Thesis 11>17
Latin
Qui sciuerit quid est uinum purissimum apud Cabalistas, sciet cur dixerit Dauid: Inebriabor ab ubertate domus tuae, et quam ebrietatem dixerit antiquus uates Museus esse foelicitatem, et quid significent tot Bacchi apud Orpheum.
'foelicitatem' is the common medieval spelling of 'felicitatem' (oe/ae interchange); kept as printed, not treated as a variant.
English
Whoever has learned what the purest wine is among the Cabalists will know why David said, I shall be made drunk by the abundance of your house, and what drunkenness the ancient seer Musaeus called happiness, and what all those Bacchic revels signify in Orpheus.
'tot Bacchi' (masculine, 'so many Bacchic things/revels') is rendered 'Bacchic revels'; Farmer instead reads it as 'so many Bacchae' (the maenads), a different noun (farmer1998:26771). Farmer's note ties 'purest wine'/'drunkenness'/'Bacchi' to a series on mystical happiness beginning at thesis 2.12 (farmer1998:26781).
Not established
- Whether Pico's 'Bacchi' should be read as the god's revels or, as Farmer takes it, as the maenads (Bacchae); the two readings diverge in gender and referent.
Discussed in
- Giulio Busi and Raphael Ebgi, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Mito, magia, Qabbalah (2014)
- Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (1989)
Farmer's cross-references
- 10>23 Qui Apollinem adibit, mediabit opus per Bacchum triethericum, et consumabit per nomen ineffabile.
- 10>24 Non inebriabitur per aliquem Bacchum, qui suae musae prius copulatus non fuerit.
- 5>7 Cum dicit Plato in Timao in medio mundi positam animam, quicquid dicant caeteri Platonici, ego per medium lunam intelligo.
- 8>6 Dicta interpretum Chaldeorum super .xi. amphorismo, de duplici ebriatione, Bacchi et Sileni, perfecte intelligentur per dicta cabalistarum d