Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500), a poet with classical training, believed that meeting the prophet Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio (c. 1451–after 1506) had changed his religious life. Explaining the change led him back to the writings attributed to Hermes, the legendary Egyptian sage. These books described a divine knowledge that transformed the person who received it. Lazzarelli thought he had met that knowledge in a man he could visit.
Brian Copenhaver dates their first meeting to 1481. The message Correggio was preaching then was biblical, not Hermetic.
In 1482 Lazzarelli gathered Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–1499) Latin translation of the Hermetic writings into a manuscript, added two more Hermetic texts, the Asclepius and the Definitions of Asclepius (the latter in his own translation), and prefaced each of the three with a letter to Mercurio. Mercurius is the Latin name for Hermes, and the root of the prophet’s chosen name. Lazzarelli wrote that Ficino had celebrated “your father (and my grandfather).” Lazzarelli called Correggio his spiritual father, so Hermes became his grandfather. The chain of sages had become a family, and its last member was alive.
The preface also corrected Ficino on a point of chronology. Ficino had placed Hermes after Moses. Lazzarelli answered that Hermes lived long before him, “as can clearly be gathered from the books of Diodorus,” the Greek historian of the first century BCE. Diodorus wrote that gods and then men had ruled Egypt. Lazzarelli argued that Hermes belonged to the age of the gods, and Moses to the age of the Pharaohs, whom he judged scarcely human. He moved a pagan sage ahead of Moses on a historian’s authority, then ran the descent forward to his own teacher.
Two years later the teacher acted the lineage out. According to Lazzarelli’s account, on Palm Sunday in 1484 Correggio left Rome, changed into a bloodstained linen mantle and a crown of thorns, and came back on a white ass, as Christ had entered Jerusalem. Fixed to the crown was a silver disc shaped like a crescent moon. In Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn’s translation, its inscription began, “This is my Servant Pimander, whom I have chosen,” and ended by naming the speaker as “Father of every talisman of all the world, Jesus of Nazareth.” Pimander is the divine mind who teaches the first treatise of the Hermetic writings. One line joined the voice from heaven in the Gospels to the Hermetic revealer.
The evidence comes in three weights. A chronicler at Cesena, Giuliano Fantaguzzi, recorded a nobleman of Carpi who went to Rome on an ass, claiming to be the true Messiah, and the Jewish writer Abraham Farissol (born 1452) saw Correggio thrown into prison in Rome. Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn think the jailing probably followed the 1484 entry, though they cannot be certain. The details of the procession come from one source, Lazzarelli’s Epistola Enoch, written under the name Enoch. The identification of Correggio with Pimander, and so with Christ, is Lazzarelli’s interpretation.
Who taught whom is harder to say. Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn read the 1482 prefaces as a sign that Correggio already prized Hermes, and they think he held something like the Pimander identification. Yet they conclude that it was due to Lazzarelli’s influence that the Hermetic elements became central in 1484, and they doubt that this lasted for Correggio afterward. Copenhaver leaves the question open.
On the evidence we have, then, the genealogy is Lazzarelli’s. Correggio was a street prophet who took a Hermetic name. The poet supplied the descent from Egypt and the learned argument for it. A Christian city accustomed to processions and prophecy made such claims intelligible, even to people who rejected them, but we know far less about the crowd than about this one admirer.
He worked out the teaching in Crater Hermetis, a dialogue written for the king of Naples. Pimander, the divine Mind who teaches in the first Hermetic treatise, was Christ. Before the closing hymn Lazzarelli says he will praise “Christ Jesus under the name of Pimander.” Wouter Hanegraaff reads the dialogue as turning the Hermetic language of making gods into the power of a reborn soul to beget new souls in others. Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn see in it a thesis of religious progress, from pagan to Christian Hermetism. Hermes began the teaching, Christ completed what Hermes had not grasped, and a prophet who united the two carried it further.
Near its end the king asks how this great work will be accomplished. Lazzarelli says the full account must wait “until some other time, in a more secluded and solitary place.” A hymn to Pimander follows.