Marsilio Ficino

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the Florentine priest, physician, and philosopher who, under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici, became the chief architect of the Renaissance Platonic revival.

In 1463 he produced the first complete Latin translation of the Greek Corpus Hermeticum (printed as the Pimander in 1471), and he went on to translate the complete dialogues of Plato and the works of Plotinus and other Neoplatonists, single-handedly making the Hermetic and Platonic corpus available to Europe.

His own major esoteric work, De Vita Libri Tres (Three Books on Life), written in the 1480s and published in 1489, is the founding text of Renaissance astral magic. Ficino matters to the mind-power lineage on two counts.

First, by translating the Corpus Hermeticum and crowning Hermes Trismegistus as an ancient sage, he relaunched Hermeticism, with its “as above, so below” and its divinized human mind, as a living European tradition.

Second, his theory of spiritus, the subtle vital medium linking soul, body, and cosmos, gave a worked-out mechanism for how the imagination, music, images, and attention could draw down the favorable life of the planets into a person.

This “natural magic” of attuning oneself to celestial influence through inner disposition is an early, sophisticated model of mind acting on life-force and well-being.