BRUNO, GIORDANO (b. Nola, Italy, 1548; d. Rome, Italy, 17 February 1600), philosophy.

Bruno's baptismal name was Filippo; he took the name Giordano, by which he is always known, on entering the Dominican order. His father, Giovanni, was a soldier, and probably a man of fairly good position; his mother, Fraulissa Savolino, has been conjectured to have been of German descent, although there is no real evidence. Hardly anything is known of Bruno's early years in Nola, a small town near Naples.

At the age of fifteen, Bruno entered the Dominican order and became an inmate of the great Dominican convent in Naples. Here he acquired a grounding in Scholastic philosophy and the reverence for Thomas Aquinas (who had lived and taught in the Naples convent) that he professed throughout his life. Here, too, he became proficient in the art of memory, for which the Dominicans were noted, and was taken to Rome to display his mnemonic skill to Pope Pius V. Another influence which he may have come under in these early years was that of the famous natural magician and scientist Giambattista della Porta, who in 1560 had established in Naples his academy for investigating the secrets of nature. Bruno was formed during these years in Naples: his mind and character never lost the imprint of his training as a friar; and it was as a passionate ex-friar that he wandered over Europe, combining philosophical speculation with a religious mission evolved through deep immersion in Renaissance magic and its Hermetic sources.

Bruno's religion was the moving force behind both his wandering career and his philosophical and cosmic speculations. He believed that he was reviving the magical religion of the ancient Egyptians, a religion older than Judaism or Christianity, which these inferior religions had suppressed but of which he prophesied the imminent return. It included a belief in the magical animation of all nature, which the magus could learn how to tap and to use, and a belief in metempsychosis. The historical origins of Bruno's “Egyptianism” and the printed sources whence he derived it are now clear, owing to the work done by scholars in fairly recent years on the Hermetic core of Renaissance Neoplatonism.

As propagated by Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Neoplatonism included a firm belief that both Plato and his followers had been inspired by a tradition of prisca theologia, or pristine and pure theology, which had come down to them from the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, a mythical Egyptian sage, and other figures supposedly of extreme antiquity. This belief rested on the misdating of certain late antique texts, of which the most important were the Asclepius and the Corpus Hermeticum, which were supposed to have been written by Hermes Trismegistus himself.

Ficino believed that these texts contained authentic revelations about ancient Egyptian religion and that in them their supposed author prophesied the coming of Christianity—and, hence, could take on sanctity as a Gentile prophet. The scraps of Platonic notions incorporated by the late antique Gnostic writers of the Hermetic texts were, for Ficino, evidence that these ancient “Egyptian” teachings were the pristine source at which Plato and the Neoplatonists had drunk. These beliefs could be supported from works of some Church Fathers, notably Lactantius. Nor were they peculiar to Ficino; on the contrary, the whole Renaissance Neoplatonic movement contained this Hermetic core, and the religious magic, or theurgy, taught by Hermes Trismegistus, particularly in the Asclepius, seemed corroborated by the intensive Renaissance study of the later Neoplatonists, such as Porphyry and Iamblichus. As a pious Christian, Ficino was encouraged by the sanctity of Hermes Trismegistus as a Gentile prophet to embark on the astral magic described in the Asclepius, which lies behind his own work on astral magic, the De vita coelitus comparanda, although he did this hesitantly