SCHEMATIZING (24)

By: Joshua Glenn
January 11, 2024

One in a series of posts via which HILOBROW’S Josh Glenn will attempt to depict the intellectual and emotional highs and lows of developing a semiotic schema.

Two diagrams from Agrippa’s *De occulta philosophia* (1533) demonstrating the proportion, measure, and harmony of human bodies. The first shows a man with his feet together as a “quadrature equilateral”, whose centre is in “the bottom of his belly”. The second shows a man with limbs perfectly bordered by the sides of a square, whose centre aligns with his navel, “the girdling of the body.” From Anthony Grafton’s essay at Public Domain review.

Grafton, the author of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, The Footnote, Defenders of the Text, and Inky Fingers, explores the Renaissance polymath’s occult insights into the structure of the universe, discovering a path that leads both upward and downward: up toward complete knowledge of God, and down into every order of being on earth.

Agrippa made it clear that celestial influences shaped each being and object on earth, endowing it both with its powers and with the external marks that revealed these to the skilled eye of the magus. No one could hope to master the occult philosophy, in other words, without mastering the higher studies of astronomy and astrology. The magus also had to have the personal gifts and formal training that would enable him to interpret dreams and prophecies and the knowledge of mathematics required to detect the Pythagorean number patterns that gave the universe structure. In the end, moreover, he needed asceticism and self-discipline since the consummation of his art involved communication with angels.

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SCHEMATIZING (24)

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