/lit/ - Literature

>>12874944
Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for heresy, anno domini 1600. 20th century anglo historians tried making him into a 'martyr for science'. When what really got Bruno in trouble was not his defence of heliocentrism and infinity of the universe, but claming christianity was but a corrupted form of the one true hermetic-egyptian religion carried over from times immemorial. Hermetic texts are actually late roman forgeries, but does it matter? Is Bruno a late remnant of late medieval thought, magical and imagistic a world away from the cool abstractions of science? The italian renaissance conjures eerie flashbacks of the 60s of McLuhan, Bateson, Debord and the whole earth catalog. You have the feeling all these people were tripping on new media technologies(the printing press or cybernetics), linking up with microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondencies, diagrammatic intelligences divine and or demonic, phantasmagoria of bygone centuries taking on new life, nietszchean apotheoses(N was a good friend of Burckhardt, but schopenhauerian contemplation wasn't enough for N, he felt compelled to somehow bring the untimely into the present, the admittedly drab present of Wilhemine Germany, with its bloodless kultur historicism and its mass produced sameness). Maybe Western Science is the epistemological anomaly, a monster borne from the theologico political sundering of Christendom in the 16th and 17th centuries? Positivism is the continuation of counter/reformation puritanism, presupposing an infinitely transcendental God, an infinitely wretched and depraved humanity, an infinite denial of eros ie. the nature of reality has already been determined.The radical core of the magickal-hermetic worldview of Bruno et. all: reality as infinitely manipulable.