Bruno's De magia and De vinculis: Magic as the Art of Binding

Among the papers Giordano Bruno left unfinished when he was arrested in Venice in May 1592 were several texts he would never see in print. They were De magia, the Theses de magia, De magia mathematica and De vinculis in genere, most probably composed between 1589 and 1591, during his years in Germany between Helmstedt and Frankfurt. They remained in manuscript for three centuries and were published only in 1891, in the third volume of the national edition of his Latin works.

A Copy Saved by a Secretary

These writings have come down to us mainly through a manuscript now kept in Moscow, known as the Noroff codex after the Russian collector who owned it. Much of the codex was copied by Hieronymus Besler, a young German who served as Bruno's secretary in Helmstedt and then followed him to Italy for a short time. Without these transcriptions the magical side of the philosopher would have remained almost unknown.

The private character of the texts is evident: they are working notes, outlines, lists of definitions. Even so they are among Bruno's densest pages, because they show how the philosopher of the infinite universe understood the relationship between the mind, the world soul and things. The same ideas return, in more literary form, in the Italian dialogues written in London.

The Many Meanings of the Word Magic

De magia opens with a distinction between the meanings of the term. A magus may be a sage, like the Persian magi, or someone who works wonders through natural virtues, who uses numbers and figures, who turns to spirits, or who produces marvels by deception. Bruno rejects malicious and fraudulent magic, but considers it legitimate to study the hidden forces that connect the parts of the universe.

For him the cosmos is pervaded by a single spirit present in all things. Nothing is wholly inanimate, and for that very reason everything can act upon everything else. Bruno knew Ficino and Agrippa well and takes up their vocabulary, but he places it within his philosophy of an infinite, living universe, with no centre and no boundaries.

De vinculis and Love as a Bond

De vinculis in genere is the most surprising text. The magus appears in it as the one who knows how to bind, that is, how to form bonds between souls and between things. The most powerful bond of all, Bruno writes, is love, which attracts, unites and transforms. That is why Cupid, in his imagination, is the lord of every bond, and whoever knows the ways of desire also knows the ways of influence.

Many modern readers have seen in these pages a theory of persuasion and of influence over crowds rather than a treatise on occultism. Bruno analyses how a person's imagination, emotions and expectations make him open or resistant to the action of another. It is a psychology of human bonds described in the language of magic.

Arrested after a denunciation by the Venetian patrician Giovanni Mocenigo, Bruno was transferred to Rome in 1593 and, after a long trial, burned alive in Campo de' Fiori on 17 February 1600. The magical writings were not the core of the charges, but they show how deeply the tradition of Ficino and Agrippa had shaped his thought. Since 1889 a statue by Ettore Ferrari has marked the place of his execution.