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  • Two Occult Philosophers in the Elizabethan Age
  • Peter Forshaw (bio)
György Endre Szőnyi , John Dee's Occultism: Magical Exaltation through Powerful Signs, Albany, New York, 2004; xviii + 362 pp., $50 (hbk); ISBN 0-7914-6223-4.
Lauren Kassel , Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician, Oxford, 2005; xviii + 281 pp., £58 (hbk); ISBN 0-19-927905-5.

'And I . . . will be as cunning as Agrippa was, Whose shadows made all Europe honour him'

Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus

In 1510 the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I sent Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) on an 'occultissimum negotium' (most secret business) [End Page 401] as ambassador to the court of Henry VIII. This was the very same year that Agrippa had composed the first draft of his De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy), arguably the best known Renaissance encyclopaedia of magic, which he left in the safe-keeping of his mentor, the German abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), famous for his own magical theology. After much interference from the Dominican authorities, De occulta was eventually printed in 1533 and in the dedicatory letter to Trithemius Agrippa fondly recalls the conversations the two of them shared about 'Chymistry, Magick, and Cabalie', and their earnest discussions about magic's high repute amongst all ancient philosophers, in contrast to its current condemnation by the Church. Furthermore, he laments the contemporary denigration of magic, such that it is 'now accounted a Capital crime, if any one dare profess himself to be a Magician'.1

Agrippa defines magic as 'the most perfect, and chief Science, that sacred, and sublimer kind of Phylosophy, and . . . the most absolute perfection of all most excellent Philosophy'. He divides this philosophy into natural, mathematical and theological forms, each of which 'Naturall Magick comprehends, unites, and actuates', and argues that without all of them no one can possibly 'understand the rationality of Magick. For there is no work that is done by meer Magick, nor any work that is meerly Magicall, that doth not comprehend these three Faculties'.2 Agrippa devotes the 199 chapters of his three books to expositions of these three forms or faculties of magic. He moves from the most licit practice, that of natural magic, concerned with the natures of the elements, the virtues of plants, minerals, animals, divination by dreams, and so forth, to the mathematical magic of book two, predominantly concerned with pythagorean number symbolism, the relationship between numbers and letters, consideration of the harmonies existing in creation, reflections on the proportion, measure, and composition of man's body and soul, as well as the more dubious predictive arts of astrology and the casting of lots. The third book deals with the most contentious and illicit form of occult philosophy, that of ceremonial or ritual magic, discussing the divine emanations of Cabala, pagan deities, orders of evil spirits, angelic names, the powers of man's soul to engage in soothsaying, rapture and ritual invocation of supernatural beings.

Anyone with even the most passing acquaintance with English Renaissance drama will immediately call to mind its most famous magicians, Marlowe's Faustus and Shakespeare's Prospero; some may even have heard of the two figures who apparently provided the real-life inspiration for some of the dramatists' representations of the early modern magus, and who form the focus of the two books under discussion here: John Dee (1527–1608) and his younger contemporary Simon Forman (1552–1611), both of whom, incidentally, possessed copies of Agrippa's work and shared equally exalted notions of the powers of magic and of themselves as adept exponents of the art. [End Page 402]

Dee's career as a magus had less than promising beginnings when in 1555 he was accused of endeavouring 'by enchantmentes to destroy Queene Mary', of having a familiar spirit, and was charged with treason for drawing up Mary's horoscope for her half-sister Elizabeth.3 He was to suffer from the accusation of conjuring for the rest of his life, complaining of the 'damnable sklaunder' in the 1563 edition of Actes and Monuments where John Foxe had described him as 'Doctor Dee the great Conjurer', giving vent to...

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