Introduction

Introduction

It is important to shine a light on works which in many cases history would rather keep closed. To see beyond the veil is not convenient for many who would otherwise like to keep deeper truths hidden…

I. Why This Book, Why Now

Il Mondo Magico de gli Heroi has never been published in English before this edition, so far as any library catalog or bibliography I have been able to locate can show.¹ That absence is not the same as obscurity. Della Riviera's book has had a continuous life in Italian for four centuries, and for the last ninety-odd years of that life it has had an unusually active one, kept in print, for most of that time, by a single, very particular hand. In 1932, Julius Evola republished the 1605 text through the Bari house of Laterza, modernizing its language while preserving, in the words of his most recent editor, its ‘patina of antiquity’, breaking it into numbered chapters with his own descriptive titles, and attaching roughly a hundred notes of his own.² That edition, not della Riviera's original, is what most readers who have encountered this book at all have actually read. It is still in print today, now credited on its own cover to both men, della Riviera and Evola together, as though the two had written it side by side rather than three hundred and twenty-seven years apart.³

The point is not that Evola did something illegitimate. Editors have always shaped how a difficult book reaches its readers, and della Riviera's Italian is difficult enough that a modernizing hand did real service to anyone who came to it after 1932. But an editor's paratext, the chapter titles he chooses, the notes he attaches, the order he imposes, does quite a bit more than assist a reader. It pre-interprets. A chapter heading tells the reader what the coming pages are about before they have read a word of them. A note placed at a particular sentence tells the reader that sentence mattered enough to stop and explain, which is itself a judgment about the text's center of gravity. None of this requires bad faith on the editor's part. It only requires that the editor have a reading, which Evola certainly did. He read this book as an early statement of what he called the solar path, a realization achieved through the will's own inward mastery, rather than through grace or external rite, and he built his chapter titles, his hundred notes, and the whole shape of his edition to carry that reading forward into every page a reader turns.⁴ A reader who has only ever met della Riviera through Evola's arrangement has not truly met della Riviera. They encounter him as Evola wanted him read, which is a different and much narrower thing than della Riviera as he actually wrote, standing before any interpretive hand had touched him.

This is not a new problem in the history of Hermetic texts, and it is worth pausing on the precedent, because it shows how long an editor's frame can outlast the reader's awareness that a frame is there. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin in the 1460s, he arranged its fourteen treatises in an order of his own choosing and gave the collection the title by which it would be known for the next four hundred years, the Pimander. Generations of readers across Europe encountered Hermes Trismegistus entirely through Ficino's sequence and Ficino's framing, many of them believing they were reading a prophet who predated Moses, until the philologist Isaac Casaubon demonstrated in 1614 that the text was a product of the early centuries after Christ, not of remote antiquity at all.⁵ The Hermetica itself had not changed in that gap. What changed was that readers finally saw the arranging hand that had stood between them and the text the whole time. I do not think Evola's redaction rises to the scale of that problem, and della Riviera's authorship of his own book has never been in doubt the way the Hermetica's pseudonymous attribution was. But the mechanism is the same, an editor's frame quietly standing in for the original long enough that readers stop noticing it is a frame at all. This translation exists so that this does not persist. I have added my own views as endnotes, appendices, and front matter, but with the strict instruction that one not read my writing or ideas as his. I have no objection, and in some ways would prefer, that a well-acquainted reader gain depth from my work after reading della Riviera’s, since the type of reader who has this type of book in his hand is likely acquainted with the occult and esoteric works of the same era.

There is also a simpler reason this particular book deserves the effort, apart from any argument about redaction. Della Riviera is not merely repeating Ficino or Pico or Agrippa in a later, lesser voice. He builds his own architecture. The book organizes itself around a sequence of days, echoing the days of Creation, in which the Magical World is fabricated stage by stage, and he fuses that structure with a sustained mythological reading of the classical Heroes, Jason, Hercules, Ulysses, Aeneas, treating their labors as one continuous allegory of the soul's ascent toward the Stone. Ficino gave the Renaissance its Hermetic philosophy. Pico gave it its Cabala. Agrippa gave it its most systematic occult encyclopedia. Della Riviera gave it a working synthesis of all three built around a genuinely original literary structure, the creation-week cosmogony married to the hero-myth, and that synthesis has simply never been available to an English reader in its own right.⁶

Some readers who already know Evola's edition may reasonably ask why a version stripped of his century of accumulated interpretive scaffolding is preferable to one that already comes furnished with it. The answer in my view is that scaffolding is not neutral, and a reader deserves the chance to see the building before anyone else's scaffolding goes up around it. Nothing in this translation prevents a reader from going on to read Evola, and the ‘Reception History’ chapter later in this introduction treats his reading seriously and on its own terms, rather than dismissing it.⁷ But it should be possible to meet della Riviera first, and only then decide what to make of what Evola built on top of him.

Why now, specifically, rather than at any other point in the four hundred years since 1605, or the ninety since Evola. There are several reasons, but one lies with me. This in many ways is a labor of love. I find tasks such as these fascinating and challenging, and I wouldn’t miss a chance to present a slice of history to an audience who cannot speak the only language or languages the work was in part, or in full available to, and often these texts are not readily available even to those who speak the language. This is for various reasons, some being age, and scarcity, but also that commentary available with a version like Evola’s is out of touch with what a modern reader unacquainted with the genre needs. Again I have no intention to sway a reader with my ideas and research if they want it not, therefore the text body by della Riviera is original. The most important reason behind this reworking is much larger and is the prime focus of The Thinking Press. This is what I call The Will Toward the Good.⁸ With this aim in mind one cannot avoid mistakes without reconciling with his inner darkness. The will which is the aim of this publication and every body of literature which comes forth from The Thinking Press has the goal of guiding one toward this. Appendix B is the work which I have taken on to achieve such a goal, that being a legend so to speak of Della Riviera’s map.

Another thing I want to mention is that Cambridge University Press published a full handbook on Western mysticism and esotericism with its own chapter on Renaissance Hermetism, and the Warburg Institute, the same institution whose own scholars have spent a century tracing exactly this material, continues to run public programming specifically on Hermetic magic and alchemy in the medieval and Renaissance periods.⁹ The scholarly apparatus for placing della Riviera correctly, alongside Ficino and Pico and Agrippa rather than only alongside Evola, exists and is active right now in a way it was not, even a generation ago.

What della Riviera himself offers, once that placement is made, has not gone stale with the centuries. He argued that the Hero's task was to distinguish the counterfeit gold the world offers from the true gold hidden within it, and to do the harder work of the second only once the first has been seen for what it is.¹⁰ That is not a claim that belongs to 1605 alone, and it did not need Evola, or me, to still be worth hearing in the original.

II. Cesare della Riviera: Life and Context

I will say plainly at the start of this section what a reader deserves to know before reading further: no independent biography of Cesare della Riviera survives. No birth date, no confirmed portrait, no correspondence, and no record of a profession or a household beyond what can be inferred from the book itself and from a handful of contemporary notices. The Italian national catalogue gives a death year of 1625 for him without stating its evidence, and the one modern study that touches his life treats his whereabouts as a matter of inference rather than record. This is not a gap in my own research. It is, as far as I have been able to determine, the actual state of the historical record.¹¹ Where other translators of Renaissance figures can open with a page of biography drawn from parish registers, university matriculation rolls, or a scholar's decades of archival work, I cannot.

What can be established comes almost entirely from the book's own paratext, and it is worth taking seriously as evidence even though it is thin. Il Mondo Magico de gli Heroi was first printed in Mantua in 1603, under the slightly different title Il magico mondo de gli heroi, by the ducal printer Francesco Osanna, and was dedicated to Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. The edition translated here, printed in Milan in 1605, describes itself on this same authority as a second edition, and the printer Pietromartire Locarni states in his own dedication, included in the front matter of this translation, that the book was "further amplified as well, and revised by the same Author" for this second printing.¹² That single clause is doing real work. It tells us della Riviera was alive in 1605, that he was reachable by his printer, and that he personally returned to his own text to expand and correct it rather than simply letting Locarni reissue the Mantua sheets unchanged. A revised second edition, prepared by the author himself within two years of the first, is not the pattern of a book that vanished from its own writer's hands. Someone was still tending it.

The book's front matter offers one further thread. A commendatory sonnet addressed "TO THE VERY ILLUSTRIOUS SIGNOR CESARE DELLA RIVIERA" appears over the name of Angelo Ingegneri, praising della Riviera as a "happy HERO" who has "formed" a "new WORLD" in his "learnèd pages."¹³ This confirms that at least one contemporary man of letters thought della Riviera's book worth a public, printed compliment, which places della Riviera among writers whose work circulated and drew notice rather than among those working in total isolation. Ingegneri, a Venetian man of letters who served as secretary to Carlo Emanuele I of Savoy from 1602 to 1608, did not stop there. In the second edition of his poem Argonautica (Naples, 1606) he glossed a passage about a noble river that had flowed underground from France to resurface in the lake of Mantua as a reference to "Signor Cesare della Riviera, of the most noble stock of Brittany, a Philosopher without equal, Author of the most learned book called the Magical World of the Heroes," and in the tract against alchemy printed with it he exempted the author of that "most learned and truly singular book" from his attack on alchemists. On the strength of these notices, and of a letter Ingegneri wrote from prison in 1608 complaining of a "deceitful Alchemist" who had spent eighteen years at the Duke of Mantua's expense before moving to Turin, Paolo Luparia has proposed that della Riviera was long maintained at the Gonzaga court and became, from about the end of 1603, an alchemist in the favor of the Duke of Savoy. The letter never names its alchemist, and Luparia offers the identification as a hypothesis; I report it as one.

I should also correct a natural misreading before it takes hold. The dedication to Carlo Emanuele I, Duke of Savoy, that opens this edition is signed by Locarni, the printer, not by della Riviera himself. It would be easy to read that dedication as della Riviera courting aristocratic patronage directly. What it shows instead is that Locarni, preparing a second printing meant to go on "multiplying its copies" and reach "men's hands," judged an appeal to Savoy's court a sound commercial and reputational strategy for the book as a physical object. If Luparia is right, however, the printer's choice was not only commercial: the author himself was by then in the Duke of Savoy's orbit, and a dedication to Carlo Emanuele placed the book where its author now stood. The two readings are not exclusive, and the evidence does not let me choose between them.

If della Riviera the man is largely unrecoverable, della Riviera the author leaves a much clearer self-portrait, and I think it belongs in this section rather than treated as separate from biography. His own preface, "The Author to the Readers," opens not with his subject but with a defense of himself. He sets clarity, order, and truth as his three aims, then spends a considerable portion of the preface attacking other writers on magic for deliberately obscuring their doctrine "in part removed from his volumes, and in part concealed," before turning to a direct, formal protestation of his own Catholic orthodoxy: that if anything in the book should be found "contrary to the true Christian faith," he has done so "not by study but unknowingly, or through mere negligence," and offers himself "most ready for every amendment" to the correction of his ecclesiastical superiors.¹⁴ A man does not open a book about natural magic with that kind of formal submission unless he has real reason to expect the book might be read as dangerous. That reason was not paranoia. Milan in 1605 was governed, in ecclesiastical terms, by Archbishop Federico Borromeo, who had held the see since 1595, who had himself sat on the commission of cardinals that revised the Index of Prohibited Books in 1596, and who carried forward the Tridentine discipline that his more famous cousin Carlo Borromeo had made the defining mark of the Milanese church a generation earlier.¹⁵ A book treating Cabala, Hermetic doctrine, and the fabrication of the Philosophers' Stone, published under that ecclesiastical administration, needed exactly the kind of preemptive defense della Riviera gives it. His preface is not decoration. It is evidence of the actual conditions he believed he was writing under, and Section VI of this introduction returns to that climate in more depth.

So this is what stands in place of a biography: a book printed twice within two years by an author still actively revising his own work, a single contemporary's public praise, a printer's commercial calculation mistaken too easily for the author's own ambition, and a preface that reveals more about the pressure della Riviera felt himself working under than any external document has yet supplied about the life he lived while working under it.

III. Print History of This Work

Two editions carry this text through the seventeenth century, and no others follow for the better part of three hundred and thirty years. The first was printed in Mantua in 1603. The second, the edition this translation is made from, was printed in Milan in 1605 by Pietromartire Locarni, who describes it in his own dedicatory epistle as "this present second edition, made by me... by multiplying its copies, and by putting them into men's hands to be read more correct, and in better form, further amplified as well, and revised by the same Author."¹⁶ One should think deeper about this, because it is doing a little more than a simple statement of reprinting. Locarni is telling his reader three separate things at once: that the first edition had already circulated enough to be worth improving on rather than simply reissuing, that the improvements were textual and substantive rather than cosmetic, since he calls them an amplification, and that della Riviera himself, not Locarni, performed the revision. A printer had commercial reasons to say all of this whether or not it was strictly true, since a "revised and enlarged" edition sold better than a plain reprint even in 1605. But I have found no reason in the text itself to doubt him, and the alternative, that Locarni fabricated an author's personal involvement in a dedication addressed to a reigning duke, carries its own risk a printer of the period would likely have avoided.

The 1603 Mantua edition can now be described from the catalogue records of its surviving copies. It was printed by Francesco Osanna, who had held the title of ducal printer since 1588, under the title Il magico mondo de gli heroi, with an engraved title page bearing the Gonzaga arms, and it was dedicated to Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Nine copies are recorded in Italian libraries and more abroad, among them the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Vatican Library, the British Library and Harvard. What I have not been able to do is read it. Whether it already carried the marginal-citation apparatus of the 1605 printing, and what exactly della Riviera altered when he revised the text, are questions only a collation of the two editions can answer, and I have not had access to a 1603 exemplar in preparing this edition.¹⁷

The physical book itself is worth describing on its own terms, apart from the question of authorship and revision. This 1605 printing is a quarto of two hundred and fifty-six pages, thirty-two of them preliminary matter, organized with the running marginal citations down the side of nearly every page that this translation preserves and explains further in the Translator's Note.¹⁸ That layout convention, an author's argument running down the main column while the names of his authorities march down the margin beside it, was not della Riviera's invention. It belonged to a broader tradition of humanist and scholarly printing already well established by 1605, a visual promise to the reader that the text's claims could be checked against named sources rather than taken on the author's word alone. Della Riviera and Locarni were using a page design a contemporary reader would have recognized instantly as signaling a serious, citation-conscious work, the typographic equivalent of the orthodoxy protestation in the preface. Both were ways of telling a wary reader, before they had read a single argument, that this book meant to be trusted.

The specific copy this translation is made from carries its own additional layer of history beyond the edition itself. It bears an ownership mark reading "Ex Bibliotheca majori Coll. Rom. Societ. Jesu," the major library of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit order's flagship college in Rome.¹⁹  What this tells us is that a book treating natural Magic, Cabalistic word-declarations, and the fabrication of the Philosophers' Stone was, at some point, held within one of the most significant libraries of the Catholic intellectual establishment, rather than existing only at the margins of clandestine or suppressed circulation. The Jesuit order of this period was not monolithic on questions of Hermetic and natural-philosophical material; some of its members, in the generation after della Riviera, would pursue Hermetic and Egyptological interests of their own at considerable length. I raise that only as context for why a stamp like this one should not be read as a contradiction. A copy of this book sitting on a Collegio Romano shelf is consistent with a serious Counter-Reformation intellectual culture that was, in places, more curious about this material than its own official caution might suggest.

Between 1605 and 1932, I have found no evidence that this book was printed again. Three hundred and twenty-seven years is a long silence for any book, and it is worth stating as its own fact rather than folding quietly into the Evola narrative that follows. Whatever readership della Riviera and Locarni hoped to reach by "multiplying its copies" in 1605, that readership did not sustain a market for further printings once the initial run of two editions had been absorbed. The book did not vanish from bibliographic memory entirely, since antiquarian booksellers today can still describe and date both editions with confidence, which means exemplars survived in private and institutional hands across those centuries even while no publisher chose to reset the type.²⁰ But for all practical purposes, for three centuries this was a book one could only own, not buy new.

That changed in 1932, when Evola's edition, published by Laterza in Bari, returned it to active print, and it has stayed in print since: through the Arktos reprints of Evola's text from 1978 onward, through Edizioni Mediterranee's 1986 edition of the 1605 text in modern type, and through Mediterranee's Orizzonti dello Spirito reissue of Evola's edition in 2022.²¹ The final development in this print history belongs to the last twenty years rather than the last four hundred, and it matters directly to how this translation itself was made possible. Digitization projects drawing on major Italian library holdings, including a scan sourced from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, have put photographic reproductions of the original 1605 printing into general circulation, something no printed edition had done, the facsimile issued in Milan in 1971 having been limited to a hundred and ten numbered copies.²² This translation was prepared from exactly that kind of direct photographic access to the 1605 text, not from Evola's redaction and not from a transcription once removed from the original page. That is a genuinely recent possibility. A translator working even twenty years ago would likely have needed to travel to a rare-book reading room to do what digitization now allows from a single working copy consulted at a desk.

IV. The Renaissance Hermetic Tradition He Writes Into

Della Riviera did not invent the intellectual tools he works with in this book. He inherited them, across roughly a century and a half of Italian and Northern European scholarship, from a specific sequence of thinkers whose names a reader unfamiliar with Renaissance Hermeticism should have in hand before reaching Book One. I want to walk through that sequence here, not as a catalog of influences to be checked off, but as the actual intellectual road della Riviera traveled to arrive at the book in front of you.

It begins with Marsilio Ficino, who in 1463 translated the Greek Corpus Hermeticum into Latin for Cosimo de' Medici, giving it the title Pimander when it reached print in 1471 and, in doing so, giving the whole Latin West its first direct access to writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.²³ Ficino's own later work, particularly his 1489 De Vita Libri Tres, developed a theory of natural magic built around a spiritus mundi, a spirit of the world diffusing through the cosmos and available to the trained practitioner through astrological and material means. This is not a distant or abstract debt. Della Riviera cites Ficino by name, directly, in his own index, defining "the magical Heaven called the Quintessence" as "the spirit of the Soul of the world diffused through the corporeal and Elementary parts," attributing that definition explicitly to Ficino.²⁴ Whatever else this book synthesizes, its account of quintessence is, by della Riviera's own citation, Ficino's account, carried forward more than a century after Ficino wrote it.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola supplies the second major thread. Pico's contribution, developed most famously in his 1486 nine hundred theses and defended in the Oration commonly known by its later title, On the Dignity of Man, was to argue that Jewish Cabala, properly read, confirmed Christian truth rather than threatening it, and could be studied by a Christian philosopher as a genuine source of wisdom rather than a forbidden one.²⁵ This is the move that makes della Riviera's own practice possible at all. Look back through the Table of Notable Matters at the front of this edition and you will find, repeated dozens of times, entries beginning "Cabalistic declaration of the word..." or "Cabalistic exposition of the word...", applied to Latin terms as varied as sale, sulfur, aquila, leo, and manna.²⁶ That method, extracting hidden magical and theological meaning from the letters and sounds of individual words, is a direct technical descendant of the Christian Cabala Pico opened up more than a century before della Riviera's second edition appeared.

Johann Reuchlin carried that opening across the Alps and gave it its systematic form. His 1494 De Verbo Mirifico and especially his 1517 De Arte Cabalistica took Pico's initial claim and built it into an actual working method, a Northern European scholar's disciplined technique for deriving Cabalistic meaning from Hebrew letters, names, and words, exportable to any reader willing to learn it.²⁷ Della Riviera's word-by-word Cabalistic declarations, applied even to Latin vocabulary rather than Hebrew directly, practice a version of the discipline Reuchlin formalized. He never names Reuchlin, whose books stood on the Index of 1596, and his own Table of Authors credits his Cabala instead to Pico and to the Hebrew Cabalists and rabbis he cites; whether he knew Reuchlin's work at first hand cannot be shown from the text. What can be said is that the method he uses is the one Reuchlin had made available to Christian readers.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa provides the fourth thread, and arguably the most structurally important one. His 1533 De Occulta Philosophia, three books moving from natural magic through celestial magic to ceremonial magic, stands as the great encyclopedic synthesis the whole sixteenth century measured itself against.²⁸ Della Riviera's insistence, stated early in Book One and running through the entire book, on distinguishing true natural Magic from the false, diabolical, or merely superstitious varieties is not a new distinction he invented for this book. His own division is twofold rather than Agrippa's threefold, Natural against Ceremonial, with the Ceremonial split in turn into Theurgy and Goetia and condemned outright, and he never cites Agrippa, who, like Reuchlin, was on the Index. But the ground he stands on, a natural magic defended as licit by being severed from every commerce with spirits, is the ground Agrippa's first book had mapped seventy-two years earlier.

The fifth thread cuts closer to della Riviera's own moment, and closer to danger. Giordano Bruno wrote his major philosophical dialogues, La Cena de le Ceneri, De la Causa, Principio et Uno, De l'Infinito Universo et Mondi, not in Latin but in vernacular Italian, arguing serious cosmology and metaphysics in the same language a merchant or a courtier could read without a university education.²⁹ That is the direct precedent for the register this translation's own Translator's Note describes, della Riviera's periodic, philosophically loaded Italian prose. Bruno did not live to see della Riviera's second edition. He was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori on the seventeenth of February, 1600, convicted as an obstinate heretic after years of proceedings that touched, among other things, his deep engagement with the Renaissance magical tradition this whole section has been tracing.³⁰ Five years. That is the distance between Bruno's execution and the Milan printing of this book. Della Riviera's elaborate, formal protestation of Catholic orthodoxy in his own preface, discussed in Section II, was not a generic literary convention borrowed unthinkingly from other title pages. It was written by a man working in vernacular Italian on Hermetic and Cabalistic material within living memory of watching what that combination could cost.

Francesco Patrizi supplies the final thread, and if anything a sharper warning than Bruno's. His 1591 Nova de Universis Philosophia, a full four-part Neoplatonist system built partly around Hermetic material, including an appended text he believed genuinely ancient Hermetic doctrine, came before the Congregation of the Index within a year of its publication: Patrizi was summoned in November 1592, the book was prohibited outright in July 1594, and the Index of 1596 listed it as banned "until corrected."³¹ Patrizi spent the rest of his life, he died in 1597, defending a book the Church had moved against almost immediately. Della Riviera published his own first edition only six years after Patrizi's death, in a genre and on a body of material the authorities had just finished demonstrating they were watching closely, and watching fast.

Taken together, these five threads are the tradition della Riviera actually stood in by 1603. A Hermetic cosmology and a natural-magical theory of the spiritus mundi, from Ficino. A method for reading hidden meaning in the letters of words, from Pico by way of Reuchlin. A framework for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate magic, of the kind Agrippa had systematized. A living demonstration that this material could be argued seriously in vernacular Italian, from Bruno, alongside the sharpest possible demonstration of what arguing it carelessly could cost. And a second demonstration, from Patrizi, that even careful, systematic, institutionally cautious Hermetic philosophy could be brought before the Index within a year of appearing in print. Della Riviera is not a fringe or eccentric figure borrowing occult scraps from the margins of Renaissance thought. He is working at the direct convergence point of five separate, serious, well-documented intellectual currents, at the exact moment those currents had become genuinely dangerous to stand at the convergence of. Section VI returns to that danger directly. This section exists so that when it does, the reader already understands exactly what tradition della Riviera was risking something to carry forward.

V. What Il Mondo Magico Actually Argues

Everything in this section is built from della Riviera's own words, either his preface or his own Table of Notable Matters, both reproduced in full in this edition's front matter. I want to say that plainly before beginning, because it means this section rests on unusually solid ground compared to the historical sections before it. I am not reconstructing a lost argument from fragments or secondary reports. Della Riviera indexed his own book, entry by entry, and that index is one of the most honest windows into a Renaissance author's mind that a translator could ask for. What follows is a reader's guide built from that window, not a psychological or symbolic reading of what lies behind it. That deeper reading belongs entirely to the essay in Appendix B. This section only wants to make sure you know what you are actually holding before you start.

V.1 The distinction the whole book turns on

Della Riviera opens his own preface by telling the reader exactly what he thinks other writers on magic get wrong. They obscure. They "treat their doctrines not only in their own proper magical terms, but in those besides of every other science, faculty, and art," deploying "every allegorical manner" until nothing is left but "enigma" and "metaphor," and they do this, he says, deliberately, so that "the common sort, forsaking the hidden light, may vainly lay hold upon the apparent shadow."³² His stated project is the opposite: to strip away that "dark and murky mantle" and present natural Magic "wholly naked and resplendent to the eyes of others."

But nakedness, for della Riviera, does not mean magic without danger or without limits. His own index shows him drawing a hard line, repeatedly, between the Magic he is defending and the Magic he is not. "The Demon has likewise his own Magic," reads one entry. Another: "Detestation of diabolical Magic, and of the fabrication, by virtue of it, of images, seals, and the like." A third condemns, in a single sweeping entry, "Geomancy, Hydromancy, Aeromancy, Pyromancy, Capnomancy, Necromancy, Neciomancy and Sciomancy," all "condemned by holy Church."³³ This is the inheritance discussed in Section IV, the licit natural magic that Ficino had defended and Agrippa had systematized, doing exactly the organizing work it was built to do. Natural Magic, for della Riviera, is not a rejection of the Church's authority over the invisible world. It is a claim to operate entirely inside a different, licit region of that world, one grounded in nature's own hidden virtues rather than in commerce with spirits, and he wants that boundary understood before a reader goes any further into his book. There is even a note of real anxiety about the material itself, not just its misuse: "God wills that natural Magic remain hidden, lest the World be destroyed."³⁴ Della Riviera is not writing a book he considers harmless. He is writing a book he considers powerful enough to require exactly the care, and exactly the orthodox self-defense, that Section II and Section VI both examine in his preface.

V.2 The architecture: the days of the Magical World

The book does not simply argue its case in continuous prose. It builds it, stage by stage, in a sequence explicitly modeled on the days of Creation. Della Riviera's own index marks this out directly: "The Magical Firmament, second day of the fabric of the World of the Heroes," followed later by "End of the third day of the Magical World," "End of the fourth day of the Magical World," and "End of the fifth day of the Magical World."³⁵ This is not incidental structure. A reader coming to this book for the first time should understand that della Riviera is not merely describing a magical cosmos, he is fabricating one, on the page, in the same seven-part rhythm Genesis uses to fabricate the physical one, and doing so quite deliberately: one index entry states outright that "to make the Stone of the Philosophers is nothing other than to make the little World, and the production of light is the first day of the formation of it."³⁶ The Stone and the cosmos are being built by the same procedure, on two different scales, at the same time. Readers who keep that architecture in view as they move through Book One will find the book's sequence of topics considerably less strange than it first appears. Della Riviera is following a plan. It simply is not the plan a modern reader expecting a linear argument or a systematic treatise would predict.

V.3 What "Hero" means

The single word this book leans on hardest is Hero, and della Riviera defines it with unusual care for a term he uses on nearly every page. "Hero derives from Hera, which signifies Earth," his index states, and adds, "The Hero had his origin from the first son of Juno, called Hero."³⁷ This is not incidental etymology. It is the foundation of the entire book's anthropology. A Hero, for della Riviera, is not simply a brave man or a mythological figure. The index defines him functionally: "The Hero is he who, working virtuously, renders himself glorious by memorable deeds." And crucially, Heroes occupy a specific ontological middle ground, "neither men only nor Gods only, but the one and the other together, and hence called demigods."³⁸ This matters for how the whole book should be read. Della Riviera is not writing a manual for ordinary devotional or ascetic practice, nor a treatise on divine grace operating independently of human effort. He is writing about a third category, a human being who, through virtuous working, rises to something more than merely human without ceasing to be human at all. Whatever a reader makes of this claim philosophically or theologically, and Section VI addresses how carefully della Riviera positions it against orthodox teaching, it is the anthropological engine the rest of the book runs on. Every subsequent claim about the Cave, the Stone, and the Magical Gold presupposes this specific figure, the demigod-through-virtuous-working, as its intended subject.

V.4 The Cave of Mercury and the second wood of life

Book One's central image is a hidden Cave, guarded, accessible only to the Hero who has earned entry to it. Della Riviera's index describes it as "the new Paradise, and a gift sent by Jove to men through Mercury himself, understood also as the Heroic wood of life."³⁹ The logic behind this image is laid out, again, directly in the index, in a pair of entries that read almost like a two-step argument in miniature: "God gave to man in the Earthly Paradise the wood of life, whereby he might perpetuate himself and not die," and then, after the Fall, "God granted to man, cast out of the Earthly Paradise, another Paradise and another wood of life, whereby he may work marvellous things."⁴⁰ This is the theological hinge the whole book turns on. Della Riviera is not claiming Magic restores the lost Eden directly. He is claiming God provided a second Paradise, a second wood of life, specifically for the fallen condition, hidden rather than simply given, and accessible only through the discipline and virtue that define the Hero. Entry to the Cave is not automatic and not free. It is a felicity "promised by the celestial Mercury to him who shall obtain entry into his Cave," a promise, not a guarantee.⁴¹ The whole architecture of the book, in a real sense, is the description of what obtaining that entry actually requires.

V.5 The Stone of the Philosophers, properly understood

No term in this book has been more misread across four centuries than the Philosophers' Stone, and della Riviera goes out of his way, repeatedly, to correct the misreading before it can take hold. His index states flatly: "Alchemy falsely called the art of transmuting metals," and again, "Alchemy an apparent, sophistical and delusory art."⁴² He is not being coy or esoteric here. He means this as a direct correction of readers who would come to his book expecting a recipe for turning lead into gold. "The purification which the Hero performs upon all other metals, reducing them into gold, is not transmutation," one entry insists, and the positive claim behind that denial appears elsewhere: the Hero, using the proper Magical Instrument, "can with a Magical Instrument draw most easily from any place whatsoever the greatest quantity of Gold and of Silver, which is like the vulgar sort, but infinitely more virtuous and perfect than it, and is therefore called Magical Gold, and also the Gold of God, but it cannot be spent."⁴³ Read that last clause again. Gold that cannot be spent is not currency. Whatever della Riviera means by the Stone and the Gold it produces, he has told his reader outright that it fails the one test that defines ordinary gold, its exchangeability. The Stone, for della Riviera, is the gift sent "by Jove to the Heroes through Mercury," the same gift as the Cave, described in different terms.⁴⁴ It is not a laboratory operation performed on base metal. It is what the Hero receives once he has done the work the Cave requires of him.

V.6 The classical Heroes, read as one continuous allegory

Della Riviera does not invent his cast of Heroes. He borrows them wholesale from classical mythology and reads their most famous exploits as one continuous, coded description of the same inward process. Hercules receives the most sustained treatment. The index tracks specific labors individually, "The tenth strength of Hercules attributed to the magical Hero," and later "The twelfth strength of Hercules applied to the magical Hero," and generalizes the whole cycle into a single correspondence: "Twelve avenging furies set against the twelve labours of Hercules, and against the twelve fruits of the wood of life," balanced elsewhere against "Ten intrinsic virtues set against the twelve avenging furies."⁴⁵ Jason receives the same treatment through a single, dense image: "The Dragon, set by the Poets to guard the Apples of the Hesperides and the Golden Fleece, which signify the Magic Stone."⁴⁶ Two entirely separate myths, the Hesperides and the Argonauts, are collapsed here into a single guarded treasure, because for della Riviera they were always describing the same guarded treasure. Even minor mythological figures get folded into the pattern: "Autolycus, grandfather of Ulysses, made most rich by Mercury from the poor man that he was," ties a comparatively obscure figure directly back to Mercury's gift-giving role that structures the whole book.⁴⁷ A reader who keeps this allegorical key in mind, every classical Hero and every guarded treasure names the same inward achievement under a different mythological costume, will find della Riviera's constant movement between myths far less scattered than it first appears. He is not surveying classical mythology for its own sake. He is demonstrating that one argument was hiding inside all of it the whole time.

V.7 Book Two's turn: the standing soul and the falling soul

Book One builds its case largely through the architecture already described, the days, the Cave, the Stone, the Heroes. Book Two shifts its center of gravity toward a different, more directly ethical vocabulary, the standing soul and the falling soul. The index gives this its own small cluster of entries: "What the falling Soul is," "What the standing Soul is," and, most tellingly, "How the falling Soul may become a standing Soul."⁴⁸ That last entry matters more than its brevity suggests. Book One's argument, for all its cosmic architecture, could in principle be read as describing a single decisive achievement, entry into the Cave, possession of the Stone. Book Two's standing and falling soul material reframes the whole project as a condition that can shift, that has a direction, and that a reader still in the falling condition is explicitly told has a path back. I want to flag this as a genuine point of connection to the essay in Appendix B without pursuing it further here, since the psychological weight of that shift, and what it might mean for a reader today rather than a reader in 1605, is exactly the kind of question this introduction has committed to leaving to that essay alone.

V.8 Why this should matter to you, specifically, now

I said in Section I that della Riviera's own case for his book had not aged out of relevance, and I want to close this section by actually making good on that claim rather than simply asserting it again. Look again at two of della Riviera's own sentences. The first: "Vulgar Philosophers consider only outwardly the force and the virtue of things produced."⁴⁹ The second, the one about Magical Gold that cannot be spent. Put those two claims beside each other and you get something that has nothing to do with whether anyone today believes in literal alchemy. Della Riviera is describing two different ways of looking at the same material, whether that material is a lump of ore or, read more broadly, anything ordinary and undervalued that a person encounters in their own life. The vulgar way looks only at outward, exchangeable worth, what a thing is obviously good for, what it will fetch. The Hero's way looks for a different kind of value entirely, one that specifically cannot be spent, cannot be extracted and traded away, because its worth exists only in the transformation of the person who found it, not in the object itself. That is not a claim locked inside 1605. It is a claim about the difference between accumulating things and being changed by them, and it is exactly as available to a reader holding this book today as it was to a reader holding the Milan printing four hundred years ago. Della Riviera built an entire cosmology, an entire allegorical mythology, and an entire vocabulary of Cabalistic wordplay around defending that one distinction. Whatever else this introduction has asked you to hold in mind about editions and censorship and intellectual lineage, that distinction is the reason the book was worth all of it, then and now.

VI. Orthodoxy and the Censorship Climate

Section IV laid out the tradition della Riviera was writing into. It also laid out, deliberately, what that tradition had just finished costing two of its most serious practitioners. Giordano Bruno, who wrote serious philosophy in the same vernacular Italian della Riviera uses, was burned in Rome's Campo de' Fiori on the seventeenth of February, 1600. Francesco Patrizi, whose Hermetic Neoplatonist synthesis was in most respects more cautious and more academically respectable than Bruno's dialogues, still saw his life's major work brought before the Congregation of the Index within a year of publication and prohibited outright in 1594. Della Riviera's first edition appeared in 1603, three years after Bruno's execution and nine after Patrizi's condemnation. This was not ancient history to him. It was recent memory, close enough that anyone moving in the same intellectual circles would have known people who had known the men involved.

A third case belongs alongside those two, closer in subject matter to della Riviera than either Bruno or Patrizi, and closer in outcome to what an author in his position might actually have feared happening to himself rather than the extreme of Bruno's execution. Giovanni Battista della Porta, a natural philosopher whose Magia Naturalis dealt with exactly the kind of natural-magical material this book deals with, first ran into the Roman Holy Office in the early 1570s. His Magia Naturalis was placed on the Madrid Index of Prohibited Books in 1583 over his naturalistic treatment of witchcraft, and in 1586 he was summoned before the Inquisition in Naples and, in a striking instruction that tells you exactly what the authorities considered the safe alternative to writing about magic, told to "abstain from publishing on divinatory and magical arts and write comedies instead."⁵⁰ He spent the rest of his life under what one scholarly account calls life-long inquisitorial surveillance, saw further works banned or restricted by the Venetian Inquisition and the Holy Office in the years that followed, and resorted at points to publishing under pseudonyms to keep working at all.⁵¹ Della Porta was not executed. He was something arguably more relevant to della Riviera's own calculation: watched, restricted, and permanently marked, for the rest of a long working life, as a man whose subject matter required supervision. That is the realistic range of outcomes della Riviera was writing inside. Not merely the extreme of Bruno's stake, but the far more probable prospect of della Porta's decades of surveillance and selective prohibition.

He was writing it, specifically, in Milan, under the ecclesiastical administration of Archbishop Federico Borromeo, who had held the see since 1595, had sat on the commission that revised the Index of 1596, and carried forward the Tridentine discipline that his more famous cousin Carlo Borromeo had made the defining mark of the Milanese church a generation before.⁵² I raised this in Section II to explain della Riviera's preface. I want to return to it here to make a sharper point. A book on natural Magic and Cabalistic word-declaration, printed in a city under sustained, actively enforced Tridentine discipline, in the years immediately following Bruno's execution and squarely within della Porta's own decades of ongoing surveillance, needed a defense. Della Riviera gives his book two, not one, and the second is considerably more interesting than the first.

The first defense is the one already discussed in Section II, the formal protestation in "The Author to the Readers": that if anything in the book contradicts the Christian faith he has erred "not by study but unknowingly, or through mere negligence," and that he submits himself "most ready for every amendment" to ecclesiastical correction.⁵³ This is a conventional gesture, the kind any author working this material in this period would be expected to make, and I do not want to overstate its originality. What is not conventional, and what I only found by reading further into Book One's actual opening argument rather than stopping at the preface, is della Riviera's second and considerably more sophisticated line of defense, built directly into his stated method.

Early in Book One, della Riviera pauses to explain why he has chosen to write in "plain and clear method" rather than following the near-universal practice of concealing magical doctrine behind "enigmas, metaphors, parables and other figures and obscurities."⁵⁴ He acknowledges the weight of authority running against him here, citing Pythagoras, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, Trithemius, Boethius, and Plato's own advice to Dionysius of Syracuse that dangerous truths be written "under enigmas, and with artificial turnings of words," lest the writing "come into peril by some strange accident" and fall into the wrong hands.⁵⁵ Against this whole chorus of ancient and Christian authority, della Riviera makes a deliberate choice for transparency, and then, crucially, supplies a theological justification for why that choice is safe rather than reckless. Clarity will not put dangerous power into unworthy hands, he argues, because God himself guarantees the outcome regardless of how plainly the doctrine is written: "the same God, who by great prodigies hardened the heart of Pharaoh, will yet bring it to pass that the reprobate and the perverse, seeing, shall not see, and hearing, shall not understand." He reinforces this with Geber's own saying, that magical knowledge "is the gift of God, who gives it and takes it away from whom he pleases," concluding that "among an almost infinite number of those who curiously seek after it, scarcely one is made worthy."⁵⁶

This is a genuinely elegant piece of self-protection, and I think it deserves to be recognized as such rather than read only as pious ornamentation. Della Riviera is not merely claiming personal innocence, the way his preface does. He is constructing an argument, borrowed from Scripture's own account of Pharaoh's hardened heart and reinforced with Hermetic authority in Geber, that his book cannot function as a manual for the unworthy no matter how openly it is written, because unworthiness itself is a condition of comprehension that no amount of clarity can overcome. If that argument holds, then writing plainly is not a risk at all, it is simply irrelevant to whether the wrong reader can misuse the material, since the wrong reader was never going to understand it regardless of how it was phrased. Whether della Riviera believed this argument sincerely, as a piece of genuine Hermetic and Christian doctrine about the nature of worthiness, or constructed it partly as insurance against exactly the kind of inquisitorial attention Bruno, Patrizi, and della Porta had all recently drawn, is not a question this introduction can answer with certainty, and I do not think the two possibilities are even mutually exclusive. A sincere believer in a dangerous period has every reason to reach for the theological argument that also happens to protect him. That does not make the belief less sincere. It makes the period he was writing in impossible to separate from the doctrine he produced inside it.

One further, more mechanical layer of this defense belongs in the historical record, and this edition's front matter, following the original 1605 printing, retains it in full: the Approbation, the formal review and license that governed what could legally be printed in Spanish Milan in this period.⁵⁷ A book could not simply be set in type and sold. It required three signatures before a printer like Locarni could legally put it into circulation: the inquisitor's vicar, Brother Ludovico Gentilino, certifying on 14 November 1604 that the book might be printed "the rules of the new Index having been observed"; the archbishop's theologian, Guglielmo Vidone, approving on Cardinal Borromeo's behalf; and Sacco, for the Senate of Milan, granting the civil licence six days later. That della Riviera's book carries one is not, on its own, remarkable, nearly every legally printed book of the period did. What is worth a reader's attention is that this formal, institutional layer of approval sits in the front matter directly alongside della Riviera's own two personal defenses, the preface's protestation and Book One's theological argument for the safety of clarity, as a third, independent line of insulation between this book and the authorities Section IV has already shown were watching this exact material closely. Three defenses, of three different kinds, personal, theological, and institutional, stacked around one book. That is not the posture of a man who considered himself safe by default.

I want to close this section the way I closed Section IV, by pointing forward rather than resolving anything. Della Riviera's orthodoxy, whatever else it was, was not incidental to this book. It was load-bearing, built into the preface, built into the method, and secured a third time by the formal license that let the book exist in print at all. A reader who skips past all of this as boilerplate is skipping past one of the clearest windows this book offers into the actual conditions under which it was written. Section VII turns to what happened to that carefully defended orthodoxy once Evola got hold of the book three centuries later, and whether his reading preserved the caution della Riviera built in, or simply stepped around it.

VII. Reception History: Evola’s Magical Idealism

Section I introduced Julius Evola's 1932 edition as the primary vehicle through which this book has reached readers for the last ninety-odd years. I held back the fuller picture of who Evola was and what he brought to della Riviera's text until this section, because it needed room, and because I think a reader deserves the full context before deciding what to make of that reading, rather than a thumbnail dropped early and never developed.

Evola was born in Rome on the nineteenth of May, 1898, and died there on the eleventh of June, 1974.⁵⁸ He began his intellectual career not as a scholar of Renaissance Hermeticism but as a Dada artist and theorist in the early 1920s, before turning to philosophy. That turn produced, in 1925, a book called Essays on Magical Idealism, developing a philosophical position holding that the ego must come to understand everything that appears to have a reality independent of it as ultimately illusory, a doctrine of the absolute individual asserting itself against the apparent world rather than submitting to it.⁵⁹ I want to underline the date on that book, because it matters directly to how his della Riviera edition should be read. Evola's Magical Idealism was not a term he coined to describe della Riviera. It was already a fully developed philosophical system of his own, seven years old, when he sat down in 1932 to prepare his edition of Il Mondo Magico. What Giovanni Sessa's account characterizes as Evola's reading of della Riviera through a "via realizzativa solare," a solar path of realization through inward magical mastery, is not a conclusion Evola drew from della Riviera's text.⁶⁰ It is Evola's own preexisting system, applied to della Riviera's text as an interpretive frame that had already been built, tested, and published years before he ever undertook the edition. This is the point Section I's discussion of editorial paratext was building toward. Evola did not simply modernize della Riviera's language and add explanatory notes. He fit della Riviera into a philosophy he had already spent the better part of a decade constructing for entirely separate purposes. That, at least, is how I read the relationship between the two; Evola's own retrospective account of the edition stresses instead what he saw as the book's direct identification of the Hero with the hermetic adept, and its conquest of the "Second Wood of Life."⁶¹

The rest of Evola's career took him a considerable distance from the cautious, orthodoxy-protesting Counter-Reformation Catholic author examined in Section VI. Through the 1930s and into the war years, Evola operated as an esoteric thinker within Fascist Italy, with documented ties extending into Nazi Germany. He contributed to La difesa della razza, the regime's racial-theory journal, from 1939 to 1942, developing what historians including Peter Staudenmaier have termed a doctrine of "spiritual racism," distinct from the more common biological racial theory of the period, and separately edited a page on "Spiritual Problems in Fascist Ethics" in the newspaper Regime Fascista from 1933 until the fall of the regime in 1943.⁶² After the war, he became, by the account of a peer-reviewed academic treatment of his political legacy, a substantial ideological influence on a younger generation of Italian neo-fascists, despite his own later claims to political detachment, and in 1951 stood trial, charged with plotting to re-establish Fascism, and was acquitted.⁶³ I am reporting this plainly, as documented biographical fact relevant to understanding a reception history, not to render a verdict on Evola the man. But it cannot be left out of an honest account of how this book reached the twentieth century, because it is not incidental to that reception. It is the reason that the editors who have kept this book in print in Italian have come largely from the Traditionalist and radical-right milieu Evola helped define, and that English-language readers who know the book at all have met it, with few exceptions, through translations of Evola's own hermetic writings rather than through della Riviera.⁶⁴

I want to be precise here about what does and does not follow from that history. It does not mean della Riviera's own 1605 text carries any of Evola's twentieth-century political commitments. Della Riviera died, if the catalogue date of 1625 is right, more than two and a half centuries before Mussolini was born. His book is a Counter-Reformation Catholic treatise on natural Magic, written under active ecclesiastical supervision and defended, as Section VI showed at length, with real theological and institutional care to keep it inside orthodox bounds. Nothing in della Riviera's own words, so far as I have found in preparing this translation, anticipates or requires Evola's later political trajectory. What does follow, and what I think matters more for a reader picking up this book today, is that the specific edition through which this text has survived and circulated for ninety years was prepared by a man who read it through a personal philosophical system built for his own purposes, and whose subsequent career gave that edition a particular intellectual address in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that della Riviera himself never chose and could not have anticipated. Those are two separate facts, della Riviera's own book and Evola's edition of it, and this introduction has tried throughout to keep them separate rather than letting one silently stand in for the other.

This separation has a direct, practical consequence for the book you are holding. This translation is made from della Riviera's 1605 text directly, not from Evola's 1932 Italian redaction, and not through any English rendering of Evola's own commentary. That is worth stating plainly for a reason beyond translation method. Evola died in 1974, and his original written work, including his commentary and editorial apparatus on della Riviera, remains under copyright protection in the European Union for the standard term of life plus seventy years, meaning protection through 2044.⁶⁵ A translation of Evola's own commentary into English would require rights clearance from his estate that this project has neither sought nor needed, because this translation does not use his words. What it uses is della Riviera's, recovered directly from the 1605 page, exactly as Section III described. A reader who wants Evola's reading in English can, as of this writing, find some of his own original philosophical works available through publishers working in that tradition. What they could not previously find was della Riviera's own 1605 argument in English, standing on its own, before Evola's hand or mine had touched it.

That is where this introduction now leaves you. Section I opened with Ficino's Pimander, a translation whose title and arrangement quietly stood in for its original source text for nearly a century and a half before Casaubon showed readers the arranging hand that had been there all along. I do not think Evola's edition of della Riviera rises to the scale of that case, and I want to be fair to what he actually accomplished, a genuinely difficult seventeenth-century text made legible to twentieth-century Italian readers through real editorial labor, sustained for ninety years, is not a small achievement whatever one makes of the man who performed it. But the mechanism Section I described is the same mechanism here in miniature. An editor's frame, built for reasons that had nothing to do with della Riviera's own 1605 intentions, became the only door most readers had into this book. This translation is the other door, opened for the first time in English, and you have now read enough of this introduction, della Riviera's uncertain biography, his book's print history, the tradition he wrote into, what he actually argued, the orthodoxy he built his defense on, and the edition that has stood in his place for ninety years, to walk through it with your eyes open rather than borrowed.

VIII. This Edition

Everything this introduction needed to tell you about how della Riviera's book came to exist, who wrote it, what tradition it belongs to, and what happened to it in the centuries since, is now behind you. What remains is only a map of what still lies ahead in this volume, so you know where to look when you need something this introduction did not provide.

The Translator's Note, placed just after this introduction, explains the editorial method in full: how the source text was established, what was preserved and what was modernized, how wordplay and classical quotation were handled, and how the apparatus that follows the main text is organized. I have not repeated that explanation here, and I would rather send you back to it than duplicate it imperfectly.

Two appendices follow the main text and the notes. Appendix A is an illustrated glossary of the book's recurring symbols and figures, the Mercury hieroglyph, the Sefirot, the mythic Heroes Section V walked through, meant as a reference to consult as needed rather than a chapter to read straight through. Appendix B is a single sustained essay reading della Riviera's argument through the lens of analytical psychology, a genuinely interpretive undertaking, clearly separated from everything else in this book precisely because it is interpretive, offered as one reader's serious engagement with what della Riviera left behind rather than as a claim about what he consciously intended.

I will not tell you what to make of the book you are about to read. That was never this introduction's job. Its job was to make sure you met della Riviera himself first, before any frame, mine included, closed back around him. What you do with him from here is yours.

B. C. P. Statema

Early September 2026