Marsilio Ficino and the Pimander: Hermes Trismegistus Comes to Florence

Around 1463 Cosimo de' Medici, by then elderly, asked a young scholar to interrupt his translation of Plato's dialogues and devote himself to a text that had just arrived in Florence. It was a Greek manuscript of treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, brought from Macedonia by the monk Leonardo da Pistoia. The translator was Marsilio Ficino, and that choice would mark the history of Renaissance philosophy and magic.

The Philosopher of Careggi

Ficino was born at Figline Valdarno in 1433, the son of a physician in the service of the Medici. He studied philosophy and medicine in Florence and learned Greek with a dedication that amazed his contemporaries. Cosimo gave him a house near the villa of Careggi, where the young man devoted himself to the study of Plato and his interpreters, surrounded by friends and pupils.

Around him formed what the sources call the Platonic Academy, a circle of Florentine scholars, poets and patricians united by a love of philosophy. Historians debate how far it was a true institution and how far rather a network of friendships, letters and lectures. Certainly his work transformed the way Europe read the ancient philosophers.

The Pimander and Ancient Wisdom

The translation of the Hermetic treatises, completed in a few months, was titled Pimander, after the name of the first treatise. First printed in Treviso in 1471, it went through a great many editions within a few decades. Ficino was convinced that Hermes was an Egyptian sage who had lived in remotest times, contemporary with or slightly later than Moses, the master of a wisdom later handed down to Plato.

In the preface he outlined a chain of sages, the prisca theologia, running from Hermes through Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras and Philolaus to Plato. Only in 1614 did the philologist Isaac Casaubon show, on linguistic grounds, that the Hermetic texts had been written in the first centuries of the Christian era. For more than a century and a half, however, Ficino's idea deeply shaped European culture.

De vita and Natural Magic

Ficino then completed his translation of Plato, printed in 1484, and that of Plotinus, published in 1492. In 1489 he issued De vita libri tres, a work devoted to the health of scholars, whose third book, De vita coelitus comparanda, discusses how, in the author's view, the influence of the stars was bound up with images, music, colours and natural substances.

The book aroused suspicions of illicit magic, and Ficino had to write an apology in his defence, arguing that he was describing a natural magic, founded on the correspondences between heaven and earth and not on the help of demons. This distinction, taken up by Pico della Mirandola, by Agrippa and by many others, became one of the theoretical foundations of Renaissance magic and of the treatises that derived from it.

Ficino died at Careggi in 1499. His translations remained for centuries the standard Latin versions of Plato, Plotinus and the Hermetic writings, and his manuscripts and editions are now among the treasures of Florentine libraries. Without him the history of Renaissance books of magic would have been very different, and certainly less learned.