The Figures

Cornelius Agrippa (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim)

Cornelius Agrippa (Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, in English also Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the name on the title page of the 1651 translation; Cologne, 1486 - Grenoble, 1535 or 1536) was the German humanist who wrote De occulta philosophia libri tres, the “occult philosophy” in three books, and who, before printing it, published another book against the vanity of all the sciences, magic included. Hermes Trismegistus appears in both books, and he is not always the same Hermes: the Hermes of the philosophical dialogues that Marsilio Ficino translated into Latin sits beside the Hermes of the medieval astrological and magical recipe books. This page tells the two apart, by chapter and date, and also separates what is documented from what was attributed to Agrippa after his death.

Who was Cornelius Agrippa? The documented record

Agrippa was born in Cologne on 14 September 1486 and worked as a lecturer, city advocate and physician in Dole, Pavia, Metz, Geneva, Fribourg and Lyon. The standard account of his life is by Vittoria Perrone Compagni, critical editor of the Occult Philosophy, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017, revised 2025). In 1508-1509, she writes, he made a journey to Spain that she calls “mysterious”, seemingly on a military mission. In 1509 he lectured at the University of Dole on Johannes Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico, until the Franciscan Jean Catilinet denounced him as a “judaizing heretic”. In the winter of 1509-1510 he visited Abbot Johannes Trithemius at Würzburg and dedicated to him the first draft of the Occult Philosophy, which Trithemius already had in his hands shortly before 8 April 1510.

In Italy he taught at Pavia: in 1512 he lectured on Plato’s Symposium and in 1515 on the Pimander, that is, the Corpus Hermeticum (SEP). Then came Metz (1518-1520), as city orator and advocate; Geneva and Fribourg, as a physician; and, from the spring of 1524, Lyon, as physician to Louise of Savoy, mother of the King of France (SEP). He wrote De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum during his Lyon years, and Johannes Graphaeus printed it at Antwerp in 1530. The Occult Philosophy came out in two stages: Book I at Antwerp in 1531 and all three books at Cologne in 1533 (SEP).

The story of his end comes from someone very close to him, his former pupil Johann Weyer. According to Weyer, in 1535 Agrippa travelled from Bonn to Lyon; King Francis I had him arrested for writing too freely against the king’s mother; others interceded for him, he was released, and he died a few months later at Grenoble, in the Dauphiné. Weyer was in Paris at the time (Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, 1583, book II, ch. 5, cols. 165-166). Perrone Compagni places his death at Grenoble in 1535 or, at the latest, in 1536.

1508: Barcelona and Valencia, in his own letter

Agrippa describes his time in Spain in the first book of his letters, printed in the second volume of his collected works (Operum pars posterior, Lyon, Beringos, c. 1600). The idea of the journey already appears in a letter from his friend Landulphus, dated Paris, 1507: “Hispanias invisamus”, let us go and see the Spains. The account itself is in letter 10, from Agrippa to Landulphus, dated Avignon, 24 January 1509 (nono Kalendas Februarii); Landulphus’s reply, the next letter, is dated Lyon, 4 February 1509.

He calls the story a “tragicomedy”: a dangerous episode at a place he names Vallis rotunda, from which he escaped at dawn, over the mountain and by boat. Then, on 26 August (septimo Kalendas Septembris), he left an abbey with Antonius Xanthus, an old man who had encouraged him to make the journey, and with one Stephen, heading for Barcelona to get news of Landulphus. He spent three days there and went on “to that great Valencia”, where he visited one Comparatus, whom he calls a Saracen, “a philosopher and a most expert astrologer, once a pupil of Zacut” (the name points to the astronomer Abraham Zacut). There was no news of his friend there either. A few days later he sailed from Valencia, past the Balearics and Sardinia, reached Naples and returned to France by way of Livorno, the Ligurian coast and Provence, as far as Avignon.

The letter does not say what the mission was, and it does not mention Hermes. It is the only first-hand source on the Spanish stay that we have read; anything added about a secret school or a Spanish master is conjecture.

Pavia, 1515: Hermes, prophet of Christ

At Pavia in 1515 Agrippa opened his course on Hermes with an inaugural oration, printed as the second of the ten in his works: In praelectionem Hermetis Trismegisti, de potestate et sapientia Dei, on Hermes Trismegistus and the power and wisdom of God (Operum pars posterior, Lyon, Beringos, pp. 1077-1080 for the passages we quote). Agrippa announces that he will expound “the dialogues of Hermes Trismegistus entitled on divine wisdom and power”, and he gives the title of the book: “Pimander, or on the knowledge and power of God”. That is the title of the Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino, first printed at Treviso in 1471. The oration praises Massimiliano Sforza as Duke of Milan, which fits the date of 1515: Sforza was duke from 1512 to 1515 and lost the duchy after the defeat at Marignano (13-14 September 1515).

The life of Hermes he gives his audience takes the ancient theology to its extreme. In his account Hermes descended from Abraham through Midian, was called Enoch among the Hebrews (he cites Abraham ibn Ezra and Eusebius), was at once the greatest philosopher, the greatest priest and the greatest king, and was therefore “thrice greatest”. And he was a prophet: he foretold the ruin of the old religion, the coming of Christ, the judgement and the resurrection. The Pimander (Ficino’s whole collection, not only its first treatise, the Poimandres), he says, teaches who God is, what mind is, what demons and the soul are, the order of providence, self-knowledge and the “sacrament of regeneration”.

Two sentences in the oration matter for what came later. The first: Mercurius himself, he says, teaches us in the Pimander how to acquire a firm mind, “by which without deception we know and work wonders”. The second closes the doctrinal part: the lecture will be given with the favour of “Christ of Nazareth crucified, who is the true Pimander” (Christo Nazareno crucifixo, qui verus Pimander, p. 1080; our translation). Hermes thus becomes the herald, and Christ the Mind that Hermes saw.

Where Hermes appears in De occulta philosophia

Hermes appears in 39 of the work’s 199 chapters: 14 of the 74 in Book I (natural magic), 6 of the 60 in Book II (celestial magic) and 19 of the 65 in Book III (ceremonial magic). We counted the chapters in which he appears under that name, as Trismegistus or as Mercurius (when the name means the author, not the planet or the god who invented the lyre in II, 26), in Joseph H. Peterson’s transcription of the 1651 English translation. The distribution tells you more than the total. In Books I and II, Hermes is above all an authority from the medieval astrological and magical treatises: fixed stars, stones, plants, suffumigations. Even so, the Asclepius already shows through there (I, 38-39), and so does treatise XII of the Corpus Hermeticum (I, 74; in II, 56 he cites it as the book “De communi”). In Book III it is the Hermes the Renaissance read: Ficino’s Pimander and the Latin Asclepius. The table lists the passages where the source can be identified.

Chapter	What Agrippa attributes to Hermes	Which Hermes it is
I, 22	The seven holes in the head, shared out among the seven planets	Medieval astrological Hermes
I, 32; II, 47 and 52	Fixed stars (Algol, the Pleiades, Aldebaran), with their stones, plants, images and characters, “according to the doctrine of Hermes, and Thebit”	Medieval astrological Hermes, alongside Thabit ibn Qurra
I, 38	An image rightly made of materials proper to an angel “will presently be animated by that Angel”	A reading of the statues passage in the Asclepius (chs. 23-24 and 37-38)
I, 39	The ancient priests made statues that foretold the future; what is drawn into them are airy spirits, “not supercelestiall, much less higher”	Attributed to Mercurius; the theme is that of the statues in the Asclepius
I, 43-44	Nothing equals the fume of spermaceti for raising spirits; the suffumigation of the seven planetary aromatics	Hermes of the magical recipe books
III, 1	A firm mind is obtained only “by integrity of life, by piety, and last of all, by Divine Religion”	The same principle he attributed to the Pimander in 1515
III, 8	The Trinity: “my God and Father begat a Mind”; in the Pimander, the author of regeneration is the Son of God	Asclepius and Corpus Hermeticum (treatise XIII, “On rebirth”)
III, 36	God made two images of himself, the world and man; he also cites the Crater Hermetis of “Lazarillus”	The Latin Hermetism of Ficino and Lodovico Lazzarelli
III, 44	God set mind before souls as a prize; whoever obtains it becomes immortal	Corpus Hermeticum IV, the mixing bowl
III, 49	“O Asclepius! Man is a great miracle”	Asclepius 6
III, 58	Offering incense to the supreme God is “like to sacrilege”, said, according to Agrippa, by Hermes to Tat	Asclepius 41, where Hermes says it to Asclepius

In the Asclepius, Hermes describes how the ancient Egyptians “made gods” by binding spirits to images; the text presents it as an error of their ancestors that gave rise to an art. Agrippa turns it into a recipe: an image rightly made, with the materials of the corresponding angel, comes alive. In the next chapter he sets a limit that he attributes to Mercurius: what comes down into those statues are spirits of the air, “not supercelestiall, much less higher”. For animated statues and ritual in the Platonist tradition, see the entry on theurgy.

Outside the Occult Philosophy, Perrone Compagni points to another Christian appropriation: in De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum (dedicated in 1516, printed in 1529), Agrippa takes the Asclepius sentence “man is a great miracle”, the line that also opens the oration of Pico della Mirandola, and turns it into “the Christian man is a great miracle” (SEP). It is the same move as at Pavia.

From 1510 to 1533: the same book, twice as long

The version printed in 1533 is twice as long as the short draft Trithemius received in 1510: it adds authors and ideas and rebuilds Book III with Kabbalistic material: sefirot, divine names, angels and demons (SEP). Agrippa explains it himself in the 1533 preface to the reader, which we quote from the 1651 English version: “I confess whilst I was very yong [young], I set upon the writing of these books”, but the text got away from him unfinished and “was carryed about imperfect, and impolished” in Italy, France and Germany; some people wanted to print it as it stood, and he chose to publish a corrected text himself. He says he added chapters and inserted passages, which the attentive reader will notice “by the inequality of the very phrase”, and he asks readers not to judge the book by the date of its publication: “pardon my curious youth”.

The 1533 printing ran into trouble. Barely begun, it was denounced by the Dominican inquisitor Conrad Köllin and suspended by the Cologne Senate; it went ahead thanks to the protection of Hermann von Wied, Archbishop of Cologne, and with an appendix reproducing the chapters of De vanitate against magic (SEP). Peterson, citing Perrone Compagni’s introduction (1992, p. 11), also puts the missing printer’s name and place down to those troubles.

Edition	What it is	Digital copy
1510, manuscript for Trithemius	First draft, shorter	We have not seen it
Antwerp, Johannes Graphaeus, 1531	Book I, with the table of contents of Books II and III (SEP)	Not checked
[Cologne, Johannes Soter], 1533, folio	The three books; [12] + 362 pp. according to the Wellcome record	Wellcome copy and McGill copy, at the Internet Archive
Lyon, Beringos brothers (Godefridus and Marcellus), octavo	Reprint; the record dates it 1550 and, according to C. F. Mayer, printer and place are fictitious	Complutense University of Madrid copy, digitized by Google
Liber quartus, 1559	The spurious “Fourth Book”, with the Elementa magica of Pietro d’Abano	Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma copy, Public Domain Mark
London, R. W. for Gregory Moule, 1651	Three Books of Occult Philosophy, translated by “J. F.”	Wellcome copy, Public Domain Mark
Leiden, Brill, 1992	Critical edition by Vittoria Perrone Compagni, with an introduction in English	No free copy

De vanitate (1530): did he recant?

Only in part, by his own account: in the 1533 preface Agrippa writes that “in my book of the vanity and uncertainty of Sciences I did for the most part retract this book” (1651 English version). That book, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio, attacks the arts and sciences one after another, magic among them, and its title already signals the genre: it is a declamatio, a rhetorical exercise (Antwerp edition of 1531). Perrone Compagni points out that there is no explicit retraction of his passion for the occult sciences: what he admits is that his youthful work may have erred out of adolescent curiosity.

Perrone Compagni also sums up the other readings. Keefer (1988) and Zambelli (2000) posit an intellectual crisis, a hypothesis she calls “merely conjectural”; Bowen (1972) and Korkowski (1976) read the book as paradox or irony; she herself, citing Weeks (1993), thinks it unlikely that the poor treatment he received at the court of Louise of Savoy was enough to make him abandon his convictions all of a sudden. Marc van der Poel (1997) studies Agrippa as a humanist theologian and reads De vanitate within the genre of the declamation. What nobody disputes is the chronology: Agrippa printed the Occult Philosophy in 1533, three years after De vanitate, and he printed it enlarged.

Hermes does not vanish from the sceptical book either. In the chapter on natural magic, Hermes is still on the list of ancient sages, “Hermes amongst the Ægyptians”, alongside Zoroaster among the Persians, and he appears again among the authors who wrote on that magic (we quote the English translation published together with the 1651 one, as transcribed by Peterson).

The black dog and the Fourth Book: fact and legend

Neither the demon dog nor the Fourth Book holds up. Agrippa’s legend was already in print in 1546, ten or eleven years after his death, in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia, and Johann Weyer, who had been his pupil and had lived in his house, took it apart in De praestigiis daemonum (we cite the 6th edition, of 1583). The table sets each claim beside the oldest source we have read.

Claim	Oldest source we have seen	What the sources and studies say
He kept a demon in the shape of a black dog	Giovio, Elogia, 1546: “cacodaemonem nigri canis specie”	Weyer, who used to walk it on a leash: it was a real, medium-sized dog, called “Monsieur”; Agrippa also had a similar bitch, “Mademoiselle” (Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, 1583, book II, ch. 5, cols. 165-166)
As he died he took off its collar with magic signs and told it “be off, wretched beast, you have ruined me entirely” (abi perdita bestia, quae me totum perdidisti); the dog threw itself into the Saône	Giovio, 1546; he attributes the Saône to “those who claimed to have seen it”	No named witness. Weyer gives two causes for the rumour: Agrippa pampered the dog (kissed it, had it at table, slept with it) and, though he would hardly leave his study for a week on end, he knew everything that was going on, because scholars wrote to him every day
He died at Lyon, in a dark inn	Giovio, 1546	He died at Grenoble (Weyer), in 1535 or 1536 (SEP)
The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy is his	Liber quartus, 1559, with the Heptameron of Pietro d’Abano	Weyer: an “abominable little book”, put out “by an impious man” and fathered on his master, dead more than forty years
The Occult Philosophy was banned	Giovio, 1546: “forbidden by edict of the Christian censorship”	Documented: Köllin’s denunciation and the suspension of the printing at Cologne at the end of 1532 (SEP)
In 1530 he retracted magic	De vanitate, Antwerp, 1530	He himself writes in 1533 that he retracted it “for the most part”; there is no formal palinode, and scholars disagree about what the book means (see above)
He was in Spain on a secret mission	His letter of January 1509	It narrates the journey (Barcelona, Valencia, Naples), not its purpose; Perrone Compagni speaks of a journey “seemingly” military

Llull, Yates and how to read him today

Agrippa also wrote a commentary on the Ars brevis of Ramon Llull (Cologne edition, Soter, 1533, Wellcome copy at the Internet Archive): this is the authentic Llull of the combinatory art, not the Llull to whom alchemy was later attributed.

Among modern studies, Frances Yates devoted chapter 7 of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) to Agrippa, “Cornelius Agrippa’s Survey of Renaissance Magic”. Charles Nauert (1965) read the move from the promises of power in the Occult Philosophy to the total doubt of De vanitate as a symptom of the crisis of Renaissance thought that gives his book its title. Christopher Lehrich (2003) studies him through the theory of language and of magical signs.

For the question this page asks, the practical upshot is simple: every “Hermes says” in the Occult Philosophy means you have to check which Hermes is meant. In Books I and II it leads mostly to the medieval astrological recipe books; in Book III, mostly to Ficino’s Pimander or the Latin Asclepius, read as Christian prophecy. And the condition Agrippa sets before any operation is not an instrument but a way of life: the firm mind of Book III, chapter 1, which in his view only integrity, piety and religion can give. The text does not explain how that firmness produces its effects; it simply asserts that it does.

Key facts

Name	Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim; in Latin, Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab Nettesheym; in English, Cornelius Agrippa or Henry Cornelius Agrippa (the form on the 1651 translation)
Dates	Cologne, 14 September 1486 - Grenoble, 1535 or, at the latest, 1536
Main work	De occulta philosophia libri tres: draft of 1510 for Trithemius; Book I, Antwerp, 1531; the three books, Cologne, 1533
Hermes in his teaching	Pavia, 1515: lecture on the Pimander (Corpus Hermeticum) in Ficino’s Latin translation
Hermes in the Occult Philosophy	In 39 of 199 chapters (our count from the 1651 English translation); the Pimander and the Asclepius mostly in Book III
Sceptical book	De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, Antwerp, Graphaeus, 1530
Attributed, not his	Liber quartus de occulta philosophia (1559), rejected by Johann Weyer
In Spain	Barcelona and Valencia in 1508, according to his letter of January 1509

Fair questions

Who was Cornelius Agrippa?

A German humanist, jurist and physician, who was born in Cologne in 1486 and died at Grenoble in 1535 or 1536. He taught at Dole (1509) and Pavia (1512 and 1515), served Metz as city advocate and orator, and was physician at the court of Louise of Savoy. He wrote De occulta philosophia, a compendium of magic in three books, and De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum, against the vanity of the sciences.

What is De occulta philosophia and when was it published?

It is a treatise in three books on natural, celestial and ceremonial magic. Agrippa sent a first draft to Abbot Trithemius in 1510; Book I was printed at Antwerp in 1531 and the three books at Cologne in 1533, twice as long, with Book III rebuilt around Kabbalistic material. The critical edition is Vittoria Perrone Compagni’s (Brill, 1992).

What is Agrippa’s connection with Hermes Trismegistus?

Direct and documented. At Pavia in 1515 he lectured on the Pimander, in Ficino’s Latin translation, presenting Hermes as a prophet of Christ and Christ as “the true Pimander”. In De occulta philosophia Hermes appears in 39 of its 199 chapters (our count from the 1651 English translation): in Books I and II he is usually the Hermes of the medieval astrological texts; in Book III, mostly the Hermes of the Pimander and the Asclepius.

Did Agrippa retract magic in De vanitate?

In part, by his own account: in the 1533 preface he says that in De vanitate he retracted the Occult Philosophy “for the most part”. Vittoria Perrone Compagni points out that there is no explicit retraction of his passion for the occult sciences. And in 1533, three years after De vanitate, Agrippa printed the Occult Philosophy enlarged, with the critical chapters on magic as an appendix. Scholars disagree: some speak of an intellectual crisis, others of paradox or rhetorical declamation.

Is the black dog story true, and is the Fourth Book his?

No on both counts. The story of the demon dog appears in Paolo Giovio’s Elogia (1546); Johann Weyer, Agrippa’s pupil, who used to walk the dog on a leash, wrote that it was an ordinary dog called “Monsieur”. The Fourth Book was printed in 1559, more than twenty years after his death, and Weyer rejected it as a false attribution.

Sources & further reading

• Vittoria Perrone Compagni, “Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (first published 15 February 2017, substantive revision 28 March 2025), plato.stanford.edu/entries/agrippa-nettesheim; with the works of Keefer (1988), Zambelli (2000), Bowen (1972), Korkowski (1976) and Weeks (1993) cited in the text.
• Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, ed. Vittoria Perrone Compagni (Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill, 1992; Studies in the History of Christian Thought 48), with an introduction in English.
• Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres ([Cologne: Johannes Soter], 1533), [12] + 362 pp., folio: Wellcome Library copy and McGill University Library copy, Internet Archive; Lyon reprint, Beringos, Complutense University of Madrid copy.
• Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, trans. “J. F.” (London: R. W. for Gregory Moule, 1651), Wellcome Library copy, Internet Archive (Public Domain Mark); annotated transcription by Joseph H. Peterson, Twilit Grotto: Esoteric Archives, Book I, Book II and Book III, with the “Censure” of De vanitate in the English translation published with the 1651 one.
• Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Operum pars posterior (Lyon: Beringos Fratres, [c. 1600]): Epistolarum ad familiares libri septem, book I, letters 3, 10 and 11; Orationes decem, II, “In praelectionem Hermetis Trismegisti, de potestate et sapientia Dei”, pp. 1077-1080 for the passages quoted; Duke University Libraries copy, Internet Archive.
• Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, atque excellentia Verbi Dei declamatio (Antwerp: [J. Grapheus?], 1531), 159 leaves: Wellcome Library copy, Internet Archive (Public Domain Mark). First edition: Antwerp, Graphaeus, 1530.
• Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, In Artem brevem Raymundi Lullii commentaria (Cologne: J. Soter, 1533), [102] leaves: Wellcome Library copy, Internet Archive.
• [Pseudo-Agrippa], Henrici Cornelii Agrippae Liber quartus de occulta philosophia, seu de cerimoniis magicis. Cui accesserunt Elementa magica Petri de Abano (1559): Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma copy, Internet Archive (Public Domain Mark).
• Paolo Giovio, Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, quae in musaeo Ioviano Comi spectantur (Venice: Michele Tramezzino, 1546), elogium “Henricus Cornelius Agrippa”: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma copy, Internet Archive (Public Domain Mark).
• Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficiis libri sex, 6th enlarged ed. (1583), book II, ch. 5, “De libris quibusdam magicis”, cols. 161-166 (the edition is numbered by columns): Internet Archive.
• Charles G. Nauert Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).
• Marc van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa, the Humanist Theologian and His Declamations (Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill, 1997).
• Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003).
• Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), ch. 7, “Cornelius Agrippa’s Survey of Renaissance Magic”.