The type of occultism that informed counterpoint and canon was hermetic in nature and largely taken from alchemy and magic. However, by "magic" I don't mean the type practiced by crude, medieval fellows who disinterred corpses, decapitated them, buried the heads in the soil sprinkled with the ashes of a black dog sacrificed on the full moon and then watered with menstrual blood, toads' entrails and white cat bile while chanting incantations in Hebrew in order to transform the head into a device by which to communicate to the world of the dead and command demons--that was a wholly different type of magic that typified the Middle Ages.
The magic we address here was Renaissance magic. To be more precise, it was this magic that
gave us the Renaissance. The man responsible for it was Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), the son of the Prince of Concord in Northern Italy. Pico was very well educated and had attended universities in several cities including Paris. At age 24 in 1487, Pico had his work,
De Hominis dignitate, published in Rome. We know it by its English title,
Oration on the Dignity of Man.
This was intended as the opening speech of a debate which never took place and so it was published in written form. Pico carried with him, 900 theses of Hermetic, Islamic and Jewish wisdom and his Oration was a defense of the system that he had formed from reading them. Since these theses were not Christian in nature, he was forbidden to publicly debate their merits in Rome. But the Church had done Pico a favor at their own expense. The Oration became immensely popular among the intelligentsia. Nearly everybody who was anybody had read it.
So popular is the Oration that it is available to this day in many libraries, bookstores and online ordering houses. Pico's view of humanity was anathema to the Church who asserted that humanity was degraded by Original Sin and could only hope to reach Heaven if it submitted itself to the Church's dogma. Pico, instead, held that the human being occupied a special place in God's Creation because man was given a great intellect.
Pico writes:
God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divinity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought Himself of bringing forth man. Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders. Still, it was not in the nature of the power of the Father to fail in this last creative élan; nor was it in the nature of that supreme Wisdom to hesitate through lack of counsel in so crucial a matter; nor, finally, in the nature of His beneficent love to compel the creature destined to praise the divine generosity in all other things to find it wanting in himself.
At last, the Supreme Maker decreed that this creature, to whom He could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature. Taking man, therefore, this creature of indeterminate image, He set him in the middle of the world and thus spoke to him:
"We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.''
So, the human being had the ability to determine his own destiny! Man did not fit into the previous molds that God had made for the other creatures but was malleable and able to inhabit any and all of them but could not solidify into them but always remain fluid in order to experience everything the world has to offer as well as what heaven has to offer. What a unique position man holds! Neither mortal nor immortal, neither divine nor mundane, self-fashioning and with total free will! Man is virtually an angel!
Of course, none of this sat right with the Church. When Pico issued his
Apology, Innocent VIII promptly banned it. Pico realized he was now in trouble and retracted his claims but when he realized this would not satisfy his opponents in the Church, he fled to Paris but was apprehended there and imprisoned. But the damage to the Church's previously unassailable position had been done and the Renaissance had begun.
Instead of a human being hobbled by sin already damned just by coming into the world, Pico transformed man into a creature with a brilliant godlike intellect with the entire universe thrown open before him, its splendors could not be denied him and, in fact, were freely and exuberantly offered if only he would accept them.
Suddenly, the Europeans sought the great ancient learning of the Greeks which had been hidden for so long. The Jewish learning, so long ignored and despised, was now openly sought and celebrated. The Islamic learning was also investigated and embraced. The effect was felt all through European Christendom and affected the entire culture including the arts and music.
