The Forbidden Universe (59 page)

 

The famous page from Copernicus
On the Revolutions of the
Celestial Spheres
(1543) showing his world-changing diagram of the sun-centred solar system. Less famously, just four lines below, he acknowledges his inspiration, the esoteric works of ‘Trismegistus’ – the legendary Egyptian sage Thrice-Great Hermes.
(Bridgcman) 

 

 

Detail from the lavish decoration of the Vatican’s fifteenth- century Appartamento Borgia, showing Hermes Trismegistus and Moses receiving divine inspiration from the Egyptian goddess Isis – somewhat unusual for a pope’s personal rooms. But this does show the extreme veneration that even the head of the Church accorded the demi-god of the Hermeticists.
(
Author’s collection)

 

The belief that Christianity could trace its origins via Hermeticism to ancient Egypt was taken to its extreme by the uncompromising Giordano Bruno, whose statue now stands on the spot in Rome where he was burned to death by the Church for heresy in 1600.
(
Science Photo Library
)
 

 

Bruno’s belief that Copernicus’ new model of the solar system would literally trigger a new age of spiritual and scientific enlightenment was shared by his successor Tommaso Campanella
(left)
, who in turn was a close friend and advisor to Galileo
(below)
. Considered science’s great martyr because of his persecution by the Church, the evidence indicates that Galileo was motivated at least as much by the Hermetic significance of heliocentricity.
(
top:
Mary Evans Picture Library
; bottom:
Bridgeman
)