Metaphysics

On the Shadows of Ideas

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Giordano Bruno

1582

On the Shadows of Ideas is Bruno's first published philosophical work, issued in Paris in 1582, and the foundation of his art of memory: a system for organising and intensifying mental powers through the imaginative manipulation of images. The work draws on the classical tradition of the ars memorativa — Cicero, Quintilian, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium — and combines it with Hermetic magic and Neoplatonism to produce something more ambitious than a rhetorical technique. For Bruno, the shadows of ideas are the images through which the mind grasps the infinite — reflections in matter of the eternal forms, which the trained memory can use as instruments of magical operations on the world. The work is both a practical manual and a cosmological statement: the mind that has mastered the art of memory has aligned itself with the structure of the universe and acquired a degree of power over it. It established Bruno's European reputation as a magus and memory-master before his more scandalous cosmological works appeared.