But as it turned out, history had reserved for Bruno a far more sinister fate in Rome …
The Field of Flowers
In March 1592, Bruno finally went to reside at the home of Mocenigo. The latter was not the gentle student that Bruno was led to believe, but turned out to be a very possessive and vindictive man. It seems Mocenigo wanted Bruno to teach him the ‘art of memory and invention’ so that he could acquire the Nolan's intellectual powers for himself. Bruno, however, seems to have been more concerned with a book that he had just completed which he intended to dedicate to the Pope Clement VIII in order to win his attention and, hopefully, his support and sponsorship. When Bruno announced his intentions to Mocenigo and furthermore informed him that he was going to Frankfort to have the book printed, Mocenigo flew into a fit of rage, locked Bruno in his room, and called in the Venetian Inquisition.
Bruno was arrested and accused of heresy on several counts, being ordered to renounce his beliefs or face trial. Apparently Bruno did renounce but the Venetian inquisitors were unconvinced of his honesty and sent him to Rome for further questioning.
Thus began an eight-year ordeal at the hands of the Roman Inquisition. Tortured and tormented in the Vatican dungeons, Bruno stood accused of heresy on several counts, including his claims of an infinite populated universe (in line with modern science), that the Earth itself is a planet (it is), and that the symbol of the cross was known to the ancient Egyptians (it was, in the form of the ankh, or crux ansata, symbolising the ‘life-force’).
Ordered to retract these and his other ‘heresies’ or else face death by burning, Bruno courageously stood firm. He not only refused to retract but also withdrew the retractions he had made earlier in Venice. Fired by his convictions, he defiantly told his accusers that he had neither said nor written anything that was heretical, but only what was true. When his sentence was passed, Bruno bravely stared at the cardinals lined up in front of him and calmly told them: ‘Perchance your fear in passing judgement on me is greater than mine in receiving it.’
On the morning of 17 February 1600, Bruno, garbed with a white shirt, was taken to the Campo dei Fiori, the ‘Field of Flowers’, a small piazza not far from the Roman Pantheon. There, the Nolan was securely tied to a wooden pole around which were stacked planks of wood and bundles of sticks. ‘I die a willing martyr’, he is said to have declared as the fire was being lit all around him, ‘and my soul will rise with the smoke to paradise.’ A young Protestant, Gaspar Schopp of Breslau (Wrocław), who had recently converted to Catholicism and thus enjoyed the favours of the pope, was an eyewitness to the burning, and reported that ‘when the image of our Saviour was shown to him before his death he [Bruno] angrily rejected it with averted face’.35 The truth is that a Dominican monk had tried to brandish a crucifix in Bruno's face while he suffered in the flames. In an act reminiscent of the courage of the Cathar perfecti, and of their detestation for the cross, poor Bruno, his legs now charred to the bone, mustered enough strength to turn his head away in disgust.
A few days earlier Bruno had written his own epitaph: I have fought … It is much … Victory lies in the hands of Fate. Be that with me as it may, whoever shall prove conqueror, future ages will not deny that I did not fear to die, was second to none in constancy, and preferred a spirited death to a craven life.36
The ‘Organisation’ at work again?
By burning Giordano Bruno the Inquisition sent a clear and unmistakable message of intolerance to all who dared think like him: such ancient heresies would be crushed, whenever and wherever they emerged. Bruno's dreams of a great universal Hermetic reform or revival – whether within the Christian framework or outside it – nosedived and burrowed deep underground. From now on any person or group thinking of religious change of any kind, or even proposing scientific theories deemed contrary to Christian teachings and dogmas, knew very clearly what awaited them.
Not surprisingly perhaps, it was after the death of Giordano Bruno that Europe was to see the resurgence of secret societies and fraternities. It was as if from the ashes of Bruno's funeral pyre arose an invisible phoenix that flew out to nurture universal reform elsewhere in Europe. Frances Yates buries in her excellent book on Bruno and Hermeticism devastating hint as to the identity of this invisible, nurturing and revolutionary ‘phoenix’: … one of the most significant aspects of Giordano Bruno [is that] he came at the end of that sixteenth century with its terrible exhibitions of religious intolerance, in which men were seeking in religious Hermeticism some way of toleration or union between warring sects
… There were many varieties of Christian Hermeticism, Catholic and Protestant, most of them avoiding the magic. And then come Giordano Bruno, taking full magical Hermeticism as his basis, preaching a kind of Egyptian Counter Reformation, prophesying a return to Egyptianism in which the religious difficulties will disappear in some new solution, preaching, too, a moral reform with emphasis on social good works and an ethic of social utility. As he stands in post-Reformation Oxford, the ex-Dominican has behind him the great ruins of the medieval past, and he deplores the destruction of the good works of those others, the predecessors, and the contempt for their philosophy, their philanthropy, and their magic.
Where is there such a combination as this of religious toleration, emotional linkage with the medieval past, emphasis on good works for others, and imaginative attachment to the religion and symbolism of the Egyptians? The only answer to this question that I can this of is
– in Freemasonry, with its mythical link with the medieval masons, its toleration, its philanthropy, and its Egyptian symbolism. Freemasonry does not appear in England as a recognisable institution until early in the seventeenth century, but it certainly had predecessors, antecedents, traditions of some kind going back much earlier, though this is a most obscure subject. We are fumbling in the dark here, among strange mysteries, but one cannot help wondering whether it might have been among the spiritually dissatisfied in England, who perhaps heard in Bruno's ‘Egyptian’ message some hint of relief, that the strains of the Magic Flute [a euphemism for Freemasonry in reference to Mozart's Masonic-Egyptian opera] were first breathed upon the air.37
We shall examine such a connection between the Hermetic movement and Freemasonry in later chapters. Meanwhile it very much appeared, on that awful morning of February 1600, that Bruno's hopes for a great Hermetic reformation of the world, together with his dreams of an ‘Egyptian’ solar city somewhere in Europe, went up in smoke along with him in the Campo dei Fiori.
Or did they?
Enter Campanella
Around the time that the firewood was being heaped at Bruno's feet in Rome, another rebellious monk with much the same sense of mission was tried in Naples by the Inquisition and thrown in a dungeon. His name was Tommaso Campanella, the future author of Civitas Solis.
According to Frances Yates: Tommaso Campanella was the last of the line of Italian Renaissance philosophers, of whom Giordano Bruno was the last but one. Like Bruno, Campanella was a magician-philosopher, in the line of the Renaissance Magi descending from Ficino. Campanella is known to have practiced Ficinian magic up to the end of his life. Like Bruno, too, Campanella was a Magus with a mission. This huge man … had colossal confidence in himself as in touch with the cosmos and destined to lead a universal magico-religious reform. Unlike Bruno, Campanella was not burned at the stake, though he was several times tortured and spent more than twenty-seven years of his life in prison. Yet – also unlike Bruno – Campanella very nearly succeeded in bringing off the project of magical reform within a Catholic framework, or, at least, in interesting a number of very important people in it.38
But Yates could have been wrong on one important point. As we shall see in Chapter Twelve, it is possible that Tommaso Campanella did much more than ‘nearly’ succeed in ‘bringing off’ the magical reform.
We think that he may have succeeded even beyond Giordano Bruno's wildest dreams …
Campanella spent the rest of his life
trying to find the contemporary representative of the Roman Empire who would build his ‘City of the Sun’ … In 1634, Campanella went to France, and transferred his whole scheme … [to] the French Monarchy…
Frances Yates, Consideration on Bruno and Campanella on the French Monarchy
Man lives in a double world: according to the mind he is contained by no physical space and by no walls, but at the same time he is in heaven and on earth, in Italy, in France, in America, wherever the mind's thrust penetrates and extends by understanding, seeking, mastering. But indeed according to the body he exists not except in only so much space as is least required, held fast in prison and in chains to the extent that he is not able to be in or to go to the place attained by his intellect and will, nor to occupy more space than defined by the shape of his body; while with the mind he occupies a thousand worlds.
Tommaso Campanella, Metafisica
CHAPTER TWELVE
ENVISIONING THE HERMETIC CITY
Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella were both born in southern Italy – the former in 1548, the latter in 1568. Both entered the Dominican order at a young age. Both men had passionate and outspoken personalities. Both detested Aristotle and both were in continuous trouble with the Catholic Church. Both ultimately came to see themselves as Hermetic magi. And both, in their own ways, changed the world.
Campanella entered the Dominicans in 1583, when he was 15, but went absent without leave six years later in 1589. He settled in Naples where his first book, Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (‘Philosophy Demonstrated by the Senses’) was published in 1591. Its contents annoyed the Church but since the book did not contain sufficient grounds to justify a trial for heresy, charges were trumped up. Found guilty of harbouring a demonic familiar under the nail of his little finger, and denounced for showing a contemptuous attitude to the Church's power of excommunication, he was imprisoned for several months in 1592 at the Dominican convent in Naples.1
After his release later that year Campanella made his way to Padua. There in 1593 he was accused of sodomy (an indictment frequently cast at those the Inquisition wished to tarnish) but acquitted. Clearly a marked man by this point he was soon charged with other heretical acts: writing a sonnet against Christ; possessing a book of magic; and not accepting the rule and doctrine of the Church. Rather gravely he was also accused of debating matters concerning the Christian faith with a ‘Judaiser’ – who had lapsed from Christianity – without having denounced the man to the Inquisition.2
In February 1594 Campanella underwent his first bout of torture at the Inquisition's hands. He was tortured again, more severely, in July the same year and his case was handed over to Rome. On 11 October 1594 he was flung into the same dungeons as Bruno – but apparently not the same cell for there is no record of the two meeting there. Released seven months later in May 1595 while his case was being determined, Campanella was found to be in poor health and suffering from hernia, sciatica, consumption and partial paralysis.3 He was rearrested in December 1596, imprisoned again, released in January 1597, rearrested in March 1597 and imprisoned again until December 1597 – on the latter occasion in the Inquisition's worst prison in Rome. His release came after he had abjured his heresies, accepted the prohibition of all his books, and agreed to reside for the remainder of his life in his native province of Calabria to the south of Naples.4
A new sort of republic and a heavenly city
It was not Campanella's destiny to live out his days quietly in Calabria. No sooner had he arrived home in July 1598 than he became embroiled in disputes with the local authorities. His writing began to take on a political tinge and also to hint that he possessed prophetic powers – given biblical sanction by Saint Paul in I Corinthians 14:31: ‘For ye shall all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all may be comforted.’
What Campanella seemed to be prophesying, however – a revolution in Calabria against the authority of the kingdom of Naples5 – did not comfort the Church. ‘It occurred to me,’ he wrote early in 1599, ‘that revolution ought to happen soon.’ To confirm this he consulted ‘several astrologers’ and they agreed ‘that political revolution ought to occur for us.’6 Elsewhere definitely with more in mind than just Calabria, he predicted: If a general transformation should impend for us, certainly it will happen on a crucial date, thus in the next seven-year period following the year 1600.7
Between February and April 1599 Campanella became an increasingly strident public preacher using the pulpit to forecast the imminence of ‘grave upheavals’ and apocalyptic events.8 He began to attract a popular following amongst all social classes in Calabria, including powerful noblemen, and with incredible rapidity found himself at the centre of exactly what he had prophesied – a revolutionary conspiracy. He and his co-conspirators even planned to enlist the services of the Ottomon Turkish fleet in their rebellion and entered into negotiations to this end.9
But the uprising was doomed from the start, beset by poor coordination and grandiose but muddled objectives. At the political level these objectives involved the establishment of something very much ahead of its time, described by Campanella's biographer, Professor John Headley, as ‘a new sort of republic’.10 Since it was to have been run along egalitarian principles and guided by benevolent scientist-priests,11 we are reminded, irresistibly, of the actual conditions that the Cathar per fecti had succeeded in fostering in Occitania in the late 12th century before the Albigensian Crusades .12 Additionally Campanella set out what sounds like a manifesto for the Hermetic idea of ‘building the City of the Sun’ in his proposed republic: And although some Fathers sustain … that only in heaven will be realised the reconciled future community, nevertheless [others], with whom I agree, allow for a literal interpretation according to which some sort of prelude of the heavenly city is already to be realised on earth.13 [Emphasis added]
This idea of building on earth an imperfect replica or ‘prelude’ of the City of God, the City of Heaven, the City of the Sun – or any one of a number of other celestial cities – is as old as the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (roughly 2300 BC) as we saw in Chapter Nine. It is also, we know, central to the agenda of the Hermetic Texts (roughly 100 BC – AD 300). It was to become the dominant obsession of Campanella's life which, partly due to luck, and partly to his own resilience and quick-wittedness, did not end over a slow fire when his Calabrian ‘revolution’ failed.
In an insane world only the mad are sane
In August 1599 two defectors gave the conspiracy away. Campanella fled but was captured and imprisoned on 13 September in the castle at Squillace. At the end of October 1599 he was herded together with 155 of his co-conspirators into four galleys sailing for Naples. On arrival at the port of Naples sixteen of the prisoners were hanged – four from the yardarm of each of the galleys. Two more were ceremoniously slaughtered by quartering (being torn into four parts) on the wharf. 14
As the mind behind the proposed revolutionary new republic with its sky-city to be built on earth, and as a man who had already come several times to the attention of the Inquisition, Campanella was now in imminent danger. One of several clerics to have participated in the conspiracy, he was investigated by a tribunal of inquisitors specially-appointed by Pope Clement VIII on 11 January 1600. The tribunal at once requested and was granted permission to use certain kinds of torture including week-long periods of underground isolation and sensory deprivation, as well as a nasty technique called the polledro that was ‘designed to rupture veins and tissue’15 without actually drawing blood.
After some weeks a partial confession was extracted from Campanella to the effect that he had indeed wanted to create a new sort of republic. But he realised that his best defence to the charges against him was to pretend to have been insane all along and thus not responsible for his actions. To help convince the Inquisition of this it seems that on 2 April 1600 he set fire to the contents of his cell .16
Three interrogations in quick succession, all accompanied by torture, follow
ed on 17, 18 and 20 May 1600. Through these, and for the next 12 months of recurrent agonies, Campanella faultlessly maintained his charade of insanity. Then at the end of May 1601 an order was received from Rome requiring the inquisitors to prove once and for all whether he was really mad or just feigning madness – and to do so by means of a terrible torture device called la veglia, ‘the awakener’. Campanella could stop the excruciating pain it would inflict upon him at any time simply by admitting that his madness was feigned. In that case he would be burnt at the stake as an impenitent heretic. If on the other hand he could withstand its pains for 40 hours then he was to be judged legally insane. This would mean that whatever else might happen to him, he could not be burnt by the Inquisition.17
Beating the awakener
Campanella's life-or-death duel with ‘the awakener’ took place on 4 – 5 June 1601 in the dungeons of Castel Nuovo, one of the great Neapolitan prisons.18 The peculiar and horrible cunning of this torture, as Professor Headley describes, is that: The victim is suspended in such a way that only his arms and shoulder muscles prevent his body from coming to rest on a set of wooden spikes; eventually, however, he tires and must allow the spikes to gash his buttocks and thighs until he can once more raise himself. Thus between these positions he must move back and forth.19