1518 FICINO DE VITA RENAISSANCE HERMETIC MAGIC ASTROLOGY MEDICINE

1st combined edition to include Ficino's Apologia on esoteric magic!

Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance magic, astrological magic and its use in medicine

A COMPLETE AND EXTREMELY WELL-PRESERVED EXAMPLE OF THIS SCARCE POST-INCUNABLE EDITION OF “A HIGHLY INFLUENTIAL COMPENDIUM OF MAGICAL MEDICINE" (Michael Allen et al, ed., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, p.268), AND ONE OF THE MOST POPULAR WORKS OF RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISM!

First published in 1489, De triplici vita ("Three Books on Life") is, arguably, the most popular of Ficino's original works! This fascinating and influential treatise provides a great deal of curious contemporary medical and astrological advice for maintaining health and vigor, while expounding the Neoplatonist view of the world's ensoulment and its integration with the human soul and defending astrological magic and its use in medicine.

This edition also includes (at the end of the volume) Ficino's Apologia, written to defend his work (particularly its more esoteric Book III) from an accusation of magic, as well as his epistle Quod necessaria sit ad vitam securitas et tranquillitas animi ("On what's necessary for life's security and tranquility of soul"). 

Ficino's De triplici vita (or simply De vita) is A KEY BOOK FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN THE RENAISSANCE ASTROLOGICAL MAGIC and the hermetic and neoplatonic revival in the 15th century Florence.

The book is a curious amalgam of philosophy, medicine, natural magic and astrology, and is possibly the first book ever written focusing primarily on the health of an intellectual and its peculiar concerns.

"Of the three Books of Ficino's De Triplici Vita the first deals with preserving the health of scholars, the second with prolonging their life, and the third with astral influences on them.

Through all three, Ficino's attention is devoted not so much to man's soul or body as to his spiritus. The De Triplici Vita is presented as a medical treatise, and the practices recommended in it might be taken as somewhat odd medical remedies and regimes - odd only because of the large place given to talismans and music; for there is, of course, nothing odd in a Renaissance medical treatise dealing with spirits and astrology.

It is clear that Ficino is strongly attracted by this kind of magic or theurgy, ... and also it is clear that he is aware that it is dangerous.

His conclusion seems to be that its dangers might be avoided if it remained within a learned, philosophical circle, and were kept secret from the ignorant vulgus, who would distort it into idolatry and superstition." (D.P. Walker, Spiritual And Demonic Magic From Ficino To Campanella, pp. 30, 51) 

"The spiritual magic of the Renaissance - Marsilio Ficino being its first and most influential representative - is built on the principle of universal pneumatic sympathy.

The first corollary of this principle is that man endowed with a hegemonikon located in the heart, the organ corresponding to the sun in the cosmos, has the capacity to impart voluntary changes to his own phantasy.

These changes, due to the continuity of the pneuma, are transmitted to the objects aimed at by the manipulator.

This phenomenon [is based on] links between individuals according to the transcendental information that the pneumatic conveyances of their souls have accumulated during their descent through the planetary heavens.

Renaissance magic [has its] point of departure in Ficino's treatise De vita coelitus comparanda [the 3rd book of De vita], which specifically states the following principles: just as the soul of the world is concentrated in the sun, whence it radiates to all parts of the universe through the quinta essentia (which is the ether or the pneuma), the human soul is concentrated in the heart and enters the body through the spirit. [...] [Ficino writes that] 'the Platonists by adapting our spirit to the spirit of the world by means of the magic and talismans (ars physica) and emotions (affectum), try to direct our soul and our body towards the blessings of heaven. That causes the strengthening of our spirit by means of the world spirit, through the action of the stellar rays acting beneficently upon our spirit, which is of the same kind as these rays, this lets it attract to itself celestial things'." (Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, p.127-8). 

De vita that put Ficino into direct conflict with the Church for the first time. From Ficino's correspondence in 1490, we know Pope Innocent VIII found inklings of heresy in the work. Although Ficino claimed that he was merely interpreting Plotinus, the more blatant references to magic in De vita are not from Plotinus but from the esoteric writings of Proclus, and, especially, from the Picatrix, the most famous medieval grimoire of astrological magic.