Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Oh, wow.

And so you can find copies of hundreds of banned books that the Church was like, "Well, we're gonna hold onto these because they're good evidence if we need to bring them, bring something to trial later." And this would run tr- for everything from, you know, Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, which I, I brought a, a 17th century copy of, all, all the way to Spinoza.

And so, uh, all this stuff ends up in, in places like the Vatican archives, which, uh, it's a, it's a funny situation where the a- archives of the Catholic Church contain a pretty healthy dose of heresy.

That's so funny.

You know, you get a bunch of people together, just make really complex, stupid decisions.

It's so much of what I find in history when I, we discover some of these books.

Um, you know, again, I think about the Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa.

The Inquisition did try to kick the doors in and, and stop the printing of the book, and they did temporarily.

This milieu would eventually produce the famous Abbot of Spondheim, Trithemius, one of the true experts of the occult in the 15th century, as it gave way to the 16th, and indeed his Abbey Library would be one of the most substantial, if not the most substantial occult libraries in all of Europe.

And, of course, the University of Cologne would produce none other than Heinrichus Cornelius Agrippa, the author of the famous and decisive Three Books of Occult Philosophy, along with many other Hermetic volumes.

And that would produce a world that would remember fondly both the historical Albert, but also his focus on the magic of the mythical Albert, we might say.

The magical Albert.

Occulticising interpretations begin earlier.

In Book 1, Chapter 39 of Henrik Cornelius Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, in its expanded 16th century form, Agrippa refers to the detestable heresy of the Templars in a discussion of the impious rites and the attraction of evil spirits.

The critical Latin edition preserves the explicit reference to the Templars.

This is not evidence that Agrippa possessed lost Templar teachings.