Giordano Bruno - On Language

Furthermore, it must be noted that occult intelligence is not heard or understood in all languages.  For the voices spoken by humans are not heard in the same way as the voices of nature.  As a result, poetry, especially of the tragic type (as Plotinus says), has a very great effect on the wavering thoughts of the soul.

Likewise, not all writings have the same impact as those markings which signify things by the particular way in which they are drawn and configured.  Thus, when certain symbols are arranged in different ways, they represent different things: in a circle, the attraction of love; when opposed, the descent into hate and separation; when brief, defective and broken, they point to destruction; when knotted, to bondage; when strung out, to dissolution.  Furthermore, these symbols do not have a fixed and definite form.  Rather, each person, by the dictate of his own inspiration or by the impulse of his own spirit, determines his own reactions of desiring or rejecting something.  And thus, he characterizes for himself each symbol according to his own impulse, and as the divine spirit personally exerts certain powers which are not expressed in any explicit language, speech, or writing.

Such were the figures, so well designed by the Egyptians, which are called hieroglyphs or sacred symbols.  These were specific images selected from natural objects and their parts to designate individual things.  The Egyptians used these symbols and sounds to converse with the gods to accomplish extraordinary results.  Later, when Theuth, or someone else, invented the letters of the type we use today for other purposes, this resulted in a tremendous loss, first of memory, and then of divine science and magic.


-G. Bruno.  De Magia.  1590.


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