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Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

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I'm going to begin this review by explaining what the book is NOT about, since a number of reviewers seem to have been disappointed by what it contains. I will also include where to find information on some these topics.

"Giordano Bruno and The Hermetic Tradition" is NOT a biography of Bruno (1548-1600), who, according to the common view was burned at the stake for teaching Copernican astronomy (this was one of the charges, but was a side issue). There is a need for a modern biography, but this volume, first published in 1964 -- not, as the listing suggests, 1991 -- was a contribution to understanding Bruno, and not intended as a full account.

(Amazon gives the date of the current University of Chicago trade paperback; there was also a similar Midway Paperback edition in 1979, and a 1968 mass-market paperback edition, as well.)

It is NOT a study of the traditions surrounding Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice-great Hermes"), a Greco-Roman version of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek Hermes, among other things, who has had a long history in Western (and Islamic) tradition; it discusses some of them, in the context of Renaissance and Reformation Europe. Collected papers by Antoine Faivre, "The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus," translated by Joscelyn Godwin, now approximate such a full account (paperback, 1995).

It is also NOT an historical account of the Greek and Latin (and Arabic, and some other) mystical / philosophical, magical, and alchemical texts purporting to be the works of Hermes and his disciples. For that, the historically-minded can turn to Garth Fowden's difficult, but rewarding, "The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind" (1986; with new Preface and corrections, as a MYTHOS paperback, 1993). The curious may also look to David Frankfurter's "Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance" (also a MYTHOS paperback, 1998) for a fuller context in popular religion. Those who want to adopt Hermeticism as part of their personal religious experience may need to go elsewhere.

It is NOT a translation of those ancient texts, some of which it summarizes for the reader unfamiliar with this rather obscure literature. For those important in Yates' account, see Brian Copenhaver's "Hermetica: The Greek 'Corpus Hermeticum' and the Latin 'Asclepius' in a new English translation, with notes and introduction" (1992; in paperback since 1995). The testimonies (references in other writers) and fragments (mainly excerpts preserved in a Byzantine anthology) are in the four-volume "Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings ..." (1924), edited and translated by Walter Scott (not the novelist). Yates warns against his high-handed editorial treatment of the main texts, but the testimonies, and most of the fragments, are given in more conservative forms; this too is (or was) available in paperback.

It is NOT an account of the Western Occult tradition in the Renaissance, with or without instructions for the would-be practitioner. For an account of the main texts and issues, the curious can begin with Yates' main authority in this matter, D.P. Walker's "Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella" (1958; there is a recent paperback). Walker and others are critically reviewed, with new hypotheses, in Ioan P. Couliano's "Eros and Magic in the Renaissance" (1987); a different perspective, and some important corrections to Couliano's data, are found in Noel P. Brann's "Trithemius and Magical Theology: A Chapter in the Controversy over Occult Studies in Early Modern Europe" (1999; both in paperback).

That being the case, what IS "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition," and is it worth reading?

Yates claimed that the book began as a translation of Bruno's Italian dialogue, "La Cena de le Ceneri," set in Elizabethan London, and grew. (The dialogue has since been translated, with useful notes, as "The Ash Wednesday Supper," by Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence A. Lerner (1977; a Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts paperback, 1995).

The book is an attempt to restore a missing, or at least neglected, chapter, in Western intellectual history. The "Hermetic Tradition" in the title is the set of beliefs about the supposed Hermes Trismegistus which Renaissance Europe inherited from the Church Fathers. They variously saw him as an ancient Prophet, and the real source of Plato's philosophy, and perhaps the disciple of Abraham or Moses, maybe even their teacher; or as a wicked tool of Satan. When Greek manuscripts of supposed Hermetic texts became available in Florence, the Medici put a priority on translating them, instead of Plato or Plotinus, and Marsilio Ficino obliged, launching a wave of excitement among some European thinkers.

What these thinkers, including, but not limited to, Bruno, did with, and to, the material they were given is the burden of the book. The enthusiasm eventually went underground, especially as it came to be realized that the wonderful Hermetic texts were not only post-Platonic, but post-Christian. This view took centuries to permeate European thought, however, and true believers in the Hermetic texts are still around. ("The Magic Flute" is just one example of originally Hermetic ideas about Egypt surviving into the Enlightenment.)

Bruno himself knocked about Europe, promoting plans for reconciling Catholics and Protestants, spending time -- not very happily -- in Elizabethan England. The Holy Office of the Inquisition eventually became aware that his plan seemed to involve the restoration of Egyptian Sun-worship -- the True, Original Religion of Mankind, as revealed by the Divine Hermes -- in a Christian cloak. There was also more than a hint of plans to use magic, and astrally empowered images, to achieve this and other goals. The heliocentric theory was for Bruno, it seems, just one more proof of the divine nature of the Sun. One can understand their indignation.

It is this Bruno, the Hermetic, the Magus, and the very amateur scientist, which is Yates' centerpiece. She continues the story with some latter-day Renaissance Hermetics, including Campanella (whose utopian "City of the Sun" seems to have revived, perhaps independently, some of Bruno's pet projects).

As someone who was a college student in the early 1970s, I can recall the impact in several areas of this book (then in its 1968 Vintage Books mass-market paperback), and its 1966 follow-up on another neglected area of European history, "The Art of Memory." Although in later writings Yates tended to leap from bold insights to unsupported conclusions, these two volumes helped rewrite the way a generation of historians would look at the European past. Some of the volumes I have mentioned would not have appeared, or would have been very different, without Yates' contribution. And yes, although not a complete portrait of either Bruno or Hermeticism, the book is still worth the reader's time and attention.

[Note, August 2005; a complaint by a more recent reviewer sent me back to take a close look at my copy of the 10th printing (1999), which is, as I remembered it, cleanly printed, with the plates as well reproduced as in earlier versions (some were made from not-very-good period originals!). Anything less, especially smudged or bleeding print, missing text, etc., as described, should be treated as a manufacturing defect, and the copy, if purchased new, should be returnable for this reason. (Or so I would think.) The University of Chicago Press certainly can do better, and usually does.]

This is Yates's masterpiece, a brilliant and lucid survey of a wide range of magical traditions in the Renaissance. Yates argues that magic lay at the heart of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, and places the extraordinary misfit Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) at the center of that development. In later works, Yates often let her insight run wild, but this book rightly revolutionized thinking about magic and occultism in the Renaissance. It will be a difficult read for those not used to academic writing, but it is extremely clear, and well worth the effort.

Actually, this book can not be evaluated at once. Rather, you should concede four stars to the greater part of the book and not any star to the rest. For this is widely an excellent book. Yates does not only prove that Bruno is not the pioneer of modern science he is often stated to be, but convincingly exposes the background against which his works have to be understood. To that purpose, she shows the impact of the Hermetic writings, an ancient source written in the second and third centuries A.D., but by some Christian Renaissance writers such as Ficino or Pico della Mirandola held to be of an authority greater and older than even Moses, on Renaissance thought. Thus it is demonstrated in chronological order how the corpus Hermeticum was received by Renaissance writers, focussing on magic that was derived from some passages of the corpus Hermeticum. Bruno is placed within this tradition. Congeniously, Yates acknowledges the significance of Casaubon's exact dating of what had been held a prophecy of Christianism for more than two centuries and discusses the following dispute which finally made the type of the Renaissance magus disappear, although this tradition of thinking never completely vanished. So this is, without any doubt, the fundamental book about Giordano Bruno and the impact of Hermetism on Renaissance thought. It provides information clear and dear also on magic in general and thus illuminates even some passages of Shakespeare and (unconsciously) Goethe's Faust.Thus the book inspires to study Renaissance authors such as Pico or Ficino or more literature on Renaissance Thought ( I recommend the overwhelming collection „Renaissance Thought and the Arts" by Paul Oskar Kristeller).
All the more it is a pity that Yates, writing with transigating passion, is lead astray to some statements about science and antique thought in general that cannot be left uncommented upon. Ancient philosophy in the time when the corpus Hermeticum was written did NOT necessarily, not even realy, stagnate (p.4, p. 449). On the contrary, Plotinus, writing about 250 A.D., renewed philosophical thought in a way that he is now often considered to be one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever lived. Furthermore, the reason for this presumed stagnation is, according to Yates, that the ancient philosophers did not know the principle of experimentation. But this principle is completely alien to philosophy, be it ancient or modern (this is quite evident, but if someone still doubts, he should read e.g. Wenisch's „Die Philosophie und ihre Methode"). The exhausting prize of modern science at the end of the book (p. 447-55) is not to the point and ignores that ancient thought must not be treated as a failing attempt at Galileo's achievements (as the German scholar Jörg Kube emphasized). Her sideswipe against Descartes (p. 454-55), finally, seems to me completely out of place. So I recommend this book to anyone who wants to know the truth about Giordano Bruno and the essence of magic, but you should not believe what is said about ancient philosophy and philosophy in general.

Interesting how a modest historian should happen to write a book of such critical interest to students and practicioners of the western esoteric traditions. Sheds enourmously penetrating light, especially in the first part of the book, into the people and historical events that shaped the powerful undergound traditions of independent spiritual philosophy-- what we now know as Magick or Magic, both high and low, alchemy, illuminisms of various sorts, and the whole spectrum of western metaphysics.

Today's science originated in the renaissance as part of a curiously retro movement devoted to resurrecting old Latin and Greek texts and ideas. When Corpus Hermeticum, a compilation of neoplatonist and gnostic texts arrived from Byzantium to the Medici court, old Cosimo was on his deathbed yet had it translated so he could read it right away. Here is an excerpt:

"Unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God: for the like is not intelligible save to the like. ..... Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances, qualities, quantities, you may understand God."

Yates uses CH as a wedge with which to illuminate a great battle fought at the end of the 16th century between the Vatican's military-political machine and its "freedom-loving" opponents. The CH texts (XI of them) were seized upon by a motley group of philosophers, cabalists, alchemists and magicians across Europe including Pico della Mirandola, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Robert Fludd and Marsilio Ficino as well as the future Borgia pope, Alexander VI. It just so happens that many of these 'magicians' also represented the first promoters and practitioners of the black empirical art that we today call science. Interest in CH was denounced both by conservative Catholics, who immediately recognized esoteric-hermeneutic competition when they saw it and by rationalists like Erasmus who were unable to follow the hermetist's imagination. The first half of Yates' book barely mentions Bruno as it lays out the context and describes the protagonists of pro-, non- and anti-Catholic versions of European hermeticism. Here she seems to champion a new, brave and unorthodox view that stresses the implications of hermetic tradition for Western philosophy, politics and science. Once you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

I always wondered about the occult & pseudo Egyptian symbols that one sees painted on the chamber walls of Vatican's residences. Yates explains the Church was not opposed to 'magic' as long as the 'magicians' recognized the primacy of Christian ideas and beliefs. Which Ficino and della Mirandola were happy to do; Agrippa paid it lip service - while Bruno denounced it loudly and clearly. Bruno's sin for which he paid with his flesh had little to do with science or cosmology. According to Yates his situation was completely different from Galileo's. The man was not burned for having championed a competing view of the solar system. Rather, Bruno was first betrayed (by a rich Venetian merchant who invited him for a visit) and sentenced to death for having revised basic tenets of hermeticism into a new kind of magic which excluded Christian dogma and symbolism. Bruno, an ex-dominican friar himself, assaulted the very foundation of the Church's claim to political and spiritual supremacy. For example, in Bruno's system of magic, Sun did not represent Jesus Christ, Corpus Hermeticum predated Christ for thousands of years and Egyptian and cabalistic symbols replaced Christian ones. This the Inquisition could not accept. Catholic Church, after all, has always been about power, worldly and otherwise.

While naive, Bruno's hereticism was also conscious and passionate. Yates, who is a Bruno champion, does not hide the man's foibles: grandiosity, political naivete, querulousness, garrulousness, occasional cowardice as he hurtled around Europe as a patronage-seeking missile. The counterpoint to lack of common sense, however, was Bruno's love for truth, his unceasing study and knowledge of hermetic, esoteric and mnemonic symbology, his total dedication to freedom of man - and, ultimately, his mission to humanize the impersonal monolith that was the Catholic Church of the XVIth century. Yates' writing makes Bruno human, I liked that. It also creates, seamlessly, a context for the Western philosophical-spiritual tradition that stretches from Pythagoras, through Plotinus, Nicolas of Cusa to Husserl and neurophenomenology of today.

Yates' knowledge and understanding of historical and esoteric minutiae is profoundly inspiring and illuminating. She shows us an age in which science, mysticism, philosophy, religion and politics were not separate, but rather - for better or worse - essential for defining people's views of reality. The book is a great read, full of surprises and treasures buried across the chapters. Definitely one of the best books i've read in a long time.

It is very simple. This book is the obligatiry reference for the hermetic tradition. It presents a very interesting aproach of Giordano Bruno as well. It is as simple as looking up the name Frances Yates to give the credit of an incredibly serious investigation from one of the pilars of the Warburg Institute. All I can say about the book, is that is a must for anyone who cares to aproach the Renaissance and the hermetic philosophy.

The edition is excellent and very pretty, and in a less superficial aspect, just look for the publishing press.

In this book, Frances Yates set out to discuss the background of the Bruno heresy procedings, and explain them in terms of the view of hermeticism prevalent in the 16th century. She does this admirably.

However, in addition, she succeeds in providing a great survey of hermetic thought in general in the 16th century. This work thus becomes extremely useful in understanding the 16th century world-view, politics, religious thought, perhaps moreso than its main thesis.

Well recommended.

I remember seeing a picture of the sculpture of Bruno (The Statue of Giordano Bruno, created by Ettore Ferrari, and erected at Campo de' Fiori in Rome, Italy, in 1889) attached to an article that advanced the argument "Bruno good, Church Bad" it wasn't a very memorable article but the image of Bruno stuck in my mind. While studying the Shakespeare authorship controversy I came across a Italian scholar who advanced the theory Billy S was an Italian by the name of John Florio, thinking an Italian writing the Bards work seemed more plausible than a yokel from England I dug around until I turned up Frances A. Yates book:

John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare's England

I bought the book, read it and while convinced Florio wasn't The Bard I ran into Bruno again as FY had also written a book about him! So, after the Florio book it was on to Bruno. To put it bluntly it seems once again most of the received wisdom is a pack of lies (puts on shocked face), Bruno was not a martyr for the scientific cause, he was a con man, opportunist and dabbler (to put it mildly) in the occult! Yates does yoemans work on Bruno by fixing him in a certain cultural milieu (Renaissance Hermetics/Kabbala) and telling his life story from within this perspective. Through this book I finally came to understand Leibniz's objections to Newtons theory of gravity, the occult Leibniz refers to in his criticism of Newton is the occult planetary attractions of the Renaissance Kabbalist's. Lot's of good info here one criticism would be Yates sympathies always seems a little toooooo close to the occult. Regardless, a great work

This book is quite disappointing given how renowned it is. While someone at U. of Chicago Press labeled this as a philosophy book on the back cover, note that this is not a book in philosophy nor about philosophy, but as the author herself states, a historical study of the Hermetic tradition. Less than half of this book deals with Bruno, the rest with Hermetism, before and after Bruno. It is arranged in chronological order starting with the character of Hermes and the Hermetic writings and going to the end of Hermetism with the beginning of modern science. While most chapters are labeled by topic, once we come to Bruno, the chapter titles, unhelpfully, become biographical (Bruno in...Paris, Germany, etc.)

The author covers at length the representatives of Hermetism during the Renaissance: Ficino, della Mirandola, Agrippa, Bruno, Campanella, and others. However, she does not discuss them in depth. Most of the discussion is fairly superficial and repetitive. What it boils down to is that these different Hermetists combined in one way or other the different strands of philosophy, religion, and magic known at the time- Egyptianism, Platonism, Christianity, Cabala, Copernicanism. What is termed Egyptianism doesn't really refer to the religious beliefs of the Egyptians but rather the preponderance they gave to images and the idea of a priestly political religious leader. Speaking of images, all Hermetists the author discusses adopt this "Egyptianism," that is to say, the belief in the power of images and the possibility of doing magic through images. And yet, there are only 16 pages of pictures in this book usually placed contrary to where you would expect to find them, pictures mentioned early in the book are found somewhere near the end. The author is at pains to describe at length some of these magical images, but provides no picture. For a book where images matter so much it's bizarre that there are so few pictures.

After reading nearly two-hundred pages about Bruno, one comes away knowing very little about Bruno, his life or his thought. The author focuses on what seem to be rather insignificant events in his life and then tries to make them key for explaining Bruno's life. From the bit one gathers about him, he appears to be far more interesting than portrayed.

A terrible flaw of this books is the large number of quotations in foreign languages that are left untranslated and unparaphrased. Especially since Yates' strategy is to start with quotations to make a point, as opposed to make a point and support it with quotations. For example, Yates says the following in discussing Kepler "The passage is so important that it must be quoted in full." What follows is nearly a page of Kepler...in Latin. Apparently it's not important for the reader to understand what the important passage says. Not only does the author expect he reader to be fluent in Latin but also in French and Italian, which I suspect is too much to ask, even of Englishmen in the 60s. It is particular unnerving since elsewhere in this book Yates will translate some sentences. Where she does translate Bruno, one gets the impression that he is a very powerful thinker and skilled writer. A shame we didn't get more of his texts in English.

I join the other reviewer in pointing out the lousy quality of this book. Nearly in every other page some text is missing, letters of words are eaten or not printed. A book this admired and still well sold deserves more care. In fact, I would say that this text needs to be entirely re-edited and reset in type. It needs to be re-edited to include translations wherever quotations in foreign languages appear and to include more pictures, especially of images that Yates discusses.

This book is a decent introduction to the history of Hermetism. It is far too long, long-winding, slow to get to important matters, and superficial. It starts fairly strong with an overview of Hermetism, and ends equally strong with an analysis of how Hermetism came to an end. But the 400 pages in between are rather dull, light on interpretation, analysis, and scholarship; repetitive, and completely lacking in even basic attempts at philosophical, esoteric, or religious depth. Time and money can be better spend looking elsewhere for information on Bruno and Hermetism.

This is a must read for students of the early Renaissance. There a few times in history that generate such a global cultural shift that the whole world is changed irrevocably for it. The Renaissance is one of those times. Understanding one of its truest heroes is a necessity, as the Renaissance is the product of human resistance and desire for change. This book is epic in every way.