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forefront of his mind, and must have acted as a hideous,cautionary tale. Advocating the motion of the Earth had certainly contributed to his condemnation as a heretic, and Galileo, along with other scholars in Catholic lands, may well have considered it prudent not to whip up any hype. But despite this, there is evidence of a more solid connection between Galileo and Bruno and the Giordanisti – including evidence that Galileo owed an intellectual debt to Bruno. And there is no doubt whatsoever that Galileo was fully aware of the significance that the Hermeticists read into heliocentricity.
    Galileo was a lifelong friend of Campanella. One of his staunchest supporters during the controversy, Campanella composed the Defence of Galileo from his prison cell in 1622. And ten years later, by then a free man living in Rome under the protection of the Pope himself, he was still corresponding with Galileo during the latter’s most difficult time, urging him to stand firm because of the spiritual importance of his work . Yates remarks when discussing Defence of Galileo :
    Campanella is being careful to dissociate himself from the full implications of Bruno’s Copernicanism. This was all the more necessary since, both in the apology and in letters to Galileo, Campanella speaks of heliocentricity as a return to ancient truth and as portending a new age, using language strongly reminiscent of Bruno in the Cena de le ceneri [ The Ash Wednesday Supper ] … And in other letters he assures Galileo that he is constructing a new theology which will vindicate him. It has therefore to be made clear that heliocentricity as a portent of a new age, and as integrated into a new theology did not mean for Campanella at this stage in his career, acceptance of all Bruno’s heresies. 15
     

    So Galileo was not only in contact with Hermeticists, but was also very aware of just how important they considered his work. But could the connection go much deeper? Was there a more mystical dimension to the whole affair?
    Galileo was familiar with Bruno’s writings. In the 1590s, when he first focused on heliocentricity, there was no problem with being a fan of the Neapolitan – just as after 1600 there were excellent reasons not to be seen to be. After the publication of Galileo’s first book touching on the controversy, Kepler criticized him for not honestly acknowledging the intellectual debt he owed to Bruno. 16 Of course it was easy for Kepler, who cited Bruno in his own work, to criticize Galileo from the safety of Bohemia.
    But Galileo’s interest in Bruno goes deeper than merely reading his books. There are close parallels between Galileo’s 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems – which led to his downfall – and Bruno’s The Ash Wednesday Supper , the first of his works to advocate Copernicus and to declare that establishing heliocentricity would free the human spirit. It may not be a coincidence that this was Campanella’s favourite of Bruno’s works.
    Another clue suggesting Galileo’s familiarity with Bruno comes from a passage in the Dialogue where he lays the foundation for the later theory of relativity. Although the term is popularly associated with Einstein, what he formulated were his special and general theories of relativity, which are in fact highly complex developments of Galileo’s original principle (sometimes called ‘Galilean relativity’). This argues that physical phenomena can only be properly described according to the context in which they are observed – i.e., the same event can look completely different to observers in different places. This principle underpinned Newton’s laws of motion and Einstein’s own theories.
    In The Ash Wednesday Supper , published over forty yearsearlier, Bruno made the same point with a very similar example: if two people, one on shore and the other on the deck of a moving ship, drop a stone, each will see their own stone move through an identical path, dropping the