This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of Fraternal Review titled, “The Numberless Worlds”.
The Cosmic Pluralism hypothesis was popularized during the Copernican Revolution, particularly as espoused and propagated by the Hermeticist, natural philosopher, mnemonist, and cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). For most of the Middle Ages, Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the cosmos was the most popular worldview, as it dovetailed with the contemporary JudeoChristian orthodoxies on the uniqueness of Earth; and any notions that said otherwise were deemed heretical and discarded. Following Copernicus’ astronomical observations, it became apparent that the Earth revolved around the Sun.
Bruno drew upon the ideas of his predecessors, such as Lucretius, Nicholas of Cusa, and Thomas Digges, to reintroduce the hypothesis of life in other worlds. Frances Yates has observed that:
“Bruno is chiefly celebrated in histories of thought and of science, not only for his acceptance of the Copernican theory, but still more for his wonderful leap of the imagination by which he attached the idea of the infinity of the universe to his Copernicanism, an extension of the theory which had not been taught by Copernicus himself. And this infinite universe of his, Bruno peopled with innumerable worlds all moving through the infinite space—thus finally breaking down the closed mediaeval Ptolemaic universe and initiating more modern conceptions.”[1]
Giordano Bruno was a deep student of the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which informed his belief in infinity and innumerable worlds, based on the principle of plenitude: that an Infinite Cause, God, must have an Infinite Effect, and there can be no limit to his creative power.[2]
In the third dialogue of his On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, Bruno states that there are “Innumerable celestial bodies, stars, suns and earths [that] may be sensibly perceived . . . by us, and an infinite number of them may be inferred by our own reason.” He further concludes that “all those worlds . . . contain animals and inhabitants no less than can our own earth, since those worlds have no less virtue nor a nature different from that of our earth.”[3]
Bruno spent time in Britain teaching his Art of Memory and philosophy; and among his students of the Art of Memory and philosophy we find Scotsmen Alexander Dicson and William Schaw, the latter of whose Statutes influenced the formation of Speculative Freemasonry.[4] Dame Frances Yates further observes:
"Bruno’s mission in England, with its appeal to pre-Reformation social and mystical ideas, his lament at the destruction of great abbeys and monasteries, might have something in common with the attitudes to the past of Freemasonry [...] It is a not impossible supposition that the influence of the importation of Rosicrucian ideas into England on Fludd, Vaughan, and Ashmole, may have crossed with an earlier stream, perhaps influenced by Bruno, to produce Freemasonry. [...] Where is there such a combination as this of religious toleration, emotional linkage with the mediaeval past, emphasis on good works for others, and imaginative attachment to the religion and the symbolism of the Egyptians? The only answer to this question that I can think of is—in Freemasonry, with its mythical link with the mediaeval masons, its toleration, its philanthropy, and its Egyptian symbolism. Freemasonry does not appear in England as a recognizable institution until the early seventeenth century, but it certainly had predecessors, antecedents, traditions of some kind going back much earlier, though this is a most obscure subject.
“We are fumbling in the dark here, among strange mysteries, but one cannot help wondering whether it might have been among the spiritually dissatisfied in England, who perhaps heard in Bruno’s ‘Egyptian’ message some hint of relief, that the strains of the Magic Flute were first breathed upon the air.”[5]
Bruno’s ideas proved highly controversial to the powerful Roman Catholic Church. For his teaching on the Infinity of Worlds and other ideas, he was imprisoned; and, after a lengthy trial, charged with heresy and burned at the stake in Rome in the year 1600. Far from suppressing these ideas, the execution of Giordano Bruno made him a martyr for free thought and science, and further popularized his hypotheses among the intellectuals of his age. Giordano Bruno is favorably mentioned as a martyr in the Albert Pike ritual of the Scottish Rite’s 30th degree; and a statue by sculptor and Past Grand Master Ettore Ferrari stands in the Campo de’Fiori, Rome, in the exact spot where Bruno was executed.[6]
It is perhaps no small wonder that another Scotsman, Brother Charles Leslie, echoed Giordano Bruno’s teaching in his oration, “A Vindication of Masonry and Its Excellency Demonstrated,” which has passed nearly unchanged into Preston-Webb workings of the Fellowcraft Degree:
“Numberless worlds are around us, all framed by the same divine artist, which roll through the vast expanse, and are conducted by the same unerring laws of nature.”[7]
Written by Daniel Rivera
Sources:
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 1964), 245.
A.D. Nock, ed. The Corpus Hermeticum, Vol. II (Paris: Assn. G. Bude, 1945), 38
Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, with Annotated Translation of His Work, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), 302, 240
David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry, Scotland’s Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 91-95
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. 1964), pg. 415, 274.
William Denslow, 10,000 Famous Freemasons (Richmond: Macoy Publishing, 1957), 157
Anonymous, The Free Masons Pocket-Companion (Edinburgh: Auld & Smellie, 1765), 163.