This book must begin with the statement that, like all my other
books, it is a strictly historical study. It is not an enquiry into ‘the
occult’ in general, which I am certainly not qualified to undertake.
It is about what was known as ‘the occult philosophy’ in
the Renaissance. This philosophy, or outlook, was compounded
of Hermeticism as revived by Marsilio Ficino, to which Pico
della Mirandola added a Christianised version of Jewish Cabala.
These two trends, associated together, form what I call ‘the
occult philosophy’, which was the title which Henry Cornelius
Agrippa gave to his highly influential handbook on the subject.
There has been a tendency in modern studies to concentrate
on the Hermetic side of the occult philosophy, a tendency to
which I may myself have contributed in my other books. Yet I
have always insisted that the philosophy, or the movement,
should be called ‘Hermetic–Cabalist’, not solely ‘Hermetic’, and
I devoted a chapter in my book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition to an attempt to expound Pico’s addition of Jewish
Cabala, in a Christianised form, to Ficino’s Hermeticism.