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The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (Frances Yates: Selected Works)

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Dame Frances Yates had an incredible impact on the study of early modern magic and occultism. Although she wrote on other subjects, her primary legacy is in this field, particularly her books _Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition_ and _The Art of Memory_. For anyone interested in the occult Renaissance, these books are both absolutely required reading.

As a scholar, Yates had some bad habits, and these are most obvious in _The Rosicrucian Enlightenment_ and, to a lesser extent, _The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age_. In these books, we see her habit of beginning with a "What if?" proposition, then repeating it in stronger and stronger formulations until it has become an accepted fact.

_The Occult Philosophy_ has this problem to some degree, but the primary problem is that Yates tries to deal with a subject on which she is not qualified to pronounce: Kabbalah. As she asmits, she is not a Hebraist, and her only access to Kabbalah comes from reading some of Gershom Scholem's work. Of course, she cannot be faulted for writing on the subject before Kabbalah became a large and accepted field of study within Jewish Studies, but Yates here displays her usual tendency to overstate her case.

A related problem is that she can be rather offhanded in her treatment of figures peripheral to her obsessions (i.e. anyone not John Dee or Giordano Bruno), and this can lead her to distort matters by repeating others' second-hand analyses.

Having said all this, bear in mind that it's Frances Yates we're talking about here. Stacked up against her best books, _The Occult Philosophy_ looks pretty sad; stacked up against almost anything else in the field, it's drop-dead brilliant: it's very well written, charming, stimulating, and extremely accessible. If you like Yates, read this book now, just take it with a little grain or so of salt; if you haven't experienced Yates yet, DON'T buy this --- read _Giordano Bruno_ NOW!

Yates had her faults, certainly, but she almost singlehandedly invented a field of study. This is an important part of the Yates corpus, but by no means its core.

As the title states this book sets out to find the philosophical roots of Elizabethan culture of the late XVI and early XVII century. The question posited by Dame Frances Yates is : What was the underlying Philosophy of the Elizabethan age and she points unmistakably to the occult philosophy i.e. Hermeticism tempered by Christian Neoplatonism and Qabbalah. Origins of the Elizabethan culture are traced straight to the Medici court, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Yates being no believer of the operative work of magic, still provides enough food for thought for the student of Renaissance humanism, history of ideas or budding hermeticist. Although this book grew out from a series of lectures on "Inspired Melancholy" it still manages to tie in such diverse subjects as historical background of Ben Johnson's The Alchemist and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Henry Cornelius Agrippa seen as the inspiration for the character), philosophico/magical/religious meaning of Elizabethan poetry (Spencer, Raleigh), the dramas of Shakespear (specially the Tempest and King Lear) and content of Durer's famous print Melencolia. The strengths of Frances Yates writing is precisely the ability to show the unifying idea behind these seemingly diverse works of art and philosophy. An important part of this book is connected to the destiny of the exiled Spanish Sephardim jews who spread the medical writings of Avicenna and rich literature of Iberian Qabbalism.

Yates history provides an alternative view of English history at the time of Tudor and Stewart dynasties most importantly in their relation to Ecclesiastical powers and politics of continental Europe.

This is a wonderful book that will stimulate a fundamental rethinking of the view of European Political and intellectual history.

Writer of this review is the translator of the book into Serbian .

Frances Yates was a scholar of world renown most famous for her text, The Art of Memory, and the biographical study, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. In this work, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, what has been known as `occult philosophy' in the Renaissance, revived by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, she explores the "Christianized" version of the Jewish Cabala, and its manifestation and influential affects on religious and philosophical ideas, including the arts, during the Elizabethan Age.

Yates begins with her proposed theses that, in past analyses of occult philosophy, it has focused primarily on the Hermetic tradition. She claims that this occult tradition should be called the "Hermetic-Cabalist", as the ideas are not solely Hermetic in nature, but have a strong Jewish Cabalistic influence, albeit in a Christianized form, as formulated by Marsilio Ficino.

This text is a rich analysis on the history of ideas. Yates adeptly sketches the influences of the hermetic-cabala in the Renaissance, moving forward to one of the more influential texts that affected this tradition more than any other treatise, Henry Cornelius Agrippa's, Three Books of Occult Philosophy. She also focuses her study on three other influential personages, the Cabalist Friar, Francesco Giorgi, and his work, "De harmonia mundi", and the works of Johannes Reuchlin. Yates also looks at the mysterious Elizabethan magus, Dr. John Dee, known as the "Queen's Conjurer" citing the doctor's primary sources of his own work directly to Agrippa. Her claim is that John Dee, was in fact, along with Agrippa, Giorgi and Reuchlin, Christian Cabalists.

The theme of this work is that there was a philosophy of the occult from the Italian Renaissance that operated and was renewed in the Elizabethan Renaissance. To back this thesis, she cites examples from great works of Elizabethan literature that have strikingly blatant examples of this occult philosophy, such as Spenser's The Faerie Queene; Christopher Marlowe's famous play, Doctor Faustus; and Shakespeare's A Mid Summer Night's Dream, Hamlet, King Lear and, of course, The Tempest. What these works of literature have in common are expressed tenets of the Christian Cabalist occult tradition, alluding to the works and lives of Agrippa and John Dee. Yates' arguments are compelling and deserve, as she herself notes, further study by scholars.

This was Yates' last work. She has become one of the most read and respected scholars on the history of the esoteric tradition. This work brings to light an intellectual movement that has been suppressed or dismissed by "serious' scholars as superstitious or irrelevant at best. It is because of her research that these once suppressed intellectual movements have regained legitimacy in the history of ideas and their relevance to the development of Western thought.

The text's style is not only written for the scholar or academic, but fortunately can also be read by the laymen interested in the history of the Western occult tradition.

This is very good book with some serious shortcomings. On the plus side Yates starts the book off in Part 1 with concise essays on the leading lights of Hermetic/Cabalistic thought of the Renaissance/Reformation [Lull, Mirandola, Reuchlin, Giorgi, Agrippa]. Part 2 shows how the philosophies advanced by the aforesaid were applied. Chapter 3 covers, of all things, Puritan Caballa! I wish I read this book before any of her others, it gives a nice broad sweep of the subject matter whereas her other books are very dense and she hits the ground running from the git go.

It seems to me much of Yates observations have not even yet begun to inform our understanding of the Middle Ages. This is hard to understand as the nature of her work requires rethinking much of the received wisdom; that Hermetics/Caballa were tolerated/integrated into the understanding of natural sciences and theology seems to belie the image of the Middle Ages as a time the world was, "...Lit only by fire." These seem to be very broadminded times to allow such research. Likewise, it is the suppression/removal of the occult that leads to the rise of science. These observations are my own but they leap off the page as you read any of her works.

The downside of the book, at least to me, was Yates blase attitude to Agrippa et al trying to control the actions of "angles" through magic! Sorry, but does anyone really believe that God would allow this? I can't see it, logically they must be consorting with demons. I have to wonder to what extent were they successful and when did this effort begin/end? Dee, Elizabeth's sorcerer claimed he could, via the "angles," listen in to conversations remotely! This is a good book full of disturbing implications. It {and Yates other works} will change how you see history.

Frances Yates is an indispensable auther, her work regarding the occult science and its development through the Renaissance to it influence today is a needed view from a clear and historically sound perspective. One of the things that I like about her is that she gives suggestions for further study on the subjects she covers and areas that have not been studied as of yet. This book and "The Rosicrucion Enlightenment" complement each other as I am sure that her other books on a similar topic do. If you are interested in higher learning this book and the auther are well worth your investigation.

Frances Yates was first recommended to me more than a decade ago and I'm sorry that I waited so long to read her. THE OCCULT PHILOSOPHY IN THE ELIZABETHAN AGE challenged many things I thought I knew about the Renaissance and Reformation, and it more than whetted my appetite for Yates's biography of Giordano Bruno.

Beginning with the strange figure of Raymond Lull, a 13th-century Spanish mystical philosopher who could read both Arabic and Hebrew (an unusual accomplishment for a Christian of his or any other time), Yates traces the influence of the "occult philosophy" on Western Christendom through the Italian and continental Renaissance to Elizabethan England. "Occult philosophy" seems to me be the wrong terminology for the Hermetic/Cabalistic spiritual science that inspired some of the greatest minds of the age, if for no other reason than that it rather discredits the whole enterprise from the outset. Part of Yates's design, after all, is to remind us that there was a time when science and religion were not at loggerheads with one another, a time before "the connections of the psyche with the cosmos" were cut off at their roots.

In the first part of the book, Yates sets the stage with brief discussions of the thought of Lull, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, Francesco Giorgi, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and she offers a new interpretation of an engraving by Albrecht Durer. At the heart of what Yates calls Christian Cabala were two central ideas: that the name of Jesus is the Tetragrammaton, the "ineffable name" of God; and that there is a unity of truth behind the appearance of things accessible to those afflicted (or blessed) by "inspired melancholy".

In the second part of the book, Yates examines the influence of Christian Cabala on English philosphers and poets, including John Dee, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton. The backlash against the occult philosophy -- signalling the end of the Renaissance -- is also examined.

You will walk away from this book with a profound sense of the largely unrecognized contribution made by Jewish culture to the development of modern Western philosophy and science. The expulsion of the Jews (and the Moors) from Spain after 1492 (not to mention the unintended consequences of forced conversions) takes on new meaning in the light of Yates's researches.

One weakness of this book, however, is its failure to consider the possible Islamic influence on the development of the occult philosophy in Western Europe. Lull, after all, studied not only Cabala but also the great Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes). While one cannot discount the enormous influence of the exiled Sephardic Jews, one should also remember that medieval Spain was home to a most fruitful cross-fertilization of Jewish and Islamic thought. Yates admits that she's no Hebrew scholar, but a knowledge of Arabic might also have been of benefit here.

Another weakness is Yates's rather prosaic and unengaged approach to her subject matter. This is understandable perhaps in a scholar, but her reluctance to let slip her passion is our loss.

Although she probably did not intend the work to serve such a purpose, Dame Frances Yates' book is certainly key to understanding the history of sixteenth and early seventeenth century Western Civilization. For between these covers, we find the essential truth that Elizabethan England represented the joining of forces of Hermetic Western occult traditions with Jewish cabalistic mysticism. These streams of thought resulted in a messianic view of Elizabethan England as a kind of British Israel mystique, to use the author's phrase. With this, we see England shorn of the traditional Faith of her people now allied with the international bankers and tradesmen of the Low Countries and Asia Minor, in defiant opposition to Christian Spain and the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. These insights are remarkable and essential to the understanding of this crucial epic of history. For these insights, we are forever grateful.

However, much of the corpus of this text is filled with complete and utter insanity. For instance, we have Pfefferkorn, who inveighed strongly against the teaching of Reuchlin, identified by the author as an "anti-semite". The problem with this identification is, of course, that Pfefferkorn was a Jewish convert. One wonders in seeing a formulation such as this how a Jewish scholar could be an "anti-semite". But it gets better. Throughout the text, the phrase, "Christian cabala" recurs. The "cabala" here referred to is the black magic canon of Jewish lore, that is the primary basis for much of modern Western occultism. The notion of "Christian cabala" is then pretty much equivalent with the idea of a promiscuous virgin. But then, in a way, it is consistent with an author who could identify a Jewish scholar as an "anti-Semite".

Despite the foregoing, the text is eminently readable and important. As previously mentioned, the insights contained are essential for the student of Renaissance and Reformation Western Civilization.