Thanks for your quick reply and encouragement, Huck.
The 900 Theses were published 7 December 1486 (Farmer, p. 3). That may have been time enough for Boiardo to write his poem before the wedding. Or Boiardo could have read Corpus Hermeticum Tractate XIII on his own (Ficino’s widely read translation had been published in 1471), toyed with a poem connecting it with the game of triumphs, and finished the poem after the publication of Pico’s Theses. What Pico did was draw attention to the 1471 list, reduce it to 10, and draw the parallel with Kabbala. His work—the book of the hour, so to speak--would have provided a philosophical context for Boiardo’s poem, something that could have enhanced its value to an alert reader, as an expression of the universal philosophy of all ages and nations.
Since some readers of this thread may not be familiar with the book by Farmer, or the texts I am referring to, I should probably and say something about the book and give the relevant quotes from Pico and “Hermes Trismegistus.”
The book is S. A. Farmer’s 1998 Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems, With Text, Translation, and Commentary. It has the Latin on one side and English on the other, with a long introduction and lots of notes.
Pico’s first 400 theses, or “conclusiones” are “Theses According to the Opinions of Others,” covering the Latins (meaning the Scholastics: sections 1-6), the Arabs (sections7-14), the Greek Perepatetics (sections 15-19), the Platonists (sections 20-24), and ending with the Pyathagreans (sect. 25), Chaldeans (section 26), “Mercury Trismegistus the Egyptian” (section 27) and “the Hebrew Cabalist Wisemen” (section 28). The theses I am citing are 27.9 and 27.10. And we are not even halfway through Pico’s book. After that come 500 more, called “Theses according to His Own Opinion,” on various subjects, ending with 72 “Cabalistic Conclusions.”
So here they are, 27.9 and 27.10. First the Latin, (Farmer, p. 342).
27.9. Decem intra unumquemque sunt ultores: ignorantia, tristia, inconstantia, cupiditas, iniustitia, luxuries, inuidia, fraus, ira, malitia.
27. 10. Decem ultores, de quibus dixit secundeum Mercurium praecedens conclusion, uidebit profundus contemplator correspondere male coordinationi denariae in cabala et praefectis illius, de quibus ego in cabalisticis conclusionibus nihil posui, quia est secretum.
The commas in 27.10 are underlined, meaning that they were added by Farmer for easier reading.
Now here is the English translation (Farmer, p. 343):
27.9. Within each thing there exist ten punishers: ignorance, sorrow, inconstancy, greed, injustice, lustfulness, envy, fraud, anger, malice.
27.10. A profound contemplator will see that the ten punishers, of which the preceding conclusion spoke according to Mercury, correspond to the evil order of ten in the Cabala and its leaders, of whom I have proposed nothing in my Cabalistic conclusions, because it is secret. (355)
The “(355)” I think refers to the original page number.
Then there are Farmer's footnotes. First, one on the Latin side of the page:
27.9. colon retained from 1486 edition | 1486 luxuries: deceptio: … ira: temeritas: | Emendationes errorum, dele dictions deception: temeritas: quas superflue ponuntur | 1487 text amended sic
And one on the English side:
27.9-10. Twelve “punishers” in the Hermetic Corpus and the editio princeps, which Pico reduced to ten in his Emendationes errorum to maintain his correspondence. See my discussion above, p. 82.
What these footnotes mean, at least in part, is that our edition (of 1487, apparently) is amended according to the corrections that Pico listed at the end of the 1486 edition, after most of it had been printed. The original 1486 wording had twelve punishers, from which Pico removed “deceptio” and “temeritas,” i.e. deceit and recklessness. The 12 came directly from the Corpus Hermeticum. However, to make the parallel to Kabbala, he had to have 10. So he removed those 2. One, recklessness, was already said equivalent with anger in the Corpus Hermeticum text. I would guess that he probably removed deceit because of its similarity to fraud.
Restoring these deletions, Pico’s actual words in the original 1486 edition are closer to Boiardo’s wording in the poem than I thought in my last post, since Boiardo did explicitly include deceit.
In the other footnote, Farmer refers to his comments on p. 82. What he says there is:
Another example of a forced fit, this time diminishing and not increasing a set of distinctions, is found in the tenth of Pico’s ten conclusions “according to the ancient teachings of Mercury Trismegistus the Egyptian.” The thesis syncretically identifies the ten demonic “punishers” (ultores) Pico found in the Corpus Hermeticum with the “evil order of ten” in the Cabala—that is, with the “left-hand coordination” or mirror image of the sefirot presided over not by God but by evil demons. Unfortunately for Pico’s correspondence, the Corpus Hermeticum lists twelve and not ten punishers, whose properties Pico unwittingly copied into his thesis. He apparently caught the discrepancy after his theses went to press. Thus in the emendations of errors at the end of the editio princeps we are simply told to drop two punishers from the thesis: When in doubt, Pico’s text, and not the correspondence, had to go.
Finally, here is the relevant passage in Tractate XIII of the Corpus Hermeticum, in a better and more recent translation (by Brian Copenhaver) than the ones on the Web:
“Do I have tormenters within me?”
“More than a few, my child; they are many and frightful.”
“I am ignorant of them, father.”
“This ignorance, my child, is the first torment; the second is grief; the third is incontinence; the fourth, lust; the fifth, injustice; the sixth, greed; the seventh, deceit; the eighth, envy; the ninth, treachery; the tenth, anger; the eleventh, recklessness; the twelfth, malice. These are twelve in number, but under them are many more besides, my child, and they use the prison of the body to torture the inward person with the sufferings of sense. Yet they withdraw (if not all at once) from one to whom god has shown mercy, and this is the basis of rebirth, the means and method. From here on, my child, keep silence and say nothing; if you do so, you will not obstruct the mercy that comes to us from god. Henceforth, my child, rejoice; the powers of god purify you anew for articulation of the word.”
“To us has come knowledge of god, and when it comes, my child, ignorance has been dispelled. To us has come knowledge of joy, and when it arrives, grief will fly off to those who give way to it. The power than I summon after joy is continence. O sweetest power! Let us receive her too, most gladly, child. As soon as she arrives, how she has repulsed incontinence! Now in fourth place I summon perseverance, the power opposed to lust. This next level, my child, is the seat of justice. See how she has expelled injustice, without a judgment. With injustice gone, my child, we have been made just. The sixth power that I summon to us is the one opposed to greed – liberality. And when greed has departed, I summon another, truth, who puts deceit to flight. And truth arrives. See how the good has been fulfilled, my child, when truth arrives. For envy has withdrawn from us, but the good, together with life and light, has followed after truth, and no tormehnt any longer attacks from the darkness. Vanquished, they have flown away in a flapping of wings.”
“My child, you have come to know the means of rebirth. The arrival of the decad sets in order a birth of mind that expels the twelve; we have been divinized by this birth. Therefore, whoever through mercy has attained this godly birth and has forsaken bodily sensation recognizes himself as constituted of the intelligibles and rejoices.”
“Since god has made me tranquil, father, I no longer picture things with the sight of my eyes but with the mental energy that comes through the powers. I am in heaven, in earth, in water, in air; I am in animals and in plants; in the womb, before the womb, after the womb; everywhere. But tell me this also: how is it that the torments of darkness, twelve in number, are repulsed by ten powers? By what means, Trismegistus?”
“This tent – from which we also have passed, my child – was constituted from the zodiacal circle, which was in turn constituted of [ ] entities that are twelve in number, omniform in appearance. To mankind’s confusion, there are disjunctions among the twelve, my child, though they are unified when they act. (Recklessness is not separable from anger; they are indistinguishable.) Strictly speaking, then, it is likely that the twelve retreat when the ten powers (the decad, that is) drive them away. The decad engenders soul, my child. Life and light are unified when the numbers of the henad, of spirit, is begotten. Logically, then, the henad contains the decad, and the decad the henad.”
“Henad” is a Neoplatonic technical term meaning, roughly, “unity.” Copenhaver has three pages of notes to the passage I have quoted; two are relevant to the present discussion. First, the eighth, ninth, and tenth members of the decad, he says, are indeed the good, life, and light. These are not Christian virtues, so Boiardo would have had to improvise. Second, Pico’s reduction of twelve to ten may not be so forced and arbitrary as Farmer would lead us to believe. The 1950's commentator Einarson, in a note to the French edition of this tractate, advocates such a reduction as one possible way of reading the last paragraph above: Einerson says: “If four of the twelve vices constitute two diaxugiai (“disjunctions”…), which act as unities, the twelve become ten…Recklessness and anger constitute one such unified disjunction. The other is not named” (Copenhaver p. 191). Einarson is disputed, however.
I think it can be seen that what the Corpus Hermeticum passage says philosophically is very close, with suitable Christian modifications, to what the Boiardo poem says poetically.
