Oldal 155 [155]
OCR
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. Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 153 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:18
