Customer Reviews
Excellent! - By: Dmitry Dulepov, 16 Dec 2007 
Most of other books (including "The Magus", for example) directly or indirectly take information from this book. This is fundamental book & may be the only you really needin your magic library. You certainly will not be disappointed!
This edition is also prefixed with a very interesting biography og Cornelius Agrippa. Edition is good but it is paperback, which is niot very convinient for such a thick book. Get a good cover for it if you can.
A classic of its kind. - By: Michael J. Brett, 23 Jul 2007 This is a curiosity from another age. In the 16th Century, much of what we would now regard as science was not based on observation or experiment but, rather like law, based on prescedent & the words of earlier writers & written sources of authority. This book is a treasure trove on contemporary magical beliefs, & techniques for making people fallin love with you, telling the future & so forth. Writers of books like this, especially Shakespeare's contemporary, Dr John Dee, are supposed to be the models for Prosperoin 'The Tempest.'
WB Yeats, who subscribed to a kind of Jungian beliefin a collective unconscious, used this book as a source of images for some of his poems. His idea was that people would instinctively know what he was talking about as they shared the same unconscious.
It is rather sad to see that some people livingin 2007 should regard this book as a scientific text of some sort, but there you go.
Essential work on Western occult tradition - By: , 28 May 1999 Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy must rank as one of, if not the most important work ever written on the Western Occult tradition. Writtenin relative youth, it nevertheless has an immensely broad range of topics covering Goetia ("Black magic") & Theurgia ("White magic') while still remainingin the Christian tradition. Agrippa's work certainly provides numerous practical instructions, but always ties together a wide range of classical & traditional sourcesin a broad theorectical framework. As a traditional astrologer I found his exposition of astrological magic to be among the best availablein English, better than Marsilio Ficino's Three Books of Life (though the Boer translation is fairly universally disliked). Much of astrological magic still remains locked upin Latin, Thabit Ibn Qurra's De Imaginibus, edited by Carmody & Picatrix, edited by Pingree being the most salient examples. I should note, however, that Brill has just published a new edition of Agrippain the original Latin which does differ in some respects from the Freake translation that Tyson has editedin this edition. For example, Chapter 50, Book II at 403 Agrippa describes the construction of amulets for love & concord between two people. The first full paragraphin the Tyson edition ends, "...let them [the two images] be wrapped upin silk & cast away or spolied. In the Latin Brill edition the sentence states that the images should be wrappedin "fine linen cloth" & "buried". Nonetheless if I could have only one book on the Western occult tradition (perish the thought!) this would be it. Anyone with a serious interestin studying or practicingin this area should have this book
Useful. - By: , 28 Mar 1999 Complex but annoyingly old-english. It's hard to read, but well worth the time & money, depending on what you're looking for. Tyson's explanation of the more obscure parts help very much, & offer important ideas that would have otherwise been missed by our modern-leaning minds.
More than worth the price... - By: , 24 Oct 1998 I'm normally very skeptical about anything produced by Llewellyn, but not only is this an honest reproduction of Agrippa's brilliant works (I've seen the first English translation for myself--1560, I think), but Donald Tyson's scholarship is almost comparable to Agrippa's own. The notes are extensive & do a marvelous job of fleshing out the myriad brief & passing referencesin the text. Quotes from Agrippa's most likely sources provide timely insights into his own mind, & Tysonin addition offers a notes on sources foreign to or later than Agrippa for comparative study. Tyson's editing does not disturb the text at all, but rather makes it that much more clear. His diagrams & seals are well produced, & his corrections (which include skilled reanalysis of the Hebrew) & major additions are saved for the back of each chapter & of the whole volume. These appendices, & the bibliographical notes as well, are intelligent, clearheaded & very useful. Agrippa's genius is well known, but Tyson's fine scholarship for this volume deserves acknowledgment as well. I recommend this book especially strongly to serious students of magic who are tired of the flood of New Age-y magical manuals & gothic garbage tossed out like so much glitter by these shallow modern writers who use "magic" as a substitute for intelligence, or as a solution to their ego problems.
