the Hermetic Asclepius with its strange description of the magic by which the Egyptian priests animated the statues of their gods... (p5)
there is a fundamental difference in the attitude to the star-ruled world among the various authores of the Hermetica. ...pessimist gnosis, or optimist gnosis. ...for the pessimist (or dualist) gnostic, the material world ... is in itself evil; it must be sacaped from by an ascetic way of life....for the optimist gnostic, mattger is impregnated with the divine, the wearth lives, moves, with a divine life, the starts are living divine animls, the subn burns with a divine power, there is no part of Nature which is not goo for all are parts of God (p22)
John Dee hsas to the full the dignity, the sense of operational power, of the Renaissance Magus. And he is a very clear example of how the will to opearate, stimulated by Renaissance magic, could pass into and stimulate the will to operate in genuine applied science. (p150)
Bruno's use of Copernicanismshows most strioikiungly how shifting and uncertain were the borders betweeen genuine science and Hermeticsm in the Renaissance. ([p155])
Do not suppose that the sufficiency of the Chaldaic magic derives from the Cabala of the Jews; for the Jews are without doubt the excrement of Egypt, and no one could ever pretend with any degree of probability that the Egyptians borrowed any principle, good or bad,f rom the Hebrews (Bruno, p223)
Kircher is much preoccupied with Isis and Osiris...here "Egyptian" divine immanence combines with Pseudo-Dionysian light mysticism to produce that acute sense of the divine in things so characteristic of Renaissance Hermetism. For Kircher, Isis and Isiris have a meaning which, when found among philosophers of the Renassance such as Bruno, is called panpsychism (p418)
The divine Dionysius testifies that all created things are nothing but mirrors with reflect to us the rays fo the divine wisdom. ...
The reign of "Hermes Trismegistus" can be exactly dated. It begins in the late 15th century when Ficino translates the newly discovered Corpus Hermeticum. It ends in the early 17th century when Casubon exposes him. ... the procedures with which the Magus attempted to operate have nothing to do with genuine science. p 449
the mechanistic world view established by the 17th century revolution has been in its turn superseded by the amazing lated developments of scientific knowledge. It may be illuminating to view the scientific revolution as in two phases, the first phase consisting of an animistic univer3e operated by magic, the second phase of a mathematical univewre operated by mechanics.