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A CHRISTIAN-HERMETIC-JUDAIC INITIATION
INTO THE MYSTERIES: LODOVICO LAZZARELLI’S
CRATER HERMETIS (CA. 1493)
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GYÖRGYE. SZÖNYI
ABSTRACT
While the rise of Florentine Neoplatonism is usually associated with
the philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
Lodovico Lazzarelli also made important contributions to the forging of
Christian Hermeticism. Like Pico, he became attracted to Jewish mysticism
and the Kabbalah and in his work Crater Hermetis (c. 1493), he contributed
to this intellectual trend with a passionate and poetical vision of ascension,
the technology of which he partly borrowed from the mystical Judaica, at
the same time creating (according to Wouter Hanegraaff) a particularly
pure form of ecstatic Christian mystery. In my paper I introduce this text
and point out the decisive meeting of Lazzarelli with Giovanni “Mercurio”
da Correggio, whom he identified as the reborn Hermes Trismegistus, while
he styled himself as a reborn Enoch. Their twin story is a fascinating example
of early Renaissance Neoplatonic mysticism which synthesized high religiosity
with classical philosophy and a fervent desire for the deification of man.
EXALTATIO— DEFINITION
The main purpose of “initiation into the mysteries” is to reach a mental
state (in modern medical terminology, an altered state of consciousness) in
which human subjects are transported out of themselves (ecstasy) and receive
intuitive, non-discursive knowledge (illumination) and may experience
the presence of the divine (epiphany). All this may take the form of communal
ritual, or individual practice. Elsewhere I have written about the English
mathematician and “magus” John Dee, who in the late sixteenth century tried
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