As documented in our former work, Petrus Romanus, the Middle Ages marked a Faustian bargain between the Roman Church and the Carolingian dynasty that served to suppress biblical theology and promote the papal juggernaut. In that work, we discussed the resulting years of darkness (757–1046 AD), ignominiously titled the “Pornocracy” or “Dark Age,” by asserting that “demonic weirdness defines the era.”[i] In light of that, a bit of arcane lore popularized by Jacques Vallée concerning a Spanish-born priest and archbishop of Lyon, Agobard of Lyon (779–840 AD), seems pertinent. Agobard mentions a folk belief concerning “a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds.”[ii] Given the historical context, we find the timing of this belief’s emergence to be telling. Beginning at this time, there was a developing acceptance that people were visiting the Earth from other worlds in flying ships. The account speaks of four visitors:
One day, among other instances, it chanced at Lyons that three men and a woman were seen descending from these aerial ships. The entire city gathered about them, crying out that they were magicians and were sent by Grimaldus, Duke of Beneventum, Charlemagne’s enemy, to destroy the French harvests.[iii]
The extraterrestrials were called “sylphs,” and these four contactees were called “ambassadors to the sylphs” (according to Nicolas Pierre-Henri, the abbot of Villars, France). The priest did his best to dispel the belief, and the citizens, while not entirely convinced, let the four ambassadors go free. The esoterica attributed to the abbot of Villars, The Count of Gabalis: Secret Interviews on Science (1670), supports the idea that the sylphs were indeed real and the contactees often achieved great success and widespread acclaim.[iv] Unfortunately, at this time, many in the priesthood were also involved in the occult arts and were not well trained in biblical theology.
It was the rise of scholasticism, largely inspired by the translation of the ancient Greek philosophers into Latin, that revived scholarly pursuits. Early on, an introduction to the logic of Aristotle by Porphyry was translated into Latin by Boethius, but it was Aristotle’s On the Heavens, available around 1170 and replete with chapters on otherworlds, that revived astrobiological speculations. An early example is from Saint Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), who wrote, “Since one of the most wondrous and noble questions in nature is whether there is one world or many, a question that the human mind desires to understand per se, it seems desirable for us to inquire about it.”[v] He wrote a complete treatise on astrology and astronomy called Speculum Astronomiae (“The Mirror of Astronomy”) and a treatise, De Mineralibus (“The Book of Minerals”), which dealt with astrological talismans made from minerals. That he was an occult practitioner is laid bare in his assertion that “the [science of talismans] cannot be proved by physical principles, but demands a knowledge of the sciences of astrology and magic and necromancy, which must be considered elsewhere.”[vi] Magnus discusses various astrological talismans, describes how to make them, and attempts to distinguish between demonic and natural magical powers of the heavens.
Even so, many of his contemporaries accused Magnus of being in league with the devil. Occult tradition holds that he discovered the philosopher’s stone and became wealthy from its gold.[vii] Nevertheless, he was “beatified” in 1622, meaning that the Catholic Church marked his entrance into heaven and endorsed his alleged postmortem capacity to intercede on behalf of individuals who pray in his name (a practice we have argued amounts to necromancy).[viii] On December 16, 1931, Pope Pius XI canonized him as the patron saint of the sciences and honored him as a doctor of the Church, one of only thirty-five persons so privileged. It was his famous student, Thomas Aquinas, who would devote more specific attention to other worlds.
Aquinas was convinced biblical truth could be reconciled with Aristotle’s cosmology. Accordingly, he sought to synthesize the Aristotelian science in On the Heavens with the Scriptures. Thus, he necessarily denied the existence of other worlds. In his influential work, Summa Theologica, he argued in this fashion:
Objection 1. It would seem that there is not only one world, but many. Because, as Augustine says (QQ. LXXXIII., qu. 46), it is unfitting to say that God has created things without a reason. But for the same reason that He created one, He could create many, since His power is not limited to the creation of one world; but rather it is infinite, as was shown above (Q. XXV., A. 2). Therefore God has produced many worlds.…
Reply Obj. 1. This reason proves that the world is one because all things must be arranged in one order, and to one end. Therefore from the unity of order in things Aristotle infers (Metaph. xii., text. 52) the unity of God governing all; and Plato (Tim.), from the unity of the exemplar, proves the unity of the world, as the thing designed.[ix]
Aquinas argued God’s power is seen in unity and order. One can readily see that he based his argumentation on Aristotle’s cosmology. Of course, Aristotle was fundamentally mistaken in his doctrine of natural place. Even so, these arguments stood unchallenged until the heresy hunters of the Inquisition turned their glance his way.
Surprisingly, it was the inquisitors who paved the way for ET belief. In 1277, Etienne Tempier, the bishop of Paris, issued a condemnation of 219 theological propositions that were said to be “true according to philosophy, but not according to the Catholic faith.”[x] Church historians believe Tempier was concerned that teachers, like Aquinas, accepted the pagan philosopher Aristotle’s views based on their internal logic rather than agreement with church doctrine. Of these 219 heretical propositions, number 34 was “that the first cause [God] could not make several worlds.”[xi] The disapproval was based on the idea that such a denial encroached upon the doctrine of divine omnipotence. Of course, this objection seemed to overlook the difference between what God could do and would do, a distinction that was not lost on theologians like William of Ockham (1290–1349) and Nichole Oresme (1320–1382), who argued that although God certainly was capable, He probably did not create other worlds. Even so, the existence of other worlds was now theologically respectable, and the stage was set for more radical divergence from what for centuries had been considered orthodoxy.
In 1440, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a German philosopher, theologian, and astronomer, had a mystical experience while returning from Constantinople by ship. He described his vision thus, “When by what I believe was a celestial gift from the Father of Lights, from whom comes every perfect gift, I was led to embrace imcomprehensibles incomprehensibly in leaned ignorance, by transcending those incorruptible truths that can be humanly known.”[xii] What followed was a treatise on mysticism entitled De Docta Ignorantia (“Of Learned Ignorance”). Similar to Buddhist practice, Nicholas called this “negative theology,” implying a sort of mystical knowing by not knowing. As a result, he conjured up hermetic platitudes like God is “a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”[xiii] He believed that the limits of science could be transcended by means of mystic speculation. Some even contend that this preempted Kepler, famous for his laws of planetary motion, by arguing there were no perfect circles in the universe. His learned ignorance inevitably led him to other worlds inhabited by extraterrestrials.
Nicholas homogenized the heavenly bodies by dismissing the Aristotelian doctrine of unity and natural place. Therefore, he concluded that the Earth, planets, sun, and stars were composed of the same elements, and that there was no center of attraction. He envisioned an infinite universe, whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere, containing countless rotating stars, the Earth merely being one of equal importance. Consequently, it is not too surprising that it is from Nicholas of Cusa that we encounter the first explicit Roman Catholic argumentation for the existence of extraterrestrials. In Of Learned Ignorance, chapter 12, he asserts:
Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heaven are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled—and that with beings, perhaps, of an inferior type—we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions.[xiv]
Rather than the censure one might expect, Nicholas’ work was enthusiastically received. It is important to note that he stated this was revelation from God and it went unchallenged by the Church. Shortly after his shipboard vision, he had become the papal envoy to Pope Eugene IV and assisted in the papal power struggle against the council of Basel, opposing its attempt to reform widespread abuse. He was promoted to the status of cardinal by Pope Nicholas V in 1448. The next person of note was more inclined to science than mystic speculation.
Perhaps one of the greatest contributors to the discussion, Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), never actually addressed the topic. Even so, his revolutionary work effectively removed the Earth from the center of the cosmos and seemingly relegated it one among many, perhaps similar, orbs revolving around the sun. He correctly surmised the apparent motion of the stars to be an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis and that the Earth orbited the sun once every year. Of course, this meant that the countless stars were potential suns and the observable planets might be other “earths.” Of course, if there are other earths, then one might imagine they are populated with people or something else entirely. It really did change everything. Yet, heliocentricism was not widely accepted in his lifetime. A few astronomers, including Germans Michael Maestlin (1550–1631), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the Englishman Thomas Digges (1546–1595), and the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), accepted it, leading historians like N. R. Hanson to quip that the “Copernican revolution” was a minor skirmish that prompted the Keplerian or Galilerian revolution.[xv] All the same, at the dawn of the Reformation, Copernicus had planted the seeds for an atomist revival replete with an alien invasion.
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The Reformation of ET
Even with heliocentricism creeping toward acceptance, the sixteenth-century revival of philosophical atomism was far more influential than astronomy. In an intellectual climate where Aristotelian cosmology was increasingly challenged, the writings of Lucretius, long lost to the West, had been discovered by the Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini. This was also the time of the council of Trent’s rabid anathemas and counterreformation Jesuit skullduggery. In 1563, the works of Lucretius were published in Paris, and this printing, known as the Lambinus edition, promoted a resurgence of atomist materialism. In the hands of the French writer Michel de Montaigne, ancient atomism was ample foil for forging a radical new skepticism. He bantered, “Your reason is never more plausible and on more solid ground then when it convinces you of a plurality of worlds.”[xvi] Despairing man’s grasp of absolute truth, a chance-driven worldview suited his fancy. It was in this environment that Lucretius’ work found its way into the hands of a Roman Catholic friar who became the poster boy of the philosophic alien invasion.
Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) is regarded among extraterrestrial apologists, secular and occult, as a free-thought martyr. Born in Naples, Bruno was a Catholic priest, Dominican monk, philosopher, hermetist, Kabbalist, mathematician, and astronomer. Influenced by Lucretius, his cosmology went well beyond the Copernican model by proposing that the sun was merely a garden variety star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of worlds populated by intelligent alien beings. Because space and time were infinite, his cosmogony (theory of Creation) denied divine causation. Still more, he adopted an animistic theory of matter. Animism is the idea that natural things like sticks and stones have immaterial souls. Bruno wrote, “If you speak of the world according to the meaning held among the true philosophers for whom the world is every globe, every star, this our earth, the sun’s body, the moon and even others, I reply that the soul of each of these worlds not only ascends and descends but moves in a circle.”[xvii] Delving deeply into occult lore, Bruno preferred magical to mathematical reasoning. Bruno’s faith has been described as “an incoherent materialistic pantheism.”[xviii] Moreover, he argued that his beliefs did not contradict Scripture or true religion. Yet, this begs the question: What did he regard as true religion?
Bruno defined magic as “the knowledge of the science of nature.”[xix] Within the renaissance worldview, it was common to merge magic and science because both explore and seek to gain mastery over the structure of the universe. Similarly, religion and magic were conflated because both answered the ultimate questions and offered communion with the divine. Accordingly, for Bruno, magic was the tool for realizing the ends of science and religion. While it seems at odds with the cold, hard, materialist posturing we are accustomed to, naturalist scientists are the heirs apparent to many of the occult traditions. Scholars have traced two streams of occultism in Bruno’s work.
Frances Yates, a scholar of Renaissance occultism, traced Bruno’s thought to the fifteenth-century rediscovery of the Hermetic Corpus, a Gnostic work allegedly authored by Hermes Trismegistus (meaning “thrice-greatest Hermes”), who is a syncretism of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. In Hermetic lore, Trismegistus is credited with having delivered all science, medicine, and magic to mankind. Yates makes the case that during the Renaissance, hermeticism spread like wildfire across the intellectual West, inspiring a revival of Egyptian magic practice and alchemy. In the case of Giordano Bruno, she writes:
Bruno was an intense religious Hermetist, a believer in the magical religion of the Egyptians as described in the Asclepius, the imminent return of which he prophesied in England, taking the Copernican sun as a portent in the sky of this imminent return. He patronises Copernicus for having understood his theory only as a mathematician, whereas he (Bruno) has seen its more profound religious and magical meanings.[xx]
Bruno cobbled the atomist extraterrestrial doctrine together with Egyptian magic, creating a system all his own. Yates writes,
Thus that wonderful bound of the imagination by which Bruno extended his Copernicanism to an infinite universe peopled with innumerable worlds, all moving and animated with the divine life, was seen by him—through his misunderstandings of Copernicus and Lucretius—as a vast extension of Hermetic gnosis, of the magician’s insight into the divine life of nature.[xxi]
Just so there is no ambiguity as to Bruno’s loyalties, Yates elaborates, “Giordano Bruno’s Egyptianism was demonic and revolutionary, demanding full restoration of the Egyptian-Hermetic religion.”[xxii] Popular among the Jesuit order, the hermetic writings combine Greek philosophy with Eastern religion. This is an interesting amalgamation paralleling Bruno’s life work in that he contributed both to modern science and to the development of Renaissance occultism.
On the other hand, Karen Silvia de León-Jones rejects the popular view of Bruno as hermetic magus and depicts him foremost as a Kabbalist. Kabbalah, meaning “tradition,” is the Jewish mysticism that arose in the twelfth century by interpreting the Torah according to secret or hidden knowledge. After the destruction of Jerusalem and subsequent Diaspora, Jews came to conceive of God as utterly transcendent. In other words, God seldom had any interaction with man. Consequently, an emanation doctrine was needed to reconcile the tension of God’s distance, and Kabbalah is one such expression. Theurgic Kabbalah, which became popular with Gentiles as well, involves study in three aspects: 1) the emanation (sephiroth) doctrine; 2) methods of interpreting the Scriptures: gematria, notarikon, and temurah; and 3) the redeemer doctrine.
The sephiroth are ten emanations of God’s attributes, which for all intents and purposes take the form of divine entities. These ten emanations are structured in a four-level control grid from God to our world. The four levels consist of: 1) the supernatural world: atziluth; 2) the world of creation: briah; 3) the world of formation: yetzirah; and 4) the world of material action: assiah. This system seemingly reconciles God’s transcendence with His imminence. The upper realms were naturally populated exclusively by spiritual entities, but by Kabbalistic meditation the adept were able to gain access. This was part and parcel of Bruno’s extraterrestrial landscape. León-Jones concludes, “Bruno is implementing those ‘angelic superstructures’ through which demons are controlled, and this is precisely demonic magic.”[xxiii] He operated in the transcendent realms, seeking to access the plurality of worlds and alien beings in which Lucretius had only dreamt. He seems knowledgeable of the extraterrestrial channelings in Nicholas of Cusa’s Of Learned Ignorance, because he outlined a method of obtaining god-like wisdom through “Kabbalistic Ignorance” associated with “certain mystic theologians” within his dialogue Cabala of Pegasus.[xxiv] Bruno scholars explain, “To achieve this, individuals must resolve the paradox (by employing a Kabbalistic reading of the Cabala) of arriving at that most vile baseness by which they are made capable of more magnificent exaltation.”[xxv] This is a strange paradox indeed.
Bruno wrote in his treatise Essays on Magic, “One can prove that demons are material and that they are of several different kinds, by the fact that they have emotions, desires, angers, jealousies and similar feelings found in humans, and in animals composed of observable dense matter. That is why the slaughtering and sacrifice of animals was instituted, for these demons are pleased a very great deal by such ceremonies and fumes.”[xxvi] Indeed he seems to have interacted with demonic entities enough to provide details concerning their bodies: “Although they are spiritual substances, nature has given them a body which is very thin and is not endowed with senses. They belong to the genus of animal which, as was said, has more species than do living, composite and sensory animals.”[xxvii] The thin body certainly brings to mind modern descriptions of wispy alien greys. Nevertheless, Bruno was no abductee. He sought to control and manipulate them by playing one against the other: “Strong invocations and supplications to make the power of the superior overcome the inferior, for example, to banish evil demons by good ones, and to banish lower evil demons by higher ones. These demons are enticed by sacrifices and holocausts; they are frightened by threats, and they are summoned by the powers of inflowing rays of light.”[xxviii] Indeed, the siren song of the occult is the promise of influencing the powers and principalities of this world. Kabbalah was the chosen methodology for reconciling his magic with Scripture.
The Kabbalistic methods of interpreting the Scriptures often yield surprising results. Gematria is the well-known practice of creating equivalences from the numerical values of words.[xxix]
The second method, notarikon, is an acrostic system in which the letters of a word might be used to form a sentence. One turns a word in Scripture into an acronym, revealing a hidden meaning.
A famous example is אגלא AGLA for Atah Gibor Le-olam Adonai, meaning, “The Lord is mighty forever.”[xxx] Esoteric lore holds that the name of AGLA preserved Lot and his family from fire and brimstone that rained down on Sodom and Gomorrah. AGLA was considered a power name of God by magicians of the Middle Ages, and it appeared in magical formulas for everything from protection to flying.
Themurah
Themurah, תמורה (“exchange”) in Kabbalah, denotes “transposition.” It consists of transposing the letters of a word by various techniques to coax hidden meanings out of Scripture. For example, each letter can be replaced with the preceding letter in the alphabet, e.g., ET = DS.
Another simple example involves folding the alphabet in half to form a code.
The third aspect of Kabbalah is the familiar Old-Testament expectation of the coming Messiah. Of course, Christians recognize that He came as the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53), but Jews await His coming as conquering King (Zechariah 14:9). Interestingly, the single most important Kabbalistic work, Sefer ha-Zohar (“Book of Splendor”), predicted the messiah’s arrival in the year 5773 (September 16, 2012, to September 4, 2013). A modern edition of the Zohar offers:
In the 73rd year, that is, seven years after Messiah Ben Joseph was revealed, all the kings of the world shall assemble in the great city of Rome. And the Holy One, blessed be He, will shower fire and hail and meteoric stones upon them, until they are wiped out from the world. And only those kings who did not go to Rome will remain in the world. And they shall return and wage other wars. During this time, the King Messiah will declare himself throughout the whole world and many nations will gather around him together with many armies from all comers of the world. And all the children of Yisrael will assemble together in their places.[xxxi]
While we are not aware that the messiah Ben Joseph presented himself to anyone years ago, the fruition of this prophecy will likely coincide near the release of our upcoming documentary on The Great Delusion. We suspect, if it amounts to anything at all, it heralds the Antichrist.
First and foremost, these methods are used to derive hidden occult meanings from Scripture. It is easy to see that, by such torturous manipulations, one could make the Bible say almost anything. In Bruno’s syncretistic faith, Kabbalah provided a biblical support for occult theories such as metempsychosis (the transmigration of the soul associated with reincarnation), an Eastern idea that Bruno sought to prove through atomic theory. In this way, his science was an extension of his magic. While hotly debated among scholars like Yates and León-Jones, it seems fair to accept that Bruno was an adept of multiple occult disciplines. Bruno’s occultism was a syncretism of Romanism, hermetism, kabbalah, and atomist philosophy. Fascinatingly, he is among the few sorcerers to be claimed by Catholics, occultists, and secular humanists alike.
In his introduction to a modern edition of Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity, Alfonso Ingegno writes, “This was a philosophy aimed at liberating man from the fear of death and the gods, pointing the way to an escape from the snares which demons use to catch us.”[xxxii] Accordingly, modern secularists and ET true believers like to portray Bruno as some sort of scientific messiah. In fact, if you would like to read Bruno’s treatise, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, you will find it hosted on the Positive Atheism website.[xxxiii] Another representative example comes from humanist Edward Howard Griggs who, while doting like a schoolgirl, calls him, “a world wandering scholar, a poet soul among philosophers, intense, passionate, disappearing in the dungeons of the Inquisition, emerging only to meet martyrdom, but in whom the intellectual spirit of our time appears three hundred years in advance.”[xxxiv] In his book, Great Leaders in Human Progress, Griggs titled the chapter on Bruno, “The Martyr of Science.” Au contraire, he should have been memorialized as a magus. The Inquisition did not doubt.
While visiting Venice, Bruno was betrayed to the Inquisition, jailed, and eventually sent to Rome. Historians are at a loss as to why he was kept in prison for six long years prior to his short tribunal by the Roman Inquisition in 1599. Bruno’s most representative work, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, a satirical indictment of papal Romanism, published in 1584, was singled out during the inquisitor’s summation. According to Gaspar Schopp, Bruno made an ominous overture to the inquisitors, “Perchance, you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”[xxxv] This quip earned him a wooden vice for his tongue, silencing any protest as Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and issued a sentence of death. On February 17, 1600, in a central Roman square called the Campo de’ Fiori, he was burned at the stake. As an extension of the unholy union of Church and state, the Roman Church is forever besmirched by its capacity for murderous zeal.
In 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, after discovering a number of lost documents relating to Bruno’s trial, stated that the Church was perfectly justified in condemning him. But is divergence from Roman Catholic Orthodoxy really a justification for a death sentence? The Catholic Encyclopedia contends:
Bruno was not condemned for his defense of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.[xxxvi]
On the four-hundredth anniversary of Bruno’s death, in the year 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno’s death to be a “sad episode,” but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno’s prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors “had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.”[xxxvii] Suspiciously, the records of Bruno’s inquisition are said to be lost. We denounce the Roman Catholic rationale with strong prejudice. No true Church has any business executing anyone for what he or she believes. While Romanism has begged to disagree, biblical Christianity can compete in the marketplace of ideas without torturing and murdering its critics.
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[i] Thomas Horn and Cris D. Putnam, Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope Is Here (Crane MO: Defender, 2012),
208.
[ii] Agobard, Liber De Grandine Et Tonitruis, chapter II cited in Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars, Comte de Gabalis, ou Entretiens sur Us Sciences Secretes, English ed (Paterson, NJ: The News Printing Company, 1914), 194.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] “Nevertheless, as they escaped with their lives they were free to recount what they had seen, which was not altogether fruitless for, as you will recall, the age of Charlemagne was prolific of heroic men. This would indicate that the woman who had been in the home of the Sylphs found credence among the ladies of the period and that, by the grace of God, many Sylphs were immortalized. Many Sylphids also became immortal through the account of their beauty which these three men gave; which compelled the people of those times to apply themselves somewhat to Philosophy; and thence are derived all the stories of the fairies which you find in the love legends of the age of Charlemagne and of those which followed.” Villars, Comte de Gabalis, 193.
[v] Albertus Magnus, as quoted in Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 23.
[vi] Albertus Magnus, De Mineralibus, translation by Dorothy Wyckhoff; from The Book of Minerals, (Oxford, 1967); viewable here: “Albertus Magnus on Talismans,” Renaissance Astrology, last accessed January 9, 2013, http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/albertusmagnustalisman.html.
[vii] Julian Franklyn, A Survey of the Occult (London: Electric Book Company, 2005), 29.
[viii] Thomas Horn and Cris D. Putnam, Petrus Romanus, 307.
[ix]Saint Thomas Aquinas and Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Summa Theologica, Translation of: Summa Theologica, I q.47 a.3 obj. 1; ad 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 2009).
[x] Etienne Tempier, as quoted in Everett Ferguson, Church History Volume One: From Christ to Pre-Reformation: The Rise and Growth of the Church in Its Cultural, Intellectual, and Political Context, Kindle ed (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), Kindle locations 9554–9555.
[xi] Etienne Tempier, as quoted in Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book, edited with commentary (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 21.
[xii] “Letter to Cardinal Guliano Cesarini,” as quoted in Christopher M. Bellitto, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Gerald Christianson, Introducing Nicholas of Cusa: A Guide to a Renaissance Man (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 2004), 206.
[xiii] Peter M. J. Hess and Paul L. Allen, Catholicism and Science (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008), 22.
[xiv] Nicolas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, translated by Germain Heron (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 111–118; as cited in Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 31.
[xv] N. R. Hanson, “The Copernican Disturbance and the Keplerian Revolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 161–184; as cited in Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, 37.
[xvi] The Complete Works of Montaigne, translated by Donald F. Frame (Stanford, 1958), p. 390.
[xvii] Giordano Bruno, The Heroic Frenzies (Parigi, Appresso Antonio Baio, 1585), translated by Paulo Eugene Memmo, Jr., 1964. Viewable here: Esoteric Archives, last accessed January 9, 2013, http://www.esotericarchives.com/bruno/furori.htm.
[xviii] William Turner (1908), “Giordano Bruno,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, (New York, NY: Robert Appleton Company). Viewable here: “Giordano Bruno, New Advent, last accessed January 9, 2013, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm.
[xix] Karen Silvia De León-Jones, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 9.
[xx] Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 155. See the book here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V5DMa7eWOlkC&lpg.
[xxi] Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 248. See the book here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V5DMa7eWOlkC&lpg.
[xxii] Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 422.See the book here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V5DMa7eWOlkC&lpg.
[xxiii] Karen Silvia de León-Jones, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah, 21.
[xxiv] Karen Silvia de León-Jones, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah, 67.
[xxv] Giordano Bruno, The Cabala of Pegaus, translated and annotated by Sidney L. Sondergard and Madison U. Sowell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), xxxii. Viewable here: http://www.yale.edu/yup/pdf/092172_front_1.pdf
[xxvi] Giordano Bruno, Essays on Magic, in Cause, Principle, and Unity & Essays on Magic translated and edited by Richard J. Blackwell and Robert de Lucca (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128. See the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=0E565t7WozQC&lpg=PA186&ots=SeZpc5VNvH&dq=Cause%2C%20Principle%20and%20Unity.%20Ed.%20R.J.%20Blackwell%20and%20Robert%20de%20Lucca%2C%20with%20an%20Introduction%20by%20Alfonso%20Ingegno.&pg=PA106#v=onepage&q&f=false.
[xxvii] Giordano Bruno, Essays on Magic, 139. See the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=0E565t7WozQC&lpg=PA186&ots=SeZpc5VNvH&dq=Cause%2C%20Principle%20and%20Unity.%20Ed.%20R.J.%20Blackwell%20and%20Robert%20de%20Lucca%2C%20with%20an%20Introduction%20by%20Alfonso%20Ingegno.&pg=PA106#v=onepage&q&f=false.
[xxviii] Giordano Bruno, Essays on Magic, 131. See the book here: http://books.google.com/books?id=0E565t7WozQC&lpg=PA186&ots=SeZpc5VNvH&dq=Cause%2C%20Principle%20and%20Unity.%20Ed.%20R.J.%20Blackwell%20and%20Robert%20de%20Lucca%2C%20with%20an%20Introduction%20by%20Alfonso%20Ingegno.&pg=PA106#v=onepage&q&f=false.
[xxix] For number values see: “Gematria Chart,” Inner.org, last accessed January 9, 2013, http://www.inner.org/gematria/gemchart.php.
[xxx] “AGLA,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, last modified August 14, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGLA.
[xxxi] Rav Shimon Bar. Commentary by Yehuda Ashlag, Edited & compiled by Rabbi Michael Berg. Yochai, The Zohar: the First Ever Unabridged English Translation with Commentary (23 Volume Set) Vol. 3: Lech lecha Vayera (Los Angeles: Kabbalah Centre Intl, 2003), 486. Google Books link Quoted here.
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