The Incantation of Circe

The Cantus Circaeus was published in Paris in 1582, shortly after De umbris idearum, with a dedication to Henri d’Angoulême, Grand Prior of France, and a preface by his secretary Jean Regnault, who arranged its publication. It consists of two dialogues. In the first, the enchantress Circe, assisted by her attendant Moeris, performs a series of solemn invocations to the Sun, Moon and planets, with altars and fumigations, and then transforms corrupt human beings into the animals whose vices they embody. The questions Moeris asks allow Bruno to develop a satirical moral typology, matching human failings to beasts, a theme he would later expand in his Italian dialogues. The planetary hymns, which appear to draw on Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy, have made the work a favourite text for students of Renaissance magic. The second dialogue, between two speakers named Albericus and Borista, is a practical treatise on the art of memory, describing how to build memory places and images for remembering things and words, including methods based on letters and numbers. The combination is characteristic of Bruno: the magical and the mnemonic are presented as aspects of a single art of working on the imagination. Ioan Couliano and others have read the work as an example of Bruno’s ‘magic of the phantasm’, in which images are used to bind and transform the soul.

What it contains

• Dedication to Henri d’Angoulême and Regnault’s preface
• Dialogue I: Circe’s invocations of the planetary powers
• Transformation of vicious humans into animals as moral satire
• Dialogue II: a practical art of memory for things and words
• Methods of memory places, images and number-letter systems