The Forbidden Universe (5 page)

The first Hermetic reference in Alexander’s apartment is in a series of pictures showing the pagan and Jewish prophets who allegedly foresaw Christ’s coming. So far this is conventional: images or statues of Hermes Trismegistus appear in several cathedrals for the same reason. More unexpected is a painting in which Hermes and Moses are shown sitting before Isis, implying that Alexander accepted Hermes’ equal status to Moses and that both drew their wisdom from Egypt. Judaism is seen as having emerged from the Egyptian Hermetic religion just as Christianity was to emerge from Judaism. Not only does Isis therefore
appear in the Vatican, but she is depicted in all her power and glory – not as some pagan deity wretchedly grovelling to a triumphant Christianity.

Other peculiar pro-Egyptian imagery in the Borgia
apartments
relates to bulls. As that animal was the Borgia family’s symbol, this may not be so surprising, at least at first glance. However, the bas-reliefs in Alexander’s apartments clearly associate the Borgia bull with the sacred Apis bull of Egypt, which is shown being worshipped and, in turn, worshipping the cross. Once again an association between Christianity and the religion of Egypt is implied, linked thematically with a Borgia pope worshipping Christ, suggesting that the relationship between Hermeticism and Christianity was important to Alexander.

However, extraordinary though it may seem, this is not to imply that Alexander wasn’t a Christian, or that a closet occultist had infiltrated the highest office of the Church. It was quite permissible to see Christianity as the heir of a tradition that stretched back to ancient Egypt, and one to be celebrated. Such associations belonged to the new spirit of the time. Indeed, the most surprising thing about the Appartamento Borgia frescoes is that they indicate that even a Borgia pope was capable of caring more deeply about his religion’s origins than most Catholics at the time.

Eighty years after the rediscovery of the lost books of Hermes, Copernicus gave pride of place to the legendary Egyptian sage in his own seminal work on the movements of the planets. But why?

It is hardly surprising that Copernicus was familiar with the Hermetica, having studied in Rome and Padua in the 1480s and 90s, where it was on everyone’s lips. But evidence suggests that the works meant considerably more to him than mere intellectual fashion. The debt Copernicus owed
to the Hermetica is demonstrated by the fact that the three revolutionary ideas he was to famously propose – the Earth’s motion in space, its rotation on its own axis and the orbiting of the Earth and other planets around the sun –
all appeared in the Hermetica.

Asclepius
, for example, provides the following statement in the middle of a discourse on ‘classes’, or archetypes:

Hermeticism lays great emphasis on the sun, which is regarded as a kind of relay station for God’s creative and sustaining power and described in turn as the ‘visible god’ and a ‘second god’.
³³
But although it isn’t so surprising to find the sun given such prominence in the Hermetica, some passages about its importance are intriguingly specific. Treatise XVI, in which Asclepius expounds various points of teaching to King Ammon, contains two particularly tantalizing statements: ‘For the sun is situated at the centre of the cosmos, wearing it like a crown’
³⁴
; and ‘Around the sun are the eight spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six of the planets, and the one that surrounds the earth.’
³⁵

These ‘spheres’ correspond to the modern concept of orbits, as it was thought that the celestial bodies were fixed to transparent spheres. Under the old Ptolemaic system the spheres surround (‘depend from’) the Earth, with the sun occupying its own sphere. But this is not what is described in Treatise XVI, with the spheres surrounding the sun, which is situated at the centre. And the Earth has its own sphere which, like the other planets, ‘depends from’ the sun in a way that only makes sense in Copernican terms.

Perhaps most interesting of all is the fact the heliocentric aspects are only mentioned in passing, when some other principle is being elucidated. It appears that the writers of at least these particular Hermetic treatises took the Earth’s journey around the sun for granted. Clearly, by referring to Hermes Trismegistus in his own exposition of the heliocentric system – besides quoting from Ficino on the sun as the embodiment of God – Copernicus shows that he was at least familiar with the prototype for his own ideas. As Frances Yates concluded:

While Tobias Churton, the British authority on Hermeticism and Gnosticism, states that (his emphasis):

The fact that Copernicus was inspired by the Hermetica
also, of course, made the debate over heliocentricity of keen interest to Hermeticists, especially as it seemed to vindicate their semi-sacred texts. If the theory could be proven beyond doubt, it would engender confidence in the entirety of the Hermetic philosophy. And as we shall see, there were some who took it considerably further than that. Certainly, and unsurprisingly, in the ensuing furore about Copernicus’ new theory, the Hermeticists were among his most ardent supporters.

As already mentioned, it is a misconception that the heliocentric theory in itself sparked off a notorious religious furore. Although Copernicus dedicated his book to Pope Paul III, he was not, as many assume, simply boot-licking in an attempt to head off papal disapproval. After all, Paul was quite happy with Copernicus’ theories ten years before
On
the Revolutions
was published. In the dedication, somewhat airily, Copernicus explained his reluctance to go public by saying he wanted to avoid harsh words from lesser scholars: he was not concerned it might stir up theological controversy, let alone accusations of heresy.

Even the notorious preface, apologetically explaining that the ideas contained therein were just theories, no more valid than any other about the workings of the heavens, was designed to placate
scholars
. The preface was actually written by a Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander, who oversaw the printing of
On the Revolutions
after Copernicus’ death. But because Osiander didn’t make his authorship clear, many readers assumed the preface expressed Copernicus’ own position. Georg Rheticus, the mathematician who persuaded Copernicus to go public with his theory, later threatened to beat Osiander up for his audacity.

The heliocentric theory raised no major theological
difficulties anyway. True, there are a handful of implications in the Old Testament concerning the immobility of the world. The First Book of Chronicles, for example, states that, ‘The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved’,
³⁸
and Joshua is said to have convinced God to stop the sun in the sky, which implies that it was the sun, not the Earth, which moves.
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But in the end few churchmen thought Copernicus’ theory was worthy of oiling the rack and heating the pincers.

Ironically, any religious objections came not from the Vatican but from Protestants, although even the most hellfire-and-damnation regarded the theory as mere folly as opposed to blasphemy. Martin Luther himself ridiculed it, but mainly because he was aghast at the suggestion that astronomy could have got it so fundamentally wrong for so long.

This was also largely the position of scholars, who too were disturbed for another reason, which is less obvious today. Proposing that traditional astronomy was
profoundly
flawed seemed intimidating, since it implied that human understanding of the order of the universe, and the way one part influenced another, was seriously lacking. If Copernicus was right, then
everything
changed.

This was not yet the era of science as we know it in the modern sense. Even learned men such as Copernicus and Johannes Kepler believed that a greater understanding of the movements of the heavenly bodies would improve the accuracy not only of astronomy but also its esoteric twin, astrology. No astronomer at that time believed the workings of the universe were due to impersonal physical forces. To them, God had decreed that the universe should operate in the way it did. As such, discovering how it worked offered an insight into the divine mind, and might also throw light on God’s plan for all creation. This mindset drove the likes of Kepler who, building on Copernicus’
work, established the laws of planetary motion.

Kepler (1571–1630) was another great name of the scientific revolution who was steeped in the Renaissance occult tradition. He believed that the planets, including the Earth, are living entities with their own world souls and that the seat of the
anima mundi
is in the sun. As an astrologer he wrote that a new star that appeared in 1604 portended major changes on Earth. Unsurprisingly, his writings also reveal a detailed knowledge of the
Corpus Hermeticum
.

A suggestion that Kepler drew direct inspiration from the works of Hermes Trismegistus appears in the following enigmatic statement from the
Harmony of the World
(
Harmonices mundi
), in which he outlined the laws of planetary motion:

Some embraced Copernicus’ new ordering of the solar system as a leap forward in understanding the workings of creation, but it absolutely terrified many others. If the traditional understanding of cosmological behaviour was wrong, then how could men begin to understand their own place in the universe? And the uncertainty – some accepted Copernicus’ new order, others stuck to the old system of Ptolemy – meant that chaos reigned, and not merely in the academic discipline of astronomy, but in the world at large. This aspect of the heliocentric debate was so significant at the time it even surfaces as a major theme in William
Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
. Shakespeare was obviously familiar with Hermeticism, as allusions appear in his works, for example in Hamlet’s homage to humankind which echoes Pico’s vision: ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! … In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!’
⁴¹

Astronomers, rather than literary historians, have often seen clear and specific allusions to the debate over the heliocentric theory in the play, which dates from around 1600. Peter D. Usher, Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University, has recently argued that the whole work is an allegory for the struggle between the two models of the universe, suggesting that
the
major theme is that Hamlet, prince of the new learning and repeatedly associated with the sun, is involved in a bid to establish his rightful place as the king – at the centre of his universe – by overthrowing his uncle Claudius. It just so happens that Ptolemy’s first name was Claudius.

References to the heliocentricity controversy are
undeniably
scattered throughout the play. For example, Hamlet writes to his love interest Ophelia:

Other references are less obvious today. For example, many generations of readers and actors have studied Hamlet’s apparently peculiar declaration, ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’,
⁴³
without realizing its potentially subversive undercurrent.

The leading supporter of Copernicus’ theories in
Shakespeare
’s England was the mathematician (and Member of Parliament) Thomas Digges, who went one step further than
his hero. Although Copernicus maintained the traditional belief that the stars all exist on the same sphere, equally distant from the centre of the solar system, Digges suggested that they are positioned at different distances in an infinite universe. His actual words were that the world was not enclosed in the stellar sphere ‘
as in a nutshell
’. And as Shakespeare knew Digges personally – they lived in the same building in Bishopsgate, east London, and Digges’ son worked at the Globe Theatre
⁴⁴
– there seems little doubt the ‘nutshell’ line was an allusion to Digges’ theory.
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