The Forbidden Universe (9 page)

As we noted in the last chapter, at least one thinker had challenged the ‘celestial sphere’ concept and argued for infinite space. This individual was Englishman Thomas Digges, ‘the first Copernican in England’,
¹⁹
whose ideas Shakespeare alluded to in the ‘nutshell’ line in
Hamlet
. Digges made the proposal in 1576 in his outline of Copernican theory – the first published in England –
A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes
. Given that Bruno wrote his work in England, it could be that he was influenced or inspired by Digges.

But Digges, too, was part of the Elizabethan esoteric scene, being a protégé of John Dee, himself a great
supporter
of heliocentricity. Although Dee left no reference to the theory in his own works, he encouraged its first champions in England, urging the astronomer John Field to
use Copernicus’ system to draw up a table of the positions of the planets in 1557. Dee was also, notably, Digges’
mathematics
tutor (Digges called Dee his ‘second mathematical father’).
²⁰
In fact, Digges’ version comes straight from
Asclepius
.
²¹

These were not the only anticipations of modern scientific thinking and discoveries in Bruno’s work. In fact, some of his ahead-of-their-time pronouncements become positively eerie. In
On the Infinity of the Universe and Worlds
he writes:

As we now know, every cell in our bodies is constantly being replaced throughout successive cycles of seven to ten years. But how did Bruno know? And that is by no means the limit of Bruno’s prescience. Peter Tompkins writes:

Bruno heavily influenced the English natural philosopher and physician William Gilbert (1544–1603) who British science writer John Gribbin describes as ‘the first person to set out clearly in print the essence of the scientific method – the testing of hypotheses by rigorous experiments – and to put that method into action.’
²⁴
 

Gilbert’s major work,
On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth
(
De magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure
), published in 1600, was one of the landmarks of the scientific revolution,
presenting
his theory that the reason magnets, or loadstones, work is because the Earth itself is a magnet. Historian Hilary Gatti, author of a study of Bruno’s legacy to England following his visit, demonstrates that in his ideas about the Earth’s magnetism, Gilbert built on Bruno’s cosmology.
²⁵

A collection of Gilbert’s papers published half a century after his death,
A New Philosophy of Our Sublunar World
(
De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova
), makes his debt to Bruno very clear.
²⁶
The two men almost certainly met, as Gilbert was physician to Elizabeth I at the time that the Neopolitan was a frequent visitor to her court.

Another royal physician who made an indelible mark on the history of science was William Harvey, who as Charles I’s physician in 1628 famously demonstrated the circulation of the blood – ‘one of the greatest achievements of the Scientific Revolution’.
²⁷
However, as Harvey acknowledged, his inspiration came from the work of one of his colleagues, the Hermeticist Robert Fludd (who we will meet in a later chapter), who had proposed the idea based on Hermetic principles. Fludd’s own inspiration was almost certainly his esoteric hero Bruno, who had put forward the same thing for the same reasons nearly half a century earlier.
²⁸
Once again, he deduced this from the Hermetica, specifically its association of the spirit that moves through the body with the blood; Treatise X of the
Corpus Hermeticum
explicitly states ‘the spirit, passing through veins and arteries and blood, moves the living thing’.
²⁹
And so another major scientific discovery can be atributed to Hermes Trismegistus – and to Bruno.

His influence was, indeed, vast. As Ksenija Atanasijevic writes:

Atanasijevic concludes that ‘it was Bruno who laid the firm foundations upon which was to rise, in the course of time, the … edifice of new atomic science’.
³¹
But although Bruno’s ideas were in many respects far closer to the modern scientific mindset than the works of Copernicus and Galileo, they sprung from his immersion in the ancient philosophy of Hermeticism.

Bruno returned to Paris with Castelnau in the autumn of 1585, being attacked by pirates as they crossed the Channel – much like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in
Hamlet
. Things were fraught in Paris: a group of ultra-Catholic French nobles had formed the Catholic League, which aimed to oust Henri III and wipe out the French Protestants – the Huguenots – and form an alliance between France and Spain. Henri had been forced to make a number of concessions such as rescinding liberties he had granted to the Huguenots, in order to avoid civil war. Henri had no heir and France was simmering with tension as sides were being taken over who would succeed him.

Somewhat surprisingly, in Paris Bruno made overtures to the papal nuncio about returning to the Catholic Church and receiving absolution, although he was spurned. This seems incongruous, but Yates explains that Bruno had become
convinced that the great Hermetic reformation would happen
within
the Catholic Church, so that was the place to be. As she wrote, ‘The new dispensation was to be an Egyptianized and tolerant Catholic and universal religion, reformed in its magic and reformed in its ethics.’
³²

However, it soon became apparent that this rather unrealistic hope was doomed, with political events in France taking a turn for the worse for Bruno’s programme of reform. He left Paris in the late summer of 1586, shortly before the Catholic League took control of the city. Adapting himself to the new situation, Bruno shifted his focus to the Protestant lands, and toured Germany for the next few years. Initially he obtained a post as lecturer at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony (which had produced Martin Luther, not to mention the fictitious Hamlet). Bruno owed his job to the influence of another important Oxford contact, Professor of Law Alberico Gentili, an Italian refugee whose family had fled abroad because of their Protestant beliefs. Gentili is remembered today as the founder of international law.

After a couple of years at Wittenberg, Bruno moved on briefly to the Prague court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. Despite his leading role in the great Catholic dynasty of the Habsburgs, Rudolph (1552–1612) was extraordinarily liberal-minded. Not only was he renowned for his patronage of the arts and learning but he was also an active and enthusiastic sponsor of the occult sciences, particularly alchemy. Rudolph employed Tycho Brahe as his Imperial Mathematician, who was himself succeeded by his assistant, Johannes Kepler. Shortly before Bruno arrived at his court, the great Dr Dee had been a distinguished guest of the Emperor.

Rudolph never shared his dynasty’s political or religious interests, and focused instead on his own enlightened
pursuits
. He moved the imperial court from Vienna to Prague
in Bohemia, which under his patronage became a sparkling Renaissance city, where all learning and culture was encouraged. In Prague, Protestants and – extraordinarily for the time – Jews were free to practise their religion. Rudolph also worked for a unified Christian Europe, backing those who worked for tolerance and reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. His own religious orientation is unclear. Although raised a Catholic, he was obviously lapsed, going so far as to refuse the last rites on his deathbed. But neither did he join any of the Protestant churches.

Rudolph acted like a magnet for occultists, artists and scholars, and Bruno was no exception. But to Bruno an added attraction must have been the existence of a court of exceptional tolerance and open-mindedness. Having received some financial assistance from the Emperor, Bruno moved swiftly on to the University of Brunswick, all the while in a ferment of thinking and plotting.

Throughout his wandering years, Bruno’s position on the Catholic Church and the nature of the Hermetic revolution shifted. Until his departure from Paris, he believed that an Egyptian reformation could begin within the Church, through collaboration between Hermes-friendly monarchs such as Henri III and allies in Rome itself. But not only was Henri losing the civil war against the Catholic League, he was soon to be assassinated by one of their agents, a Dominican monk. (Catherine de’ Medici also died – surprisingly of apparently natural causes – at the beginning of that year.) Spain was bringing its whole might to bear on crushing Bruno’s next best hope for harmony in Europe, Elizabeth’s England, building up the armada for the attack of 1588; few gave England much of a chance.

At this time, when Catholicism seemed on the brink of triumph, a strangely symbolic event took place in Rome. In 1586 a great ancient Egyptian obelisk that had remained
neglected for over a thousand years was moved to the centre of St Peter’s Square. During the Roman Empire, many obelisks and statues were carried off to the imperial hub from Egypt and erected around the city, usually in honour of some emperor or another. Unsurprisingly, they had been knocked over and vandalized as nasty pagan monuments when Christianity became the state religion, but many were left where they fell, either in pieces or whole, to disappear beneath the ground over the centuries. In the sixteenth century only one obelisk was still standing, albeit with its base deeply buried, in a dingy alley behind St Peter’s. Nearly three thousand years old, it had been taken to Rome on the orders of Caligula.

In 1586 Pope Sixtus V ordered that the obelisk be moved to its prominent place and following a monumental engineering effort that stretched the resources and skills of the day to their very limit, this 83-foot-tall (25-metre),
350-ton
monument stood tall in the centre of the square. After being duly exorcised, it was topped with a large iron cross and had inscriptions honouring Christ (and of course Sixtus) carved into it.

Sixtus’ declared motive was to assert the triumph of Catholic Christianity over paganism and to ‘eradicate the memory of the superstitions of antiquity by raising the greatest footing ever for the Holy Cross’.
³³
At first glance, this seems rather strange, since Christianity had put an end to paganism long before and the major threat to Catholicism at the time was Protestantism. But in the context of the Hermetic, Egyptian undercurrent the desire of this
ultra-conservative
and reactionary ex-Inquisitor – of whom it was said that he wouldn’t even forgive Christ of his sins – to symbolize his Church’s superiority over Egypt certainly makes sense.

For his part, Bruno became much more confrontational, publicly denouncing the Catholic Church and the Pope as
both tyrannical and the cause of disorder and violence in Europe. He also changed strategy and decided that the Hermetic revolution would now be brought about by stealth, using more clandestine methods. He devoted much of his time in Germany to organizing a secret society, the Giordanisti, to further his ambitions. This underground network would act as contingency should there be a Catholic take-over of Europe, which seemed only too likely. The Giordanisti were effectively a Hermetic resistance movement. One fellow guest of the Inquisition in Rome said that Bruno had declared:

The chief informer against him, Zuan Mocenigo, said that shortly before his arrest Bruno had ‘revealed a plan of founding a new sect’ to him.
³⁵
Although this revelation suggests that Bruno was still at the initial planning stages, his activities just before returning to Italy suggest otherwise. In retrospect it seems improbable that such a messianic figurehead would
not
have organized cells of disciples wherever he went, linking them into an underground network. Forming secret groups is what Hermeticists do.