My life's introduction to Cornelius Agrippa was not through reading his books, but through the article about him in Man, Myth and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural.
It includes the following little rumor about Mr. Agrippa:
...He went out one day, leaving the key of a secret room with his wife. She foolishly lent it to the lodger, a student, who went into the room and found a huge book of spells, which he began to read. After a while he looked up and found a demon standing in front of him, asking why it had been summoned. He gaped at it in horror and the demon strangled him.Agrippa returned and, fearing a charge of murder, made the demon restore the student to life for a few hours. The young man was seen walking in the street but when the demon's magic wore off, he collapsed.
Now, the first time I ever laid hands on Struwwelpeter, many years afterwards, it was through the Mark Twain translation (as Slovenly Peter) -- and I was surprised that in that version, there was no mention of Agrippa.
The character is instead St. Nicholas.
In the original German, the verses read:
Der Niklas wurde bös und wild, du siehst es hier auf diesem Bild! Er packte gleich die Buben fest, beim Arm, beim Kopf, beim Rock und West den Wilhelm und den Ludewig, den Kaspar auch, der wehrte sich. Er tunkt sie in die Tinte tief, wie auch der Kaspar »Feuer« rief. Bis übern Kopf ins Tintenfaß tunkt sie der große Nikolas.
The character "Agrippa" in the 1848 Shock-Headed Peter translation is the "Nikolas" in the German. In other words, he is replacing Santa Claus.
Why was Agrippa used, instead of Santa, for the earlier English version? It's likely that in the 1840s, Santa Claus/St. Nicholas wasn't perceived as well known in the English speaking world, and especially not if the translation was meant for a British rather than American audience.
What made Agrippa seem like a good substitute? It appears that in the late 18th and early 19th century he had a semi-legendary status as a magician (you will find apocryphal stories about him meeting the devil and such, in texts from the era) comparable maybe to someone like Marie Laveau. Also whatever figure it was had to match the illustration of Saint Nicholas, and Agrippa might be supposed to dress like a wizard in a similar habit with pointy hat and robe. Add in his German connection, and perhaps he was deemed the most logical boogieman to mete out justice for the story of Die Geschichte von den schwarzen Buben.
You can read the text with Agrippa's full appearance at Project Gutenberg.
From Wikipedia:
Agrippa was born in Cologne in 1486. In 1512, he taught at the University of Dole in the Free County of Burgundy, lecturing on Johann Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico; as a result, Agrippa was denounced, behind his back, as a "Judaizing heretic." Agrippa's vitriolic response many months later did not endear him to the University.
In 1510, he studied briefly with Johannes Trithemius, and Agrippa sent him an early draft of his masterpiece, De occulta philosophia libri tres, a kind of summa of early modern occult thought. Trithemius was guardedly approving, but suggested that Agrippa keep the work more or less secret; Agrippa chose not to publish, perhaps for this reason, but continued to revise and rethink the book for twenty years.
During his wandering life in Germany, France and Italy he worked as a theologian, physician, legal expert and soldier.
He was for some time in the service of Maximilian I, probably as a soldier in Italy, but devoted his time mainly to the study of the occult sciences and to problematic theological legal questions, which exposed him to various persecutions through life, usually in the mode described above: He would be privately denounced for one sort of heresy or another. He would only reply with venom considerably later. (Nauert demonstrates this pattern effectively.)
There is no evidence that Agrippa was seriously accused, much less persecuted, for his interest in or practice of magical or occult arts during his lifetime, apart from losing several positions. It is impossible of course to cite negatively, but Nauert, the best bio-bibliographical study to date, shows no indication of such persecution, and van der Poel's careful examination of the various attacks suggest that they were founded on quite other theological grounds.
It is important to mention that, according to some scholarship, "As early as 1525 and again as late as 1533 (two years before his death) Agrippa clearly and unequivocally rejected magic in its totality, from its sources in imagined antiquity to contemporary practice." Some aspects remain unclear, but there are those who believe it was sincere (not out of fear, as a parody, or otherwise). Recent scholarship (see Further Reading below, in Lehrich, Nauert, and van der Poel) generally agrees that this rejection or repudiation of magic is not what it seems: Agrippa never rejected magic in its totality, but he did retract his early manuscript of the Occult Philosophy - to be replaced by the later form.
According to his student Johann Weyer, in the book De praestigiis daemonum, Agrippa died in Grenoble, in 1535.
Man, Myth and Magic adds the following:
Much of his career is shrouded in mystery and even before his death he became the centre of stories in which he figured as a master black magician. Goethe drew on some of these stories for the title character of his play Faust.
...
Agrippa says that everything which exists has a 'soul' or spiritual component, part of the total world soul, which shows itself in magical properties of herbs, metals, stones, animals and other phenomena of Nature.
...
Agrippa builds up a system of the universe in which everything is part of a great spiritual whole, which is God. Magic is the way of investigating this system but magic is only for the initiated few, for men like Agrippa himself -- as most of them were, in fact -- of secret societies. He does not press the point fully home but his conclusion that man 'containeth in himself all things which are in God' is well in line with the magical theory that the magician can make himself God and wield the supreme power of God in the universe.
Agrippa's planetary incense recipes have made the rounds, and turns up all over the place, from Scott Cunningham's Incense Oils and Brews to Lauron William De Laurence's Obeah Bible. He basically gives two recipes for each type, one that usually was specific and which involved something unpleasant and hard to find like a weasel's brain, and another that came down to a single type of substance (woods, leaves, etc.) that could be formed into a planetary incense.
Here are some suggested formulas for each of the basic planets as based on the recommendations of Agrippa, for his simple planetary magical incenses:
MARS (made from woods)
Oak, Hickory and Mesquite.
VENUS (made from flowers)
Rose, Balm of Gilead Buds and Clove Buds.
MOON (made from leaves)
Patchouli and Clary Sage.
MERCURY (made from barks and peels)
Orange Peel, Cinnamon and Mace.
JUPITER (made from fruits)
Vanilla or Tonka Bean, Nutmeg and Allspice Berries.
SATURN (made from roots)
Calamus, Vetiver and Mandrake.
SUN (made from resins)
Dragon's Blood, Frankincense and Gum Arabic.
If you want to read works by the real, actual Agrippa, you can find many at the wonderful Esoteric Archive: http://www.esotericarchives.com/agrippa/index.html
But Agrippa was a Skeptic
In 1530, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim published a book arguing that all human knowledge is "pernicious" and "destructive," all arts and sciences are vanity, and the only reliable guide to anything is Scripture interpreted through faith, not through the scholastic apparatus that has been layered over it, and that simple, unlearned people are often better positioned to receive this than the learned, whose minds are cluttered with human opinions. The book is called De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum atque artium — English "On the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences and Arts" which can be read here — and it is comprehensive in its take-down of grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, medicine, law, natural philosophy, and, not incidentally, Renaissance magic in every form Agrippa could name. One year later, he published De Occulta Philosophia, his three-volume masterwork defending and systematizing the entire edifice of Renaissance ceremonial magic, natural magic, and Kabbalah that he had just finished calling worthless. He died in 1535.
This is the central fact of Agrippa's intellectual career, and few who read his books read both, which produces some spectacular misreadings in both directions. The chronology is worth untangling because it changes the interpretive stakes considerably. Agrippa wrote the first version of De Occulta Philosophia around 1510, when he was in his mid-twenties and burning with the particular certainty of a young man who feels that he has personally unlocked the structure of the universe. He sent the manuscript to Johann Trithemius, the Benedictine abbot and cryptographer whose own reputation for occult knowledge was formidable enough that his enemies accused him of summoning demons; which was, in that era, a meaningful professional hazard. Trithemius praised it and advised him to keep it private, advice Agrippa followed for twenty years while the manuscript circulated anyway in the way 16th century manuscripts did (to mind comes Nashe His Dildo, but that’s another post).
The officially published version of Agrippa’s book, substantially revised and expanded, came out in 1531. De incertitudine, written around 1526 and published in 1530, therefore preceded De Occulta Philosophia’s first book into print by a year.
What De incertitudine actually does, chapter by chapter, is work through the entire curriculum of Renaissance learning and finds it wanting. The argument in each chapter follows roughly the same pattern: the discipline claims more than it can deliver, its practitioners contradict each other endlessly on foundational questions, and whatever it touches it corrupts. Grammar produces heresy through disputes over words. Rhetoric is organized manipulation. Logic produces equally valid arguments for any position and therefore none. Numerology assigns metaphysical properties to numbers that are asserted rather than demonstrated. Astrology is shot through with irreconcilable disagreements between every school that has ever practiced it — Indian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Arab, Hebrew, Latin — about the most basic questions of how many spheres there are and how they move, and Agrippa mentions with some bitterness that he wasted years on it himself.
Then he gets to magic, which is where the text gets interesting for anyone coming to it from an occult practice background. Agrippa does not take a simple position. He distinguishes natural magic — the knowledge of occult properties in natural things, the sympathies and antipathies between stones and herbs and animals and planets — from ceremonial magic, which involves spirits and ritual operations, and both of these from what he calls "goetia," the lower traffickings with demons and the dead. He had defended all three categories, in varying degrees and with varying qualifications, in De Occulta Philosophia. In De incertitudine he takes the position that natural magic, properly understood, is just natural philosophy under another name, and natural philosophy is uncertain, so natural magic is uncertain. Ceremonial magic depends on the reliability of the spiritual entities involved, and those entities are either demons, in which case the operation is spiritually damning regardless of outcomes, or something more ambiguous, in which case their reliability is open to question. Divination (such as geomancy, chiromancy, physiognomy, the interpretation of dreams) is mostly guesswork, and mostly poor guesses at that.
This is not a comfortable position for anyone who has spent significant time with Agrippa's other work, because De Occulta Philosophia is one of the most systematic and serious accounts of Renaissance magical theory that exists, and De incertitudine is, among other things, an argument that systematic magical theory is a contradiction in terms. The question scholars have been arguing about for several centuries is what to do with this contradiction. The three main positions are: that De incertitudine is sincere and De Occulta Philosophia represents an earlier, now-abandoned enthusiasm (which Agrippa himself claims is the case in the text); or that De Occulta Philosophia is sincere and De incertitudine is a tactical retreat in the face of ecclesiastical pressure; and that both books are sincere and represent genuinely different registers of Agrippa's thought — the skeptic and the magician dwelling together in the same mind, each one honest, but neither canceling the other out. Charles Nauert's 1965 monograph Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought makes the most sustained case for this third position, and to many it remains more persuasive than either of the simpler alternatives, because the simpler alternatives require you to treat one of the books as dishonest performance; but like so many magicians, his career was characterized by a reckless willingness to say what he actually thought regardless of professional consequences, which were considerable and fairly continuous.
For practitioners reading Agrippa today, De incertitudine is worth taking seriously. A magician who has also read the skeptical literature on his own tradition is in a stronger epistemological position than one who hasn't, not because skepticism defeats magic but because it forces precision about what magic is claimed to do and how. Agrippa's objections to natural magic — that its accounts of occult properties in herbs and stones are inconsistent across authorities, that the sympathetic correspondences are asserted rather than demonstrated — remain legitimate objections to a great deal of what gets written on the subject today, including things written by people who cite De Occulta Philosophia as their authority. The correspondence systems Agrippa synthesized in that work were themselves drawn from sources that frequently disagreed with each other, a fact he acknowledged in the text and that most people working from his tables quietly set aside.
The book is available in a 1569 English translation by James Sanford, titled Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, which has the period charm you would expect and is readable if you have some tolerance for sixteenth-century spelling and grammar (thee, thou, thine = you, you, your; compare French toi, tu, ton) Reading it alongside De Occulta Philosophia (usually Englished as Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and available here) is a better engagement with what Agrippa actually thought, than is reading either one alone. Even nowadays, some magical practitioners (like me!) hold skeptical ideas alongside superstitious ones.