Jesse Hilson’s Reviews > Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition > Status Update

Speedrunning through the last 100 pages, not even really picking everything up. Bruno has been burnt at the stake by the Venetian inquisition as a heretic. Some followers try to put forth other versions of his political reform ideas embodied in Hermetic magic. The scriptures of Trismegistus are proved to be forgeries…

Frequent updates, sorry. This book is opening so many avenues of other books I want to read, including The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Yates and Men of Mathematics by Bell. Science, philosophy, and magic used to be all one thing, more or less, it seemed.

Such a good book. Copernicus was a magician! Or maybe, magic and science were not yet sundered at the time. If the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa, then the earth is animated, and if the earth is animated…then all objekts are animated too? With what? With spirits…?

Catholics. Protestants. Magicians. Kabbalists. Copernicus. Queen Elizabeth I. The Inquisition. It’s getting kind of hectic.

This will be slow and steady progress.

It was helpful to have read Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (if I have that title right) before reading this. It is interesting to see how much of Ficino’s and Pico della Mirandola’s energies are being put into trying to convince everybody that the magic they’re discussing is not demonic. And the Church got on their case about this to a large degree.

Hilarious