The Forbidden Universe (6 page)

But the most specific of Shakespeare’s references to the heliocentric debate relate to Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), the flamboyant Danish alchemist and astronomer (whose eccentric household included a clairvoyant dwarf who lived under his table and a pet elk that met its end in a drunken plunge down stairs). Tycho’s great ambition was to reconcile ‘the mathematical absurdity of Ptolemy and the physical absurdity of Copernicus’
⁴⁶
through a hybrid model in which the sun and moon orbit the Earth but the other planets and stars orbit the sun. Tycho therefore literally embodied the struggle between the two great systems.

Tycho was employed by his patron, Frederick II of Denmark, to purchase artworks and scientific equipment for his new castle at Elsinore (built just twenty-five years before
Hamlet
was written), where the play is set. Frederick gave Tycho the island of Hven, in sight of the castle, to build an observatory, Uraniborg. The character of Hamlet, like Tycho, was a graduate of the University of Wittenberg. Most tellingly, two of Tycho’s relatives were envoys to London in Shakespeare’s day. Their names – Frederick Rosenkrantz and Knud Gyldenstierne – are the same as Hamlet’s ill-fated peers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Obvious though the links may be, what was Shakespeare trying to convey about the big heliocentric debate? After all, the play sees the demise of all of its leading characters,
including Hamlet himself, in the famously bloody finale. So although Shakespeare seems to be championing the new Copernican system, his major emphasis is really the uncertainty that was overturning the world and throwing everything into chaos.

During Shakespeare’s time, none of this was an issue for the Church, which had long frowned on astrology. But by Galileo’s day heliocentricity had become a burning issue and its spokesmen were condemned as heretics. He was first warned off in 1616, and it was only in that year – seventy-seven years after it was published – that the Catholic Church placed
On the Revolutions
on its Index of Forbidden Books. From that point on books advocating heliocentricity were automatically relegated to the Index, a practice that only ended in 1758.

What had changed? Why, by the 1600s, had
heliocentricity
become a matter of life and death? What made it so dangerous that even the Church of Rome was running scared?

The answer to these questions lies almost entirely in the threat posed by one man … 

Although largely forgotten today, the Dominican
monk-turned-heretic
Giordano Bruno was regarded as one of the greatest intellects and philosophers of his time. The champion
par excellence
of the Hermetic tradition, he travelled Europe preaching its virtues and arguing for a root-and-branch reform of society based on its principles. He aimed to be Hermeticism’s greatest prophet – even its messiah – but instead became its greatest martyr, ending his days in the searing embrace of the Inquisition.

Bruno was messianic, bombastic and stubborn, with a huge ego and belief in his own brilliance and importance. But then a man whose whole philosophy and mission in life centres on the Hermetic adage of
magnum miraculum est homo
is hardly destined to be a shrinking violet. He saw himself as living proof of just how miraculous a man could get. Where he parted company with most typical egocentrics, however, was that he considered all men and, less usual for the time, all women, as being either actually or potentially as brilliant as himself. The targets of his greatest fury were those who held people back, who told them they were insignificant and worthless. Surely it is difficult for a philosophy to be more diametrically opposed to the Christian doctrine of original sin, the idea that babies are born in a fallen state due to the famous transgression of Adam and Eve.

Bruno was first, foremost and totally besotted with Hermeticism, the great golden thread that connected his philosophy, religion and magic. He wrote a huge number of treatises and poems that contained coded and symbolic teachings, being heavily influenced by the works of Ficino and Agrippa, although characteristically he was never afraid to depart from them.

Bruno was born in 1548 – five years after the publication of
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
– in the town of Nola in the Kingdom of Naples, which comprised the whole of the southern half of Italy and, due to the complex
geopolitics
of the day, actually belonged to the Spanish king of Aragon. As we will see later, this area witnessed
particularly
odd activities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly concerning Dominican monks. Although he was baptised Filippo, when he became a monk in the Dominican monastery in Naples at the age of sixteen, he took the name Giordano (or ‘Jordan’, from the baptismal river). Like many bright kids from a humble background – his father was a soldier – his decision to become a monk was probably the only career move that allowed him to get an education. And he was indeed very bright, being particularly distinguished for his mastery of mnemonics and memory systems, even being summoned to Rome by Pope Pius V to explain how they worked.

The ‘Nolan’, as Bruno was often known, refused to let anybody tell him what to think or even what he could and couldn’t study, which was something of a shortcoming in a sixteenth-century monk. In 1576, at the age of twenty-eight, he came under suspicion for heresy, or rather suspicion of suspicion of heresy. ‘Suspect of heresy’ was the formal term for a transgression against Church law, committed by those who read heresy and listened to heretics, even if they disagreed with them. At that time it was in fact best for one’s health and safety to have no dealings with the work of
heretics at all. (The official transgression had the somewhat Monty Pythonesque subdivisions of ‘Vehemently Suspect’ and ‘Slightly Suspect’, although there was nothing funny about the Vehemently Painful punishment.)

Though the details are a bit sketchy, it appears that all Bruno did was read and discuss ideas that had been condemned as heretical. He certainly debated the Arian heresy
¹
in tones that weren’t unequivocally negative and questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, largely because he thought it made no sense. (He later maintained to the Inquisition he had never denied the doctrine, only doubted it.) And he hid a copy of a book by the Dutch
proto-Protestant
Erasmus in the monastery toilet – although he could easily have explained away its presence as toilet paper, which would no doubt have appealed to his superiors. Perhaps that’s what he did do. It would have been in keeping with his character.

Despite being mild compared to what he would preach later in his life, this string of actions coupled with his general freethinking was enough to attract suspicion, and so he abandoned the monastery and fled from Naples. For five years he wandered around northern Italy, southern France and Switzerland and appeared in Venice, Padua, Milan, Geneva, Lyons and Toulouse, among other places. Given the extent of his travels, it is impossible to pinpoint how and when Bruno became devoted to Hermeticism and magic. He may have started to study it in the monastery (perhaps in the toilet?), or perhaps encountered it during his wanderings, but the catalyst for his entrance into the world of the arcane is most likely to have been his
fascination
with memory systems.

The art of memory, which Bruno did much to help revive, developed in classical Greece as a system for storing and recalling information using specific mental images. So powerful is the system that it is still widely used today, even
by celebrities such as the gifted British illusionist Derren Brown. However, an esoteric version of this technique that combined the mental images with magical principles could, it was believed, be used not just to remember what had already been learned but to acquire completely new information. Briefly, this version employed the principles of talismanic magic, in which different symbols, shapes, colours and materials are deemed to have specific
properties
and energies based on magical associations. The trick was to use those principles when forming the mental images. It was as if a portal opened and hidden knowledge flowed in. It was writing books on the magical art of memory that made Bruno’s reputation when he settled in Paris in 1581, but by this time he had also developed some extraordinary ideas about the importance of magic in general and Hermeticism in particular – ideas which challenged its previously conceived limitations.