Pierce begins reading the unpublished manuscript of Fellows Kraft, a novel of Giordano Bruno, beginning with a discussion of how the coming of printed books destroyed the empires of memory through which Monkish minds could hold all creation.
The library of the Dominican monastery of which Giordano is a resident "was a midden of a thousand years' writing; no one knew all that the monastery contained, or what had become of all that the monks had copied, bought, written, commented on, given away, and collected over centuries."
Reflecting on the then dominant Aristotelian astrology, Girodano asks himself why the fixed, unchanging outer spheres of God are "perfect" as opposed to the changeable, living terrestrial spheres. "Why is changelessness better than change? Life is change, and life is better than death."
Giordano reads the commentary on the spheres by the heretic Cecco in secret, "shut up in the privvy, swallowing it like sweetened wine." The privy is the secret reading room, and library of the monastery.
Late Medieval Naples: "There were always riots; there were always the poor, crowded in the tall close houses of the port quarters, in narrow alleys piled with refuse, where the children grew like weeds, untended and wild and numerous."
The roots of Giordano's heresy that he incorporates the "twelve houses" of the heavens into his memory palace; he merges the heavens into the terrestrial.
The leaned mage Della Porta, who had run afoul of the religious authorities as a youth for casting his eyes "above the sphere of the moon" -- and now practices "only the whitest of magic" -- advises Giordano to utilize the secular hireoglyphs of AEgypt for his nmeonics rather than the heavens. He advises the young scholar to read Hermes.
In the privy one day, one of Giordano's followers -- a Giordanisti -- slips him a copy of a banned book: the Picatrix.
The heresy contained in the pages of the Picatrix: "Man is a little world, reflecting in himself the great world and the heavens: through his 'mens' the wise man can raise himself above the stars." The Picatrix lays out the form of the talismans by which a wise man can capture and guide the spirits.
The Picatrix tells of the lost twelve-mile, four gated city of AEgypt founded by Hermes. Pierce's heart beats fast when he reads that the name of that city is the same as that of the mythical kingdom he created in his boyhood imagination: Adocentyn.
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1 comment:
There is no question that Giordano Bruno was unique for his time and many novels will be written about the man just to express his brilliance in a time when so many minds were closed. But most importantly as we explore the man, one must ask the question, why after so many years of Giordano Bruno's scientific heresies, philosophizing, womanizing, and contempt for the robes he wore as a Dominican priest, did Pope Clement finally have him burned at the stake. What was it that prevented Clement's predecessor, Sixtus V, a pope notorious for his murdering of close to thirty thousand opponents that he had labelled as brigands from doing so much earlier. And why was it only after Bruno spent two years in Prague, as friend and sometimes confidant of the Emperor Rudolf II, (a man also despised by the Church until they removed him a few years after burning Bruno by forcing him to abdicate and naming his brother as Holy Roman Emperor) that the Church finally felt it had to act? Even then, it was only after eight years of imprisonment that they finally were able to sentence him on a new charge of denying the Trinity. What exactly did he confess to that they felt it necessary to extinguish his brilliance? History is not without its sources that escape the book burnings and bannings in spite of the Church being very thorough in its eradication programs. Many of the clues as to what Giordano Bruno did during those two years in Prague that finally sealed his fate can be read in the book Shadows of Trinity released by Eloquent Books. Bruno was a complex and complicated man, who took a path which led him to his own personal salvation. What he learned about the Trinity in Prague sealed his fate. The book is available at the publisher's website http://www.eloquentbooks.com/ShadowsOfTrinity.html or from Amazon Books and Barnes and Noble. A great read that helps you not only understand the man, but the reason the Church feared him most of all and led to his final comment to them when he asked, “I believe you fear me more than I could ever fear this sentence?”
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