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A CHRISTIAN-HERMETIC-JUDAIC INITIATION...
with certainty. D. P. Walker and Moshe Idel interpreted the soul-creating
motive as if Lazzarelli were promising by a magical act to create a spirit to
enliven the ailing king.”* Crater Hermetis thus moves from the god-making
of Asclepius, which meant that a demon or spirit had to be drawn to a lifeless
statue, to the cabbalistic creation of a soul, when a wise man creates, by
the power of his words, something of the same substance as his own, similarly
to the creative generation of God himself.
According to Hanegraaff, soul creation is a symbol that refers to perfect
gnosis, a non-magical but mystical illumination by which the practitioner
indeed becomes equal with God. He developed his argument on the basis
of Idel’s reading of Pico’s teacher and Lazzarelli’s probable acquaintance,
Yohanan Alemanno, who quoted Abraham Abulafia in his Collectanaea,
according to whom the Kabbalah was more of an ecstatic and prophetic
exercise than a practice of magic: “Since God made man perfect, in the image
of God, [...] this is why every learned person is obliged to make souls, [... ]
this being the way a man can imitate the Creator.”
The most recent voice in the debate, that of Hanegraaff, has proposed
that Lazzarelli represents the purest form of Christian Hermetism, because
he rejected the questionable astral magic of the Corpus Hermeticum and
of Ficino, and instead, influenced by allegorical interpretations of the Sefer
Yetzirah and other cabbalistic works, asserted a purely spiritual, meditative,
and transformative generatio mentis. Contra Idel, Walker, and Yates,
according to Hanegraaff, Lazzarelli did not consider the making of the Golem
a kind of magical procedure. It was to be understood figuratively, describing
the process of exaltatio.
I personally do not think that with this proposition the question has been
settled once and for all. Hanegraaff himself emphasized the importance
of taking into consideration complexity and contextuality in such cultural
historical investigations. Lazzarelli’s cultural background was as complex
as that of Ficino or Pico, and this complexity taught Renaissance thinkers
that there could be many roads leading towards the ultimate goal of raptured
transportation to God.
With respect to Enoch, we have seen that the Neoplatonic-Hermetic revival
in Italy brought about a new appreciation of his writings, and his authority was
reinforced in an esoteric-magical context. For this elevation of status, it was
necessary that Christian philosophers discover the Jewish mystical heritage
and develop a conviction that it could be useful for proving the ultimate truth
of Christianity in a novel, modern way, at the same time referring back to
an ancient, prisca theologia, or a timeless, perennial wisdom. The intellectual
2 Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 67-71; Idel, Hermeticism and Judaism, 68-69.
3 Abulafia, quoted via Idel, Hermeticism and Judaism, 70; see also Hanegraaff, 92.
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