I find the emphasis on Bruno’s involvement with the renaissance re-creation of the Art of Memory particularly interesting – I’ve written a bit about how important I think the art of memory is within the traditions of western consciousness exploration.

Giordano Bruno has been called a martyr to science and an occultist, but a new book argues that the brilliant philosopher’s unconventional behavior did him in.

the hooded and manacled effigy of Bruno, with its haunted stare, immediately catches the eye, and the gruesome story attached to it — Bruno was burned at the stake in that very spot, for the crime of heresy — cements him in memory. Practically every tourist who comes to Rome tromps through the Campo and hears that story, even if they’ve never heard of Bruno before. The students who commissioned the statue in the 1880s, as an emblem for freedom of thought and the division of church from state, really got their money’s worth.

But who was Giordano Bruno, and why was he executed in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600? A common misperception mixes him up with Galileo, who ran into trouble with the church 16 years later for embracing the Copernican model of the solar system instead of endorsing the Aristotelian belief that the sun revolves around the Earth. (In fact, the two men shared an Inquisitor, the implacable Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, canonized by the Catholic Church in 1930.) Bruno, too, thought that the Earth circled the sun, and subscribed to many other than heterodox ideas as well: that the universe is infinite and that everything in it is made up of tiny particles (i.e., atoms), and that it is immeasurably old. But as Ingrid Rowland demonstrates in her new biography of the renegade thinker, “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic,” Bruno was no martyr for science. What got him killed was a murky mixture of spiritual transgression and personal foibles, combined with a large dose of bad luck.

Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians from the 16th and 17th Centuries – from Bibliodyssey

Visit bibliodyssey to see larger versions of this image and others… Bibliodyssey page on the Kalighat Pictures of Indian Gods

This is what the Voynich Manuscript is – a mysterious book, now believed to be a forgery created by John Dee to swindle a king out of $50,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

An older scientific american article By Gordon Rugg showing a method by which the VM might have been created by Edward Kelly (made famous by John Dee) using a fairly simple coding technique that creates gibberish that looks like language.
Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript

“The Cardan grille method therefore appears to be a mechanism by which the Voynich manuscript could have been created. My reconstructions suggest that one person could have produced the manuscript, including the illustrations, in just three or four months. But a crucial question remains: Does the manuscript contain only meaningless gibberish or a coded message? ”

Here’s a report about a recent statistical analysis that seems to comfirm that the book is gibberish intended to look like a language:
Another chapter in the story of the world’s most mysterious book.

“A breakthrough comes with the publication in Cryptologia this April of an article by Austrian researcher Dr Andreas Schinner (who) analysed the text of the manuscript using specialist statistics capable of handling quasi-stochastic distributions, and found that the manuscript’s statistical properties were consistent with a hoax consisting of meaningless gibberish produced using Rugg’s method or a similar quasi-random method.

This does not prove that the manuscript is a hoax, but it strongly suggests that the hoax theory is correct. If there is meaningful coded material in the manuscript, then either:

1 there is only a small amount, surrounded by large amounts of meaningless padding – otherwise the statistics would have come out differently, or

2 if there is a large amount of meaningful coded material, then it must have been encoded using a method which just happens to produce the same statistical properties as a quasi-random gibberish generator. ”

Why is this worthy of note? It’s worth being reminded that fascinating (and the Voynich has been consdiered fascinating for many years) does not mean true, and may often mean one is dealing with mistakes, misunderstandings, or deliberate deception.

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MORE: Here’s a Flickr of the complete Voynich Manuscript.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/12/la-trs-sainte-trinosophie.html

From the BIBLIODDYSSEY web site:

“Either the Count de Saint-Germain or Cagliostro is considered to be the author of ‘La Très Sainte Trinosophie’ (The Most Holy Three-fold Wisdom), from the latter half of the 18th century. It has been called “the rarest of occult manuscripts”1 and the only surviving copy is owned by the library in Troyes, France.

‘Trinsophie’ is an allegorical alchemistry work and ritual egyptian magical treatise containing an intentionally coded text with arabic, chaldean hebrew, cuneiform, ionic greek, syriac, esoteric idiograms and heiroglyphs amongst the french writing. A full translation is available online if you look hard enough — I tend to regard the esoteric arts as a fascinating well from which to draw outstanding and eclectic imagery for this site, but if you want to incorporate the mystical and theosophical practices into your life then you ought to inject your own energies into the process, as thou wilt.

Suffice it to say that ‘Trinsophie’ remains an important codex in masonic, rosicrucian and hermetic traditions.”"

Here’s a French flash tool to look thru the books pages

More Alcemical texts from BibliOdyssey

Another great page from BibliOdyssey