Thus it was, after sojourning a year at the French court, that Bruno travelled to England in March 1583. His purpose, as discerned by the Baron Cobham, English ambassador to Paris at the time, was to promote a ‘religion I cannot commend’.15 Or as Frances Yates puts it: Giordano Bruno, Hermetic magician of a most extreme type, [was] now about to pass into England to expound his ‘new philosophy’.16
Bruno in London and Oxford
Bruno was to spend two very active years in England during which he converted his life ‘from that of a wandering magician into that of a very strange kind of missionary indeed.’ 17 He took up residence in London at the house of the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau, Sieur de la Mauvissière, having earlier been introduced to him by the king of France, Henry III.
No sooner had Bruno settled in his new home than he began to write in earnest. His first publication was a book on the art of memory dedicated to his host, the French ambassador. Bruno was hoping that, as in France, his special knowledge of this ‘magical art’ would attract the attention of scholars, perhaps even the favour of the court, and obtain for him a scholarship at Oxford.
He was, however, soon to be disappointed. In June 1583, just a few months after his arrival in England, Bruno somehow found his way into a debate with a group of Oxford scholars during an evening organised for the entertainment of Prince Albert Laski of Poland. Bruno delivered a lecture on ‘the immortality of the soul’ and on his personal vision of the Copernican theory but was heckled and interrupted by an elderly Oxford gentleman. ‘Learn how roughly and rudely that pig behaved,’ Bruno commented later: … and with what patience and humanity the Nolan [Bruno] replied, showing himself to be indeed a Neapolitan, born and bred beneath a kindlier sky. Hear how they [the Oxford dons] made him leave off his public lectures on the immortality of the soul and on the quintuple sphere.18
Bruno (who liked to be known as ‘the Nolan’ after Nola, his place of birth) had a deep aversion for narrow-minded scholars like those he encountered at Oxford. He called them ‘Grammarians’, ‘Aristotelians’ (Aristotle, unlike his master Plato, had long been a favoured philosopher of the Catholic Church) and ‘pedants’. Rather than seeking divine truth, he complained, they quibbled and endlessly debated with each other over trivialities. Worse, there was many a scholar of this type who ‘understood but did not dare to say what he understood [and] … saw but did not believe what he saw’.19 In Bruno's view, all such were to be pitied for their inability to develop deeper insight or to grasp the importance of the intuitive faculty that the ancients had once harnessed with their ‘profound magic’.
At the heart of Bruno's attack on his fellow scholars was the view that their titles and positions merely served to disguise their fundamental emptiness. They were quite the opposite of the Gnostic and Hermetic sages of antiquity whose search for knowledge and truth had not depended solely upon the analysis and observation of nature. Those remote figures, Bruno knew, had relied additionally, and especially, on deeper insights that could be reached only by intuition harnessed through natural magic – in the manner of the high initiates of ancient Egypt.
None of this means that Bruno condemned analytical or mathematical science; quite the contrary, as his support for Copernicus proves. Indeed, Bruno was among the very first to speak openly at Oxford on the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. But with a major difference. Unlike others scholars, the Nolan insisted on placing the theory within ‘the context of the astral magic and sun-worship’ that was evident in the Hermetic texts, as well as extending it to support his own cosmological vision of an infinite universe with numberless inhabited worlds .20 It was because the stiff Oxonians of the 16th century were not ready for such cutting-edge ways of thinking that they treated Bruno insultingly and forced him to abandon in midstream his lecture on the immortality of the soul.
Sidney and Dee
Present that day was the young and influential English statesman, Sir Philip Sidney, who had come on the command of Queen Elizabeth I to escort the Polish nobleman, Prince Albert Laski, to the debate. The queen had high regard for Sidney, and it was no secret that his uncle, the debonair Earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Dudley, had once been Elizabeth's favourite and, according to some, even her secret lover.
Philip Sidney was a refined scholar and poet and would, almost certainly, have been familiar with the Hermetic texts, which by this time had been circulating in Europe for more than a century. A great patron of scholars and artists Sidney is credited with ushering in the age of Elizabethan poetry with his acclaimed sonnet sequence ‘Astrophel and Stella’. This he composed as the result of his passionate love for Penelope Devereux, the beautiful young wife of Lord Rich. Sidney was also well acquainted with the famous court astrologer and ‘magician’, Dr. John Dee – although the extent and depth of this connection is unclear.
Dee was a genuine mathematician, but had also previously served as astrologer to Mary Tudor. She had ended up accusing him of practicing evil magic on her and had imprisoned him at Hampton Court. Dee was released in 1555 and later resumed his work as official astrologer and magician at the court of Elizabeth I – from whose royal support, favour and protection he was fortunate to benefit. It was John Dee in his role as astrologer who advised the court on the most favourable date for Elizabeth's coronation.
Dee seems to have been an alchemist, cabalist, astronomer, astrologer and mathematician all rolled into one, but is remembered mostly as a ‘conjuror’ and ‘magician’. He believed, with utter conviction, that he could communicate with the spiritual world and ‘angels’ through crystals. To further his work in this area he employed a certain Edward Kelly, a clairvoyant with a rather dubious past, to assist him.
At the time Bruno arrived in England, Dee was preparing to travel to Poland and Bohemia to give séances and exhibitions of his conjuring at the courts of various princes. We shall see in a later chapter how this magical mystery tour of Dee's was to be among the catalysts that led to the formation a secretive movement known as Rosicrucianism. Not unlike Bruno, the Rosicrucians made use of Hermetic magic and the Cabala as tools for religious reform.
The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
Although Bruno did not meet Dee, he did know Philip Sidney, a fact which is attested by Bruno himself in the dedication of his most important book, Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (‘The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast’), published in 1584.
The peculiar and striking title of this work is to be understood on at least two levels. First, as Bruno also states in his dedication to Sidney, ‘driving out of the triumphant beast’ is a metaphor for driving out ‘the vices which predominate, and oppose the divine part of the soul.’21 What this calls to mind is something closely akin to the Gnostic/Cathar/Manichean vision of the soul imprisoned in the world of matter and ever more deeply entrapped by surrender to the fleshly vices. But at the second level of meaning the ‘triumphant beast’ is unquestionably the pope, and with him the entire established structure of Catholic Christianity. At this level the ‘expulsion’ envisaged by Bruno is to make way for his ‘Egyptianism as a religion’22 based on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus: It is the good religion which was overwhelmed in darkness when the Christians destroyed it, forbade it by statutes, substituted worship of dead things, foolish rites, bad moral behaviour and constant wars.23
One of the very peculiar and distinctive aspects of the religious revolution proposed in the Spaccio, notes Frances Yates, and one clearly attributable to the influence on Bruno of the Hermetic texts: Is that it begins in the heavens; it is the images of the constellations of the zodiac and of the northern and southern constellations which are reformed or cleansed through a council of the planetary gods … 24
The Spaccio, in short, is a treatise on Hermetic astral magic, filled with references to the stars, the zodiac and the constellations, that goes to great lengths to explain how their powers can be brought down and vested in earthly things through ‘the magic and divine cult of the Egyptians.’25
Bruno's intention was clear enough. He wanted to show that Egyptian wisdom came earlier than that of the Greeks, and certainly much earlier than that of the Christians and, therefore, must be regarded as ‘the best religion and the best magic and the best laws of them all’.26
Bruno reproduces a passage in the Spaccio from the famous Lament of Hermes. In this text, the reader will recall from Chapter Eight, Hermes Trismegistus tells his pupil Asclepius that the religion of Egypt will fall, and be lost under the hands of invading barbarians, and vanish from the world. But Hermes also says that a time will come when it will be restored and accorded a place of honour once again – and so too does Bruno: The marvellous magical religion of the Egyptians will return, their moral laws will replace the chaos of the present age, the prophesy of the Lament will be fulfilled … 27
In Bruno's eyes, ‘the sign in heaven proclaiming the return of Egyptian light to dispel the present darkness was … the Copernican sun.’28 Accordingly he looked on the Copernican diagram of the concentric orbits of the planets encircling the Sun as a sort of hieroglyph or talisman. It functioned as a magical Hermetic seal that he, Bruno, thought he understood at its deepest level. He became in consequence acutely aware of the huge ‘revolution’ which it was about to unleash and of its potential for inflicting a total upheaval on the dogmas of the Church. Bruno's strategy – simple really – was to integrate this inevitable Copernican truth that was about to revolutionise science and religion into his own Hermetic revolution. He believed that Copernicus had vindicated the Sun-centred system of the ancient Egyptians, and that it was now up to the Nolan to revive and restore that lost faith it in order to reform the world.
As above so below
We said above that the great religious reformation envisaged by Bruno, which he expounded in the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante, is supposed to begin in the heavens among the stars. Here, a great council of ‘magicians’, including the Egyptian goddess Isis, is convened by Jupiter (Zeus-Amun) in order to reform the images of the constellations and thus, at the same time, through astral magic, also reform the earthly world below. Such ideas, notes Yates, are clearly pulled from the Kore Kosmou (the ‘Virgin of the World’), a well-known Hermetic tract in which Isis addresses Horus and another pupil called Momus, and explains to them how things below on earth must be kept in ‘sympathy’ with things above in heaven in order to avoid chaos and destruction .29 There is a strange and telling passage where Hermes reveals to Momus that he, Hermes, plans to invent a ‘secret engine’, or celestial mechanism, a sort of cosmic clockwork regulated by the cogwheels of the planetary orbits, the constellations, the zodiac, the Moon and the Sun, in order to control events on Earth as well as the lives of men: ‘Momus’, said he [Hermes], ‘I will devise a secret engine linked to unerring and inevitable fate, by which all things in men's lives, from their birth to their final destruction, shall by necessity be brought into subjection; and all things on earth likewise shall be controlled by the working of this engine’ …30
It seems clear that Bruno believed that the great religious reform that many were dreaming of could, as in the Kore Kosmou, be brought about by Egyptian astral magic or, as Yates was to put it: … [by] manipulating the celestial images on which all things below depend in order to make the reform come. For in the Spaccio Bruno has Jupiter proclaiming: ‘If we thus renew our heaven, the constellations and influences shall be new, the impressions and fortunes shall be new for all things depending on this upper world.’31
‘And what’, asks Yates, ‘does this remind us of?’ Surely of the magical city of Adocentyn in Picatrix, built by Hermes Trismegistus, who placed around the circumference of the city ‘engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and withdrawn from all wickedness and harm.’ This … provides the connection between Hermes Trismegistus as magician and Hermes Trismegistus as law-giver of the Egyptians, who gave them their good moral laws and kept them in it. And this, I believe, may be also the connection in the Spaccio between the manipulation or reform of the celestial images and the universal religious and moral reform.32
In the Picatrix we learn that Hermes built a temple dedicated to the Sun, a sort of Hermetic solar temple if you will. The reader will recall that this solar temple, as well as the magical city of Adocentyn, much resembled another Hermetic metropolis described in the Asclepius in which: … the gods who exercise their dominion over the earth will be restored one day and installed in a city at the extreme limit of Egypt, a city which will be founded towards the setting sun, and into which will hasten, by land and sea, the whole race of mortal men …33
It may be worth noting at this stage that there did once exist two great solar temple-cities at both extreme limits of Egypt, one in the north, which was the ‘City of the Sun’ at Heliopolis, and another in the south, the solar city of Karnak-Luxor at Thebes – which is indeed oriented towards the setting sun. So could the Hermetic city of the Picatrix somehow have been modelled on ancient Thebes? And, more importantly, what effect are such statements in the Picatrix and the Asclepius likely to have had on the prepared minds of Bruno and other Renaissance Hermetic reformers? Might they not have been inspired to accelerate the great religious changes they sought by building a magical solar city somewhere in Western Europe?
The high possibility that Bruno would have associated his own Hermetic reformation of Europe with the founding of magical ‘solar’ cities is confirmed by one Guillaume Cotin with whom Bruno spent some time after he returned to France from England in 1585. Cotin, the librarian at the Abbey of St. Victor in Paris, reports that Bruno had: … heard it said that the Duke of Florence [a Medici] wished to build a Civitas Solis [literally a ‘City of the Sun’] in which the sun would shine every day of the year …34
Just the mention of the words Civitas Solis should immediately bring to the mind of any student of Renaissance magic and the Hermetic tradition the strange mission to Paris of yet another Hermetic thinker. The man in question was Bruno's contemporary and, like him, was also a ‘defrocked’ Dominican monk hounded out of Italy by the Inquisition. Like Bruno, too, he was inspired by the Hermetic vision of religious revolution. The greatest similarity of all, however, is that this Bruno clone is famous for having written a book entitled Civitas Solis – ‘The City of the Sun’ – and for seeking out an enlightened monarch of ‘solar’ pedigree to install such a utopian city somewhere in the heart of Europe.
Bruno's fatal decision
We'll meet the author of the Civitas Solis later in this chapter.
Meanwhile Bruno left England in 1585 and sailed back to France, only to find Paris in turmoil and a far less hospitable place for him than it once had been. King Henry III, whose favour Bruno had formerly enjoyed, was totally preoccupied with the religious war within his realm that was by this point reaching a crescendo.
The situation, which we sketched out earlier, was explosive. The Catholic forces, assisted by the Spanish and led by the Count of Guise, were mobilised outside Paris. Pope Sixtus V had declared the Protestant leaders Henry of Navarre and the Prince of Condé to be heretics, thus supposedly debarring Henry from the throne of France – a move which, by its provocative implications, was virtually a declaration of war against Navarre and the Huguenots. The Catholic clergy in Paris, especially the Jesuits, were inciting the populace with inflammatory sermons against the ‘heretics’ and Huguenots, forcing the meek Henry III to retreat into his convoluted acts of piety, scarcely to be seen in public except during those bizarre and morbid religious processions in which he participated doing ‘penance’. It was obvious to Bruno that he could no longer rely on royal support.
After quarrelling with the scholars at the college at Cambrai, who were incensed over a public attack Bruno had made on Aristotle, the Nolan left France in September 1586 and went to Germany, then Poland, then back to Germany where he stayed until the summer of 1591. At this time that he was seized by a deep – and for him fatal – nostalgia for Italy and a
naïve hope that the newly elected Pope Clement VIII could somehow be persuaded to adopt his plans for a universal Hermetic reform.
Events in France may have encouraged Bruno: Henry of Navarre had been crowned King Henry IV, and there was already much hopeful talk that this once staunch Protestant prince would soon convert to Catholicism. This was probably seen by Bruno as a sign of the impeding great reformation – albeit here within a Catholic framework – that he, Bruno, had been divinely commissioned to bring about.
Fired by such misplaced ideas about himself and his mission, Bruno was probably in an unusually susceptible state of mind when he received an invitation to become the private tutor to a certain Señor Zuane Mocenigo, a Venetian nobleman who claimed to be a great admirer of the Nolan's works. Mocenigo was put into contact with Bruno through the Venetian bookseller, Giovanni Battista Ciotto, who knew of the heretic's whereabouts in Germany. Oblivious to the grave danger of returning to Italy, Bruno impulsively accepted Mocenigo's offer and left for Venice in late 1591.
At first the Nolan did not stay with Mocenigo, but took up residence independently in Venice. He also travelled to Padua where he stayed from January to March 1592. Ironically, had he stayed a little longer he would probably have met the author of the Civitas Solis, who was not to arrive in Padua until October that same year. Had they met, the author of Civitas Solis would certainly have warned Bruno of the terrible risks he was taking by staying in Italy, and might have even convinced him to return to Germany where he could live in relative safety.
The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World Page 36