#renaissancemagic

Giordano Bruno: Love Across the Cosmos

On February 17th, 1600, the Inquisition lit a pyre in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. There, naked and silenced with an iron spike through his tongue to prevent him from speaking until the end, Giordano Brun —philosopher, poet, cosmologist, and magician— was consumed by flames.

´ Maxima et gravissima sine minimis et levissimis non existunt´

Before Cardinal Inquisitor Robert Bellarmine¹, who urged him to recant, Bruno replied:

"Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it." Henri de Henin, Documenta Giordani Brunii in Archivis Vaticanis et Romanis reperta²

Bruno was not executed for promoting heliocentrism —a theory still under theological debate but not yet formally condemned. He died for daring to unravel the great chain of being, to deny christology, and to proclaim a vision of the cosmos in which divinity permeates all things. He was condemned not so much for what he believed, but for what he embodied: a free and untamed form of thought that could not be confined to a cross nor bound in a forbidden book.

His gravest crime was not scientific, but ontological. Bruno dissolved both the center and the summit: there was no longer a God enthroned above, watching from beyond. The universe, he said, is infinite, homogeneous, and isotropic —a cosmos without edges, without height or depth, teeming with endless suns and worlds.

“All that is an element of the infinite must also be infinite; therefore both the Earth and the Sun are infinite in number. But the infinity of the one is not greater than that of the other; and where all are inhabited, the inhabitants are no more disproportionate to the infinite than the stars themselves.” Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, Dialogue V³

Each being —each star or soul—expresses the Infinite in its own right. The cosmos reflects itself in every subject, like an active monad. Does this not echo “Every man and every woman is a star”?

Nolan Philosophy: An Enchanted Universe

What scholars call Nolan philosophy⁴ is not merely speculative thought; it is a mystical cosmotheology⁵—a system in which science, magic, and theology converge as expressions of the same substance. One hears the resonances of the ancient Hermetists, Neoplatonists, Kabbalists, and Alchemists. Bruno was deeply nourished by Renaissance Hermeticism —particularly the Corpus Hermeticum⁶—as well as Plotinus, Nicholas of Cusa, and the symbolic fire of Empedocles.

For Bruno, everything is animated by the spiritus mundi—that subtle breath which interconnects all things. The universe is a living being composed of the four elements —Fire, Air, Water, and Earth⁷—and true knowledge arises from recognizing their interplay. There is no dead matter, no ontological void. The divine pulses within every atom.

From this principle arises the claim that the soul of the world—the Anima Mundi —is immanent, and that God is neither outside nor above, but within all things. Such a vision shatters the Christian Scala Naturae: if the divine flame burns in all, if the One is in all, then every being may ascend by its own fire.⁸

For Bruno, the entire universe is made of relationships. And all that binds, binds through affinity, through attraction —through love. In De Vinculis in Genere⁹, he lays out a theory of magic as the science of bonds: for any action to occur, there must be an active agent, a receptive subject, and a proper occasion. This dynamic of soul and matter forms the basis not only of Natural Magic, but also of philosophical eros and mystical love.

Bruno understood love not as romantic sentiment, but as a metaphysical force that links and transforms. The lover becomes what they love. The soul transmutes through its burning desire to know, penetrate, and merge with its object. In this process, the subject and the object dissolve: there are no longer two, but one. This is the magical power of Eros.

Here, Bruno formulates the archetype of the heroic enthusiast: the seeker who, like Actaeon¹⁰, enters the sacred domain of the goddess Artemis and is transformed into what he beholds; the goddess’s hounds—discursive reason, rational logic—devour him. But this symbolic death is his true initiation. He has drawn the Divine toward himself, and no longer needs to seek it outside.

This union is the magical act par excellence: magic as spiritual metamorphosis, accomplished through love and contemplation.

Bruno’s Vision of Magic

Giordano Bruno’s ideas presented in a comparative table with his celebrated contemporaries Dr. John Dee, Paracelsus, and Girolamo Cardano.

In his writings, Bruno identifies ten kinds of magus, among them:

The natural sage, who understands the bonds of the cosmos (in the tradition of Pythagoras, Egypt, India, and the Celts).

The natural magician, who works through the elemental forces.

The theurgist, who invokes higher spirits through prayer and ritual.

The occult mathematician, who employs words, symbols, numbers, letters, and auspicious timings.

The prophet or diviner, who reads the world’s signs to foresee.

Every magician is a binder of bodies, souls, spirits, and thoughts. But they are also, necessarily, bound: no operation is possible without being affected in turn. To bind is to join, to merge, to exchange—magic is reciprocity. Just as a spell moves the forms, it transforms the spellcaster. This vision foreshadows modern ceremonial and theurgical practices, and even inspires the Thelemic concept of “doing your Will” as the conscious expression of True Desire.

For in this view, love —when it is conscious—is creative power. And when it becomes Will, it is magic.

It is no coincidence that Aleister Crowley named Giordano Bruno a Gnostic Saint in the Gnostic Mass of Liber XV. Bruno embodies a cosmic, magical worldview that resonates deeply with the Law of Thelema:

“...with Paracelsus, Michael Maier, Roderico Borgia, Pope Alexander the Sixth, Jakob Böhme, Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Andrea, Robertus de Fluctibus, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Dee... O Children of the Lion and the Serpent! With all Thy Saints we worthily commemorate them...” Aleister Crowley, Gnostic Mass¹¹

Thelema proclaims the union of Will and Love: "Love is the law, love under will."

Thelema affirms that each being is a star.

Thelema dissolves imposed hierarchies and aims at the divinization of the self through individual gnosis.

Bruno was a priest who became a philosopher, a philosopher who became a magician, and a magician who became a myth. Those who remember him only as a martyr of science forget that he was, above all, a spiritual visionary. He did not fight religion out of love for reason, but battled superstition out of love for the soul. His cosmology was not cold, but ardent. His science was not materialist, but erotic. His magic was not illusion —but potentia.

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Notes ( to consult the sources, visit ):

¹ This figure was canonized under the name Saint Robert Bellarmine in 1930.

² This reference points to the online catalogue of the Vatican Library —a true treasure trove. Bookworms, you'll never be bored!

³ This quotation appears in De l’infinito, universo e mondi (1584) by Giordano Bruno, which you can find in various public domain editions.

⁴ In the chapter "Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought" from the volume Giordano Bruno’s Nolan Philosophy, Giovanni Aquilecchia notes that Bruno often referred to himself as Bruno Nolano, asserting his connection to his birthplace—the city of Nola—and to the Neoplatonic and Hermetic traditions that flourished there.

⁵ “Cosmotheology” is a modern neologism describing theological reflection on the divine structure and meaning of the cosmos. In my view, this term is not entirely necessary—as more organic alternatives like entheogens might be—because it obscures the long-standing tradition of natural theology that has existed since Antiquity.

⁶ Setting aside the layers of later occultism and assorted nonsense, the Corpus Hermeticum is a collection of seventeen philosophical-theological treatises written in late Greek and attributed to the legendary figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Praised for its literary quality and philosophical depth, this Hellenistic-Egyptian syncretic work had enormous influence on Renaissance thought.

⁷ Students of occultism are just as likely to consult Mendeleev’s Periodic Table as anyone else; the Four Elements—Fire, Air, Water, Earth—are metaphors for the qualitative aspects of matter: dryness, fluidity, temperature, density, and so on. They form a dynamic system, and it is misleading to present them in isolation from their cycles, interrelations, and transformations.

⁸ For a detailed account of the Renaissance Hermetic revival, Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture—already cited in the Florence Farr biography—is an essential read.

⁹ De Vinculis in Genere can be found in scanned editions online (including in my own Google Drive). The PDF was shared by the Committee for the Revaluation of Giordano Bruno, an institution devoted to “honoring and restoring the legacy of this great philosopher, executed at the stake by the Inquisition on February 17, 1600. At the same time, we aim to highlight, in our own era, the deep and wise tradition of knowledge to which he belonged. Over the past twenty years, we have promoted Bruno’s work through conferences, roundtables, articles, book editions, research, and more. It has been two decades of uninterrupted dedication, driven by admiration for a man and a vision we consider fundamental to understanding our destiny and the deeper meaning of human freedom.”

¹⁰ Actaeon was a young Theban hunter, nephew of Cadmus and pupil of Chiron, who one day stumbled upon the goddess Artemis bathing at a sacred spring. Enraged at the profanation of her privacy, the goddess transformed him into a stag—either with the touch of her arrow or with divine water—and condemned him to be torn apart by his own hunting dogs and hounds. Thus, the hunter died at the hands of his former companions, becoming a symbol of divine punishment for curiosity and the transgression of the sacred.

¹¹ Liber XV: Ecclesiæ Gnosticæ Catholicæ Canon Missæ—the Gnostic Mass—was first published in The International, a literary magazine that acquired esoteric overtones under Aleister Crowley’s direction starting in 1914 during his time in the United States. It was later included in The Equinox.