Three Books on Life (De Vita Libri Tres)

Three Books on Life is the founding text of Renaissance astral magic, addressed to the care of the scholar's body, mind, and vital spirit. Its central claim rests on spiritus, a subtle vital medium linking soul, body, and cosmos, through which a person may draw down the favorable life of the planets.

The work proceeds as practical philosophy and medicine, showing how images, music, diet, and attention can attune the inner disposition to beneficial celestial influence. This natural magic of attunement amounts to an early, sophisticated model of mind and imagination acting upon vitality and wellbeing.

Ficino, who first translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin, here joins his Hermetic and Neoplatonic learning to a worked-out mechanism of inner influence. The doctrine of spiritus and the ascending soul became roots of later self-elevation and mind-over-life thought.