A Teacher
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
The human as a self-shaping being who chooses its own nature
The transmission
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was an Italian Renaissance nobleman and philosopher who, in 1486 at the age of twenty-three, proposed to defend 900 Theses drawn from every known school of wisdom, pagan, Hermetic, Christian, and Jewish, in public disputation at Rome.
As the intended preface he composed the Oration on the Dignity of Man, later called the “Manifesto of the Renaissance.” The debate was banned and the theses condemned, but the Oration and Pico’s Kabbalistic conclusions endured: he is regarded as the founder of Christian Kabbalah, the attempt to read Jewish mystical doctrine as confirmation of Christian truth.
Pico matters to the mind-power lineage above all for the vision at the heart of the Oration: God places the human being at the center of creation with no fixed nature, free to “fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer,” descending toward the brutish or ascending toward the divine by inner choice.
This is one of the clearest early statements that identity precedes circumstance, that the self is self-made rather than given, and that the human can ascend through the levels of being by an act of will and imagination.
Coupled with his Kabbalistic conviction that the right manipulation of divine names and inner states yields real power, Pico supplied the Renaissance with a charter for the creative, self-determining mind.
What they gave
The self-shaping human: The Oration declares humans uniquely without fixed nature, free to make themselves divine or bestial by inner choice, a root of “identity precedes circumstance.”
- Ascent by will and imagination: Framed human life as a vertical movement up or down the chain of being, accomplished through inner orientation.
- Christian Kabbalah: Founded the tradition that the manipulation of divine names and mystical correspondences yields spiritual power, feeding later ceremonial magic.
- The dignity of the magus-philosopher: Joined natural magic and Kabbalah to a humanist exaltation of the knowing, willing self.
In their words
We have set you at the world’s center that you may from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever shape you shall prefer.
You shall have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. You shall have the power, out of your soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Ficino’s Platonism and Hermetism; Jewish Kabbalah; Plato and the Neoplatonists; Avicennian and scholastic sources.
- Influenced: Agrippa; Johannes Reuchlin and the Christian Kabbalah tradition; Renaissance humanism’s image of the self-fashioning human; the esoteric anthropology that underlies mind-power thought.
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 2
Essential Works
- Oration on the Dignity of Man1486
- 900 Theses (Conclusiones)1486