Toward Ecosophy

The difficulty in answering that question is that Renaissance Hermeticism was a very broad movement that incorporated many different philosophical outlooks, from the Neoplatonism of Ficino and Agrippa through the ecstatic pietism of Jakob Boehme and beyond. The one pervasive difference, though, is that in the Renaissance the intellectual impact of Copernicanism still hadn't really hit, and most people -- even if they'd encountered the notion of a heliocentric cosmology -- still lived mentally in the orderly, enclosed geocentric universe of Ptolemy. By the time the currents that became the Golden Dawn began to take shape, all that was a matter of distant memory, and people -- including occultists -- lived mentally on a planet whirling through immensities of space. The result was a much greater focus on magic as an act of the individual will, rather than as participation in a cosmic process -- the keynote of Renaissance magic.