Of the Occult Virtue of the Seventy-two Names of God
Perrone Compagni — Table of Comparison
1533 edition (3:12): new
This chapter, De influxu divinorum nominum per singula media in haec inferiora (“Of the Occult Virtue of the Seventy-two Names of God”), 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.
According to Perrone Compagni's table of comparison, this chapter is entirely new in the 1533 edition: it has no antecedent in the Würzburg draft (W). Its presence marks one of the conceptual expansions that distinguish K from W — the addition of material reflecting Agrippa's subsequent reading and intellectual development.
The absence of this chapter from the Würzburg draft invites reflection on what prompted its insertion in the mature edition. Agrippa's intellectual biography between 1510 and 1530 — including his engagement with Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Hermetism, and scholastic natural philosophy — provides the context for understanding such additions. The partial edition A (sigla A in Perrone Compagni) may offer clues about when the material was composed.
Scholarly Perspectives
The seventy-two names of God represent the Kabbalistic tradition of divine nomenclature at its most elaborate. Lehrich (2003) analyses these names as the intersecting nodes of the divine-name system that Books II and III together construct: each name is a facet of the infinite divine reality, refracted through the structures of human language. The chapter illustrates the tension between the surface suggestion that these names inherently contain divine power and the deeper qualification — stated explicitly in III:11 — that their power is conditional on the faith of the practitioner.