Oldal 141 [141]
OCR
A CHRISTIAN-HERMETIC-JUDAIC INITIATION INTO THE MYSTERIES: LODOVICO LAZZARELLI’S CRATER HERMETIS (CA. 1493) —o> — 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 + 139 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 139 6 2020. 06.15. 11:04:17
