Guided Pathway

The pentagram and the hand

In the last two images of panel B, we witness the influence of such regression as we transition from the seemingly abstract bodily geometry of Leonardo and Dürer’s theoretical explorations to symbolic representations of the body in Agrippa’s Occultist Philosophy. These two images represent a different form of interiorization of earlier cosmological principles within the circle of an esoteric system; yet here such cosmic analogies appear as rudiments of an archaic belief system that has only limited claims to validity the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

In the second of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy devoted to “Celestial Magic” and in chapter xxvii, titled “Of the proportion, measure, and harmony of man’s body,” the German occultist, theologian and physician, offers six different diagrams representing the human body inside a circle or a square. The body appears as if performing a number of gymnastic exercises, such as closing or opening its feet and raising its arms higher or lower in order to fit within the shape whose frames appear to be “decorated” by naturalistic animal or abstract cosmological (including numerical) symbols. For the diagram reproduced in #9.1 (which follows two more simple diagrams of the body with its arms extended but feet closed inside a circle and a square from a 1533 edition of Occult Philosophy ), Agrippa writes: “But if on the same center a circle be made by the crown of the head, the arms being let fall so far till the end of the fingers tough the circumference of that circle, and the feet spread abroad in the same circumference, as much as the fingers ends are distant from the top of the head; then they divide that circle, which was drawn from the center of the lower belly, into five equale parts, and do constitute a perfect Pentagon; and the Heels of the feet, having reference to the navile [navel], make a triangle of equal sides” (Book II, ch. 27).