Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies) [Hardcover]

Three Books on Life is not a translation, but an original work by Ficino written for the benefit of scholars and intellectuals, who being under the dominion of Saturn and Mercury, suffer melancholy and related health concerns.

The third book, is however, the most interesting as it details Ficino's world view and gives his methods of astrological magic. Ficino, a priest and devout Christian, saw no real contradiction between the teachings of ancient philosophy and Christianity. He therefore felt free to use astrological magic particularly for healing and other medicinal purposes.

What is most significant about Three Books on Life is Ficino's ability to provide a theoretical framework for astrology and magic as well as practical examples of how to practice astrological magic.

Kaske and Clarke have done an excellent job in the MRTS edition of Three Books on Life. Their introduction is good, despite a few errors only noticeable to an expert on traditional astrology and the text with the Latin original facing the English translation is quite useable. This translation is much better than the Charles Boer's edition.

For those interested in Neo-platonic and Hermetic thought, astrology and magic in the Renaissance this is an essential primary source.

For a moment it seemed that Charles Boer had provided one with "The Book of Life," originally published in 1980, and currently in print. It was an attractively printed and extremely readable translation. Unfortunately, it was not only based on unreliable versions of the Latin, but it paid little if any attention to the vast scholarship needed to understand Ficino. Since Boer was dismissive of the existing Ficino scholarship, hostile reviews were perhaps to be expected, but I can testify from experience that Boer's work was more frustrating than useful.

Fortunately, a far superior translation, along with a carefully edited Latin text, useful introduction and helpful notes, and glossarial indexes, was already in progress. It appeared about a decade later, and, like Boer's, has been reprinted several times. It is an impressive accomplishment, providing a rich source of information on Ficino's theological, philosophical, medical, astrological, and magical readings and world-view, and how they interact.

Ficino, famous in his day and in histories of philosophy as the pioneering translator of Plato and the Neo-Platonists (a distinction made long after his time), was the son of a physician, which in those days meant an astrologer. He was trained in his father's profession, but also as a priest, and read the Aristotle of the late Scholastics as well as Plato and his followers, and his supposed source, the books attributed to the Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus. Bits and pieces of all of these interests, and others, appear in the "Books on Life," which are in large measure an attempt to avoid the negative implications of Ficino's own horoscope, which was dominated by the influence of Saturn, seeming to doom him to lethargy and sickness.

In the process, he worked a minor revolution in European thought, which is still with us today. He did this by finding good aspects to melancholy, which in the tradition he had inherited was a disease, combining aspects of depression and mania. He argued that it was also a producer of scholarship and wisdom, helping to launch both the modern idea of "genius" and the suspicion that it has some connection with insanity.

Ficino also argued for special diets to control the negative aspects (lots of sugar and cinnamon), and, in a controversial final section, for astrological talismans to concentrate good forces and repel bad ones. This was dangerous ground, obviously shading into magic, and protesting that he was vindicating Free Will against astrological determinism was not much of a cover.

Although a very high proportion of the thousands of websites mentioning Ficino seem interested mainly in Ficino the Great Astrologer or Ficino the Renaissance Platonist, he was a lot more complicated, as Kaske and Clark make clear. Nothing will make ""Three Books on Life" easy reading, but they have done everything possible to make it intelligible to modern readers.