thing that is sort of woven both philosophically as well as practically almost throughout the entire work. Yeah, astrology is essentially the physics of the ancient world. Because the basic worldview would be that influences come from God. Or the first cause or however you want to conceptualize that. And it goes down through several levels until it hits the planets and the planets then lend their influences in their own way until it reaches the moon, the moon then disperses those influences to us. And everything else on the planet. So if we're doing magic or if we're doing any kind of enterprise on earth, then the planets have to be part of that picture. So it's everywhere in the book. There's a lot of there are a lot of chapters that are explicitly astrological, but there's a lot of material in there that just mention that maybe in one sentence. And I think that it's important to understand that this isn't the strategy just wasn't a divinatory tool. To someone like Agrippa, this was, even if you weren't explicitly using astrology, it was just how things worked. That's how nature worked. Astrology was the means by which divine influences came into being. So it goes pretty deep. So one of the things I was struck by was the extent to which he says that you have to pay attention to the astrology and the inception astrology of the election astrology anytime that you want to attempt to do any sort of magical working and how thoroughly that is integrated into his philosophy and his practice of his actual practice of magic that you have to have an auspicious sort of astrological alignment at the time in order for things to be successful. Yes, and it seems this is a throwaway statement, but in one of the chapters he says that when starting some sort of a magical operation or any other enterprise, and then you just kind of move on. To election astrology. And which was a fascinating idea to me because I think to a lot of astrologers, I think a lot of us Rogers do elections for non magical purposes. We did it for this podcast. But the idea with that is that if the especially if the moon is disposing these influences, if something is damaged, then that's going to damage the operation that you're doing. The work that you're doing. And since this is part of the primary worldview to someone like a grip into the time, it's a given I think. It's interesting the level in which they paid attention to this. The sort of thing. Right. So that comes up, for example, in making talismans and if you want to invoke or capture the power of a specific planet, you have to do it at a specific astrological time in which that planet is powerful or prominent and well situated. But more broadly, just the how much he integrates that into doing any sort of magical working or operation is interesting because I know I don't think that's been the case necessarily or that continued to be the case in modern times so that sometimes creates tensions with modern practitioners of magic who maybe don't pay attention to astrology and want to be able to just do whatever they're trying to do with that reference to that versus going back to some of these older texts we see the grip is saying. You must take this into account at all times and this is sort of the foundation of everything. So does that create a sort of tension in some ways in the modern magical tradition? It can. However, I'm a big believer in compartmentalizing things like that. I think that making astrological election for every single thing you should do or I think according to those rules isn't strictly necessary every single time. Because some magical systems just don't, it doesn't matter. Or in things like some solomonic magic, the election rules are pretty simple by comparison. And I think it's okay.
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"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"I think. And that book was mostly plagiarized from three books, which I guess in turn was also plagiarized from many books, but the Jupiter talisman that he had has a feature in the sigil, which reproduced a printing flaw. That's in Barrett's megas, which is, I think. So I don't think it was directly aggressive, but it could have been. But the megas was very readily available, maybe more so than Agrippa during his time. Yeah. So, and whether it was like direct is a little inconsequential but the point is just the writing of this book in the 16th century ended up influencing and being sort of the grandfather of many, many different occult traditions in the west over the past 500 years, making it I mean, I think your book or one of the introductions says that it's the single most influential occult text in the past 500 years. Would you say that's true or what's your ranking? In terms of that? I do. Because when you compare it with other major books, there aren't many books like this that lay out esoteric thought in this way. I think the predecessors, the closest would have been probably ficino, there are gaps in his thinking, which is why I think Agrippa tackled it. You know, a lot of it comes down to the central question of what is good magic, what is bad magic? And in a group of wanted to really reconcile this idea that we had these ancient sages such as ancient Greeks and Romans that were hardly questioned in the renaissance. I mean, people like Plato, and they were doing all of these non Christian things, yet they're revered as being wise. So how does that work with Christianity? And that's kind of the central theme with this. And I don't want that to scare people because there's a lot to be learned from that kind of inquiry. Because today instead of Christianity, we might be trained to reconcile it with science. The scientific worldview. So I think there's a lot of value in deconstructing this and figuring out how does this work for me and if nothing else, getting you to ask those questions. But there's nothing else like that. There's some major books about the golden dawn. But they don't really deal with this kind of worldview either. Most books on magic, and astrology, frankly, are recipe books. They're books on techniques..
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Really they're all, it's all one big soup, really, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was something I talked about last month in my episode on hermeticism was there was a little bit of an issue in the early Hellenistic tradition because of the influence of stoicism and a lot of the early Hellenistic astrologers were really focused on learning what your fate is so that you know what you have to accept in the future. And that's like the point and purpose of astrology. And I think then that was sort of self contained in terms of just doing the astrology for the sake of that. But then definitely once you get later into the Hellenistic tradition and especially into the medieval tradition, there was more tensions with concepts of free will and stoicism fell out of fashion and therein we see the rise of some of the magical traditions and their integration with astrology because some of the magical traditions were playing with this question of once you know your fate, what if you could change it or if you could do something to alter things in some way or work with it in a way that's more constructive rather than just adopting this position of acceptance, I think. Yeah, it's an interesting shift that happened. And that shift happened largely because of the fall of the Roman Empire and both, again, these parallel histories that astrology and magic moved east over to Byzantium and Persia. And the Persians were definitely very much interested in jailbreaking astrology a little bit for magical purposes and that had been around for a while in some of the cultures in that area such as the Iranians and things like that. And by the time it came back into Europe, it was sort of taken for granted that it was always done. But it really developed after I think in the form that we recognize it after the fall of Vermont empire. It's a very interesting shift to me. 'cause you can see a lot of that in early astrological literature and things like the Greek magical papyrus. They don't have a lot of complex elections. They have things like this is a ceremony for this particular star or constellation or something like that, but you don't have these complex venous elections where Venus has to be in a particular position and things like that. That seems to be much later. Right. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so let's circle back around to question who is who's this? What is this work that we're talking about? And why is it important or influential? So the three books is interesting because it is the first book that I'm aware of that has this all encompassing philosophy that covers all of esoterica. He puts everything in one place. And so it's astrology. It's magic. It's what a lot of what we would call today magic, but also natural, they call it natural philosophy, which is the study of the esoteric effects of plants, animals, and stones and things like that. That's kind of part of the magic umbrella today. But back then, you had this kind of all encompassing worldview. And there was a lot of conflict before Agrippa wrote the book about how to reconcile magic and astrology with, say, Christianity. And this book, I know we're going to go into this more deeply, but this book seeing that there's really nothing like it. It never really disappeared from the shelves. I mean, it was translated during the esoteric revival in England in the 1600s. And that copy was disseminated and reprinted throughout until today. And it was influential in things like the formation of the golden dawn and a lot of the 19th century and early 20th century lodge magical systems. It's used as a source for pretty much any book on herbs and stones. That have been modern books, it's so readily available, but it's this all encompassing worldview that he has, which I think is entirely unique and something that is really missing today. A lot of people don't really want to take it to the level that I grew up in. Which is fascinating to me. Right. So this is a work, the final version of which it was published in 1533, correct? 15, yeah, 1533. 1533. And Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was originally a he was German. He wrote the work in Latin. It's a massive text on all different spheres of occultism and it ended up being basically the single most influential text or one of the single most, if not the most influential text on occultism over the past 500 years, basically since that time because it was translated into English relatively early on only about a century later. And ended up influencing a ton of different subsequent traditions all over the western world since that time, including even famously, I think the founder of mormonism, Joseph Smith, when he died, is said to have been found with a Jupiter talisman around his neck and the design was the same as the one that was in Agrippa's three books of a cult philosophy, right? Yeah, what's interesting about that is it probably wasn't directly Agrippa. It was probably from amigas. By Barrett, John Francis.
The Astrology Podcast
"agrippa" Discussed on The Astrology Podcast
"Interviewing Eric perdue and talking about his new translation of the three books of occult philosophy from the 15th, 16th century occultist and philosopher Henry Cornelius Agrippa. So hey Eric, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Yeah, and just for those that pay attention to such things today is Saturday, march 12th, 2022, starting at 1155 a.m. in Denver, Colorado, and this is the 243rd episode of the show. So you have been work. I've actually known you. I think we originally met through the old astrology forum that I used to run on MySpace. Many years ago in the mid 20 mid 2000s. And way back at some point, I think towards the end of the decade, like 2008, 2009, I remember you sending me some pieces of this translation you were working on even way back then of this huge tome of this book that you were working on. How long have you been translating this book? Seriously since 2011, I was doing a little snippets before that to see if I could. So yeah. So and this is the first time that this book has been translated into English again in over 300 or 350 years or something like that. I think it's more than that, I was doing the math yesterday. It was, I think, three 70, wow. Okay. So there was one prior translation, but it was done so long ago in the 17th century that it is itself both kind of weird in terms of its language, but also a little unreliable. So that's one of the reasons that you wanted to do this. What's your background? And you have a background in both astrology as well as magic, right? Yes, I've been practicing magic since seriously since 1990. And mostly through the effort Cuban sphere, I sort of fell into that accidentally. And my teacher was unusual. He was Cuban, and he was unusual in that he was also interested in the western esoteric tradition as well. So he knew some astrology. He used to elect some of our ceremonies. Probably not well in retrospect. And he introduced me to Agrippa. He also introduced me to pick a tricks, which I think is interesting because this would be mid 90s and that really wasn't on a lot of people's radars yet. So he didn't know about the critical edition that was of both books, which would have already been out. So he didn't really have a copy pick a tricks. He just knew subject matter and all that. But we talked a lot about Agrippa. Back then. And I was talking with my friend Austin copic about this the other night, and he was telling me that there's been a similar revival, just like how in the astrological community, starting in the 1990s, there was a revival of older forms of astrology and a sort of looking back into what are some of the sources of the western astrological tradition from prior to the past century and realizing that things were sometimes done very differently in modern times compared to even a few centuries ago or a thousand years ago or what have you. And he was saying there was a similar trend in some of the magical communities to start going back and looking back at some of the sources of the western magical tradition and it seems like this work is very much at the intersection of those two trends of the revival of ancient astrology and revival of the more traditional practices and magic. And maybe we should situate and frame and explain for those that have no background on this text whatsoever. Who Agrippa is, what this book is and why it's important and influential. Yeah, I wanted to mention really quickly too that one of the interesting things that I've always noticed is how the histories of astrology magic really were parallel. And they didn't always cross, but the revivals and all the various revivals that it's been through. And philosophical changes were exactly the same. When the psychological revolution happened in the 20th century. That also happened with magic. Same thing with the hermetic, the medieval hermetic revival happened both astrology and magic. The new renaissance that's happening with translation projects, they're both happening at the same time. I think astrology had a bit of a jump on that compared to the magical world. But it's interesting that they're always, they're always running alongside each other, even though today the two camps don't always cross. Yeah, I mean, for me, I had always focused more on the astrological tradition in isolation and there's a lot of ancient works where they are just purely astrological or the astrologers are just doing astrology purely and I was aware that there were also magical texts that were doing magic sort of purely on its own and some of the histories of that. And then that there were occasional intersections, but it seems like this work in reading it and especially reading your translation recently is one of the huge nexus points where astrology and magic very much intersected and more synthesized and combined in a really major way when he published this work in the early to mid 16th century, basically during the renaissance. And it was always that way throughout most of the ancient world up until really the 19th century, I think. I'm not sure about the Hellenistic world because they don't really have astrological magic in the way that we think of it. Today. It's a very different world there. So I'm not sure how those two mixed. I think it was part of the same worldview though, for sure. But today people tend to compartmentalize things.