306 GIORDANO BRUNO PART 



God is in all things : " Animals and plants," says Jupiter 

 in the Spaccio, " are living effects of nature, and nature 

 is nothing but God in things. Diverse things represent 

 diverse deities, and diverse powers." 1 God is in all 

 things, but not fully expressed in each, " in some more 3 

 in some less excellently," in some one divine attribute 

 or power predominates, in some another. Thus the 

 viper or the scorpion represents Mars, the cock or the 

 lion the Sun> because of their greater affinity, respec- 

 tively, with these deities, or rather with the divine 

 powers which the deities embody. For as divinity is 

 communicated in a divine scale downwards to nature, 

 so from the light that is reflected in natural things we 

 may rise to the divine life that is above them. It was 

 on these sympathies between animals, plants, metals, on 

 the one hand, and the various attributes of divinity on 

 the other, that genuine magic and divination depended. 

 The Magi ascended by the same scale of nature to the 

 highest divinity, by which that divinity itself descended 

 to the least of things, in its self-communication. Their 

 ceremonies were not vain imaginations, but living voices 

 that reached the very ears of the gods. " These wise 

 men knew God to be in things, divinity to be latent in 

 nature, acting in and scintillating diversely from diverse 

 subjects, and making them to participate in itself, as in 

 its being, life, and intelligence." 2 Of Jupiter, Venus, 

 and the rest is said what Bruno no doubt thought of 

 Christ, and other founders of religion, that they had 

 been mortal human beings. What men adored was 

 not Jupiter, as a divine being, but divinity, as expressed 

 in Jupiter : in this or that man were worshipped the 

 name and symbol of a divinity which in their birth com- 

 municated itself to men, and with their death was 



1 Lag. 529 ff. 2 Sfaccio, Lag. p. 530. 



