Occultists

"Then saith the prophet and slave of the beauteous one: Who am I, and what shall be the sign? So she answered him, bending down, a lambent flame of blue, all-touching, all penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, & her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers: Thou knowest! And the sign shall be my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body."

"I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy."

"These are fools that men adore; both their Gods & their men are fools. This verse establishes uncompromisingly that all Gods — G capital, that is to say, 'true Gods' — and all men deified by legend or deceit — that is to say, false gods' — are fools. How come? It is a key. Distinction is clearly made between the two types: one are Gods; the other is men."

"Every man and every woman is a star."

"The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament, especially the book of Job, the Psalms, the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. ... In writing English the most important quality that you can acquire is style. It makes all the difference to anyone who reads what you write, whether you use the best phrases in the best way."

"Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out! The first two of these instructions comprise the whole of the technique of Yoga. The last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to expound in this present elementary stage."

"Black magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results — of an extremely temporary nature. The recoil upon those who practice it is terrific. It is like looking for an escape of gas with a lighted candle. As far as the search goes, there is little fear of failure! To practice black magic you have to violate every principle of science, decency, and intelligence. You must be obsessed with an insane idea of the importance of the petty object of your wretched and selfish desires. I have been accused of being a "black magician." No more foolish statement was ever made about me. I despise the thing to such an extent that I can hardly believe in the existence of people so debased and idiotic as to practice it."

"There seems to be much misunderstanding about True Will ... The fact of a person being a gentleman is as much an ineluctable factor as any possible spiritual experience; in fact, it is possible, even probable, that a man may be misled by the enthusiasm of an illumination, and if he should find apparent conflict between his spiritual duty and his duty to honour, it is almost sure evidence that a trap is being laid for him and he should unhesitatingly stick to the course which ordinary decency indicates ... I wish to say definitely, once and for all, that people who do not understand and accept this position have utterly failed to grasp the fundamental principles of the Law of Thelema."

"I am inclined to agree with the Head Master of Eton that pæderastic passions among schoolboys 'do no harm'; further, I think them the only redeeming feature of sexual life at public schools."

"Religion in life is either an amusement and a soporific, or a sham and a swindle."

"I am certainly of opinion that genius can be acquired, or, in the alternative, that it is an almost universal possession. Its rarity may be attributed to the crushing influence of a corrupted society. It is rare to meet a youth without high ideals, generous thoughts, a sense of holiness, of his own importance, which, being interpreted, is, of his own identity with God. Three years in the world, and he is a bank clerk or even a government official. Only those who intuitively understand from early boyhood that they must stand out, and who have the incredible courage and endurance to do so in the face of all that tyranny, callousness, and the scorn of inferiors can do; only these arrive at manhood uncontaminated."

"I was in the death struggle with self: God and Satan fought for my soul those three long hours. God conquered — now I have only one doubt left — which of the twain was God?"

"Chi vuole che la quaresima gli paia corta, si faccia debito per pagare a Pasqua."

"That I shall sink in death, I know must be; But with that death of mine what life will die? Across the air, I hear my heart's voice cry: Where dost thou bear me reckless one? Descend! Such rashness seldom ends but bitterly' "Fear not the lofty fall" I answer "rend With might the clouds, and be content to die, If God such a glorious death for us intend.""

"Most historians merely mention that Bruno was charged with the heresy of teaching Copernican astronomy, but Frances Yates, a historian who specialized in the occult aspects of the scientific revolution, points out that Bruno was charged with 18 heresies and crimes, including the practice of sorcery and organizing secret societies to oppose the Vatican. Yates thinks Bruno may have had a role in the invention of either Rosicrucianism or Freemasonry or both. Bruno's teachings combined the new science of his time with traditional Cabalistic mysticism. He believed in a universe of infinite space with infinite planets, and in a kind of dualistic pantheism, in which the divine is incarnate in every part but always in conflicting forms that both oppose and support each other. Whatever his link with occult secret societies, he influenced Hegel, Marx, theosophy, James Joyce, Timothy Leary, Discordianism, and Dr. Wilhelm Reich."

"Due to the genius and labours of Newton almost all the problems presented by the motions of the planets had been mastered. Newton had shown for all time that these motions could be completely accounted for if it were assumed that the same laws of nature, and in particular gravity, operated in the celestial realm as well as in the terrestrial. Although the old Aristotelian distinction between the corrupt earth and the incorruptible heavens was thus finally abandoned, the stellar realm still lay beyond the range of scientific investigation. The natural step, taken by Digges and Bruno, of likening the stars to the sun and scattering them throughout space was still only a step of the imagination."

"You I admire as being more, — much more — a man, and more believer too, than half the canting orthodox."

"Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ’s body."

"The whole of Bruno's philosophy is based on his view of an infinite universe with an infinity of worlds. He conceived the universe as a vast interrelationship throughout space and time, comprehending all phenomena, material and spiritual. Thence he was led to contemplate the parts under the mode of relativity. The conception of the infinity of the universe renders meaningless the ascription to it of motion, but Bruno conceives each of the infinitely numerous worlds to be moving on its course in relation to other worlds, impelled by its own twofold nature as individual and as part of the whole. All estimates of direction, position and weight within the whole must be relative. Moreover, the cosmological system is illumined by the properties of number."

"[From Schopenhauer's assessments of other philosophers] Bruno and Spinoza are to be entirely excepted. Each stands by himself and alone; and they do not belong either to their age or to their part of the globe, which rewarded the one with death, and the other with persecution and ignominy. Their miserable existence and death in this Western world are like that of a tropical plant in Europe. The banks of the Ganges were their spiritual home; there they would have led a peaceful and honoured life among men of like mind."

"Giordano Bruno asserted that in the end even the devils would be pardoned and that religious strife, with its human claim to see through God's eyes, was the most misguided strife of all. Despite the optimism of the Roman students who erected his monument in Campo de' Fiori, in many respects the generation he foresaw still belongs to the future. ... Giordano Bruno defies any kind of summary judgment; his life, his ideas, and his personality are as complex as his times are distant from our own. He could be charming or infuriating, charismatic or repellent. For all his faults, however, he was brave and brilliant, and ... he was a splendid writer."

"February 17 marks a peculiarly Roman holiday whose ritual centers on the bronze statue of a hooded friar. Just over life size, clutching a book in manacled hands, he glowers over the marketplace of Campo de' Fiori, the “Field of Flowers” that was also, for many years, one of the city's execution grounds. The statue was meant to point in the opposite direction, facing the sun, but a last-minute decision by the City Council of Rome in 1889 turned it around to face the Vatican, which had complained that the original placement was disrespectful. Because of this change in position, the friar's face is always shadowed, so that he looks more melancholy than defiant. But then, he is a man condemned to die by burning at the stake; he has every reason to be melancholy. ... in letters of bronze on his granite pedestal: “To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned.” ... The Roman students chose Bruno as their patron martyr not only for his bravery but also for his ideas; more boldly than anyone in his age, including Kepler and Galileo, he had declared that the universe was made of atoms and that it was infinite in size. His violent, public death for those convictions showed the Catholic Church in its most cruelly repressive light, for Bruno had not been a political man, nor had he committed any crime except to speak his mind. For the students of a new Italy and a newly independent Rome, the statue was meant to prove that ideas can and must prevail over the attempt to stifle them."

"By sanctifying cruelty, early Christianity set a precedent for more than a millennium of systematic torture in Christian Europe. If you understand the expressions to burn at the stake, to hold his feet to the fire, to break a butterfly on the wheel, to be racked with pain, to be drawn and quartered, to disembowel, to flay, to press, the thumbscrew, the garrote, a slow burn, and the iron maiden (a hollow hinged statue lined with nails, later taken as the name of a heavy-metal rock band), you are familiar with a fraction of the ways that heretics were brutalized during the Middle Ages and early modern period. During the Spanish Inquisition, church officials concluded that the conversions of thousands of former Jews didn’t take. To compel the conversos to confess their hidden apostasy, the inquisitors tied their arms behind their backs, hoisted them by their wrists, and dropped them in a series of violent jerks, rupturing their tendons and pulling their arms out of their sockets. Many others were burned alive, a fate that also befell Michael Servetus for questioning the trinity, Giordano Bruno for believing (among other things) that the earth went around the sun, and William Tyndale for translating the Bible into English. Galileo, perhaps the most famous victim of the Inquisition, got off easy: he was only shown the instruments of torture (in particular, the rack) and was given the opportunity to recant for “having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves.”"

"Bruno makes a clear distinction between the ‘universe’ and the ‘worlds’. In his view of the cosmos, talking about a world system does not mean talking about a universe system. Astronomy is legitimate and possible as a science of the world that falls within the scope of our sensory perception. But beyond it lies an infinite universe containing those “great animals” we call stars, which encompasses an infinite plurality of worlds. That universe has no dimensions or measurements, no shape or form. It is both uniform and formless, neither harmonious nor orderly, and cannot in any way be considered a “system.”"

"Giordano Bruno represented a break between the pre-modern and modern eras with his thinking. The pre-modern era involved the idea that there is an order in society as in everything else and that this order is vertical: from top to bottom; something, therefore, that clearly takes the form of a hierarchy. What Bruno brings to philosophy is the infinity of the universe. In an infinite universe, there are no absolute centers: every point is relatively a center, with respect to all the others. With Bruno, there is therefore a transition from a hierarchical vision to one that I would not hesitate to define as anarchic!"

"He was drawn to the centers of learning to announce his startling philosophy; from most he was curtly expelled... He was contradictory, capricious, often insufferable: his moods could flash abruptly from antic lampooning to raw invective, from wild exhilaration to fierce bitterness, from clownishness to a blackdog melancholy. "Gay in sorrow, sorrowful in gaiety," he said of himself, and the contraries of the tempestuous Bruno survive in his writings, where exalted and discerning passages seem to bob and dip in great waves of bombast... Controversial and largely dismissed in his lifetime, Bruno fared no better after his death. If his ideas were disputed, so was his martyrdom. For centuries, rumor and doubt shrouded the terrible fire in the Campo dei Fiore and as late as 1885 there are references to the "legends" of Bruno's burning at the stake... Only in the twentieth century has Bruno begun emerging from his long neglect into prominence."

"In 1584, twenty-five years before Galileo lifted a telescope, Bruno took the Copernican hypothesis to the outrageous new conclusion that the sun is merely one of an infinity of stars, which stretch across boundless and inexhaustible space. It was consummate audacity to proclaim an infinite universe in the teeth of the doctrinal dogfights of the 16th century. It was yet bolder to exult in the de immenso with the bounding wonder of a poet. The prospect of our earth reduced to a turning speck in endless space was terrifying to contemplate. An ecstatic Bruno cried, "My thoughts are stitched to the stars!" and contemplated little else. With an impetuous abandon that his contemporaries found reckless and even dangerous, Bruno proceeded to rethink man's relationship to the universe, to himself, and to God by the unimaginable light of countless stars. His conclusions were simply unbelievable for a late medieval mind: infinite other worlds, inhabited like our own, spread throughout space; a structure to the universe of suns and clusters of suns circling in grand orbits, but no "center" except in the ground beneath two human feet; the presence of God not atop an empyrean throne past the threshold of the farthest stars, but inhabiting every atom of matter; an eternal span to matter, which can change its form but never be exhausted in any proportion; and finally a logic infinity demanded of him — an innate union of all contraries, by which evil and good, history and the future, localized humanity and an infinite universe inform and express one another..."

""History has not yet registered a stable appraisal for Giordano Bruno" writes Giorgio de Santillana in The Age of Adventure. Perceptions of Bruno were volatile enough in his lifetime; many have remained polarized to this day. Radoslav Tsanoff calls Bruno "the outstanding philosopher of the Renaissance," and Harold Hoffding cites Bruno's work as "the greatest philosophical thought-structure executed by the Renaissance." Yet Bertrand Russell despairs of crediting Bruno with philosophy at all: "There were fruitful intuitions lost in that disorder, but they had not yet reached the point of precision at which philosophy begins." The chasm of opinion dividing Bruno, even to this day, is one of the many improbables of this turbulent and exultant figure."

"Joyce gives the ghost guises like Saint Bruno and The Nolan of the Cabashes and Noland's brown and Nolan Browne and Bruno Nowlan and Nolans Brumans and Mr. Brown and Bruno Nolan and many others. The encyclopedic Joyce was deeply impressed by Bruno's heady coincidence of contraries, and was no doubt sympathetic to Bruno's hectic and finally tragic bouts with the Inquisition. McLuhan the Joycean scholar was certainly conscious of Joyce's debt to Bruno. But I like to think there was more: that when "Bruno Nolan" winked from one of paper sleeves, McLuhan made a recognition as if glimpsing a companion from across the centuries and winked back."

"He is one martyr whose name should lead all the rest. He was not a mere religious sectarian who was caught up in the psychology of some mob hysteria. He was a sensitive, imaginative poet, fired with the enthusiasm of a larger vision of a larger universe... and he fell into the error of heretical belief. For this poets vision he was kept in a dark dungeon for eight years and then taken out to a blazing market place and roasted to death by fire."

"The First Great Star — Herald of the Dawn — was Bruno... He was a pantheist — that is to say, an atheist. He was a lover of Nature, — a reaction from the asceticism of the church. He was tired of the gloom of the monastery. He loved the fields, the woods, the streams. He said to his brother-priests: Come out of your cells, out of your dungeons: come into the air and light. Throw away your beads and your crosses. Gather flowers; mingle with your fellow-men; have wives and children; scatter the seeds of joy; throw away the thorns and nettles of your creeds; enjoy the perpetual miracle of life."

"Bruno — one of the greatest and bravest of men — greatest of all martyrs — perished at the stake, because he insisted on the existence of other worlds and taught the astronomy of Galileo..."

"Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed."

"But Bruno was not quite an atheist or pantheist. He most likely followed an apophatic creed (via negativa), making him more of a pandeist."

"[. ..] he became a symbol of freedom of thought, a strange symbol one might add, as there have often been those who made him a secular hero, which is true to a certain extent: it is true that he went against the Catholic Church, but then the content of his philosophy is anything but secular."

"Bruno stood at the stake in solitary and awful grandeur. There was not a friendly face in the vast crowd around him. It was one man against the world. Surely the knight of Liberty, the champion of Freethought, who lived such a life and died such a death, without hope of reward on earth or in heaven, sustained only by his indomitable manhood, is worthy to be accounted the supreme martyr of all time. He towers above the less disinterested martyrs of Faith like a colossus; the proudest of them might walk under him without bending."

"The real story of our times is seldom told in the horse-puckey-filled memoirs of dopey, self-serving presidents or generals, but in the outrageous, demented lives of guys like Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, Scott Fitzgerald — and Paul Krassner. The burrs under society's saddle. The pains in the ass."

"His view with regard to morals and their relation to religion may best be seen from the following words addressed by Momus to Jove: “It will be sufficient if you put an end to that lazy tribe of pedants, who, without doing good, according to the divine and natural law, consider themselves, and wish to be considered, as religious men, agreeable to the gods, and declare that it is not by pursuing good and shunning evil that men become worthy and pleasing to the gods, but by believing and hoping according to their catechism." Elsewhere, he makes Wisdom say: “Wherefore, it is an unworthy, foolish, profane, and reprehensible thing to think that the gods demand reverence, fear, love, worship, and respect for any other good end or utility than those of men themselves, inasmuch as being perfectly glorious in themselves, and therefore unable to add any glory to themselves from without, they have made laws, not so much to obtain glory from men as to communicate glory to them. Hence, laws and judgments fall short of the goodness and truth of law and judgment, just in proportion as they fail to order and approve, above all other things, that which consists in the moral actions of men with respect to each other." I doubt whether the Society for Ethical Culture could frame a better statement of the relation between ethics and religion than this of Bruno's. Reading this, we are at no loss to understand why Bruno, though he spent some time in Geneva, and afterward in Protestant England and Germany, never became a Protestant. He appears, from recently discovered documents, to have got into considerable trouble at Geneva; and no wonder, when he puts into the mouth of Wisdom words like the following, concerning the chief reformers: “While they say that all their care is about invisible things, which neither they nor anybody else ever understood, they maintain that, in order to obtain grace, all that is required is fate, which is immutable, but which is determined by certain affections and fancies on which the gods are especially fond of feeding." Indeed, his contempt for the doctrines of the reformers, who exalted faith as all-potent for salvation and despised works and a moral life, is without bounds. His treatment of the doctrine of predestination is not only contemptuous, but funny. I think I need not say anything more to convince you that Bruno was one of the mighty, one of those strange, incomprehensible, pioneer geniuses that lived centuries before their time, destined, apparently, to lay out the tasks for many succeeding ages. He rose not only above the dogmas and superstitions of half-obsolete mediaeval Catholicism, but, with equal ease and firmness, above the new follies of growing Protestantism. He belongs not to the sixteenth century, but to the nineteenth, and even to the elite of it. Great in philosophy, great in science,— physical and moral, — he was greater still in practice, in life and in death. No man ever labored more or suffered more, in order to be free himself and help others to be so. No one ever met death more firmly and heroically. Among the martyrs for truth and freedom, — those first essentials of manhood, — he occupies the highest place."

"The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe — what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of?"

"Like Cusanus and Calvin, Bruno has an unknown and ineffable God. But his God is unknown not in virtue of His infinite actuality and real transcendence of the universe, but in virtue of the immensity of the universe itself and the relative disproportion between it and the human way of knowing and loving."

"The men of "sound common sense," i.e., of those snails in intellect who wear their eyes at the tips of their feelers, and cannot even see unless they at the same time touch. When these finger-philosophers affirm that Plato, Bruno, etc., must have been "out of their senses," the just and proper retort is "Gentlemen! it is still worse with you! you have lost your reason." By the bye, Addison in the Spectator has grossly misrepresented the design and tendency of Bruno's Bestia Trionfante; the object of which was to show of all the theologies and theogonies which have been conceived for the mere purpose of solving problems in the material universe, that as they originate in the fancy, so they all end in delusion, and act to the hindrance or prevention of sound knowledge and actual discovery. But the principal and more important truth taught in this allegory, is, that in the concerns of morality, all pretended knowledge of the will of heaven, which is not revealed to man through his conscience; that all commands, which do not consist in the unconditional obedience of the will to the pure reason, without tampering with consequences (which are in God's power and not in ours); in short, that all motives of hope and fear from invisible powers, which are not immediately derived from, and absolutely coincident with, the reverence due to the supreme reason of the universe, are all alike dangerous superstitions. The worship founded on them, whether offered by the Catholic to St. Francis or by the poor African to his Fetish, differ in form only, not in substance. Herein Bruno speaks not only as a philosopher but as an enlightened Christian; the evangelists and apostles everywhere representing their moral precepts, not as doctrines then first revealed, but as truths implanted in the hearts of men, which their vices only could have obscured."

"I propose to give an account of the life of Giordano Bruno... who was burnt under pretence of atheism, at Rome, in the year 1600 and of his works which are perhaps the scarcest books ever printed... The most industrious historians of speculative philosophy have not been able to procure more than a few of his works... out of eleven, the titles of which are preserved to us I have had an opportunity of perusing six."

"Against Bruno, Ratzinger is critical of what other commentators have described as his pandeism."

"Now during the half-century after Copernicus, no one was bold enough to champion his theory save a few eminent mathematicians like Rheticus and a few incorrigible intellectual radicals like Bruno. In the late eighties and early nineties, however, certain corollaries of Copernicus' work were seized upon by the youthful Kepler, then in his student days..."

"There is a real unity underlying each of his works; but all give the impression of disorder... Bruno lost no opportunity of keeping his readers awake by the oddness of his antics; he surprises them by bombardments and unexpected raking fires. He thinks to throw each noble design, each lofty thought into relief by the dodge (not unknown to modern writers) of smart paradox... All is overdone: there is not a thought of repose. Penetrative insight, soaring observation, novel wisdom, severe thought have a setting of jest and jeer, clumsy buffoonery and sheer indecency."

"Bruno is the first thinker who based the soul's duty to itself on its own nature: not on external authority, but on inner light. ... Of Bruno, as of Spinoza, it may be said that he was "God-intoxicated." He felt that the Divine Excellence had its abode in the very heart of Nature and within his own body and spirit. Indwelling in every dewdrop as in the innumerable host of heaven, in the humblest flower and in the mind of man, he found the living spirit of God, setting forth the Divine glory, making the Divine perfection and inspiring with the Divine love. The Eroici is full of the pantings of his soul for intellectual enfranchisement and contact with Truth, the divine object.... The heroic soul, says Bruno, shall seek truth and find it. The time had not then come for Pilate's question to be put again. Bruno was happily unvexed by the problem of truth... there is a view implicit in the Eroici and in all but the earliest of his philosophical writings, and this is that our truth is a progressive, ideal approximation towards that whole Truth which is one with the inmost nature of Being."

"Bruno embraced a pantheistic doctrine, identifying God and Nature, the active and the passive sides of reality. Each is infinite, he insisted, and there could not be two infinities, for they would limit each other. God is all Being, and the universe is his ."

"We hereby, in these documents, publish, announce, pronounce, sentence, and declare thee the aforesaid Brother Giordano Bruno to be an impenitent and pertinacious heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon, the laws and the constitutions, both general and particular, imposed on such confessed impenitent pertinacious and obstinate heretics... We ordain and command that thou must be delivered to the Secular Court... that thou mayest be punished with the punishment deserved... Furthermore, we condemn, we reprobate, and we prohibit all thine aforesaid and thy other books and writings as heretical and erroneous, containing many heresies and errors, and we ordain that all of them which have come or may in future come into the hands of the Holy Office shall be publicly destroyed and burned in the square of St. Peter before the steps and that they shall be placed upon the Index of Forbidden Books, and as we have commanded, so shall it be done.."

"Your god is too small."

"Heroic love is the property of those superior natures who are called insane (insano) not because they do not know (no sanno), but because they over-know (soprasanno)."