Ancient wisdom also promised powers that its reader might learn to use. Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) explained in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy how plants, stones, numbers, and sacred names were tied to the heavens and to spiritual powers. Someone who understood those ties might do more than contemplate them.
Agrippa’s 1515 lecture at the University of Pavia on the Hermetic writings carried a genealogy that Wouter Hanegraaff traces to Lazzarelli. In the introduction Agrippa placed Hermes before Moses, as Lazzarelli had. He then added a safeguard of his own. Citing Genesis for a son of Abraham called Midian, he wrote that Midian “begat a son called Enoch,” so that, in Hanegraaff’s rendering of the Latin, “our Hermes, called Enoch among the Hebrews” was “a grandson of Abraham by way of Midian.” Hermes stayed ancient and gained a biblical pedigree. The same lecture called Christ “the true Pimander,” an idea Lazzarelli had held. Hanegraaff argues that Agrippa probably took both ideas from Lazzarelli, and he calls the route by which Agrippa learned them a conjecture. He goes further and reads Lazzarelli’s teaching of spiritual rebirth as the hidden core of the Occult Philosophy. That stronger claim remains Hanegraaff’s own argument.
The planetary tables gave the learning its most portable form. A reader could copy a numbered square and engrave it on metal, following instructions that tied it to a planet and its powers. The design worked even for a reader who followed little of the larger explanation.
Agrippa had sent an early draft to Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516) in 1510. The printed work joined kinds of learning that were hard to separate, from hidden properties in nature to ceremonies invoking spiritual beings. Explaining a power was not the same as showing that a Christian could lawfully use it.
The later life of the book depended on readers who made selections of their own. Compilers copied tables and procedures into collections that did not necessarily preserve the original explanations. Ancient wisdom consequently travelled in forms much smaller than a complete theological treatise. A page of figures might reach someone who had never heard of Agrippa, with its practical instructions intact and its learned ancestry forgotten.