Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition - a summary

 I've been told, and I've found out for myself, that the best way to remember and learn things is to explain them to other people.

So trying to remember the story told in this book by Frances A. Yates...

...should fix it better in my mind. It is an interesting story.

This is what happened. The (European) intellectuals of the 1500s had an idea that Hermes Trismegistus...

 ... (that's the one on the left) was a great Egyptian magician who lived after the Biblical Abraham but before the Greek philosophers. Since in the 1500s everything that "ancient" was considered purer/better than the current age (whatever the current age was) Trismegistus was much admired. He lived in a Golden Age.

By the way Trismegistus means "Thrice Great".

Here is the wrong timeline:

 

 Here is the correct timeline.

"This huge historical error was to have amazing results," writes Yates.

The Corpus Hermeticum is an "ancient" text where Trismegistus is supposed to have explained Egyptian magic.

Among the things ancient Egyptian magicians (like Trismegistus) were supposed to be able to do was to draw powers down from the gods into their statues. For example into Horus:

It was a pagan magic, though some people thought that Hermes Trismegistus has foreseen the decline of the Egyptian civilization and the arrival of the Christian one, so in one way Trismegistus could be considered a "pre-Christian". And this could be used as an "excuse" to use this pagan magic.

Strangely enough, for a time, the fathers of the church accepted Trismegistus as an ancient authority so it was fine to believe in him.

A Italian priest called Pico Della Mirandola...

  ...wished for a Hermetic Reformation, a Christian Cabala. Though he was against predictive astrology. He wrote 900 theses, some of which got him into trouble with the Catholic Church. He said that there is good (Christian) Cabala magic, and bad Cabala magic. Good Cabala magic raises good angels, the other raises devils. 

So natural magic is good, the other magic is bad, but both were non-Christian.

Pico died young, some think poisoned (by the church?).

Giordano Bruno was enthusiastic about Hermetic magic. He proposed that memorizing diagrams, images and colors and would help reflect the (Hermetic) universe in the mind of the memorizer, and so the memorizer would be able to call on power from heaven and the spheres. It would be hard, but those who immersed themselves into this obscure magic would have great rewards,

Hermetical Magic Diagram of Giordano Bruno

"Those that doubt that the memorizing and visualizing of the special images is pointless should heed the words of Merlin and not talk about things they know nothing of. "

At some point Giordano Bruno said: "Egyptian Magic is the one true religion, which Jesus and Christianity have debased and obscured." This got him into deep trouble with the Catholic authorities in Italy. He left for a tour of the rest of Europe

Renaissance magic consisted in manipulation of the spheres above to bring down "fluences".

 The Corpus Hermeticum was found out (by Casuabon) to be a fake, and from that the conclusion was that Trismegistus never existed. But many magicians ignored the evidence and carried on trying out the Hermes Trismegistuc magic: