Cornelius Agrippa - RENAISSANCE ASTROLOGY

Agrippa's Theory & Philosophy

Agrippa's thought unites the streams of classical Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophy, Jewish Kabbalah and Christianity.

Three Books of Occult Philosophy, his most famous work, is a systematic exposition of the occult, in the sense of hidden, knowledge extant in Renaissance Europe. It is an encyclopedic work of Renaissance magic providing information on such diverse topics as planetary rulerships, occult virtues, sympathies and enmities of natural things, enchantments, sorceries, types of divination, the scales of numbers and their significance, astrological talismans, the divine Trinity, the Kabbalistic Names of God and the orders of evil spirits.

Yet despite its comprehensive nature Three Books of Occult Philosophy is organized in a systematic fashion. The three books each correspond to the three worlds of the elementary, celestial and intellectual realms. Agrippa sees the descent of all things from God through the worlds as a hopeful sign of the possibility of an ascent back to God.

The Renaissance philosophy of magi like Cornelius Agrippa represents the highest development of a spiritual and unified schema of thought in the West prior to the advent of the materialism and atheism of the Enlightenment. After 500 years Three Books of Occult Philosophy remains one of the leading texts of Western esoteric thought.

Here is a more comprehensive article on Agrippa's Theories of Astrological Magic.