SOURCE: "'Doctor' Bruno's Solar Medicine," in The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XV, No. 2, Summer, 1984, pp. 209-24.

I. The Solar Age and the Internal History of Science

In an article published in 1958, Eugenio Garin discussed the influence of the emperor Julian's Oratio ad solem upon the "solar literature" of the Renaissance. Nothing the deeply religious flavor of the texts of such authors as Gemistus Plethon, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, and Agostino Steuco, Garin theorized that their platonizing tendencies had led them toward a recuperation, albeit Christian, of the sun worship of Julian [E. Garin, Studi sul Platonismo medievale, 1958]. Garin further suggested—and I think entirely correctly this time—that the continuation of the manufacture of "solar literature" into the seventeenth century, that is, from the time of Copernicus to that of Galileo, "could help to underline a double tone, at the same time also ambiguous, of scientific revolution and of religious crisis…. Nothwithstanding Galileo's eifort, it will be difficult to separate the new scientific vision of the world from a whole complex of religious resonances."

We can readily discern such intertwining themes in two scientific works which were written toward the beginning and toward the end of this era of Renaissance solar literature: Copernicus' De revolutionibus and Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess. At a vital point in his description of the heliocentric model of the universe, Copernicus refers to that part of the Asclepius where Hermes calls the Sun a "visible god." And Galileo concludes his Letter with a quotation from Julian's Oratio.

Whatever we may wish to make of these facts, Copernicus' and Galileo's works are recognizable to us as books of science, with what we would today call scientific intent. Thus do historians of science and intellectual historians now read these works. In addition, both historians of science and intellectual historians would agree that the philosophical and religious writings of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola are in no way scientific. Yet the texts of all of these men comprise that part of Renaissance literature which Garin calls "solar."

In this article I wish to address the reading of a text which seems curiously to bridge the two extremes of Copernicus and Galileo, on the one hand, and Ficino and Pico, on the other. The text in question is Giordano Bruno's La Cena de le Ceneri or, as it is known in English, The Ash Wednesday Supper.

The Ash Wednesday Supper is one of the most forceful products of late Renaissance solar literature. Its force comes from its embrace and adaptation of the Copernican achievement as well as from its use of a multi-solar and infinite universe as a means to achieving religious reconciliation in late sixteenth-century Europe. I shall argue that Bruno performs a kind of solar magic in this dialogue and that the work must be read in this way in order to make sense of it. Although I do not wish to enter into a discussion of the question of the relation of Hermetism to the Scientific Revolution, I do want to preface my discourse on The Ash Wednesday Supper as solar literature with a brief look at certain internalist, history-of-science views on Bruno's text. Briefly, the internalist's approach endeavors to place Bruno in a kind of positivistic continuum wherein he becomes a fairly important step between Nicholas Oresme and Galileo. While this approach can be defended, for the historian of science to say that any nonscientific or extrascientific reading of the Supper is improper cannot be justified.

Many problems arise when the internalist turns to The Ash Wednesday Supper. Since this work uses the Copernican theory and adds to it such notions as those of the infinite universe and the plurality of worlds, the reader is tempted, as Professor Emile Namer has suggested should be done, to isolate this work from Bruno's oeuvre. This procedure, however, assumes that there was a "true" Bruno and a "cunning" Bruno. The former entrusted his intuitive insights to paper as seldom as possible, though the "modern" reader realizes that it was just these fragmentary insights which bridged the gap between Copernicus and Newton. The latter, "cunning" Bruno knew what kind of superstitious bogus the market would bear, and he opportunistically pandered to this audience. But, as we shall see, The Ash Wednesday Supper complements rather than opposes the works written by Bruno at approximately the same time [Emile Namer, Revue d'Histoire des Sciences et de leurs Applications 29, 1976].

Yet, this isolating of The Ash Wednesday Supper from others of Bruno's writings would seem to lead to edifying results. By ignoring the emblematic nature of Bruno's text and its engravings, a "corrected" and "sanitized" text makes it appear as if Bruno's intentions in the Supper were entirely "scientific." Such treatment seems to save Bruno for the internalist historian of science, for it is no longer necessary to think that Bruno was "interested only … magical or even political motivations" in The Ash Wednesday Supper [R. S. Westman and J. E. McGuire, eds., Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution, 1977].

There is, however, a high price to pay for this too narrow reading of the Supper. The rest of the text is truncated and made incomprehensible. If it were true that Bruno was merely following in Oresme's footsteps, why the second dialogue's tale of the Nolan's journey through London; why the constant theme of Unity throughout the Supper; why, indeed, the very title of this work, and why the incantation at its end? The internalist approach does not and cannot answer these questions. Yet, surely it is more than an aesthetician's dream that they can be answered and that the text can be read as an integrated whole, not as a cunning medium for a few intuitive insights. It is my contention that an analysis of textual themes will most fruitfully unify the Supper and yield Bruno's overall message of the healing powers of the Copernican Sun.

II. Social and Intellectual Illness

Since much has already been written about The Ash Wednesday Supper, I need only to summarize some of the most salient points about its general meaning and intent. One of six "Italian dialogues" written by Bruno in England between 1583 and 1585, it is dedicated to the Marquis de Mauvissière, at whose ambassadorial residence Bruno stayed in London. The Ash Wednesday Supper telescopes together two events. The first is a description of a "supper" supposedly held at Sir Fulke Greville's home on Ash Wednesday (February 14) 1584. (It is more likely, on the basis of textual evidence and statements Bruno later made to the Inquisition, that the "supper" really took place at Mauvissière's residence.) The subject of this supper was la Cena, the Eucharist. The second event is the lecture-debate in which Bruno engaged at Oxford University on the occasion of the visit there of the Polish prince Albert Alasco (June 1583); the subject of that event was supposed to have been the Copernican theory. Bruno, however, created quite a scandal at Oxford not only because of his Italian pronunciation of Latin but also because he apparently "lifted" portions of his remarks from Ficino's famous book on astral magic, De vita coelitus comparanda.

We should also bear in mind two facts external to the text: first, that Bruno explicitly said that the "troubles" in religion would only be settled if the dogmatic differences between Protestants and Catholics concerning the Eucharist could be composed, and, second, that Bruno felt that he was in England on a clandestine mission from the French king. It is by remembering that Bruno placed great emphasis on the impasse over the Eucharist and that he thought of himself as Henri Ill's ambassador without portfolio that we can begin, as we study its thematic structure, to understand the imagery that pervades The Ash Wednesday Supper and the role played in it by the Sun.

A major theme of The Ash Wednesday Supper is disease and its opposite, health. The Nolan (Bruno) first refers to his two opponents in debate, Doctors Nundinio and Torquato, as "two ghastly harridans, two dreams, two ghosts, two quartan agues." Bruno's prefatory admonition that not one word in the Supper will be idle is perhaps not enough to make us attach great importance to the reference to quartan agues. We also know, however, that the medical lore of the time had it that such fevers could be cured by the correct application of communion wafers. Such beliefs were popular and rural, but more sophisticated adherents of the belief could be found among those who were adept in the cabalistic arts. And, of course, the Roman Catholic Mass, just before the communion service, speaks of the Eucharist in terms of spiritual healing, "Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur anima mea. " Drawing upon these ecclesiastical and high- and low-culture traditions, Bruno will, by applying the Eucharist rightly understood, cure the fevers, drive out the bad doctors, and restore health and sanity to England and Europe.

In the first two dialogues of the Supper Bruno constantly returns to the theme of disease and health. In addition to calling him a quartan ague, Bruno describes Torquato as a desiccated being from whom not one drop of juice could be extracted by a press. Torquato and Nundinio were Aristotelians at now Protestant Oxford. Speaking of this generalized group of sterile Aristotelians, Teofilo says that the Nolan's opponents are in blindness and the dark. On the other hand, Teofilo asserts that the Nolan and other followers of the "true" solar philosophy are:

… moderate in life, expert in medicine, unique in divination, miraculous in magic, wary of superstition, … irreproachable in morality, godlike in every way. All this is proved by the length of their lives [and] their healthier bodies.

Such magi as Bruno "free the human mind" and

open the cloisters of truth, give eyes to the moles and sight to the blind, loose the tongues of the dumb [so that they can now] express their entangled opinions.

Given the opportunity, then Bruno could even cure the blindness of Nundinio and Torquato.

While the first dialogue offers the reader a picture of diseased intellectuals and their happier alternative—Bruno and all those who enjoy the good health and miraculous powers made available by the solar philosophy—, the second dialogue delineates the social results of the teachings of such Protestant professors as Torquato and Nundinio. Disease, infirmity, and darkness are present throughout this dialogue, which recounts the Nolan's arduous journey from his residence to Sir Fulke Greville's house. Teofilo says that the stars "lay behind a dark, obscure mantle." The pages that follow indicate that this is the dark of social blindness and disease. The social, individual, and physical blight infecting London and its townsmen is evident everywhere: the Nolan's surly and preternaturally decrepit oarsmen with great effort can only move the hollow wreck of a boat a short way before the Nolan and his friends are ungraciously forced to go ashore and make their way through swinish passages and Avernus-like potholes. Worst of all is the boorish and boarish populace they encounter, whose incivility makes of them:

such a stinkhole that, if they were mightily well repressed…, they would send forth such a stink and reek as would darken the name of the whole population, to the extent that England could boast a people which in irreverence, incivility, coarseness, boorishness, savagery and illbreeding would yield nothing to any other people the earth might nourish on its breast…. I set before your eyes [those] who, seeing a foreigner, seem, by God, so many wolves and bears and who, by their grim looks, regard him as a pig would [regard] someone who came to take away his trough.

In characterizing the London mob as "ramming and butting beasts" who, as they lug and push their heavy loads of food and wares, crash into the Nolan and nearly kill him, Bruno seems to allude to the animal and other constellations whose reformation he describes as taking place in the Spaccio della bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast). Perhaps by describing this London mob in their animal forms, Bruno is magically trying to rid them of their baleful power. This interpretation fits well with my discussion of Bruno's powerful conjuration at the end of the Supper, which I will give below.

That Bruno is not simply portraying a bestial mob of the sort that could have been found in any sixteenth-century city is evidenced by the fact that, later, Bruno explicitly says that the London mob is the epigones of the Oxford doctors and their economy of salvation which frustrates the inclination for "good works." Further indication that Bruno relates the bestiality of the mob to the Protestant dispensation and its "dead" eucharistic Sacrament is given at the end of the second dialogue itself. There Teofilo thanks God that at Greville's supper the "ceremony of the cup" did not take place. Although it did not, Teofilo nevertheless describes it in a marvelous parody of the Protestant communion in both kinds:

Usually the chalice passes around the table…. After the leader of this dance has de tached his lips, leaving a layer of grease which could easily be used as glue, another drinks and leaves a bit of meat on the rim, still another drinks and leaves a hair of his beard…. Since all of them came together to make themselves into a flesh-eating wolf to eat the lamb or kid or Grunnio Corrocotta, by thus applying each one his mouth to the selfsame tankard, they come to form themselves into one selfsame lech, in token of one community, one brotherhood, one plague, one heart, one stomach, one gullet and one mouth [emphasis mine].

We are now once again reminded that the subject of the dialogue is the Supper. And we are now told that the Protestant communion is a plague, that is, a disease.

Having discoursed on the diseases afflicting the university teachers and the English commoners whose rude behavior results from the Protestant doctrine of salvation, which gives no place to the efficacy of good works and thus "quenches the fervor of good actions," Bruno turns to the arguments, in the latter three dialogues, in which we find his physical experiments. It is these that the internalist historian of science relies upon to make of Bruno a link between Oresme and Galileo. Yet, even in these sections—following the dialogues that speak of sickness, the Eucharist, and the solar philosophy—we find him referring again and again to disease. He no longer speaks of quartan fevers and plague but of madness.

Bruno notes the fear with which the Copernican theory was met in some quarters. The prefacer [Osiander] of Copernicus' De revolutionibus was afraid, says Bruno through Teofilo, that he and others would be "driven mad" by Copernicus and for this reason had insisted falsely that Copernicus' model had been advanced solely for calculational purposes. Later in the Supper Torquato asks the Nolan if he is "sailing to Anticyra," that is, if he is going mad. According to legend one could obtain in Anticyra the "hellebore" which cured madness. In a sense—to Bruno's mind at least—the Nolan was sailing to that fabled place not because he was mad but he was bringing to England the drug which would cure the madness of religious division. This point is implicit in Bruno's statement that it is Torquato who is mad and that he, the Nolan, is going to "glue together the brains of these mad barbarians."

The "gluing together" of the brains of the Protestant doctors will heal the fevers and madness of Elizabethan society. Or, as the Nolan says in the midst of a seemingly scientific discussion:

As for those of you who place yourselves under the banner of Aristotle, I advise you not to boast, as if you understood what he penetrates. There is, in fact, the greatest difference between not knowing what he did not know and knowing what he knew, because where that philosopher was ignorant he has for followers not only you [Torquato] but all your ilk, together with the London boatmen and dockers.

The uncouthness and rudeness of the Oxford dons and the London mob are both the consequences of the philosophy of Aristotle as it was vulgarly understood in Protestant England. The reader of The Ash Wednesday Supper can only look forward to the amelioration of social and intellectual conditions, the curing of madness and quartan agues, when he reads at the end of the fourth dialogue that Nundinio and Torquato were, as it were, driven out of the dining room by the Nolan's pressing of his Copernican arguments "ad rem, ad rem."

III. Solar Medicine

The arguments that Bruno pressed ad rent have to do with the Sun and its power. As we shall see, the curing of the social and intellectual ills afflicting England is made possible by the eucharistic medicine of the Sun, the "hellebore" that the Nolan was bringing to England.

There is, according to Bruno, a close connection between cosmology and virtue. For this reason, he says, Moses had taught that the earth is motionless at the center of the universe; otherwise his followers, seeing his teaching to be at variance with sensible experience, would no longer have followed the Mosaic Law. But ever since Copernicus had heralded the dawn of a new age, the heretofore necessary exoteric lie was no longer necessary to preserve virtue. Upon Copernicus' astronomy Bruno intended to build a new cosmological dispensation based on the infinite vigor, motion, and thus active good works implicit in his version of heliocentrism.

Accordingly, Bruno transformed Copernicus, selfadmittedly understood what Copernicus the "mere mathematician" could not, and spoke of an infinite universe with many living and inhabited worlds, all of which are in motion around their own suns which themselves are in motion. It is unseemly, says Bruno, to think that the earth is at the center of the universe, for it is impossible to conclude that the "totality of innumerable bodies, of which many are known [to be] more splendid and greater [than the earth], look to the earth as the center and basis of their circles and influences…."

The imagery that pervades The Ash Wednesday Supper and its physical experiments stresses the theme of Unity. Influenced by Cusanus, Bruno constantly emphasizes the progress from multiplicity to One. Opposites are reconciled. Thus, he describes The Ash Wednesday Supper itself as being both "comic and tragic, joyous and choleric, Florentine for its leanness and Bolognese for its fatness." If separated from each other infinitely, stars and planets share their light; the obstacles, the "opaque bodies" which had obstructed the free passage of light between them, become insignificant. At a sufficient distance, a star can illuminate more than a hemisphere; it can illuminate a whole sphere. Polar opposites share the same light and thereby become one.

This healing, antipodal reconciliation is vitally important for Bruno's reunionist schemes. On the celestial level this Brunonian reconciliatory optics supports the idea that the earth is like all the other stars. At one point, in fact, Bruno says that the earth would become as hot as the Sun. In other words, earth and Sun share the same essence. This implies a reconciliation of the most extreme sort, for, according to traditional cosmology, earth was a drossy, mutable body while the Sun was perfect and never-changing.

If the earth and Sun are hot and mobile, then they are both "animals" and have souls. The universe is alive, and we no longer need to look outward for divinity because

we have the knowledge not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.

Or, speaking on another level, when Torquato asks, "Where is the apogee of the Sun?", the Nolan replies that it is anywhere he wants it to be. To the repeated question the Nolan rephrases his answer to show its true import:

How many are the sacraments of the Church? [The Sun] is about the twentieth degree of Cancer, and the opposition is about the one-hundred-tenth degree of Capricorn, or above the bell-tower of St. Paul's.

Sacraments, Summer, Winter, England: All these are components of the Nolan's answer to Torquato's question about the apogee of the Sun. Certainly this is not a fitting reply to a supposedly astronomical question. Clearly, Bruno's physical arguments are of a piece with his Cusanan reconciliation of opposites. For Bruno, if the heretofore putatively inert earth moves and is alive, then the universe and each of its parts partake of soul and are alive. If the earth is alive, then the Sacrament, as one of its parts, is no problem, for it, in a similar way, must be alive, mobile, and thus "anywhere you want it to be." It would seem, then, that the eucharistic sacrament need not be defined rigidly. If liberal-minded Protestants and Catholics realize that they all share in divinity and that the Sun's light can shine through even the Eucharist, then the seemingly opaque eucharistic host need no longer impede their interaction.

Bruno's discussion here is to some degree similar to discussions of light's penetration of opaque bodies in his "De umbris idearum" ("On the Shadow of Ideas"). This similarity suggests that it might be fruitful, at some future time and in another context, to begin reading The Ash Wednesday Supper in the light of this book on Bruno's magic memory system. At this point, I shall only point out that Bruno does not really offer a "doctrine of the Eucharist"; rather, his strategy is to transcend definitions and to allow the Eucharist to become a noncontroversial object through which, metaphorically, the light of Bruno's solar, nonchristian religion can pass. This is Bruno's eucharistie medicine that will heal the "troubles" in religion and the disease plaguing England.

Bruno therefore looks forward to spiritual calm in the Supper, brought about by the dawning Age of the Sun. This calm is indeed the goal of his physics, a fact that is probably best seen in his famous ship experiment. Speaking on an earthly, physical level of the kind of motive attractions found between straw and amber as well as between magnets, Teofilo tells us that a man on the mast of a ship can drop a stone which will fall to the deck directly below, while a man standing on the shore at a point above the ship's mast, not participating in the same system or reference frame, cannot similarly drop a stone to the foot of the mast as the ship passes beneath him. The man atop the mast is successful because he lets the stone fall with an impressed force, a virtù impressa. The impressed force of which Teofilo speaks is as much moral and ethical as it is physical. This man atop the mast of this ship which represents spiritual calm, France and Henri III, is a Brunonian solar magus whose solar Sacrament and universe are alive with spiritual force, while the man on the shore, like Nundinio and Torquato, exists in a universe that does not exude divinity, and he consequently has neither the knowledge of the forces of Nature nor the ethical virtù of a solar magus.

The efficacy of Bruno's healing "hellebore" is guaranteed, to Bruno's mind, by the Sun itself. The occasion for this dialogue was the Lord's Supper on Ash Wednesday. If, as Bruno would like the reader to think, the Supper was attended by both liberal Catholics and liberal Protestants, then the Supper must have been understood by both sides somewhat heterodoxically. Such heterodoxy supports Bruno's conception of the Sacrament as a metaphorical but vital source for interchange among men and between men and Divinity. On one level Bruno's exposition of the Sacrament through the hieroglyph of Copernican heliocentrism is a metaphor for the proposed Anglo-French union. (Indeed, I am inclined to think that Bruno's very choice of Copernican heliocentrism as a vehicle for expounding his Hermetic "secret" of la Cène desguisée was in part due to his awareness that the Dee circle in England—which included the Copernican Thomas Digges—and the Pléiade-Academic movement in Paris both shares an interest in the Copernican theory.) The subject of this dialogue, a sacramental celebration on Ash Wednesday, thereby indicated that a period of spiritual renewal was about to begin: the Lenten season. Again various themes conjoin: Ash Wednesday, sacrifice and self-assessment, renewal, and rebirth of light, all culminating at Easter, that is—on Bruno's nonchristian level—with the coming of Spring. The Sun once more rising above the equator is the bearer of Divinity with which the divinity within men can interact.

Bruno's optimism rests on the life-giving interactions between the divine Sun and the divinity within Nature and Man. Accordingly, the fifth dialogue of the Supper describes the Sun's centricity in these vivifying and renewing interactions. For example, Teofilo speaks of the climatic change that he finds, significantly, occurring at his very time:

… and from the fact that France and Italy are gradually becoming warmer, while England is becoming more temperate, we must conclude that in general the characteristics of regions are changing and that the disposition to cold is diminishing toward the Arctic pole.

This change, Teofilo tells his friends, results from the circulation of the Sun. Unlike Copernicus' Sun, Bruno's is in constant motion. The Sun "diffuses and communicates vital forces," and if the Sun

did not move to the other bodies or the other bodies to it, how could it receive what it does not possess or give what it has?

The Sun, then, is essential for all interaction and change.

The motion of the living earth is also necessary, so that it may imbibe and be nourished by the life-giving forces of the Sun. It is because of the interactions between the two divine animals, Sun and earth, that seas over time become continents and continents seas. As Teofilo sums up:

… in conclusion, every part of the earth comes to have every view of the Sun which every other part has, so that every part eventually participates in every life, every generation, every felicity.

The Sun warms, the earth turns, and changes occur. These changes on the geological level are also antipodal, and things become their opposites. If seas become continents and continents seas, then they are, sub specie aeternitatis, the same: One.

The last dialogue of The Ash Wednesday Supper is thus a powerful summing up of the themes and "experiments" that have come before, in the context of the Lord's Supper on Ash Wednesday. Now, in the fifth dialogue, the propagators of disease, Nundinio and Torquato, are no longer present, and the events leading up to and including the Supper and debate at Greville's (or Mauvissière's) residence are history. In a sense the reform—metaphorically implicit in the Lenten imagery of The Ash Wednesday Supper—has begun. Its arrival is signified by the engine of the Sun, the power-station which accomplishes all change and nourishment. The "engine" is efficacious because of the constant turning and motion of the Sun, earth, and all the other stars. Again, we must ask ourselves, what is the relationship between Bruno's cosmological vision found here in The Ash Wednesday Supper and the star images that constantly turn about the Sun and interact in the complex Lullian memory wheels which Bruno describes in "De umbris idearum?" However we may eventually answer this question, there is a striking similarity between the Lullian mnemonic art as perfected by Bruno in his book on Shadows and the Copernican solar system as perfected by Bruno in his book on the Ash Wednesday Supper.

Just as the efficacy of the memory system in "De umbris idearum" depends on the quasi-Copernican complex of whirling wheels which can store and expose all knowledge, the movement from multiplicity to One and from disease to health in The Ash Wednesday Supper is achieved by Bruno through the Sun's circulation and the revolutions of the earth made necessary by the centricity of the Sun in our solar system. Just as Bruno's previous experiments in the Supper had shown that two stars illuminate each other, so here in the fifth dialogue both Sun and earth are shown to turn so that every part of each shares and interacts with the other. If this can happen cosmologically and astronomically, then nothing, to Bruno's mind, prevents the beneficial interaction of the English Protestants, whose Sacrament had been thought to be, like the earth, dead with the French, whose king is that solar lion, the creature of Light, who was praised in The Ash Wednesday Supper and to whom "De umbris idearum" was dedicated.

IV. Epilogue

By way of drawing together the strands and themes that we have been following, I would like to turn back to a certain point in the fourth dialogue of The Ash Wednesday Supper. After Frulla and Teofilo have bemoaned the existence of the diseased doctors and of the London mob—the so-called "fruits of England"—, the Nolan and Torquato discuss the apogee of the Sun. As we remember, the Nolan replies with a series of questions: How many sacraments are there? Is it Summer or Winter in England; that is, is the Sun high or low? These strange questions are leading to a confluence of the themes we have discussed and thus are leading up to a very dramatic moment.

Torquato and the Nolan cannot agree about whether Copernicus had put the earth and moon on the same epicycle. Copernicus' book is brought in for all to look at. At the real debate at Oxford Bruno had quoted from Ficino's book on magic, De vita coelitus comparanda. This time, in an analogous situation, the Nolan turns to De revolutionibus.

The book is opened, and everyone looks at Copernicus' diagram of the heliocentric universe. Although Bruno does not explicitly say it in the Supper, we know, he knew, and the guests present at the Supper would have known, what words were printed directly beneath the engraving in the Copernican text:

In the midst of all this is the Sun…. Trimegis tus [sic] calls it the visible god.

Clearly, Bruno sees no essential difference between Ficino's book on magic and Copernicus' book on astronomy. They are both mediums for his Hermetic secret.

At this critical juncture of the text, we find telescoped together within a very few pages the diseased "fruits of England," the sacramental cure, the Sun, an allusion to Bruno's discourse on magic at Oxford, and Hermes Trismegistus. The very core of the scientific argument in The Ash Wednesday Supper is Hermetic, the quasi-religious revelation of a Sun whose mobility in an animate and mobile universe makes it a powerful image for change. By setting the Sun and earth free or by making the Sun image the center of all "intentions of the will" in a Lullian magic memory wheel (as was found in "De umbris idearum"), Bruno's Sun can help to heal, nourish, and redeem a Europe plagued by confessional "troubles."

Perhaps looking forward to a time when his "secret," alluded to in "De umbris idearum" and expounded in La Cena de le Ceneri, will have restored a (nonchristian) unity to Europe, Bruno promises another work on the "fruit of redemption," as The Ash Wednesday Supper ends. Finally, it is Prudenzio, so often before the butt of criticism and mockery in this work, who ironically is made to deliver the stunning conjuration that sums up Bruno's "medicine": found among the six parts of the conjuration are, for example, the "cure" of the French alliance by the progeny of the Trojan horse; the more traditional cure by Aesculapius of Nundinio and Torquato; and the violent "cures" befitting the "butting and kicking beasts" whom the Nolan had encountered in his journey across London.

Bruno returned to France with Mauvissière in 1585, following an adverse change in the balance of power within France between Henri III and the Guisards—a change that nullified Bruno's "mission" to England. From Paris he recommenced his European wanderings. His failed mission to England has therefore left us without the promised Purgatorio de l'inferno on the "fruit of redemption." Yet, even without it the confluence of themes in the fourth dialogue—preparatory to Bruno's discussion of his solar philosophy in the fifth dialogue—and the magical conjuration at the very end of The Ash Wednesday Supper, ridding England of its baleful propagators of disease, should be enough to alert us to the fact that what has gone on in the text is more closely related to Hermes the Thrice-Great, to Julian's pagan Sol Invictus, and to Bruno's own work on the magical and Lullian memory system than it is to Oresme's impetus theory and to Galileo's mechanics. More than a practitioner of the astronomical art, Bruno is a practitioner of what he will later call the medicina Lulliana—the healing art.