Is there any article treating Renaissance and feminism which had not at least mentioned Agrippa ? I haven't read one. If you had, please let me know. If you can, please let its author know he knows nothing.

No feminist writer will ever dare question Agrippa's influence on feminism. No modern feminist will ever try to have a look at Agrippa's hermetic view of Woman. For Hermetica was, is, and will always be irrelevant to Margarets - of Austria, of Alençon, of wherever.

Even Prof. Charles Nauert, in a recent book review in The Sixteenth Century Journal (vol. xxviii, No.2, summer 1997, pp.688-9), concerning the English edition of De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus, confessed he overlooked Agrippa's influence on feminism in his work of 1965 (Nauert, Charles G., Jr. : Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Urbana, Illinois. See also my bibliography on Agrippa) with these words:

"Only when viewed in the context of this emerging protofeminist tradition does the larger significance of the Declamation [De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus] stand out. Judged only in the context of Agrippa's other works, the treatise may seem to be of modest importance, just another example of Agrippa's tendency to go counter to prevailing opinion and to present shrewd arguments that stand conventional wisdom on its head. Agrippa himself claims no more, and the present reviewer in his own study of Agrippa's thought published in 1965 certainly failed (as Rabil justly notes) to perceive this little book's significance as part of an emergent protofeminist challenge to misogyny."

There was a crisis in Renaissance thought, and there was a rise of feminism. Five hundred years later we live in the world of Fukuyama's End of history, or of Spengler's Decline of the West - a world of severe crisis in modern thought. And there is a respective rise of feminism.

With all my esteem for Prof .Nauert, he only failed in explaining the reason for this treatise's modest importance. And the reason is that, unlike over periodical bursts of feminism, Agrippa had and has a continuous impact over hermetic thought, while this treatise, though fitting in Agrippa's critical periods of need for support, does not fit in the continuity of his hermetic understanding of the World.

For in Tabula Smaragdina Hermes Trismegistus said:

And if you only look at the contents of De occulta philosophia, you will immediately notice Book II, ch. XXXII De Sole et Luna eorumque magicis rationibus, where you will read the following and much more:

"Sol elementalium omnium virtutum dominus et Luna virtute Solis domina generationis, augmenti et decrementi... multi Platonicorum mundi animam in Sole principaliter collocarunt ... vitam, sensum et motum ipsi universo distribuens ... ipsus Dei exactissimum simulachrum.
.......
Sol omnibus lumen a seipso dat ... luce, magnitudine, pulchritudine omnes excellens, omnes illuminans...
...
Luna ... receptaculum omnium coelestium influxuum ... et velut stellarum omnium uxor facta ... et licet ab omnibus stellis vires suscipiat, potissime tamen a Sole."

Agrippa composed De nobilitate et praecellentia in 1509, by April 1510 he had not included the above chapter in his manuscript of De occulta philosophia. He did it only in the edition of 1533 (for more details, see Vittoria Perrone Compagni's De occulta philosophia libri tres). All feminists know Diotima was a teacher of Socrates. Her teachings are not so popular though. You know why ? Because the Moon still shines with the Sun's reflected light. And if we consider Agrippa's words on the Moon, not being a sovereign of generation otherwise than by virtue of the Sun, within the words of Diotima:

"hoi men oun enkymones, ephê, kata ta sômata ontes pros tas gynaikas mallon trepontai kai tautêi erôtikoi eisin"

("Those [men] who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children - this is the character of their love.")

we shall have at least some idea of the two Worlds.

For in Tabula Smaragdina Hermes Trismegistus said:

"Quod est inferius, est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius"

And 400 years after Agrippa, a book appeared in May 1903 with the following conclusion (Pt.II, Ch.XI) :

"Das Verhältnis des Ich zur Welt, das Verhältnis von Subjekt zu Objekt ist nämlich selbst gewissermaßen eine Wiederholung des Verhältnisses von Mann zu Weib in höherer und weiterer Sphäre, oder vielmehr dieses ein Spezialfall von jenem."

("The relation of the ego to the world, of the subject to the object is, in a certain respect, a repetition of the relation of Man to Woman in higher and wider spheres, or rather the latter is a special case of the former.")

Phrases that bind these two worlds tend to perplex the reader - he wonders whether this is philosophy or prophecy, a book or a door. What I mean ? Simply that Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter came to connect Platonic Tradition to the Inferior world. Nothing more, nothing less. And when speaking of the Inferior, as if having just read Agrippa's Chapter xxxii, Weininger wrote:

"Amongst the philosophers, the opinions of Aristotle must first be considered. He held that in procreation the male principle was the formative active agent, the "logos," whilst the female was the passive material. When we remember that Aristotle used the word "soul" for the active, formative, causative principle, it is plain that his idea was akin to mine, although, as he actually expressed it, it related only to the reproductive process; it is clear, moreover, that he, like all the Greek philosophers except Euripides, paid no heed to women, and did not consider her qualities from any other point of view than that of her share in reproduction.

Amongst the fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origen certainly had a very low opinion of woman, and St. Augustine, except for his relations with his mother, seems to have shared their view. At the Renaissance the Aristotelian conceptions gained many new adherents, amongst whom Jean Wier (1518-1588) may be cited specially. At that period there was general, more sensible and intuitive understanding on the subject, which is now treated as merely curious, contemporary science having bowed the knee to other than Aristotelian gods.

In recent years Henrik Ibsen (in the characters of Anitra, Rita, and Irene) and August Strindberg have given utterance to this view. But the popularity of the idea of the soullessness of woman has been most attained by the wonderful fairy tales of Fouqué, who obtained the material for them from Paracelsus, after deep study, and which have been set to music by E.T.A. Hoffman, Girschner, and Albert Lorzing."

When we read this, we ask ourselves: why a philosopher having a decisive impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein, when speaking of the Woman principle, would cite Pico della Mirandola (an authority for Agrippa), Paracelsus (a contemporary of Agrippa) and Johann Wier (a pupil of Agrippa), without citing Agrippa himself ? Some kind of anti-Aristotelianism in Agrippa ?

Who knows... Maybe Declamations like De nobilitate, dedicated to Margaret of Austria and De sacramento matrimonii, dedicated to Margaret of Alençon, were not amongst Agrippa's brightest ideas in life. In life means that almost immediately after the first Declamation, Margaret of Austria was indirectly involved in Agrippa's accusation of judaicising heresy by the Franciscans (he even had to leave the continent for a while), and soon after the second Declamation, Margaret of Austria directly contacted the Inquisition concerning one of his books, which presently sentenced Agrippa to death for heresy. Both Margarets did not like him at all. When Agrippa dedicated his works to William Paleologus, or to Hermann von Wied, it meant something else. Friendship. His third and last wife abandoned him, taking away all of his money.

But he had friends who lasted for life.

Maybe this was the reason why Otto Weininger did not include him, at least amongst Pico, Paracelsus and Johann Wier. Maybe Agrippa wrote too much on the Superior world. The real contradiction in Agrippa was that he suffered from adoring women as an object for love or knowledge, while knowing the real meaning of Woman in the light of Hermetic and Platonic Tradition. If feminist authors want to understand my point on friendship, the only thing they have to read is some material on Agrippa's last wife. I do not want them to read neither Tabula Smaragdina, nor Sex and Character. It is much more pleasant to read commentaries, especially pleasant ones.

Agrippa could not escape from his own will for projection in the Inferior. He certainly knew Diotima's words on children in Plato's Symposium, but did not have the time to resolve the riddle. He also knew one should observe but not confuse the Ideas from the Higher spheres with their material incarnation. You can talk to your friend's dress or dwelling but it is not the same as talking to your friend himself. Agrippa knew there was only one science, above all other sciences, explaining it clearly - with "why's" and "how's". He praised it in his De occulta philosophia (Book I, ch. II). He knew that what perishes in the Earth is not Love.

And what is Love?

"Es gibt also "platonische" Liebe, wenn auch die Professoren der Psychiatrie nichts davon halten. Ich möchte sogar sagen: es gibt nur "platonische" Liebe. Denn was sonst noch Liebe genannt wird, gehört in das Reich der Säue. Es gibt nur eine Liebe: es ist die Liebe zur Beatrice, die Anbetung der Madonna. Für den Koitus ist ja die babylonische Hure da.

("Then there is also "platonic" love, which professors of psychiatry have such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only "platonic" love. Any other so-called love belongs to the kingdom of the hog. There is only one love: it is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madonna. The symbol of Coitus is the Babylonian whore.")

Thus spoke "the greatest misogynist known to history", Otto Weininger. Considering the Madonna as ultimate argument, in his De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus Agrippa was even more eloquent:

"Praecellentiae tam felicissimi sexus omnibus hoc vel evidentissimim argumentum esse potest, quod dignissima omnium creaturarum, qua nec unquam beatissima virgo Maria, qua siquidem praeter originali peccatum concepta sit, ne Christus quidem quod ad eius humanitatem attinet maior erit."

The most evident argument as woman worship's ultimate reason - by virtue of the Father, giving birth to a Son. A hermetist is what he is.

And vain in its vanity, a question is arising - was Agrippa a greater misogynist than Weininger ?

Don't you think only modern feminists know everything and are on the right way ? Maybe not all of them? Maybe just a few ? Don't you know them all ?...

Inter caecos luscus rex.

But over there, high above all, the Eagle is looking at you.

Can't you see Him ?