The Hermetic Conception

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was the father of Renaissance neo-Platonism. It was he who produced the first translation of Hermes Trismegistus's Pimander into Latin. It was immensely popular, printed for the first time in 1471 and going through no fewer than sixteen editions before the end of the century [Yat1, p.17]. The neo-Platonists looked longingly back at Classical times and before; what was old was good, and the older the better. Thus, Hermes, then believed to have been an Egyptian contemporary of Moses, was the wisest of all. Pimander--the divine spirit, the Nous--appears to Hermes in a dream, and slakes Hermes's thirst for knowledge of the nature of the universe. Pimander reveals the magic of creation in convoluted allegories and structures which posit the elevation of spiritual man through the nested spheres of corporeal existence until, finally bereft of all vestiges of evil, mortal nature he enters into the "ogdoadic nature, hears the Powers singing hymns to God and becoming mingled with the Powers." [Yat1, p.25]

The story of creation in Pimander has the magical flavor of the Gnostic Gospels. The Egyptian Adam "is more than human; he is divine and belongs to the race of the star demons, the divinely created governors of the lower world. It is true that he falls, but this fall is in itself an act of power. He can lean down through the armature of the spheres, tear open their envelopes, and come down to show himself to Nature. "...In short, the Egyptian Genesis tells the story of the creation and fall of a divine man, a man intimately related to the star-demons in his very origin, Man as Magus." [Yat1, p.28]

Ficino passionately embraced Hermetic doctrine, the pristine fount of illumination flowing from the divine Nous, which would lead him to regard the core of Platonism as truth derived from Egyptian wisdom. It would be more than one hundred years before all the Hermetic writings would be shown to be the work not of an ancient Egyptian but of a Second or Third Century Christian (and thus their eerie similarity to the Gnostic Gospels). In his seminal 1489 work, De vita triplici, Ficino sets out a Hermetic theory of melancholy: "Melancholia, id est, atra bilis est duplex: Altera quidem naturalis a medicis appellatur, altera vero adustione contingit." [Fic2, p. unnumbered] Melancholy has two distinct natures, the one a medical pathology in which the humor just sits there, the other a spiritual nirvana in which the humor fiercely burns. (And thus is a definition of the word "adust" still given as "melancholy".)

Melancholy had long been associated astrologically with the planet Saturn, the dimmest of the planets visible to the naked eye and the slowest moving, and to which were attributed similar attributes of crystallization, depression, and fear. In explaining the causes which produce melancholy in scholars, Ficino also redefined the role of Saturn, which now took on the virtues of perseverance, patience, and concentration. In De vita Ficino notes this influence of Saturn coupled with the mental energy of Mercury as a cause of the drive for scholarship. And Saturn's nature is presumed to be cold and dry, which is the same as that of melancholy.

Other influences reinforce the cold-and-dry motif: Ficino presents an almost Buddhist conception of study, comparing it to the journey from a circle's circumference into its center. But the property of being centered is principally that of the earth itself, to which black bile has a very close resemblance. To ice the argument, Ficino notes that a hard day of contemplation turns the brain cold and dry through an excess of thought, depleting the spirits. Though Ficino is closely identified (and identified himself) with Plato, in making this argument he actually binds together the Aristotelian conception of the melancholy of the outstanding intellect with Plato's divine frenzy. Black bile "obliges thought to penetrate and explore the center of its objects, because the black bile is itself akin to the center of the earth. Likewise it raises thought to the comprehension of the highest, because it corresponds to [Saturn] the highest of planets." [KPS, p.259]

It was very important to Ficino that melancholy throw off the evil associations that had been made to it in the Middle Ages. His theory is most understandable from a psychological perspective: He himself claimed to be of melancholic temperament and occasionally experienced deep depressions [Kris, p.212]; the fusion of the spiritual characteristics of unrest and frenzy with the clinical characteristics of depression and immobility is otherwise difficult to synthesize.

"In this sense the vague sorrow of the internal consciousness is a philosophical experience which constitutes the common basis for the theories of restlessness and melancholy, but is interspersed in either case in an entirely different manner and direction. For when we speak of the restlessness of consciousness, the basic experience at once is inserted into a great metaphysical or theological context and the state of mind, though it is felt at once and concretely, is merely the occasion through which that context enters our feeling and consciousness. Here we are entirely on the ground of the medieval Christian conception as given by St. Augustine." [Kris, p.213]

On the other hand, when the same state of mind is placed against a mundane rather than metaphysical backdrop, it is simply sadness, caused by any manner of earthly and heavenly imbalances. Ficino thus incorporated the Medieval view of melancholy as original sin, a condition that could not be overcome and thus had to be accepted and worn as a badge of honor. Melancholy's dual nature was one of static and dynamic components, which though they shared a common foundation were never logically linked very well. Nevertheless, this conception of the tortured artist, stretched on the philosophical rack between the depths of sorrow and the heights of genius, a figment of Ficino's own psyche and very much a reflection of the Hermetic macrocosm-and-microcosm, is still with us today.

"The birth of this new humanist awareness took place, therefore, in an atmosphere of intellectual contradiction. As he took up his position, the self-sufficient 'homo literatus' saw himself torn between the extremes of self-affirmation, sometimes rising to hubris, and self-doubt, sometimes sinking to despair; and the experience of this dualism roused him to discover the new intellectual pattern, which was a reflection of this tragic and heroic disunity--the intellectual pattern of 'modern genius.' At this point we can see how the self-recognition of 'modern genius' could only take place under the sign of Saturn and melancholy; and how, on the other hand, a new intellectual distinction now had to be conferred on the accepted notions of Saturn and melancholy. Only the humanism of the Italian renaissance was able to recognize in Saturn and in the melancholic this polarity, which was, indeed, implicit from the beginning, but which only [pseudo-]Aristotle's brilliant intuition, and St. Augustine's eyes, sharpened by hatred, had really seen... There was therefore a double Renaissance: firstly, of the neo-Platonist notion of Saturn, according to which the highest of the planets embodied, and also bestowed, the highest and noblest faculties of the soul, reason, and speculation; and secondly, of the 'Aristotelian' doctrine of melancholy, according to which all great men were melancholics (whence it followed logically that not to be melancholy was a sign of insignificance)." [KPS, p.247]

Ficino melds his fascination and reverence for melancholy into an Hermetic taxonomy of succeeding cosmological spheres expanding up to the Nous. In De vita triplici he posits three levels:

Level	Type	Ruler	Function
1	Mens imaginatio	Mars	Invention, creativity
2	Mens ratio	Jupiter	Discursive reasoning
3	Mens contemplatrix	Saturn	Transcendent intuition

In what would become a quintessential characteristic of Hermetic doctrine in the Renaissance, Ficino adhered to the Augustinian view of inevitability here. Although there were three levels, one had no choice but to be stuck at whichever level the frenzy left him; the system was grand but static, neither evolution nor learning were possible. Because melancholy was simultaneously at both the center and the apex of intellectual life, thus could only contemplation--no longer fettered by imagination or even logic--truly deserve the title of melancholy. This view that it was impossible for the merely imaginative mind to rise to true melancholy was reinforced, ironically, by those philosophers who associated melancholy strictly with illness. They too claimed that the afflicted mind could not rise above imagination.

De vita was a standard reference among Renaissance scholars. It was natural, therefore, that this theory of melancholy should be discussed and modified. Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was born in Cologne in 1486. His fascination with the occult was equaled only by his skill as a mercenary, and he served in both the courts and military campaigns of Maximillian I, Louis XII, Henry VIII, and Popes Julius II and Leo X. There is no record of his ever meeting Ficino, but he was lecturing in Germany on the Pimander in 1511. In spite of his Byzantinely picaresque life, he was a highly contemplative and liberal man, openly friendly to Jews during an era when it was dangerous to be so, and somewhat of a feminist, authoring a treatise entitled On the Pre-eminence of Women. Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, which spelled out his interpretations of the Hermetic arts, was over 20 years in the making, finally published in 1531. But there were drafts in circulation as early as 1510, and in these Agrippa posited a more dynamic theory of melancholy.

Agrippa embraced Ficino's three levels, calling them melencholia imaginativa, melencholia rationalis, and melencholia mentalis, but inserted--presaging the Mannerists--the dynamism of the focused, animist search for the Nous:

"The whole of antiquity bears witness that this occurs in three different forms, corresponding to the threefold capacity of our soul, namely the imaginative, the rational, and the mental. For when set free by the 'humor melancholicus', the soul is fully concentrated in the imagination, and it immediately becomes an habitation for the lower spirits, from whom it often receives wonderful instruction in the manual arts... But when the soul is fully concentrated in the reason, it becomes the home of the middle spirits; thereby it attains knowledge and cognition of natural and human things...But when the soul soars completely to the intellect, it becomes the home of the higher spirits, from whom it learns the secrets of divine matters..." [KPS, p.357]

To Agrippa, the frenzy of melancholy was thus the source of inspired creative achievement, and the faithful and disciplined student could graduate to its highest level.