The Quest For Hermes Trismegistus: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern World by Gary Lachman

Author:Gary Lachman [Lachman, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780863158490
Google: y2RrBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Floris Books
Published: 2011-06-08T22:00:00+00:00

Ficino: born under a bad sign

Marsilio Ficino was born in Figline, Italy, in the Val d’Arno on 19 October 1433, at 9:00 in the evening. Saturn, the planet of time, materiality, and restrictions was in the ascendant, and if you have only a passing familiarity with astrology, you will know that this is not a particularly auspicious augury. Readers of mythology will remember that Saturn — the Greek Kronos —ate his children and is usually depicted as an old man brandishing a scythe. Given the astral influences dominant at his birth, it’s not surprising that Ficino grew up with a profound sense of melancholy and that he spent a great deal of his career exploring ways to offset the dark character allotted to him at his entry into the world.

In many ways, Ficino’s use of the Hermetic wisdom he gleaned from the Asclepius, Corpus Hermeticum, and Picatrix — a Arabic manual of spirit evocation not ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, but which contains the story of the fantastic city of Adocentyn, mentioned in the Introduction — was an early form of psychotherapy.20 Frances Yates didn’t know how accurate she was when she remarked that reading Ficino’s Renaissance ‘self help manuals’, collectively known as The Book of Life, ‘we might be in the consulting room of a rather expensive psychiatrist who knows that his patients can afford plenty of gold and holidays in the country’.21 Not long after Yates wrote this, James Hillman would be claiming the ‘loveless, humpbacked, melancholy’ Ficino as an early and seminal exponent of the ‘centrality of the soul’ which is at the heart of Hillman’s ‘archetypal psychology’.22

It’s also not surprising that Ficino would become a ‘Doctor of Souls’, a phrase he used to described Plato and which, legend has it, his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici used to describe Ficino himself.23 Ficino’s father was a successful doctor — one of his many influential patients was Cosimo — and Ficino himself would more than likely have followed in his father’s footsteps, were it not for the influence of his mother, who seems to have had considerable psychic gifts. She predicted several events accurately, such as her own mother’s death, that of a new born baby, and her husband’s accident with a horse, and had a reputation for being slightly odd.24 Some suggest that Ficino inherited his oversensitive temperament and frail physique from her, and Ficino himself believed that his overly coddled mother could, in some way, travel ‘out of her body’. If Ficino did inherit his weakness from his mother, he countered them by assimilating his father’s character as a healer. In many ways Ficino’s career as an Hermetic medicine man was born of the union of his parents. As cliché would have it, he was doctor and patient in one.

Ficino was a sickly boy, and his humped back, dwarfish form and stammer meant few friends, but what he lacked in physical vitality — he was, according to his translator, ‘one of the least active of men’ — he more than made up for with an acute and highly active mind.

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