If God is benevolent and almighty, why should there be so much suffering in the world? Luria's answer was that the forces that cause suffering and evil in the world are remnants of the universe before ours- a primal cosmos of unbalanced forces- and the mission of human beings, and Jews in particular, is to redeem the powers of evil through religious observance and Cabalistic disciplines.
I know that I hung on the windy tree Nine full nights, Pierced by a spear offered to Odin Myself to myself of which none knows Upon that tree Where its roots run...
Ironically, once he was safely dead, Bruno was redefined as a martyr for science. For centuries, historians quietly ignored the vast amount of occultism in his writing and insisted that he had been burned at the stake for his belief that the earth circled the sun and there were an infinite number of habitable worlds in space. Only in the middle years of the twentieth century, when scholarly prejudices against occultism had begun to fade, did the scope and depth of his occult involvements become clear.
