Italian astrologer and Kabalist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was born February 24, 1463
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy tells us:
“…is, after Marsilio Ficino, the best known philosopher of the Renaissance: his Oration on the Dignity of Man is better known than any other philosophical text of the fifteenth century. Pico was also remarkably original—indeed, idiosyncratic. The deliberately esoteric and aggressively recondite character of his thought may help explain why Renaissance philosophy has had so small a place, until recently, in the canonical history of the discipline as accepted by Anglophone philosophers.”
Read more of his general biography here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pico-della-mirandola/.
Meanwhile Artlark.org expands on his relations to magick and Qabala:
“In 1486, at the young age of 23, he famously offered to defend 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy and magic, in spite of opposition from theologians and Pope Innocent VIII (the public debate never happened). His theses were supported by his work, Oration on the Dignity of Man, referred to as the ‘Manifesto of the Renaissance’, a crucial work on Renaissance humanism and the ‘Hermetic Reformation’. Hermeticism was a philosophical and religious tradition based on the alleged writings of Hermes Trismegistus, according to which one true theology established by God in antiquity links all systems of thought and belief. It is often seen as the school of thought preceding the establishment of Christianity.
“The reason why Pico was unpopular with the clergy is that he took an oblique way to established views of religion. In Pico della Mirandola: New Essays (ed. M. V. Dougherty, OUP, 2007), Sheila J. Rabin’s article ‘Pico on Magic and Astrology’ explored Pico’s preference for the Kabbalah, an esoteric school of thought that originated in Judaism, based on a set of esoteric teachings which aim to elucidate the relationship between an eternal and mysterious Ein Sof (no end) and the mortal and finite universe, which is God’s creation. Pico saw the Kabbalah as the work which proved the truths of Christianity and claimed that those who studied it, worked actively to reform the world. The philosopher wrote in Conclusiones that ‘no power exists in heaven or earth seminally and separated that the magician cannot actuate and unite (…) as true astrology teaches us to read in the book of God, so the Cabala teaches us to read in the book of the Law’”.
Read more here: https://artlark.org/2017/02/24/pico-della-mirandola-on-magic-astrology-and-religion/
