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The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

Page 4

by Lynn Picknett


  At any rate, Copernicus’ discovery came out with the blessing of Hermes Trismegistus upon its head, with a quotation from that famous work in which Hermes describes the sun-worship of the Egyptians in their magical religion.36

  While Tobias Churton, the British authority on Hermeticism and Gnosticism, states that (his emphasis):

  One gets the impression that Copernicus is saying: the truth of the matter was already there, but went unseen because we judged things from an earthly perspective. But Hermes, at the beginning of science, he saw it.37

  The fact that Copernicus was inspired by the Hermetica also, of course, made the debate over heliocentricity of keen interest to Hermeticists, especially as it seemed to vindicate their semi-sacred texts. If the theory could be proven beyond doubt, it would engender confidence in the entirety of the Hermetic philosophy. And as we shall see, there were some who took it considerably further than that. Certainly, and unsurprisingly, in the ensuing furore about Copernicus’ new theory, the Hermeticists were among his most ardent supporters.

  ‘TOO MUCH IN THE SUN’

  As already mentioned, it is a misconception that the heliocentric theory in itself sparked off a notorious religious furore. Although Copernicus dedicated his book to Pope Paul III, he was not, as many assume, simply boot-licking in an attempt to head off papal disapproval. After all, Paul was quite happy with Copernicus’ theories ten years before On the Revolutions was published. In the dedication, somewhat airily, Copernicus explained his reluctance to go public by saying he wanted to avoid harsh words from lesser scholars: he was not concerned it might stir up theological controversy, let alone accusations of heresy.

  Even the notorious preface, apologetically explaining that the ideas contained therein were just theories, no more valid than any other about the workings of the heavens, was designed to placate scholars. The preface was actually written by a Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander, who oversaw the printing of On the Revolutions after Copernicus’ death. But because Osiander didn’t make his authorship clear, many readers assumed the preface expressed Copernicus’ own position. Georg Rheticus, the mathematician who persuaded Copernicus to go public with his theory, later threatened to beat Osiander up for his audacity.

  The heliocentric theory raised no major theological difficulties anyway. True, there are a handful of implications in the Old Testament concerning the immobility of the world. The First Book of Chronicles, for example, states that, ‘The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved’,38 and Joshua is said to have convinced God to stop the sun in the sky, which implies that it was the sun, not the Earth, which moves.39 But in the end few churchmen thought Copernicus’ theory was worthy of oiling the rack and heating the pincers.

  Ironically, any religious objections came not from the Vatican but from Protestants, although even the most hellfire-and-damnation regarded the theory as mere folly as opposed to blasphemy. Martin Luther himself ridiculed it, but mainly because he was aghast at the suggestion that astronomy could have got it so fundamentally wrong for so long.

  This was also largely the position of scholars, who too were disturbed for another reason, which is less obvious today. Proposing that traditional astronomy was profoundly flawed seemed intimidating, since it implied that human understanding of the order of the universe, and the way one part influenced another, was seriously lacking. If Copernicus was right, then everything changed.

  This was not yet the era of science as we know it in the modern sense. Even learned men such as Copernicus and Johannes Kepler believed that a greater understanding of the movements of the heavenly bodies would improve the accuracy not only of astronomy but also its esoteric twin, astrology. No astronomer at that time believed the workings of the universe were due to impersonal physical forces. To them, God had decreed that the universe should operate in the way it did. As such, discovering how it worked offered an insight into the divine mind, and might also throw light on God’s plan for all creation. This mindset drove the likes of Kepler who, building on Copernicus’ work, established the laws of planetary motion.

  Kepler (1571–1630) was another great name of the scientific revolution who was steeped in the Renaissance occult tradition. He believed that the planets, including the Earth, are living entities with their own world souls and that the seat of the anima mundi is in the sun. As an astrologer he wrote that a new star that appeared in 1604 portended major changes on Earth. Unsurprisingly, his writings also reveal a detailed knowledge of the Corpus Hermeticum.

  A suggestion that Kepler drew direct inspiration from the works of Hermes Trismegistus appears in the following enigmatic statement from the Harmony of the World (Harmonices mundi), in which he outlined the laws of planetary motion:

  … after the pure Sun of that most wonderful study began to shine, nothing restrains me; it is my pleasure to yield to the inspired frenzy, it is my pleasure to taunt mortal men with the candid acknowledgement that I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far, far away from the boundaries of Egypt … See, I cast the die, and I write the book.40

  Some embraced Copernicus’ new ordering of the solar system as a leap forward in understanding the workings of creation, but it absolutely terrified many others. If the traditional understanding of cosmological behaviour was wrong, then how could men begin to understand their own place in the universe? And the uncertainty – some accepted Copernicus’ new order, others stuck to the old system of Ptolemy – meant that chaos reigned, and not merely in the academic discipline of astronomy, but in the world at large. This aspect of the heliocentric debate was so significant at the time it even surfaces as a major theme in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare was obviously familiar with Hermeticism, as allusions appear in his works, for example in Hamlet’s homage to humankind which echoes Pico’s vision: ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! … In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!’41

  Astronomers, rather than literary historians, have often seen clear and specific allusions to the debate over the heliocentric theory in the play, which dates from around 1600. Peter D. Usher, Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University, has recently argued that the whole work is an allegory for the struggle between the two models of the universe, suggesting that the major theme is that Hamlet, prince of the new learning and repeatedly associated with the sun, is involved in a bid to establish his rightful place as the king – at the centre of his universe – by overthrowing his uncle Claudius. It just so happens that Ptolemy’s first name was Claudius.

  References to the heliocentricity controversy are undeniably scattered throughout the play. For example, Hamlet writes to his love interest Ophelia:

  Doubt that the stars are fire;

  Doubt that the sun doth move;

  Doubt truth to be a liar;

  But never doubt I love.42

  Other references are less obvious today. For example, many generations of readers and actors have studied Hamlet’s apparently peculiar declaration, ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’,43 without realizing its potentially subversive undercurrent.

  The leading supporter of Copernicus’ theories in Shakespeare’s England was the mathematician (and Member of Parliament) Thomas Digges, who went one step further than his hero. Although Copernicus maintained the traditional belief that the stars all exist on the same sphere, equally distant from the centre of the solar system, Digges suggested that they are positioned at different distances in an infinite universe. His actual words were that the world was not enclosed in the stellar sphere ‘as in a nutshell’. And as Shakespeare knew Digges personally – they lived in the same building in Bishopsgate, east London, and Digges’ son worked at the Globe Theatre44 – there seems little doubt the ‘nutshell’ line was an allusion to Digges’ theory.45

  But the most specific of Shakespeare’s references to the heliocentric d
ebate relate to Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the flamboyant Danish alchemist and astronomer (whose eccentric household included a clairvoyant dwarf who lived under his table and a pet elk that met its end in a drunken plunge down stairs). Tycho’s great ambition was to reconcile ‘the mathematical absurdity of Ptolemy and the physical absurdity of Copernicus’46 through a hybrid model in which the sun and moon orbit the Earth but the other planets and stars orbit the sun. Tycho therefore literally embodied the struggle between the two great systems.

  Tycho was employed by his patron, Frederick II of Denmark, to purchase artworks and scientific equipment for his new castle at Elsinore (built just twenty-five years before Hamlet was written), where the play is set. Frederick gave Tycho the island of Hven, in sight of the castle, to build an observatory, Uraniborg. The character of Hamlet, like Tycho, was a graduate of the University of Wittenberg. Most tellingly, two of Tycho’s relatives were envoys to London in Shakespeare’s day. Their names – Frederick Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstierne – are the same as Hamlet’s ill-fated peers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

  Obvious though the links may be, what was Shakespeare trying to convey about the big heliocentric debate? After all, the play sees the demise of all of its leading characters, including Hamlet himself, in the famously bloody finale. So although Shakespeare seems to be championing the new Copernican system, his major emphasis is really the uncertainty that was overturning the world and throwing everything into chaos.

  During Shakespeare’s time, none of this was an issue for the Church, which had long frowned on astrology. But by Galileo’s day heliocentricity had become a burning issue and its spokesmen were condemned as heretics. He was first warned off in 1616, and it was only in that year – seventy-seven years after it was published – that the Catholic Church placed On the Revolutions on its Index of Forbidden Books. From that point on books advocating heliocentricity were automatically relegated to the Index, a practice that only ended in 1758.

  What had changed? Why, by the 1600s, had heliocentricity become a matter of life and death? What made it so dangerous that even the Church of Rome was running scared?

  The answer to these questions lies almost entirely in the threat posed by one man …

  Chapter One

  1 Morris A. Finocchiaro, from his introduction to Galileo, Galileo on the World Systems, p. 2.

  2 Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, p. 147.

  3 Our translation of the Latin: ‘Siquidem non inepte quidam lucernam mundi, aln mentem, aln rectorem vocant. Trismegistus visibilem Deum …’

  4 For example, Washington State University’s World Civilizations website: www.wsu.edu:8001/~dee/REN/PICO.HTM

  5 Pico della Mirandola.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid.

  9 Ibid.

  10 See Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, pp. 87–91.

  11 Some academics prefer ‘Hermetism’, while others use that term for the original philosophy of the early centuries CE and ‘Hermeticism’ for its Renaissance reincarnation.

  12 Tuveson, p. 9.

  13 E.g. the opening of Treatise XVI (Copenhaver, p. 58).

  14 Lindsay, p. 166.

  15 Tuveson, p. xi.

  16 Magee, p. 10.

  17 Copenhaver, p. 36.

  18 Magee, p. 9.

  19 Copenhaver, p. 69.

  20 Tuveson, p. xii.

  21 The relationship between the Sabians of Harran and the Sabians mentioned in the Qur’an – known to us today as the Mandaeans, a baptismal sect whose homeland is in southern Iraq and Iran and who venerate John the Baptist as their great teacher – is a matter of controversy. The line taken by the Arab chroniclers who first set down the al-Mamun story – the earliest account was written about a hundred years after it was supposed to have happened – is that the Harranians took the name simply because although it appears in the Qur’an by then everyone had forgotten who the Sabians were. This is also the position of most historians. However, there is an intriguing complication, as the Mandaeans also have an ancient link with Harran, which seems to be stretching coincidence rather far, especially for us personally since they were central to our research on the true status of John the Baptist, as discussed in our books, The Templar Revelation (Chapter 15) and The Masks of Christ (Chapter 7).

  22 Gündüz, pp. 157–8 and 209.

  23 Ibid., p. 208.

  24 Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 27.

  25 See ibid., p. 38.

  26 E.g. Copenhaver, p. xlvi.

  27 Tuveson, p. ix.

  28 Parks, p. 207.

  29 Tompkins, p. 52.

  30 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 7, quoting an 1871 translation by William Fletcher. Copenhaver (p. 71) renders the phrase as ‘progeny of his own divinity’.

  31 Copenhaver, p. 2.

  32 Ibid., p. 89.

  33 E.g. in Asclepius (ibid., p. 85).

  34 Ibid., p. 59.

  35 Ibid., p. 61.

  36 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, pp. 154–5.

  37 Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 59.

  38 1 Chronicles 16:30 (TNIV).

  39 Joshua 10:12–13 (TNIV).

  40 Kepler, p. 391.

  41 Hamlet, Act II, scene 2.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Ibid.

  44 Gingerich, p. 23.

  45 See Couper and Henbest, pp. 111–3.

  46 Quoted in ibid., p. 116.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE HERMETIC MESSIAH

  Although largely forgotten today, the Dominican monk-turned-heretic Giordano Bruno was regarded as one of the greatest intellects and philosophers of his time. The champion par excellence of the Hermetic tradition, he travelled Europe preaching its virtues and arguing for a root-and-branch reform of society based on its principles. He aimed to be Hermeticism’s greatest prophet – even its messiah – but instead became its greatest martyr, ending his days in the searing embrace of the Inquisition.

  Bruno was messianic, bombastic and stubborn, with a huge ego and belief in his own brilliance and importance. But then a man whose whole philosophy and mission in life centres on the Hermetic adage of magnum miraculum est homo is hardly destined to be a shrinking violet. He saw himself as living proof of just how miraculous a man could get. Where he parted company with most typical egocentrics, however, was that he considered all men and, less usual for the time, all women, as being either actually or potentially as brilliant as himself. The targets of his greatest fury were those who held people back, who told them they were insignificant and worthless. Surely it is difficult for a philosophy to be more diametrically opposed to the Christian doctrine of original sin, the idea that babies are born in a fallen state due to the famous transgression of Adam and Eve.

  Bruno was first, foremost and totally besotted with Hermeticism, the great golden thread that connected his philosophy, religion and magic. He wrote a huge number of treatises and poems that contained coded and symbolic teachings, being heavily influenced by the works of Ficino and Agrippa, although characteristically he was never afraid to depart from them.

  Bruno was born in 1548 – five years after the publication of On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres – in the town of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples, which comprised the whole of the southern half of Italy and, due to the complex geopolitics of the day, actually belonged to the Spanish king of Aragon. As we will see later, this area witnessed particularly odd activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly concerning Dominican monks. Although he was baptised Filippo, when he became a monk in the Dominican monastery in Naples at the age of sixteen, he took the name Giordano (or ‘Jordan’, from the baptismal river). Like many bright kids from a humble background – his father was a soldier – his decision to become a monk was probably the only career move that allowed him to get an education. And he was indeed very bright, being particularly distinguished for his mastery of mnemonics and memory systems, even being summoned to
Rome by Pope Pius V to explain how they worked.

  The ‘Nolan’, as Bruno was often known, refused to let anybody tell him what to think or even what he could and couldn’t study, which was something of a shortcoming in a sixteenth-century monk. In 1576, at the age of twenty-eight, he came under suspicion for heresy, or rather suspicion of suspicion of heresy. ‘Suspect of heresy’ was the formal term for a transgression against Church law, committed by those who read heresy and listened to heretics, even if they disagreed with them. At that time it was in fact best for one’s health and safety to have no dealings with the work of heretics at all. (The official transgression had the somewhat Monty Pythonesque subdivisions of ‘Vehemently Suspect’ and ‘Slightly Suspect’, although there was nothing funny about the Vehemently Painful punishment.)

  Though the details are a bit sketchy, it appears that all Bruno did was read and discuss ideas that had been condemned as heretical. He certainly debated the Arian heresy1 in tones that weren’t unequivocally negative and questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, largely because he thought it made no sense. (He later maintained to the Inquisition he had never denied the doctrine, only doubted it.) And he hid a copy of a book by the Dutch proto-Protestant Erasmus in the monastery toilet – although he could easily have explained away its presence as toilet paper, which would no doubt have appealed to his superiors. Perhaps that’s what he did do. It would have been in keeping with his character.

  Despite being mild compared to what he would preach later in his life, this string of actions coupled with his general freethinking was enough to attract suspicion, and so he abandoned the monastery and fled from Naples. For five years he wandered around northern Italy, southern France and Switzerland and appeared in Venice, Padua, Milan, Geneva, Lyons and Toulouse, among other places. Given the extent of his travels, it is impossible to pinpoint how and when Bruno became devoted to Hermeticism and magic. He may have started to study it in the monastery (perhaps in the toilet?), or perhaps encountered it during his wanderings, but the catalyst for his entrance into the world of the arcane is most likely to have been his fascination with memory systems.

 

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