Giordano Bruno: Royal Wedding Series
by Gordon • • History • 8 Comments
My hero
Not for nothing is my darling Bruno in the header image for this website. He’s one of my all-time heroes.
The combination of a passionate, brilliant spiritual seeker and a boisterous, obstinate Italian is intoxicating and unrivalled.
Only a certain kind of person has to flee in the night when he finds out the Inquisition were after him for 130 (!) heretical charges. At age 28.
Other things he did in his lifetime that I adore him for:
- He was first accused of heresy by his fellow Dominican monks as a teenager.
- He taught magic to the king of France. Made him order the Picatrix from Spain and everything.
- He moved in the same British Hermetic circles as Dr Dee.
- He didn’t want to just ‘astrologize’ Christianity. He genuinely wanted to overthrow it and replace it with an Egyptian/Hermetic religion.
- He was possibly an anti-Catholic spy for Walsingham. (Only found that out on his wiki page today.)
- He was chased out of London by an angry mob.
- He competed for a job as math professor with Gallileo himself. (And didn’t get the job.)
When the Inquisition finally caught him and sentenced him to burn at the stake, you know what absolute rockstar thing Bruno said to them?
Perchance your fear in passing judgement on me is greater than mine in receiving it?
He got the stake not because of his Copernican views of the universe (which, incidentally, he saw as a talisman and proof that the macrocosm was governed by a central intelligence filtered through the planetary powers). No, it was because it took it way beyond Copernicus.
- He insisted that the sun was just a star.
- He insisted that the universe was infinite.
- He insisted that there were an infinite number of stars, each with their own solar system like ours.
- He insisted that it was all God.
So Bruno is, in my estimation, the patron saint of pantheism.
Cleopatra showed us how a queen dies, Bruno showed us how a sorcerer lives.
Here’s some of his writing that he published while in London. I prefer On Magic which is toward the end.
Giordano Bruno Cause Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic CUP
I love Bruno, too. What’s not to love? My his dream of replacing Christianity with a truly Humanist religion, that is, Hermeticism, live on and on.
Uh wait.
What does this mean in Modern English?
“Perchance your fear in passing judgement on me is greater than mine in receiving it?”
I don’t get what Perchance means…
Bruno also cited himself as the mystical inventor of shadows and keys in his great list of 150 inventors, which of course was part of his series of Lullian Wheels. That is to say that he thought that his invention of using the shadows of ideas, summoned from the celestial and super-celestial realms into this world was so awesome that he listed it along with all the others (although not all of the others were all that awesome considering there was also the inventor of spreading manure, and of baskets). Funny thing is that the source I read about this in said “No modern can comprehend the logic behind the concept of the shadows of ideas, so no modern (that means modern person just so you know) con truly understand Bruno’s theory, or his works”, I just laughed, since once you read what he says it’s actually pretty fundamental, though you do have to make a few unsavory assumptions like some kind of divine human origin.
Heard of dictionaries? Perchance: archaic word meaning maybe or perhaps.
The Scribbler´s last [type] ..By Jove! I think Ive got it!
Let’s see if I can give you a modern translation: “Yo! Dudes! I ain’t half as scared to hear you gave me the death sentence as you should be for doin’ such a dumbshit thing that obviously flies in the faice of everything noble and decent. There’s gonna be karmic hell to pay for offing me. Just sayin’.”
The Scribbler´s last [type] ..By Jove! I think Ive got it!
@Scribbler: Thanks for the, uh… translation. It didn’t have to sound that vulgar though.
I’ve been studying his works and diagrams for almost a year now and have to admit that I’ve crossed the line between scholarly interest and falling in love. Thank you for re-igniting interest in this great man.
Bruno Has always been my favorite, and when I was in Rome with my Ex. did some awesome Rituals right there at his Statue. Change the Universe type Magick, was Intense and wonderful.
Bruno, they need to make an updated movie about his life.