Lodovico Lazzarelli

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Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500) was an Italian humanist and poet, born in San Severino Marche, who became the first Renaissance writer to turn the newly recovered Hermetic texts into a personal religion of spiritual rebirth. He is remembered chiefly for the Crater Hermetis — the Mixing-Bowl, or Cup, of Hermes — a dialogue in which the recovered wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus is read not as ancient philosophy to be admired but as a way still open to the living.

He came to this late and by way of an encounter. Trained in the ordinary humanist manner, a crowned poet writing on classical themes, Lazzarelli was by his own account converted in Rome around 1481 by a wandering prophet who called himself Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio — a figure who rode through the city in penitential dress proclaiming a Hermetic and Christian renewal. Lazzarelli took him as a master and recorded his messianic entry into Rome; from that point his work bends entirely toward the Hermetic writings. Whether Correggio was visionary or charlatan the sources do not settle, and Lazzarelli’s devotion to him is the strangest and most personal thing in his life.

The Crater Hermetis builds on a claim Lazzarelli drew from the Latin Asclepius: that the human being, made in the divine image, can in turn generate “gods” — that the regenerated person becomes a maker of living spiritual beings, much as God makes. This is the doctrine of generatio deorum, god-making, the most arresting and most contested idea in his thought. Lazzarelli framed it as wholly Christian, the new birth of the soul through Christ and the Word; readers since have argued over how far his Hermetism strains against orthodoxy and how far it stays within it. He also worked directly on the Hermetic corpus itself, supplying a Latin version of the Definitions of Asclepius to King Ammon, the text that completed what Marsilio Ficino had begun when he first translated the Greek Hermetica for Florence in the 1460s.

Lazzarelli matters to historians as the point where Renaissance Hermetism turns devotional. Ficino had treated Hermes Trismegistus as the most ancient of the gentile theologians, a witness to the prisca theologia, the single old wisdom held to run beneath the traditions; Lazzarelli took the further step of asking what it would mean to undergo the rebirth those texts describe. Modern scholarship, above all the critical edition of his Hermetic writings, has recovered him from near-total obscurity and set him beside Ficino and Pico as a distinct third voice — quieter, odder, and more thoroughly committed to the texts as scripture rather than as antiquities. He died in 1500, his works little read until the twentieth century returned to them.

→ In the library: The Definitions of Asclepius unto King Ammon (Mead)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Renaissance Hermetism · Marsilio Ficino · Prisca Theologia · Asclepius · Apotheosis