Watching the new TV series Cosmos I was delighted to see so much attention given to Giordano Bruno.  But Hermetic and Platonic traditions that influenced his thought were as usual, ignored.  The currently official history of science tells us that while astrology and astronomy, and alchemy and chemistry grew up together in the 17 ^th century with the birth of what would become modern science astronomy and chemistry soared into the heavens while astrology and alchemy were condemned to lurk in the shadows.  That’s not how Professor Leon Marvell sees it.

In his groundbreaking book Transfigured Light: Philosophy, Science and the Hermetic Imaginary  Marvell argues that new research in the fields of Chaos and Complexity theory, Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, far from being the radical arrival of previously unknown ideas, in fact have a long history which Marvell calls “Hermetic: the intellectual tradition that developed from the rediscovery…