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A CHRISTIAN-HERMETIC-JUDAIC INITIATION... LAZZARELLI AS THE NEW ENOCH AND DA CORREGGIO AS TRISMEGISTUS Pico’s cabalistically oriented interest in Enoch/Metatron* gained a new dimension in the late fifteenth century, when Christian cabalists and Renaissance magi in increasing numbers claimed themselves either the heirs to the patriarch or even his reincarnation. A notable example was Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500), one of those eccentric wandering Humanists who were in possession of great philological knowledge about ancient languages and philosophies while at the same time their minds were filled with syncretic and esoteric ideas about religious enthusiasm and magical exaltatio. These people thronged the roads of Europe as they travelled from court to court looking for prospective patrons, and they not infrequently ended up in the prisons of dissatisfied princes or representatives of the Inquisition. Lazzarelli* was born in a Jewish neighborhood of San Severino. Like Ficino, he was the son of a medical doctor. At the beginning of his career, he resembled a typical Humanist, under the spell of Classical genres and rhetoric. Around 1466, he moved to Venice, where he studied Latin and Greek with the humanist Giorgo Merula. In 1468, Emperor Frederick III came to Italy, and in Pordenone (near Venice) Lazzarelli had the opportunity to greet the emperor with a Latin oration on the dignity of poetry (De laudibus poesis et de dignitate poetica). Lazzarelli moved to Rome around 1469 and later joined the Societas Literatorum S. Victoris in Esquiliis, a reformed version of the former Roman Academy, which had been of dubious repute and had been dissolved by Paul I], who had accused the institution of having conspired against the pope and having practiced pagan rites and sodomy. In this period, Lazzarelli wrote his first major work, Fasti christianae religionis, which was ® Inhis famous 900 theses, in which he sought to lay new foundations for Christian philosophy, Pico della Mirandola, the first Christian Cabalist, identified Enoch with the archangel Metatron, the regent of God. This idea first appeared in 3 Enoch, the Hebrew version of the Book of Enoch, and in the fifteenth century it was not common knowledge among gentile Humanists. See Copenhaver, Number, Shape, and Meaning in Pico’s Christian Cabala... (1999), 36. On Pico’s cabalist-Hermeticism see also Brach, Umanesimo e correnti esoteriche in Italia (2010), especially 262-70; Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) (1998), 105-33; Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (1989); on Jewish intellectual culture in the Italian Renaissance see Ruderman ed., Essential Papers on Jewish Culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (1992), especially Moshe Idel’s paper, The Magical and Neoplatonic Interpretations of the Kabbalah in the Renaissance, 107-69; and Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery In Early Modern Europe (1995). On Lazzarelli see primarily the critical edition of Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn (Lazzarelli, The Hermetic Writings (2005); and Hanegraaff’s monographic introductory study in that volume (Lazzarelli, 1-151). Furthermore: Brach, Umanesimo e correnti esoteriche in Italia (2010), 271ff; Kristeller, Marsilio Ficino e Lodovico Lazzarelli (1938); Kristeller, Lodovico Lazzarelli e Giovanni da Correggio (1960); Rudermann, John Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio’s Appearance in Italy (1975); Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (2000), 64-72; Thorndike The History of Magic and Experimental Sciences (1923-1958), 5:438. + 141 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 141 6 2020. 06.15. 11:04:17
