On Magic

De magia is an unfinished Latin treatise from about 1590, written during Bruno’s wanderings in Germany and preserved only in manuscript until Felice Tocco and his collaborators printed it in 1891. It is the fullest statement of Bruno’s theory of magic. He begins by distinguishing the many meanings of the word magus, from wise man to wonder-worker to sorcerer, and divides magic into divine, natural and mathematical kinds. He then sets out a cosmology in which a single universal spirit or world-soul pervades all things, so that every being is linked to every other through a chain of influences descending from God and ascending from matter. Magic, on this view, is the art of understanding and manipulating these connections, exemplified by the magnet’s attraction. The long final section, on the ‘bonds of spirits’, analyses the ways spirits, including human souls and demons, can be bound and influenced: through faith, voice and song, sight, imagination and the cogitative power. The treatise thus links Ficino’s natural magic, the demonology of Neoplatonic and medieval writers, and Bruno’s own theory of the imagination. Ioan Couliano made it central to his reading of Renaissance magic as a technique of manipulating the phantasms of others, a reading that has influenced studies of rhetoric, propaganda and persuasion as well as of esotericism.

What it contains

• Definitions of magus and the kinds of magic
• Divine, natural and mathematical magic
• The universal spirit and the chain of beings
• Attraction, sympathy and the example of the magnet
• The classification of spirits and demons
• Bonds of spirits: faith, song, sight, imagination and thought