The art of memory, which Bruno did much to help revive, developed in classical Greece as a system for storing and recalling information using specific mental images. So powerful is the system that it is still widely used today, even by celebrities such as the gifted British illusionist Derren Brown. However, an esoteric version of this technique that combined the mental images with magical principles could, it was believed, be used not just to remember what had already been learned but to acquire completely new information. Briefly, this version employed the principles of talismanic magic, in which different symbols, shapes, colours and materials are deemed to have specific properties and energies based on magical associations. The trick was to use those principles when forming the mental images. It was as if a portal opened and hidden knowledge flowed in. It was writing books on the magical art of memory that made Bruno’s reputation when he settled in Paris in 1581, but by this time he had also developed some extraordinary ideas about the importance of magic in general and Hermeticism in particular – ideas which challenged its previously conceived limitations.
As we have seen, since the rediscovery of the Hermetica a century before Bruno’s birth, many had believed Hermeticism was compatible with Christianity, as its sacred books could be seen to foreshadow the coming of Christ. However, as far as Bruno was concerned this line of reasoning didn’t go far enough. As Frances Yates explains:
Giordano Bruno was to take the bolder course of maintaining that the magical Egyptian religion of the world was not only the most ancient but also the only true religion, which both Judaism and Christianity had obscured and corrupted.2
Bruno burned with a sense of destiny, believing passionately that it was his mission to restore the old Egyptian religion, and that this would bring an end to Europe’s political and social ills. He also saw Hermeticism as a way of transcending the religious schisms that were causing such horrors.
One of the keys to understanding his Egyptian passion is found in the famous section of Asclepius known as the ‘Lament’, in which Hermes warns of a time when the gods will abandon Egypt to the rule of foreigners, who will then establish their own false religions and ban the country’s traditional faith on pain of death. This will, Hermes continues, be a tragedy not just for Egypt but for the world, since Egypt is the home of the gods on Earth, and once they leave the land they will be lost to all mankind. But, he goes on, in time the one God will intervene and the lesser gods will be restored, and ‘stationed in a city founded at Egypt’s farthest border toward the setting sun, where the whole race of mortals will hasten by land and sea.’3
Because the Hermetic books were believed to hail from the zenith of the Egyptian civilization, the Lament was seen as an authentically ancient prophecy. And since the time of their writing, it had come to pass that Egypt’s native religion had indeed been eclipsed: since Alexander the Great’s invasion in the fourth century BCE, the country had been under foreign domination – first Greeks, then Romans, then Christians and now Arabs. It stood to reason that if the first part of the prophecy was true, the second part might be also. The ancient gods might return, and a golden Hermetic city might be built that would draw the whole world to its magic.
While most considered the Greeks and Romans as the interlopers responsible for crushing Egypt’s religion, Bruno singled out the Christians as the real villains. He may even have been right. Although the Greek and Roman overlords did import their own gods and cults, they also permitted the continued practice of religions native to the area. As we mentioned earlier, Clement of Alexandria witnessed processions of the Egyptian priests and priestesses, bearing the forty-two sacred books of Hermes, around the year 200. It was only when Christianity came to dominate in the fourth century that native Egyptian cults were ruthlessly persecuted and ultimately banned on pain of death. Bruno’s interpretation of the Lament required no uncanny knowledge on his part, since Christian writings of the time recorded the suppression of Egypt’s ‘demonic’ pagan cults with characteristic glee.
What excited and motivated Bruno most, however, was his conviction that the second part of Hermes’ prediction – the restoration of the Egyptian religion and the return of the gods – would take place during his own lifetime. He interpreted the religious wars that were ripping Europe apart as the death throes of the faith that had suppressed the Hermetic religion. He also believed that Christianity was an offshoot of something much bigger and more ancient, despite it mistaking itself as the main event. Bruno did, however, admire the way of life Jesus taught, particularly the simplicity of the injunction to treat others as you yourself wish to be treated. (He seems to have regarded Jesus’s mission as an attempt to take the Jewish religion back to its Egyptian roots, which our own research indicates to be at least partly correct.)4 In a statement made to the Inquisition at the time of his arrest, Bruno is reported to have said, ‘the Catholic religion pleases him more than any other, but that this too has need of great reform’.5 He particularly deplored the way the Catholic Church sought to impose itself through ‘punishment and pain’; using force rather than love to keep its worshippers was a sure sign that something was terribly wrong.
Yet even at its best, Bruno viewed Christianity as only an also-ran in the great race towards enlightenment and salvation. The ancient Hermetic religion of Egypt would soon assert its superior position when it returned to the Earth through the mediation of its greatest prophet, Bruno himself.
Bruno believed that the great religious revolution on Earth would be preceded by upheavals in the heavens, reflecting the Hermetic principle (from the Emerald Tablet) of ‘as below, so above/as above, so below’. Bruno moreover suggested an intriguing variation on this theme, namely that any changes would be echoed in a shift in mankind’s perception of the heavens. And this, he believed, unlocked the true significance of the heliocentric theory.
For centuries the most learned of men had simply got cosmology wrong; Copernicus had shown that. But the Hermetic books, which Bruno believed preserved the most ancient wisdom of all, also stated that the sun was at the centre of all that mattered and that the Earth moved around it. Copernicus – who also invoked Hermes Trismegistus – had restored the correct perception of the order of the cosmos. Bruno thought Copernicus had proved mathematically what Hermeticists already knew but had never been able to prove. At the very least, he reasoned, establishing that the Hermetic philosophy contained demonstrable truths about the cosmos would surely win it more converts.
But Bruno also believed that Copernicus’ work went way beyond vindicating the Hermetic treatises; he considered it as the key to the prophesied new Hermetic age. The fact that Copernicus had presented his proofs when he did was a portent of the coming changes. But not everybody had yet accepted the new system; it was still being hotly debated. If it could be established beyond doubt and enter into the canon of accepted fact, Bruno thought, then this would literally trigger the new age of Hermetic enlightenment. In turn, this would reveal a new way of comprehending the mysteries of creation, that is by using the intellect to obtain otherwise elusive proof of certain Hermetic magical and philosophical concepts, as summarized by Frances Yates:
The marvellous magical religion of the Egyptians will return, their moral laws will replace the chaos of the present age, the prophecy of the Lament will be fulfilled, and the sign in heaven proclaiming the return of the Egyptian light to dispel the present darkness was … the Copernican sun.6
Ironically events showed that Bruno was at least half right. Establishing heliocentricity did indeed lead to a revolution that would change academic attitudes to religion, but it was the scientific revolution. The crucial Hermetic philosophy was simply lost along the way. Another cause to Lament.
THE MISSION
It was no accident that Bruno decided to begin his mission in Paris. The city was the perfect place given that the centre of the Renaissance had shifted to France as the sixteenth century unfolded (neatly symbolized by Leonardo da Vinci’s own move to France at the invitatio
n of the king in 1510).
This shift was a consequence of the Catholic Church’s attempts to reverse the damage of the Protestant Reformation, through their Counter-Reformation. This was kicked off by the Council of Trent, initiated by the Pope in 1545 – and which continued for eighteen years – to tighten up and rigidly define Catholic doctrine and practices. One result of the Council was that the Church came to assert greater control over the arts, which included, for example, the banning of non-Christian, and especially pagan, imagery in paintings and sculpture. (No more depictions of Isis and Hermes by popes. Amazingly those in the Appartamento Borgia were allowed to remain.) These prohibitions bit more deeply in Italy than in France, where the Church’s real power over French daily life might best be summed up by the timeless Gallic shrug. As the cultural centre of the Renaissance had relocated to Paris, it also became a great centre of Hermeticism, even among Catholic scholars and intellectuals. Both developments owed much to the sophisticated thirst for knowledge of the French court.
Although of course outwardly Catholic, King Henri III of France was a devotee of the occult philosophy. The celebrated poet and chronicler Agrippa d’Aubigné recorded how after swearing him to silence, Henri had revealed a collection of magical treatises he had had brought in from Spain. In this he was only maintaining the family tradition, since his mother was Catherine de’ Medici, the great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Then in her sixties, she still exerted a powerful influence of her own in Paris. Very much a de’ Medici, like her ancestor the great Cosimo, Catherine was a renowned patron not just of the arts but also of astrologers and magicians. So it was hardly surprising that Henri III, the third of her sons to reign in France, shared her arcane interests.
But Henri was, from Bruno’s perspective at least, also ideally positioned in Europe’s power politics, in which a major conflict between the Catholic and Protestant nations was looming. Henri had a relaxed attitude to Protestantism, both at home and abroad, and as a result of anxiety about the strength of the major Catholic power of Spain he favoured closer ties with Protestant England, Spain’s great enemy. Many, not just Bruno, saw Henri as Europe’s best hope for a peaceful and tolerant future. As a powerful Catholic monarch with a zealous interest in magic and the Hermetica and no animosity towards Protestants, Bruno considered Henri the ideal leader of his Hermetic revolution. There are indications in other books published in Paris at that time, and in plays being performed in the king’s honour such as the Ballet comique de la Reine (the first ballet, staged for the court of Catherine de’ Medici in 1581) that Bruno was not alone in this view of Henri.
Meanwhile a well-established circle of expatriate Italians who had settled in Paris because of their heterodox ideas (probably because of the Medici influence) welcomed Bruno with open arms. More significantly, these Italians had some influence over the king. But lurking behind the Franco-Italian circle was, inevitably, an eminence grise, a secret adviser and friend of the greatest movers and shakers of the time. This shadowy force-to-be-reckoned with was one Gian Vincenzo Pinelli of Padua (1535–1601), a scholar and collector (primarily a botanist but his interests were truly Renaissance in scope and depth) best remembered today as Galileo’s mentor. Pinelli had built up a pan-European network of correspondents and informants who reported to him on not just scientific and cultural issues but also political events. Unsurprisingly, he therefore showed great interest in Bruno’s arrival in Paris and they are likely to have met when Bruno visited Padua during his wanderings.
After the larger-than-life Hermeticist arrived in the French capital in 1581, he gave public lectures and published two books on the magical art of memory. Bruno soon attracted the attention of the King, and having cannily dedicated the first of his books, On the Shadows of Ideas (De umbris idearum) to Henri, was duly summoned for a royal audience. As a reward he was given a paid lectureship at one of Paris’ colleges. His next move was more surprising: in the spring of 1583 he left Paris for London, where he was to spend more than two years and produce his most important work. The English ambassador in Paris sent a report to Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, advising him of the impending arrival of Bruno, ‘whose religion I cannot commend’.7 With a nice ironic edge Bruno described himself to the Oxford scholars as a ‘doctor of a more abstruse theology’.8 Well, yes. That’s one description of it.
Although he had no official diplomatic standing, Bruno was clearly on some kind of unofficial, or semi-official, mission to England. Travelling with letters of introduction from Henri, he lived in the house of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de Mauvissière. Because he kept such close company with Castelnau – even accompanying him regularly to Queen Elizabeth’s court – and Castelnau was in turn happy to be known as an associate of Bruno, it fostered the impression that the latter had the French king’s backing. And it seems Henri had no problem with that.
As to the purpose of Bruno’s mission, it fitted perfectly his agenda of uniting Christianity and averting a catastrophic war in Europe. The idea was to get the Catholic nations to band together under a single monarch and the Protestant nations to unite under another, both of whom would be advised and influenced by Hermeticists who would ensure peace between them. Henri III and Elizabeth I were prime candidates.
English esoteric circles, too, had great influence at the royal court, most obviously in the shape of John Dee (1527– 1608), Elizabeth’s astrologer and adviser in many areas, including diplomacy, espionage and the expansion of English influence across the globe. Although there is no record of Bruno and Dee meeting, because they had mutual friends and frequented the same court and intellectual circles they almost certainly did. This was especially likely as Dee was not only a champion of the Copernican theory but also a passionate devotee of the Hermetic tradition.
Bruno met the Queen herself on the many occasions he accompanied Castelnau to court, declaring himself a fervent admirer of the ‘diva Elizabetta’ and proclaiming her superior to any man in her heroism, learning and wisdom.9 That fulsome compliment ‘diva’ was to count against him with the Inquisition, since they took against calling a declared heretic ‘divine’. Worse by far, Elizabeth was an illegitimate heretic in Catholic eyes at least. In any case she was female. And she had a sure sign of the witch, being red-haired. But Bruno enthusiastically joined the cult of the Virgin Queen, which lauded her as the potential spearhead of a new age, the bejewelled goddess who would unify Protestant Europe. He seems to have admired the relatively peaceful nature of Elizabethan England when compared to the internal divisions that were then tearing apart the other nations of Europe.
The uncompromising Neapolitan took part in a famous debate with the scholars at Oxford, in front of the Polish prince Albert Laski and the eminent courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney, in which he endorsed Copernicus’ ideas and linked them to magical concepts about the sun derived from Marsilio Ficino’s work.
It was in England that Bruno wrote some of his most important books. Of these, all apart from the first were penned in Italian rather than the customary Latin. But why go to London to publish books in Italian? Of the few Londoners who could read in the first place, how many could read Italian? Presumably Bruno’s books targeted Italians in London and Paris, a readership who would then take his ideas back to their homeland. Or perhaps Bruno had intended that the books be shipped over to Italy? Either way, they were circulating there within a few years, as we will see.
The first – and only Latin – work he published in his first year in London was Explanation of the Thirty Seals (Explicatio triginta sigillorum), a book about the magical memory system that culminates in an essay about the Hermetic vision. In this, Bruno lists Moses and Jesus as among those who had achieved enlightenment through this means. The latter is portrayed not as the Son of God, or even as a divinely appointed prophet, but as a gifted and advanced magus, a practitioner of the same art so beloved by Bruno. This is an interesting concept – the founder of the religion that saw Bruno�
��s work as heretical practising the same heresies himself – but one that is not without some foundation, as we have discussed elsewhere.10
In 1584 Bruno published two key works, both of which relate to Copernicus and heliocentricity. The first was The Ash Wednesday Supper (Cena de le ceneri), a dialogue between a group of scholars as they journey around London. In this book Bruno praises Copernicus, although he also claims that even Copernicus never came to understand the full importance of his discoveries. With his usual bravura, Bruno also declares himself to be Copernicus’ heir and states his intention to use his revelations to free the human spirit.
The second book was Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (Spaccio della bestia trionfante) a ‘glorification of the magical religion of the Egyptians’,11 an unequivocal declaration of the need for its return in order to restore balance to the world. He links this to the Lament in Asclepius, which he reproduces in full.
The drama of the Triumphant Beast takes the form of a gathering of Greek and Egyptian deities to reform the heavens, changing the constellations in order to produce a similar shift on Earth. This is modelled on the Hermetic treatise The Virgin of the World (Korè Kosmou) in which Isis describes a similar council of the gods to her son Horus. She also features, alongside Sophia, in Bruno’s work. The ‘triumphant beast’ is, according to Bruno’s dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, the sum of all the vices that prevent human beings from activating their divine potential. However, some – including, fatally, the Inquisition – interpreted it as a veiled reference to the Pope. A political subtext runs through the Triumphant Beast, as it ends with the council of the gods praising the great virtues, pureness of heart and magnanimity of Henri III, and his fitness to preside over a spiritually unified Europe.
The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God Page 5
