Alchemy And The Secret Idea Of Transmutation Book

This was a path-breaking book, and for me, a revelation. Yates' account of the little monk burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600 was revisionist history, but when I read it, I didn't realise it. Till Yates, Bruno was a revolutionary free-thinker murdered by Papism out of little more than pique. His thinking system was lionised, his memory system admired and his belief in multiple inhabited worlds considered very advanced and even scientific. But I didn't know any of this.

Yates paints a different picture of an unscientific man, whose scientific ideas were mostly cribbed from Lucretius, and whose belief in "Hermeticism" tragic, and her account has triumphed as, in general, it should.

But Bruno, even for Yates, had very redeeming features, and his aim to enlarge Christianity through incorporation of the teachings of one Hermes Trimegistus, was a noble one. Sadly for him, Hermes' works were a forgery and not the words a great thinker who lived even before Moses - but the forgery wasn't revealed till well after Bruno's demise, and even now there are believers.

What I liked most about this book, however, was its truly wonderful account of "white magic" and its place in renaissance thought. It led me on to the real deal, the thinkers who made up the white magic brigade spanning several centuries, and their admirers and acolytes. It has been a fascinating journey and Yates began it for me.

There is a kind of postscript to this: in 2000, the 400th anniversary of Bruno's execution, half a million people gathered at the square in Rome where he was burnt at the stake, and asked among other things that Bruno be pardoned. The Vatican did not agree.