Ficino, who was at times philosopher, priest, and doctor, had published several volumes in his life in which he had taken as axiom, as the middle ages were want to do, the influence of the heavens upon the terrestrial world. This would be felt as the temperaments of the various organs were subject to the effects of the planets and their motions upon the body, such that an imbalance in the humors caused by planetary disturbances was thought the fons et origo of a huge number of maladies.

Now it was for Hermes to extend this, and claim a heavenly effluvia which descended unto the realms of man and coalesce in certain plants, objects, and metals most sympathetic with each planet. It was to universalize the effects of the heavens in the world, in such a way that it was only then natural to ask how one could tempt the planets into action by use of the new knowledge of affinities. Could not then certain plants and herbs be used in the prescription of a diet which would rectify ills due to planetary discord? Could one not then gain the protection of the cosmos by adorning oneself with the right talismans and ornaments?

Yet Christian doctrine throughout the middle ages had developed a principled aversion to any form of magic or perceived manipulation of the fate by untoward means. A new philosophy of crystals and herbs to pervert the course of fates was a hard sell, lest one be a heretic and black magician. Ficino began his justification with the Neoplatonic, calling Plotinus to his cause, and claiming nothing other than the practices he advocates is the understanding of the divine All, and through its mens the world comes to be discreet and malleable. The ontology is a bit complicated and convoluted, and I will elide the most confusing bits, which even I don’t understand.

To these then medicine would turn its tools, and all under the empyrean could remain still within Christendom.

Ficino did not restrict himself to merely the Hermetic tradition, but also practiced the Orphic hymns, Orpheus being only second to Hermes in the the ranks of prisci theologi. In the complete synthesis to which the Renaissance was in search, Ficino posited that these Orphic songs caused one to mirror the tones emitted by the planetary spheres, per Pythagoras, and thus to sing in harmony with the world.

Ficino was to lay the groundwork from which his predecessors would build, extending the Christian synthesis to cover a host of variant philosophies. For one thing, he was a scholar of Greek, but was still ignorant of Hebrew tongue. It was left to Pico Della Mirandola and his knowledge of the Hebrew to take the work of Ficino, and find in it Cabala. He was merely the first to have immixt these two, but the Hermetic-Cabalist school would then flourish in the coming years, generating a plethora of ever more elaborate and inimitable systems. From the Cabala one was to learn the magic not only of things, but also of words. Hebrew, with its claim to be the tongue of God and a long history already of the Gematria, the Jews having taken it from the Assyo-Babylonian numerological systems. From the Egyptians, one could learn of controlling deities, and in what way they were to control the heavens. As Yates puts it so eloquently,

That strange people, the Egyptians, had divinised time, not merely in the abstract sense but in the concrete sense that each moment of the day and night had its god who must be placated as the moments passed. The decans, as they came to be called in Hellenistic times, were really Egyptian sidereal gods of time who had become absorbed in Chaldean astrology and affiliated to the zodiac.