You are looking at a highly sophisticated mnemonic devise representing ideas about the nature of reality crafted by one of the most famous thinkers killed by the Catholic Church for heresy. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is well-known for refusing to recant his ideas in the face of the Inquisition. Many notions he favored ultimately found support in the Scientific Revolution – heliocentrism, for instance. And another – the idea that stars might be far-away suns with planets that might support life. But Giordano was no early developer of the Scientific method: he was an exceptionally creative thinker who saw the world from a lens largely divorced from his contemporary intellectuals.
Besides creating memory palaces in his teaching of mnemonics like the “Figura Intellectus” shown here, Bruno believed in reincarnation and in the importance of (alleged) Ancient Egyptian mystical lore in studying reality, and came to the conclusion that the universe “was an organism in which each principal body and the life sustained on it participated in a common animating principle, in the same way as the many parts of the human body were vivified by one and the same soul.” So Giordano Bruno not a martyr to science, but rather to free thought.
Source(s): In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 28, 2019. See DOI:plato.stanford.edu/entries/bruno .
