If Copernicus ignited a revolution in astronomy and our entire thinking about the universe, then it was Bruno who spread that fire all across Europe and who was finally engulfed by the conflagration. His theories of an infinite universe and a multiplicity of worlds, combined with his fascination with the Hermetic tradition of magic and the arts of memory, led to multiple charges of heresy. Following his excommunication in Italy and an accusation of murder, Bruno settled for a time in Paris, London, Oxford and various university towns in Germany.
In 1591, he made the fatal move of returning to Italy, where he was tried for heresy, briefly in Venice and for seven long years in Rome. After being condemned to death for refusing to retract his views, he famously said to his judges, ‘Perhaps your fear in passing judgement on me is greater than mine in receiving it.’ He was gagged and burned alive on the Campo de Fiori.
Bruno has also always been seen as the dissenting enemy of a repressive Catholic Church. In many small Italian towns the Piazza Giordano Bruno stands directly opposite the main Catholic Church, often at the initiative of the local Communist Party.
Through techniques of memory, the human being can achieve absolute knowledge and become divine. For Bruno, to understand is to speculate with images, where the human mind is the mirror of the cosmos which functions through powerful, proto-Jungian archetypes. Through the divine power of the imagination, the intellect can seize hold of the whole, [..] an elaborate and geometrically exacting theatre of memory, a kind of machine for recalling the whole, a mortal portal for touching the divine, [..] Shakespearean theatre might thus be the continuation of ancient and Renaissance traditions of the art of memory, a concrete building that embodied the operations of occult memory. If ‘All the world’s a stage’, then the theatre is the stage of the world itself: its mirror and key.
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