What Magic Is, Its Parts, and the Magician's Qualifications
Revised & ExpandedPerrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (1:2): W, 1: 2 + two short additions
This chapter, 1:2 (“What Magic Is, Its Parts, and the Magician's Qualifications”), occupies a significant place in Agrippa's systematic exposition of occult philosophy. In the 1533 Cologne printed edition (De occulta philosophia libri tres, sigla K in Perrone Compagni's critical apparatus), the text represents Agrippa's mature formulation of the ideas it addresses, the product of over two decades of reading, travel, and revision since the composition of the Würzburg draft.
This chapter corresponds to W 1:2 in the Würzburg draft, with shorter additions in the 1533 text. The core argument is preserved from W, but Agrippa refined it with supplementary passages, qualifying or extending particular points.
The extent of revision in this chapter illustrates the dynamic character of Agrippa's rewriting process. Rather than simply updating facts, he appears to have substantially reconfigured the argument. Comparison with the partial edition A — which represents an intermediate stage — may reveal whether the additions were introduced gradually or in a single later revision.
Agrippa's Argument
Agrippa's definition of magic as totius nobilissimae philosophiae absoluta consummatio is a deliberate elevation beyond his sources. Where Pico called magic 'the most perfect accomplishment of natural philosophy,' Agrippa substitutes 'noblest philosophy' — a term that encompasses all three registers (natural, celestial, divine) and not merely the elemental tier. The operative formula is 'uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other': magic is the discipline of correspondence, of traversing the links that connect hierarchically ordered spheres. This makes the definition architecturally necessary for everything that follows — it is not a claim about magic as a craft but a philosophical proposition about the structure of reality and the cognitive activity appropriate to it. Agrippa draws on Neoplatonic sympathy theory, Hermetic correspondence, and Christian Kabbalah simultaneously, treating them as complementary articulations of a single cosmological truth.
Scholarly Perspectives
Lehrich (2003) treats De occulta philosophia I:2 as the foundational anchor for his entire reading of Agrippa's system, opening the analytical portion of his study by quoting the chapter's celebrated definition of magic at length and noting that the passage appears nearly verbatim in the Juvenile Draft, which establishes its centrality to Agrippa's mature project. For Lehrich, the operative phrase is the definition's insistence that magic works 'by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other': this articulates the semiotic infrastructure of the whole DOP, the principle that hierarchically ordered spheres — natural, celestial, and divine — are linked by correspondence and that the magician's art consists in traversing those links. Lehrich argues that this makes Agrippa's categorization more rigorous than the frameworks of Ficino or Trithemius, because where his predecessors tended to collapse the three registers into one another, I:2 insists on their structural distinctness while asserting their mutual implication. The chapter thus occupies an unusual position in historiographical debates about whether the DOP is a coherent system or an encyclopedic miscellany: Lehrich's reading uses I:2 as evidence that Agrippa's tripartite structure is architecturally intentional, with the definition of magic here functioning less as an introduction than as a load-bearing proposition for everything that follows.