By Cris D. Putnam (continued from part 5)
Bruno’s interactions with demons are evident in his writings. He wrote in his treatise Essays on Magic,

“One can prove that demons are material and that they are of several different kinds, by the fact that they have emotions, desires, angers, jealousies and similar feelings found in humans, and in animals composed of observable dense matter. That is why the slaughtering and sacrifice of animals was instituted, for these demons are pleased a very great deal by such ceremonies and fumes.”[1]

Indeed he seems to have interacted with demonic entities enough to provide details concerning their bodies: “Although they are spiritual substances, nature has given them a body which is very thin and is not endowed with senses. They belong to the genus of animal which, as was said, has more species than do living, composite and sensory animals.”[2] The thin body certainly brings to mind modern descriptions of wispy alien greys. Nevertheless, Bruno was no abductee. He sought to control and manipulate them by playing one against the other: “Strong invocations and supplications to make the power of the superior overcome the inferior, for example, to banish evil demons by good ones, and to banish lower evil demons by higher ones. These demons are enticed by sacrifices and holocausts; they are frightened by threats, and they are summoned by the powers of inflowing rays of light.”[3] Indeed, the siren song of the occult is the promise of influencing the powers and principalities of this world. Even so, modern atheists consider Bruno their hero.

In his introduction to a modern edition of Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity, Alfonso Ingegno writes, “This was a philosophy aimed at liberating man from the fear of death and the gods, pointing the way to an escape from the snares which demons use to catch us.”[4] Accordingly, modern secularists and ET true believers like to portray Bruno as some sort of scientific messiah. In fact, if you would like to read Bruno’s treatise, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, you will find it hosted on the Positive Atheism website.[5] Another representative example comes from humanist Edward Howard Griggs who, while doting like a schoolgirl, calls him, “a world wandering scholar, a poet soul among philosophers, intense, passionate, disappearing in the dungeons of the Inquisition, emerging only to meet martyrdom, but in whom the intellectual spirit of our time appears three hundred years in advance.”[6] In his book, Great Leaders in Human Progress, Griggs titled the chapter on Bruno, “The Martyr of Science.” Au contraire, he should have been memorialized as a magus. The Inquisition did not doubt.

While visiting Venice, Bruno was betrayed to the Inquisition, jailed, and eventually sent to Rome. Historians are at a loss as to why he was kept in prison for six long years prior to his short tribunal by the Roman Inquisition in 1599. Bruno’s most representative work, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, a satirical indictment of papal Romanism, published in 1584, was singled out during the inquisitor’s summation. According to Gaspar Schopp, Bruno made an ominous overture to the inquisitors, “Perchance, you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”[7] This quip earned him a wooden vice for his tongue, silencing any protest as Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and issued a sentence of death. On February 17, 1600, in a central Roman square called the Campo de’ Fiori, he was burned at the stake. As an extension of the unholy union of Church and state, the Roman Church is forever besmirched by its capacity for murderous zeal.

Coming next Mount Graham Arizona the Vatican’s Assimilation of the Sky Island.

See: http://www.exovaticana.com/

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By Cris D. Putnam (continued from part 3)
In 1440, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), a German philosopher, theologian, and astronomer, had a mystical experience while returning from Constantinople by ship. He described his vision thus, “When by what I believe was a celestial gift from the Father of Lights, from whom comes every perfect gift, I was led to embrace imcomprehensibles incomprehensibly in leaned ignorance, by transcending those incorruptible truths that can be humanly known.”[1] What followed was a treatise on mysticism entitled De Docta Ignorantia (“Of Learned Ignorance”). Similar to Buddhist practice, Nicholas called this “negative theology,” implying a sort of mystical knowing by not knowing. As a result, he conjured up hermetic platitudes like God is “a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”[2] He believed that the limits of science could be transcended by means of mystic speculation. Some even contend that this preempted Kepler, famous for his laws of planetary motion, by arguing there were no perfect circles in the universe. His learned ignorance inevitably led him to other worlds inhabited by extraterrestrials.

Nicholas homogenized the heavenly bodies by dismissing the Aristotelian doctrine of unity and natural place. Therefore, he concluded that the Earth, planets, sun, and stars were composed of the same elements, and that there was no center of attraction. He envisioned an infinite universe, whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere, containing countless rotating stars, the Earth merely being one of equal importance. Consequently, it is not too surprising that it is from Nicholas of Cusa that we encounter the first explicit Roman Catholic argumentation for the existence of extraterrestrials. In Of Learned Ignorance, chapter 12, he asserts:

Rather than think that so many stars and parts of the heaven are uninhabited and that this earth of ours alone is peopled—and that with beings, perhaps, of an inferior type—we will suppose that in every region there are inhabitants, differing in nature by rank and all owing their origin to God, who is the center and circumference of all stellar regions.[3]

Rather than the censure one might expect, Nicholas’ work was enthusiastically received. It is important to note that he stated this was revelation from God and it went unchallenged by the Church. Shortly after his shipboard vision, he had become the papal envoy to Pope Eugene IV and assisted in the papal power struggle against the council of Basel, opposing its attempt to reform widespread abuse. He was promoted to the status of cardinal by Pope Nicholas V in 1448. The next person of note was more inclined to science than mystic speculation.

Perhaps one of the greatest contributors to the discussion, Nicholas Copernicus (1473–1543), never actually addressed the topic. Even so, his revolutionary work effectively removed the Earth from the center of the cosmos and seemingly relegated it one among many, perhaps similar, orbs revolving around the sun. He correctly surmised the apparent motion of the stars to be an illusion caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis and that the Earth orbited the sun once every year. Of course, this meant that the countless stars were potential suns and the observable planets might be other “earths.” Of course, if there are other earths, then one might imagine they are populated with people or something else entirely. It really did change everything. Yet, heliocentricism was not widely accepted in his lifetime. A few astronomers, including Germans Michael Maestlin (1550–1631), Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the Englishman Thomas Digges (1546–1595), and the Italian Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), accepted it, leading historians like N. R. Hanson to quip that the “Copernican revolution” was a minor skirmish that prompted the Keplerian or Galilerian revolution.[4] All the same, at the dawn of the Reformation, Copernicus had planted the seeds for an atomist revival replete with an alien invasion.

Next week… the infamous Giordano Bruno.

See: http://www.exovaticana.com/

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