The Golden Builders Page 9
At the Hermetic Bowl
One scholar who was hot on the Hermetic trail was the Frenchman, Lefèvre d'Étaples, known to Latin readers as Jacobus Faber Stapulensis. In 1494, while Mercurio and Lazzarelli were active in Italy, Lefèvre had the University of Paris publish his edition of Ficino's Pymander. Lefèvre made a number of trips to Italy and certainly met Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In 1505, a most significant work appeared in Paris bearing Lefèvre's name and dedicated to Guillaume Briçonnet, bishop of Lodève in the Languedoc. This exciting publication not only joined the Pymander and the Latin Asclepius in print for the first time, but its appearance also marked the beginning of a momentous importation of Hermetic ideas into France and the French Renaissance. His commentary on the Asclepius even came to be printed along with Ficino's collected works, and was long mistaken for Ficino's own work. But most importantly for our purposes, this book also contained another Hermetic work : the Crater Hermetis, written by Lodovico Lazzarelli and dedicated to Ioannes Mercurio de Corigio.
It is not unlikely that Lefèvre d'Étaples had encountered Lazzarelli on his travels around Italy. The impression which Lazzarelli's work -if not his person - made upon the Frenchman must have been great, for Lazzarelli to have his own work linked in print to the key works of Renaissance Hermetism was a tremendous privilege; his work was being linked to what was regarded as the very origin of religious thought, thereby promising his vision of the Hermetic message a very wide currency indeed. Again, one can only speculate on how it was that Lefèvre came upon Lazzarelli's manuscript. Was it recommended to him by Florentine Platonists? Had he heard of Mercurio through his friend Symphonien Champier who lived in Lyons, where we know Mercurio made an appearance at some time in the 1490s? We can only guess, and wonder at the extraordinary co-incidence of interests which Lefèvre d'Étaples' publication signifies.
Crater Hermetis means the “Hermetic bowl (or vessel)”, and the work is a kind of meditation on the meaning of the fourth treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum61. Lazzarelli sees the description in the fourth treatise as symbolic of the transformative relationship between Hermetic master and pupil :
TAT : I too, father, much want to be baptized in that bowl.
HERMES : If you do not first hate your body, my son, you cannot love yourself; but if you love your [true] self, you will have mind; and having mind, you will partake of gnosis also. …In these things, my son, I have drawn a likeness of God for you, so far as that is possible; and if you gaze upon this likeness with the eyes of your heart, then, my son, believe me, you will find the upward path; or rather, the sight itself will guide you on your way. For the Good has a power peculiar to itself; it takes possession of those who have attained to the sight of it, and draws them upward, even as men say the loadstone draws the iron.
Lazzarelli's meditation takes the form of a dialogue between the author and the old King of Naples, Ferrante d'Aragona. The dialogue is permeated by ecstatic hymns - very much in tune with the flavour of the original Hermetic discourses, (one such hymn was discovered among the codices of the Nag Hammadi Library) - and exhortations wherein the king asked him not to speak of his quality as a poet, but of what he has seen happening on Mount Sion. Sion is linked to the inspirational mountain of Parnassus and clearly symbolises that which is seen when the soul ascends towards the Father. There is a long eulogy to Hermes Trismegistus as precursor and master of Moses. Poimandres, (possibly Greek transliteration of ‘the knowledge of Re’), is explicitly identified as Christ, teacher of Hermes. Thus, we see the Gnostic Christ emerging as a cultural force four and a half centuries before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library (1945).
Lazzarelli poses the question : what is the way to happiness? - to which the response is that of the Oracle of Delphi : nosce te ipsum : Know Yourself. Knowledge of ourselves is necessarily linked to the love of God, for man was made in God's image. We cannot know the substance of God. God created the All for his love of mankind, and by means of man is brought to perfection all that the world itself could not do. God cultivates the soul; man brings nature into culture. The human soul is “the light of God”, and by this link, we can come down from knowledge of God to knowledge of ourselves. There then follows a ‘hymn of contemplation’ wherein the Hermetic mystery is expressed thus : as God, like man, is fertile, we may expect fruitfulness in intellect (nous), as well as in body - not only in the sciences and the arts, but in the syngenea mentis generatio, through which “mind generates mind”. This generation of a new mind by the agency of a divinely illuminated mind is then expressed in the “hymn of divine generation”. As God created the angels and true man, He produces divine souls which live with humans, (cf : the Qabalistic sefiroth), and who bring cares and fears, supplying aid, guidance and providence. These beings are God's servants and through them God gives man a mind and the gift of language, so that men might generate other gods.
The king, somewhat set back by all this abstruse theology, asks Lazzarelli for his authority. In reply, Lazzarelli cites Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, the Book of Enoch, a certain Abraam, and the example of Christ. The dialogue concludes with a Prayer of Thanksgiving - again, very much in the proper Hermetic mode. (A Prayer of Thanksgiving emerged from the Nag Hammadi Library discovery also). By divine generation, the “true man” is capable of regenerating souls, and such a one is elevated to the gnosis of God. The God-like souls created by him become the servants of God, accomplishing supernatural deeds and through their regeneration, rise to even greater heights of divine existence so that they receive the faculty of prophecy and the ability to work miracles. The process of generation is seen as strictly subsisting within the relation of master and pupil - books are apparently insufficient. There must be an actual transmission of mind to mind. Mercurio da Correggio is of course creditied with this gift, so Lazzarelli feels he can speak with authority.
Lazzarelli, the Hebrew scholar, cites ‘Abraam’ as a source for his theory and practice. In particular, Abraam's work Zepher izira - clearly a reference to the ancient Sefer Yetsirah, or ‘Book of Creation’. (circa 3rd-6th century AD). This Jewish Gnostic work of no more than 1600 words is the earliest extant ‘speculative’ work in Hebrew. The Book of Creation concerns the elements of the world : the ten sefiroth, (numerical projections of the divine Name), and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, combining to form the “thirty-two secret paths of wisdom”. Perhaps it is Lazzarelli's “divine souls which live with humans” which form the link with the Qabalah of the Sefer Yetsirah. The guiding servants of Lazzarelli's Hermetic vision may have been linked in his mind to the hayoth who support the Throne (or Chariot) of God (the Merkabah) in Merkabah mysticism : the “living beings” described by Ezekiel in his vision of the heavenly throng. (viz : Ezekiel I.26). These beings are identified in the Sefer Yetsirah with the “living numerical beings” of the Sefiroth whose “appearance is like a flash of lightning and their goal is without end; His word is in them when they come forth [from Him] and when they return; at His bidding do they proceed swiftly as a whirlwind, and before His throne they prostrate themselves.” (cf the “heavenly science” which leads men to the “throne of God” in the masonic Third Degree.)
It may be inferred from the deep contents of the Crater Hermetis that Lazzarelli has himself been taken on a journey of inner ascent with, presumably, Mercurio as his spiritual helmsman, and has seen with the “eyes of the heart” the living Anthropos, the cosmic Man who has appeared in gnostic revelation literature through the ages, guaranteeing to the eyes of the seer at least, the fundamental conception that man is in essence a spiritual being. In a fascinating parallel to the language of alchemy, Lazzarelli compares the making of the ‘new’ or ‘true’ man from the regenerative mind to the making of Adam from the “red earth”, the alchemical prima materia (in this context). Little wonder then that Lazzarelli grew to regard his merely artistic gifts of verse as barely skimming the surface of reality. That what men consider to be ‘good’, or even ‘high art’ is no
t the same as the Divine Good, is a consistently re-iterated message of Lazzarelli, and, one suspects, of Mercurio as well. Mercurio, as far as Lazzarelli is concerned, is a ‘natural’, performing in deed that which the scholar had previously, only read about : the Hermetic rebirth, with visionary gifts as the parergon of that experience. This was spiritual magic of a high order.
Frances Yates in her influential book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), described the Crater Hermetis as “a work which is something like a magical interpretation of the psychology of religious experience”, and suggested that it may have influenced the mind of that wild genius of cosmology and psychology, Giordano Bruno. Bruno was one of the very first men to imagine that the universe was infinite and thoroughly populated with life (though perhaps of kinds we cannot readily recognise) - and he was deeply interested in the idol-making passage in Asclepius, regarding this ability as a fundamental distinction of the high level of magical awareness and spiritual technology achieved by his ideal culture, that of Ancient Egypt. He wished to re-apply these Hermetic principles to a renewal of the Catholic Church based on the cosmic, magical religion of his (fictional) Hermetic Egypt, combined with his epoch-marking panentheist concept of the infinite universe. According to an authority on Renaissance Magic62, the experience described in the Crater Hermetis “is somewhat like a magical operation by which the master provided his disciple with a good daemon [his ‘true Self’], and is analagous to the introduction of daemons into idols described in the Asclepius.” It is certain that Lazzarelli saw the parallel, and it is hard to imagine that Bruno's voracious intellectual appetite would have passed over the Crater, especially since he was such an avid enthusiast of the Asclepius. Frances Yates went so far as to suggest that Bruno may have in some way modelled his own sense of destiny and importance on the authority of the regenerative or divinizing experience described in the Crater Hermetis. Professor Yates made the following judgement of Bruno : “People like Giordano Bruno are immunized from a sense of danger by their sense of mission, or their megalomania, or the state bordering on insanity in which they constantly live. ‘Although I cannot see your soul,’ he makes an English admirer say of him, ‘from the ray which it diffuses I perceive that within you is a sun or perhaps some greater luminary.’63 Hermetism, with its belief in a divinizing experience, is conducive to religious mania of this kind.” Clearly Bruno irritated contemporaries by his ‘not of this world’ demeanour, but Bruno was trying to change the world, indeed was part of that change. He needed to get ‘above’ things. He saw further and deeper than ordinary men and he really needed to be ‘immunized’ from day-to-day pressure. He was not a cloistered, academic type, so it seems to this author that to call his condition a “mania”, with all that that implies, (viz : ‘he should be put away’) is unkind to say the least. He was ‘put away’ - permanently his enemies might have thought - burned at the stake for his beliefs in 1600. If an element of Bruno's courageous stance can be laid at the door of Mercurio and Lazzarelli - at least in the dimension of encouraging Bruno to believe in himself, (against tremendous odds) - then surely some credit is due to the (officially) unlearned Mercurio da Correggio.
In the Sun
Another French scholar who helped to promote the Hermetic vision into the very centre of European cultural life was Symphonien Champier of Lyons. He was the leading apostle of Neoplatonism in France and a profound admirer of Ficino and his circle. In fact he modelled his De Quadruplici Vita (Lyons, 1507) on Ficino's work on the relationship between the soul and the cosmos. This book is also remarkable because it contains a kind of response to Lefèvre's Hermetic publication of 1505, which had contained Lazzarelli's Crater Hermetis. Champier not only dedicates his book to Lefèvre d'Étaples, but also adds to its contents the first-ever printed version of Lazzarelli's Definitiones Asclepii, which we last encountered in the community library of Viterbo in manuscript form, dedicated to Ioannes Mercurio de Corigio. By including Lazzarelli's Latin translation of treatise XVI of the Corpus Hermeticum (the Letter from Asclepius to King Ammon), Champier completed the printed availability of the classic Hermetic works begun in 1469 with the publication of the Latin Asclepius. The inclusion of Lazzarelli's work was also intended to complement the work of Lefèvre d'Étaples. It is again remarkable to see Lazzarelli's work finding centre-place among the great works of the Renaissance Hermetic corpus. Furthermore, libellus XVI of the Corpus Hermeticum, short as it is, was, in conjunction with the gathering momentum of interest around the other Hermetic works, to have far-reaching effects on Renaissance thought.
The Letter of Asclepius to King Ammon (which Lazzarelli translated and prefaced) takes as its chief subject the nature of the sun. There is a stunning description of the sun surrounded by a veritable choir of daemons64. Treatise XVI reinforced the gathering interest in the sun as the key star in the planetary system, (still not yet called the ‘solar’ system), based on Plato's view of the sun as the chief image for the world of Ideas which project their nature into the world, and which, (according to the Neoplatonic scheme), lose a quantity of their purely spiritual nature as they become expressed in the natural, organic world. This view gained even more support from the system of Divine Hierarchies attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite where the sun is seen as the image for the origin of spiritual light, a kind of living metaphor.
When Copernicus came to write his work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs65, proposing the heliocentric system, he justified the philosophical soundness of his mathematical conclusions by quoting Hermes Trismegistus; that the sun is a “second God”, most suitable to be venerated as the spiritual centrepiece for a divine cosmic system. One gets the impression that Copernicus is saying : the truth of the matter was already there, but went unseen because we judged things from an earthly perspective. But Hermes, at the beginning of science, he saw it. Treatise XVI, brought to the public attention by Lodovico Lazzarelli provided the fullest expression then available on the dignity of the sun as seen by Hermes :
the Demiurgus (that is, the Sun) [identified in libellus I as ‘Mind the Maker’] brings together heaven and earth, sending down true being from above, and raising up matter from below,…and if there is such a thing as a substance not perceptible to sense [intelligible substance=mind], the light of the sun must be the recepticle of that substance…God does not manifest himself to us; we cannot see him, and it is only by conjecture, and with hard effort, that we can apprehend him by thought. But it is not by conjecture that we contemplate the sun; we see him with our very eyes. …for he is stationed in the midst and wears the kosmos as a wreath around him.
Next, in startling prescience to such theories as photosynthesis we are told of how:
the light is shed downward, and illuminates all the sphere of water, earth, and air; he puts life into the things in this region of the kosmos, and stirs them up to birth, and by successive changes remakes the living creatures and trasforms them…For the permanence of every kind of body is maintained by change.. And as the light of the sun is poured forth continuously, so his production of life also is continuous and without intermission.
The intelligible kosmos then is dependent on God; and the Sun receives from God, through the intelligible kosmos, the influx of good (that is, of life giving energy), with which he is supplied. …God then is the Father of all; the Sun is the Demiurgus; and the kosmos is the instrument by means of which the Demiurgus works. …Therefore in making all things, God makes himself. And it is impossible that he should ever cease from making; for God himself can never cease to be.
It is perhaps hard for us today to imagine the effect of these words on an early sixteenth century mind, a mind seeing what were being regarded more and more as the primal thoughts of intelligent, divinely illuminated man, linked directly to the power of the spiritual sun.
Respect for Hermes Trismegistus grew apace. He was quoted throughout the sixteenth century as an authority on an almost equal level to that of the Bible and, as far as real Hermetic
enthusiasts were concerned, he could even be seen in some senses as superior to the Bible, insofar as his works were (wrongly) considered to predate Moses. The influence of Lazzarelli's work was subtle, unspoken. The Crater Hermetis appeared again in 1549 in a French translation of the Hermetica, dedicated to Cardinal Charles de Lorraine. Hermes was even being considered as a basis for transcending religious differences between Catholics and Protestants (after 1517), and members of the Lorraine family privately encouraged this. Wherever the Hermetica were studied, religious toleration and cosmic understanding grew. This dynamic is seen in a parallel movement regarding the dating of Hermes Trismegistus. In 1554, Turnebus published Ficino's Pymander along with the Definitiones Asclepii, (translated by Lazzarelli). This highly influential edition, appearing 103 years after the birth of Mercurio da Correggio, followed Lazzarelli's dating; that is to say, Moses derived his wisdom from the sage of pristine gnosis, Hermes Trismegistus. As Frances Yates has expressed it : “There seems to be a tendency by which the holier and more Christian Hermes Trismegistus becomes, the more his date is pushed back.” (The Hermetica were not properly dated until 1614).
The call for Rebirth - and the successful realization of that call (accomplished in Lodovico Lazzarelli) - perhaps represents the abiding value of the fifteenth century Hermetic effort. There is something uncanny and mysterious about Mercurio's ‘operation’ : a great symbolic public showing, demanding attention, getting it - and then withdrawing into obscurity. Meanwhile, he attracts an unlikely ‘fisher of men’, a disappointed scholar who found that academic honours, for all their glitter, mattered not too much at all. Crowned a poet, he threw the crown away, preferring the sight of Mercurio da Correggio's crown of thorns and ridiculous crescent : This is my son Poimandres whom I have chosen...
There is reason for considering that Jesus' entry into Jerusalem “to fulfill the prophecies” and to set a storm raging in the Temple was conceived deliberately as a symbolic drama, organised by a faithful following. In a sense, Mercurio, whether he knew exactly what he was doing or not, did dramatise the beginning of a new age. He called for a rebirth and a new hope. He brought at least one man closer to God, and there can be no doubt that Lazzarelli, the deep, obscure scholar, passed on the torch.