The Body in the Back Garden by Mark Waddell

This idea was so powerful and compelling that it fundamentally altered intellectual life in Europe and continues to inspire people today. ” Learned magic had its roots in the distant past, and those who embraced it did so with the hope that they would uncover secrets and mysteries that would transform European society forever.

This is very different from the magic worked by healers, midwives, and others in small communities and rural areas across Europe, practices usually labeled by historians as “folk magic. Both hermeticism and the other tradition we explore in this chapter, cabalism, are examples of learned magic – that is, magic studied and practiced by the educated elite. The tradition disseminated by Ficino is known as hermeticism, and it incorporated both philosophical lessons on the nature of the divine as well as hands-on instructions for magical work. Ficino, along with many others, believed that the Hermetic writings contained traces of ancient, uncorrupted wisdom that might restore human understanding to the heights achieved by those, long ago, who had known God and His creation in ways since lost to modern people.

His writings promised to reveal the secrets of the universe to those willing to learn, and this soon included Ficino, who became a passionate advocate for the ideas of Hermes and was instrumental in disseminating them throughout Renaissance society. The works that Ficino translated became known as the Corpus Hermeticum, and they contained the recorded wisdom of a mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus or Hermes “the Thrice-Powerful,” a contemporary of Moses and a sage of unparalleled learning who had lived thousands of years earlier in ancient Egypt. He conversed with angels and advised some of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, but like the fictional figure of Faustus, who dabbled in dark arts and damned himself for eternity, Dee had to contend with the distrust and fear of contemporaries who believed that magic was the work of demons. These traditions of learned magic inspired the archetypal Renaissance magus, the English philosopher John Dee (1527-608), in his quest for knowledge. The philosophical tradition known as hermeticism quickly spread across Renaissance Europe, alongside renewed interest in the mystical Judaic practice of the Kabbalah, another source of wisdom that sought to reveal the hidden traces of God in the universe. He and many others believed that the writings of Hermes conveyed the prisca sapientia, or ancient wisdom, once vouchsafed to Adam in the Garden but then lost after humanity’s fall from divine grace. When Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) translated the ancient Corpus Hermeticum in 1460 and unlocked the secrets of the mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus, he discovered a wellspring of knowledge that promised to transform humanity’s understanding of both the world and its Creator.

The Body in the Back Garden by Mark Waddell