Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by Joseph P. Farrell

I
THE MARTYR, THE METAPHOR, AND THE
MERCHANTS
“… Hermeticism is once again relevant, this time
to the realm of quarks, M-theory and DNA. As
science itself becomes more magical, Hermeticism’s
time has truly come.”
—Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,
The Forbidden Universe: The Occult Origins of Science and
the Search for the Mind of God, p. 210.

One
MARTYR TO THE METAPHOR: Banksters,
Bishops, and the Burning of Bruno
“We here, then, have a Jove, not taken as too legitimate and
good a vicar or lieutenant of the first principle and universal
cause, but well taken as something variable, subject to the Fate
of Mutation …”
—Giordano Bruno
ON ASH WEDNESDAY in the year 1600, a man who was a constant
irritation to Churchianity—and to its hierarchy preaching more than
hypocritically about the God of Love—was led through the arched
corridors of various buildings into a public square, where he was tied to a
stake at which cords and bundles of wood were thrown at his feet. When
this was done, the man was most likely brushed with tars and oils
according to the practice of the period, and flame was put to the bundles
of wood. The flames and smoke rose, boiling and baking the skin,
perhaps amid cries of anguish and suffering, until, overcome with pain,
he finally lapsed into unconsciousness and death.
This burnt offering of a man had made his way to France, thence to
Geneva, back to Paris, onward to London and Oxford, back to Paris, to
Germany and Bohemia, and finally back to his native Italy. Along all
these travels, he had managed to anger the Anglican doctors and dons of
Oxford, the Puritans of Cambridge, the Calvinists of Geneva, and of

Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance by Joseph P. Farrell