1533 CE (final printed edition) · Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim

Three Books of Occult Philosophy

The Renaissance synthesis

De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres — Agrippa's masterwork, the great encyclopedia of Renaissance magic. He gathered Hermetica, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Picatrix, and folk magic into one architecture in three books: Natural, Celestial, and Ceremonial magic.

Table of Contents

Begin reading →

Primary — authentic public-domain translation · Keeper's — interpretive synthesis authored for this app

The Synthesis

Agrippa drafted the Three Books at age 23 in 1510, while serving as imperial secretary to Emperor Maximilian I. He spent the next 23 years revising, adding, defending — and dying just before its impact was fully felt. The 1533 Cologne edition is the canonical text. It pulls Picatrix, Sefer Yetzirah, the Hermetica, Reuchlin's Christian Kabbalah, and Pico's 900 Theses into a single coherent architecture.

Book I — Natural Magic

The cosmos is a chain of correspondences — every herb, stone, animal, and metal is tuned to a planet, a sign, an element. Mastery means knowing the tuning. The lion's hair, the heliotrope, gold, the sapphire, the chamomile all share the solar key. Burn them together and you amplify the Sun's nature in any space.

Book II — Celestial Magic

The seven planets, their intelligences (good spirits) and spirits (raw forces), their magical squares (the Kameas), the Names that command them. Each planet has a number, a seal, a Hebrew Name, an Intelligence Name, a Spirit Name. To work the planet you draw its Kamea, inscribe its Names, consecrate at its hour.

Book III — Ceremonial Magic

The angels of the four corners, the ranks of the hierarchies, the divine Names, the consecration of vessels, the angelic alphabets (Malachim, Celestial, Passing-the-River), the conditions of the magician (chastity, fasting, study). This is where Agrippa most directly fed John Dee's Enochian working forty years later.

The Fourth Book

After Agrippa's death, a 'Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy' circulated under his name — almost certainly not his — containing more explicit conjurations and goetic material. Agrippa himself, late in life, wrote De Vanitate Scientiarum, denouncing his own occult work as folly. Scholars still argue whether he meant it or was protecting himself from the Inquisition.

Read the Book Decode in this script Test thy memory →Ask the Keeper →

Alphabet · Glyphs

Tap to hear