The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince Read Free Book Online

city, where all learning and culture was encouraged. In Prague, Protestants and – extraordinarily for the time – Jews were free to practise their religion. Rudolph also worked for a unified Christian Europe, backing those who worked for tolerance and reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant. His own religious orientation is unclear. Although raised a Catholic, he was obviously lapsed, going so far as to refuse the last rites on his deathbed. But neither did he join any of the Protestant churches.
    Rudolph acted like a magnet for occultists, artists and scholars, and Bruno was no exception. But to Bruno an added attraction must have been the existence of a court of exceptional tolerance and open-mindedness. Having received some financial assistance from the Emperor, Bruno moved swiftly on to the University of Brunswick, all the while in a ferment of thinking and plotting.
    Throughout his wandering years, Bruno’s position on the Catholic Church and the nature of the Hermetic revolution shifted. Until his departure from Paris, he believed that an Egyptian reformation could begin within the Church, through collaboration between Hermes-friendly monarchs such as Henri III and allies in Rome itself. But not only was Henri losing the civil war against the Catholic League, he was soon to be assassinated by one of their agents, a Dominican monk. (Catherine de’ Medici also died – surprisingly of apparently natural causes – at the beginning of that year.) Spain was bringing its whole might to bear on crushing Bruno’s next best hope for harmony in Europe, Elizabeth’s England, building up the armada for the attack of 1588; few gave England much of a chance.
    At this time, when Catholicism seemed on the brink of triumph, a strangely symbolic event took place in Rome. In 1586 a great ancient Egyptian obelisk that had remainedneglected for over a thousand years was moved to the centre of St Peter’s Square. During the Roman Empire, many obelisks and statues were carried off to the imperial hub from Egypt and erected around the city, usually in honour of some emperor or another. Unsurprisingly, they had been knocked over and vandalized as nasty pagan monuments when Christianity became the state religion, but many were left where they fell, either in pieces or whole, to disappear beneath the ground over the centuries. In the sixteenth century only one obelisk was still standing, albeit with its base deeply buried, in a dingy alley behind St Peter’s. Nearly three thousand years old, it had been taken to Rome on the orders of Caligula.
    In 1586 Pope Sixtus V ordered that the obelisk be moved to its prominent place and following a monumental engineering effort that stretched the resources and skills of the day to their very limit, this 83-foot-tall (25-metre), 350-ton monument stood tall in the centre of the square. After being duly exorcised, it was topped with a large iron cross and had inscriptions honouring Christ (and of course Sixtus) carved into it.
    Sixtus’ declared motive was to assert the triumph of Catholic Christianity over paganism and to ‘eradicate the memory of the superstitions of antiquity by raising the greatest footing ever for the Holy Cross’. 33 At first glance, this seems rather strange, since Christianity had put an end to paganism long before and the major threat to Catholicism at the time was Protestantism. But in the context of the Hermetic, Egyptian undercurrent the desire of this ultra-conservative and reactionary ex-Inquisitor – of whom it was said that he wouldn’t even forgive Christ of his sins – to symbolize his Church’s superiority over Egypt certainly makes sense.
    For his part, Bruno became much more confrontational, publicly denouncing the Catholic Church and the Pope asboth tyrannical and the cause of disorder and violence in Europe. He also changed strategy and decided that the Hermetic revolution would now be brought about by stealth, using more clandestine methods. He