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“If any one individual symbolizes the tormented history of the Hermetic tradition it is Giordano Bruno.”1
“But Bruno was, in reality, a martyr for the Hermetic Tradition.”2
—Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince
IT HAS BEEN A LONG JOURNEY from the fires that roasted Giordano Bruno through the soaring heights of his cosmology and arts of memory, through the implications of the ancient Topological Metaphor of the Medium, to the rise of the Republic of Venice and the cunning and brutality of its byzantine institutions, its oligarchy, and its mechanistic, closed-system cosmological views, reflected in its static view of wealth and physics. But we are at last in a position to summarize our results thus far:
1)The motivations for Bruno’s murder by Venice and the Papacy are two-fold:
a)Bruno was murdered because there is a possibility he was a Venetian agent. In support of this possibility, we have in the previous pages noted the following things:
i)As was pointed out in Chapter One, when Bruno fled the Kingdom of Naples for northern Italy—Padua and Venice—he had already explicitly and openly disavowed Catholic dogmas and practice, such as the deity of Christ and the veneration of relics and images of the saints. It is significant in light of Bruno’s subsequent denunciation for heresy to the Inquisition by Mocenigo that Bruno was not denounced for clearly heretical views on his first visit to Venice. This implies that he was possibly under protection from Venice during his first visit.
ii)Bruno’s subsequent travels to Geneva, Paris, Oxford, London, and Germany took him to the heart of all the religious controversies of the day. Since Venice had made a goal of publishing both Protestant and Catholic works during his lifetime, and since through Venetian efforts the Index of Prohibited Books and the Jesuit Order were established, the possibility arises that Bruno’s travels throughout Protestant and Catholic Europe may have been in service of this typically Venetian dual agenda. Additionally, as was noted, Bruno did take part in the many “informal discussion” groups in Venice prior to his first departure from that city, discussion groups which included members of the oligarchical Mocenigo family.
iii)Mocenigo’s subsequent contact with Bruno while the latter was in Frankfurt also suggests that Bruno’s whereabouts were being closely followed by Venetian spies in the service of the Council of Ten. The very fact of Bruno’s contact with that powerful Venetian oligarchical family indicates that Bruno was of extreme interest to the oligarchy.
iv)Therefore, Bruno’s subsequent acceptance of Mocenigo’s invitation to return to Venice to teach him his art of memory system is no longer a mystery, for Bruno might have assumed the latter’s protection was assured, based on his prior contact with that family during his first Venetian sojourn and participation in the discussion group.
v)Bruno’s revelation to Mocenigo that he intended to found a secret society—the Giordanistas—in Europe to promote his Hermetic philosophy as a religion to replace both Protestantism and Catholicism ran counter to the Venetian agenda of fomenting religious conflict between the two camps, and thus, for this reason alone, Bruno would have posed a threat to Venice’s agenda. Additionally, this may have been seen as Bruno’s betrayal of whatever possible assignment he had been originally given as a possible Venetian agent. The question then arises of why Bruno was not simply strangled in a private execution, as was customary for the methods of the Council of Ten. The answer may be that because of his notoriety, and the possibility that he had already founded his secret society, a more public message had to be sent to any possible adherents of that society.
b)Bruno was murdered for the threat his Hermetic views and system of memory posed to the oligarchical financial elite of Venice and to the religious elite of the Papacy:
i)As was seen in Chapters One and Two, Bruno’s Hermeticism implied that there was an “original theology” or prisca theologia stemming from Ancient Egypt that was “more true” than either Judaism or Christianity, and, by implication, Islam. As such, Bruno, like many Renaissance humanists and Hermeticists of his day, viewed Christian doctrine—especially the Resurrection and Trinity—as disguised elements of Egyptian religion. Bruno went further than most during his day and advocated the complete abolition of Christianity, a position that brought him into conflict with the oligarchical powers of Venice and the religious powers of the Papacy. Additionally, Hermeticism claimed, as we saw, to be a continuation of antediluvian knowledge;
ii)By taking this position, Bruno also pointed out that the character of Yahweh was morally contradictory, and one, moreover, that was an anthropomorphic projection of humanity itself. He advocated a return to the God of the Metaphor, to which all men, without the need of special revelation or divinely sanctioned institutional structures such as the Church, could, through the powers of reason, have access. Again, this brought him into direct conflict with the financial and religious powers of his day, and for these reasons, both Venice and the Papacy colluded to have him murdered in a public fashion that would “send a message” to anyone similarly tempted;
iii)Additionally, Bruno’s Hermeticism, as we saw, made him—in his own words—a “citizen of the world,” a position of political as well as religious “egalitarianism” that conflicted directly with the political and religious institutions of his day, and that anticipated, as we saw, the views of the subsequent Bavarian Illuminati and the revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries;
iv)As we also discovered, in the implications of the Topological Metaphor of the Physical Medium, and particularly in Bruno’s exposition of it, mankind itself is, to a certain extent, the “common surface” of the differentiated “regions” of the medium, with the medium, and therefore man, to that extent becoming symbols of the alchemical Philosophers’ Stone, the transmutative, information-creating medium. In Bruno’s view, this means that mind or soul is a non-local phenomenon binding all things together and making possible the practice of magic through the bringing of the mind into harmony with universal archetypes based on astrological principles;
v)As we also noted, the Metaphor is a metaphor of fecundity, of the creation of information that is, in a word, debt free and open and available to all. This explicit implication of the Metaphor and the general Neoplatonic and Hermetic impulse of the Italian Renaissance was a clear threat to the closed-systems Aristotelian materialism of Venetian oligarchs, for whom wealth was a zero-sum, debt-encumbered system, as we discovered in the thought of Giammaria Ortes. Lest this point be missed, it is best to restate it in more modern terms: for both Bruno and the Hermeticists, and for the Venetian financial oligarchy, there is a clear and explicit connection between the types of systems of finance being advocated, and the cosmological and physics systems being advocated. In this context it will be recalled that Ortes formulated his sociological meme of carrying capacity and zero population growth as not only a zero-sum game but a zero-summed vector field, implying a clear physics model. We may therefore view Ortes as being the first modern “econophysicist.” By emphasizing the principle of fecundity in the Metaphor, Bruno and other Renaissance humanists were a threat to the entire mercantilist financial system;
vi)In Bruno’s version of the Metaphor, as noted, there is a direct connection between memory, mind, astrology, alchemy, and the physical medium. Here we may speculate on another possible reason for the sudden Venetian oligarchical “about face” with respect to Bruno. In chapter three, we noted that Venetian oligarchical families may have in fact descended from Chaldean slaves brought to Italy from Mesopotamia during the Roman Empire. In Babylon’s Banksters, I noted that financial and economic cycles appear in some sense to be coordinated to planetary positions, an essentially astrological notion, and that this knowledge of the coupling of financial with physical systems may have been a declined legacy of a high science passed down from High Antiquity, and a closely-held secret of the temple elites of Babylonia. Thus, it is a possibility that such knowledge was passed down precisely in these families to medieval times. With his statements to Mocenigo that he intended to found a secret society based on his Hermetic principles, Bruno would have been threatening to end the possible monopoly of this closely held secret by those families, and hence had to be permanently silenced;
vii)This possibility of hidden and suppressed knowledge became evident in our exploration in a different way, for as we have seen, some account has to be made for why the Italian Renaissance so suddenly exploded with knowledge of Neoplatonic and Hermetic texts. We suggested that this occurred through access to the imperial archives of Constantinople, access possibly given to Florence through the participation of Byzantine humanists in the Church reunion Council of Ferrara-Florence, and also possibly through Venice’s sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, which would have provided access to archival information, some of which may ultimately stemmed from the ancient Library of Alexandria. We noted the possibility that this may have included ancient maps clearly depicting the New World, and alternate trade routes to the Far East bypassing the Venetian stranglehold and trading monopoly on the Eastern Mediterranean. In such a circumstance, Venice would have chosen to suppress not only any Hermetic cosmological knowledge it recovered from Constantinople, but also any geographic and cartographic knowledge. As we shall discover in chapter nine, there is evidence that such cartographic knowledge did indeed exist, and that it was a closely held secret during the Middle Ages prior to the discovery of the New World by Columbus;
viii)With respect to the Metaphor, we also observed that in the Vedic and Christian trinitarian versions, the Metaphor creates not only an initial triadic structure but also the implicit categories of persons, functions, and nature, with persons being closely associated with peculiar functions. This is, as we shall encounter in the next part of this book, the basis for the rise of the doctrine of the corporate person in theology and jurisprudence;
ix)Finally, we noted that the Metaphor is always of a both/and dialectical nature, having both theistic and atheistic interpretations, personal and impersonal interpretations, and that all are necessary to maintain in order for a full understanding of the Metaphor and its implications. We noted also that in its original understanding, the Metaphor is one of fecundity, and not tied to notions of debt and sacrifice.
2)With respect to Venice itself, we noted the following classic and telltale signs of the operations and methods of oligarchical imperialism and financial mercantilism, each of which, again, is directly threatened by the opposing epistemology of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism:
a)With respect to Venetian history, we noted that there are three possible ways that it is connected with ancient Mesopotamia, two of these via symbolism, and one of them via actual physical descent:
i)The first symbolic connection is through the winged lion of St. Mark, Venice’s patron saint. The winged lion, as we saw, ultimately derives from Babylonia;
ii)The second symbolic connection is more tenuous, via the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in the Venetian lagoon. The image of St George on a stead killing a dragon with a spear is similar to Mesopotamian and Egyptian images;
iii)The third, and most important, connection to Babylonia is via the possible descent of Venetian oligarchical families from Mesopotamian slaves brought to Rome. As noted above, it is possible these families preserved the knowledge of the connection between planetary alignments and financial and economic cycles. As also noted, these Venetian oligarchical families took great pains to protect their racial and ethnic purity from “contamination” by subject peoples in their Empire;
b)The Venetian connection to Byzantium and the heavy Byzantine influence on its culture and institutions was also noted, and this influence, we now note, extended to its methods of intelligence gathering, influence building, and empire building. These methods included:
i)A consistent policy of mercantilism, evident in the obtaining of special trading privileges and tax exemptions for the Byzantine empire;
ii)Use of obfuscation in military expeditions, as in the possible cover story of the Fourth Crusade being to expel the Muslims from the Holy land, when a certain amount of evidence suggests that Constantinople, at least as far as Venice was concerned, was the original goal of the expedition. Venetian intelligence would, for example, have known of Alexius Angelicus’ presence in Germany and of his claims to the Byzantine imperial throne.
iii)Duplicitous secret diplomacy and intrigue was practiced at all times, as, for example, in the aforementioned Fourth Crusade, when Venice was negotiating simultaneously with the French Knights to lead an expedition which they thought ultimately targeted Egypt, while concurrently negotiating with the Viceroy in Egypt to guarantee that no attack on Egypt was forthcoming. This, again, is evidence that Venice’s goals during the Crusade may have been Constantinople all along. Similarly, as we have noted, Venice promoted both the Catholic and Protestant cause during the Reformation, with a view to fomenting crisis and war in order to begin the transfer of its center of operations from the lagoon northward, to a new strategic base with access to the Atlantic trade;
iv)The Byzantine influence and oligarchical method is also evident in the creation of the notorious Council of Ten, which combined the functions of foreign policy-making, legislation, trial, intelligence and counter-intelligence gathering and analysis, disinformation, assassination, and so on. In this, the Council of Ten resembles the Byzantine Empire’s Bureau of Barbarians, which combined similar functions. The fact that this Council was created with explicit controls designed to keep it in the hands of the oligarchical families is testament to its utility to their designs and security. In short, terrorism was an official state policy;
v)The oligarchy similarly promoted the idea of the closed system of physics and wealth as a zero-sum game, as we saw with Giammaria Ortes. This becomes a major identifying factor in all oligarchical meme-promotion ever since, and it is therefore an identifying marker of the fact that Venetian oligarchical methods have survived to our own day;
vi)Similarly, as we have also noted, the oligarchy would have to suppress any epistemological, cosmological system or any other knowledge threatening that closed-system approach, and this would have included—and does include—cartographic knowledge.
vii)The oligarchical method of empire included, as we have also discovered, two important points, namely the willingness to transfer the center of operation if the situation arises, and secondly, the promotion of empire by the maintenance of bases and ports of call that allow for the swift projection of military power and the protection of trading interests. These methods, too, have survived from the collapse of Venice, through the founding and dissolution of the British Empire, and the founding and rise of America as an empire.
With these thoughts in mind, we are now ready to take the plunge into the murky world of medieval finance and banking, the rise of corporations, and the little-known story of the possible real reasons that the New World was discovered. But before we can do all that, we must first look back, once again, to ancient times, and their understanding of money and the Metaphor, as well as a little-known hidden “Hermetic” hand in the promotion of the former, and preservation of the latter …
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1Picknett and Prince, The Forbidden Universe, p. 341.
2Ibid., p. 342.