1486 - 1535

A natural mystic, Agrippa was one of the most important occultists of the 16th century. His writings on magic and the occult influenced generations of thinkers that followed. Like Paracelsus, he was far ahead of his time, which made him very unpopular with his contemporaries. He spent most of his life in trouble with the authorities of Church and state.

Agrippa was born on September 14, 1486, in cologne, and was educated at the University of Cologne. Some biographers say he was born into a noble family, but the prevailing view is that he adopted the name von Nettesheim himself, after the founder of Cologne.

As a young man, he excelled in his studies. He became proficient in eight languages and was a voracious reader. He was fascinated by alchemy and magic and delved into the Kabbalah and Hermetic literature, attracted by the idea of achieving a spiritual union with the Godhead.

His first job was an appointment as court secretary to Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor and king of Germany, who sent him to Paris as a spy. In what would become a hallmark of his career, Agrippa became embroiled in local political trouble and was forced to leave.

By the time he was 24, he had collected a vast store of knowledge, which he set down in a three volume work, On Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia), which was a summation of all the magical and occult knowledge of the time. Agrippa maintained that magic had nothing to do with the Devil or sorcery but depended upon natural psychic gifts such as second sight. He believed in the ultimate power of will and imagination to effect magic and in the power of mind over body; a jilted lover, he said, could truly die of grief. He said that man could achieve his highest potential by learning the harmonies of nature.

Agrippa embraced astrology, divination, the magic of numbers (numerology) and the power of gems and stones. He described the astral body as the "chariot of the soul" and said it could leave the physical body like a light escaping from a lantern. It was said that he practiced necromancy for divination and conjured various demons.

After writing On Occult Philosophy, more than 20 years passed before it was published. Meanwhile, Agrippa weathered one storm after another in his life. In 1509, at the University of Dole, France, he earned a doctorate of divinity and lectured on the Kabbalah. He tried to win the patronage of Maximilian's daughter, Margaret of Ghent, with a flattering work, The Nobility of Women, but the local monks denounced him as a heretic, and he was forced to flee to England the same year.

Agrippa spent years drifting around Europe, forming secret societies, holding various jobs until his temper or his occult views caused him to be run out of town. He was frequently at odds with the Church, for he considered many monks to be ignorant and narrow-minded. He was unlucky in marriage: two wives died and the third ruined him emotionally and financially.

In Lyons he was appointed physician to Louise of Savoy, the queen mother of the king of France. She was slow to pay him and kept him confined in Lyons, impoverished from 1524 to 1526. Finally, he was able to quit his job and leave for Metz, where he undertook the defense of a woman accused of witchcraft. The chief evidence against the woman was that her mother had been burned as a witch. Agrippa destroyed the case against her with the theological argument that man could be separated from Christ only by his own sin, not that of another. As Reginald Scot describes in Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), Agrippa triumphantly "delivered her from the claws of the bloodie moonke, who with hir accusers, were condemned in a great summe of monie to the charter of the church of Mentz; (sic) and remained infamous after that time almost to all men." The humiliated inquisitor threatened to prosecute Agrippa for being a supporter of heretics and witches. Ever after that, Agrippa was suspected of witchcraft himself and was considered an enemy of the Church.

Many fantastic tales surround the life of Agrippa, who was widely regarded as a black magician. He was said always to be accompanied by his familiar, who took the shape of a large black dog. On his deathbed, he renounced his magic works and the familiar by saying, "Begone, wretched animal, the entire cause of my destruction," where-upon the familiar ran out and threw himself in a river.

Agrippa conjured demons and spirits, sometimes using magic mirrors. He supposedly conjured the spirit of Tully to deliver an oration for him; the spirit was so effective that it reduced the audience to tears. It was also said that when Agrippa traveled, he paid innkeepers in gold coins that later turned to seashells. He became associated with the story of Faust, the legendary doctor who sold his soul to the Devil.

The most famous occult legend about Agrippa tells of an unfortunate young man who poked about in his study. Agrippa, who was living in Louvain, Belgium, at the time, rented out a room to this young man. Once when Agrippa was out of town, the youth asked the magician's wife for a key to his study, saying he was interested in reading some of the books. At first the wife refused, but the youth begged her until she relented and gave him the key.

In the study, the youth found a book of magic spells lying on a table and began to read aloud. Suddenly there was a knocking at the door, and a demon appeared. The demon demanded to know why he had been summoned. The young man was so terrified that he could not reply, whereupon the demon seized him by the throat and strangled him.

When Agrippa returned home, he was horrified to find the corpse. If he called the authorities or tried to get rid of the body, he would be accused of murder. he summoned the demon to restore the corpse to life. The demon did, and Agrippa sent the reactivated corpse to walk up and down the market-place, and then collapse in an apparent natural death. But the marks of strangulation were found, and Agrippa was accused of murder. Once again, he had to flee town.

Agrippa secured the patronage of Charles V. who appointed him to chronicle history. by then, he was disillusioned with magic and considered it a waste of time. Theology, he said, was the only thing worth studying. Around 1530 he had published On the Vanity of Sciences and Arts, an attack on all sciences and the occult, in which he took the view that knowledge only makes man aware of how little he really knows. The book angered the king, who had Agrippa jailed for a year on charges of heresy.

After his release, On Occult Philosophy was published, and it appeared to contradict everything Agrippa had said in Vanity. The apparent inconsistency further blackened his reputation.

Agrippa went to Cologne, where he got into trouble with the inquisitor. Not only was he thrown out of Cologne, he was banished from all Germany. He went back to France, but his uncomplimentary remarks about his former employer, the queen mother, led him again into jail.

Upon his release, he went to Grenoble, where he died in 1535. His first work, On Occult Philosophy, survived to have a profound impact upon the development of Western occult thought.

The Encyclopedia of Witches and Witchcraft
Rosemary Ellen Guiley