'Hermetic Magician of a Most Extreme Type' Burned at the Stake Today

I noticed on Wikipedia today that it is the anniversary of Giordano Bruno’s burning at the stake for heresy in 1600. Whenever I think of Bruno, I immediately think of the wonderful book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Dame Frances Yates (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1991), and it occurred to me to post my favourite passage from this book. Having described at some length the Renaissance ‘Hermetic tradition’ and shown that Bruno was essentially a sort of neo-pagan Platonist practitioner of demonic magic, Yates tells us about how this fellow embarked on a journey to England. Then:

The English ambassador in Paris, Henry Cobham, warned the ever watchful Francis Walsingham [I can just picture Geoffrey Rush reading this note!], in a despatch dated March, 1583, of Bruno’s impending arrival: ‘Doctor Jordano Bruno Nolano, a professor in philosophy, intends to pass into England, whose religion I cannot commend’ (Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, January—June 1583, p. 214). Note that it is Bruno’s religion, not his philosophy, which the ambassador feels that he cannot commend—perhaps an understatement.

If the reader feels somewhat aghast at the state of mind of a noted philosopher of the Renaissance as revealed in this chapter, and is inclined to agree rather strongly with the ambassador, I cannot blame him. But if we want the truth about the history of thought, we must omit nothing. Giordano Bruno, Hermetic magician of a most extreme type, is now about to pass into England to expound his ‘new philosophy’. (p. 204)

Yates’s is an important book, in part for the history of Hermeticism I mentioned, but also because of the evidence it presents that ‘the legend that Bruno was prosecuted as a philosophical thinker, was burned for his daring views on innumerable worlds or on the movement of the earth, can no longer stand’ (Yates, p. 355). I should note, however, that her chapter on St Dionysius the Areopagite (‘Pseudo-Dionysius and the Theology of a Christian Magus’, pp. 117-29), while it accurately reflects the traditional Western interpretation of his writings and therefore that of the Renaissance Hermeticists, cannot be relied upon by those interested in the teaching per se of the Corpus Dionysiacum.