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GYÖRGY E. SZÖNYI
To serve this purpose, five hymns are also inserted into the Crater which
express with strong poetical beauty the authors rapturous understanding of
self-knowledge, contemplation, and divine generation.
1he king is increasingly impressed by the lofty philosophy, but he keeps
urging the narrator to come to the pragmatics of the work, which is how
to reach the exalted state of the self. Lazzarelli leads the treatise towards
its climax by inserting a hymn to Divine Generation. At its start, the poem
recalls Enoch, the predecessor-archetype of the narrator: “Where do you
transport me, Father? Is this not the place where pious aged Enoch went|[?]”
(27.1; Lazzarelli, 249). The place is a place of magic, and by the end of the hymn
we relive the god-making act of the Asclepius:
This is certainly the newest novelty of novelties
and a miracle far greater than all others,
that man has discovered the nature of God
and knows how to make it. [ ...]
That is why the Begetter has given man
a mind like his own, and speech,
that he, like the gods, may bring forth gods,
fulfilling the decrees of the Father.
(Ibid., Lazzarelli, 253-55)
The supreme task of humans is thus to create gods, as is suggested in
the Asclepius and passed on by Ficino in his De vita coelitus comparanda.”
Ficino, however, was rather cautious in defining this god-making magic:
he consistently tried to prove that it was simple magia naturalis. He also
claimed only to have interpreted Plotinus and not really to have voiced his
own opinion." Lazzarelli seems to be much bolder. He expressly claims that
“true man creates divine souls / which the ancient host used to call gods of
the earth” (ibid., 255), and a few lines further on, he announces that these
divine souls “create the Word of God.”
One can ponder why in an earlier part of this hymn Lazzarelli used
the phrase “newest novelty of novelties” about his revelation, when actually
this god-making act was an old idea taken from the Corpus Hermeticum.
According to Hanegraaff’s plausible suggestion, although he took the idea
of deification from the Neoplatonic and Hermetic literature, Lazzarelli
consciously introduced a revolutionary innovation in this program, namely
” Critical edition and English translation is Ficino 1989, see also the in-depth study by Carol
V. Kaske in that edition.
18 Ficino, chapter 3.2; in the edition of Kaske and Clark see on p. 255.
+ 150 ¢
Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 150 6 2020. 06.15. 11:04:17