Giordano Bruno’s On Magic (De magia), written around 1590 and left unpublished in his lifetime, sorts the many meanings of “magic”, from the wisdom of the magus to natural, mathematical and divine magic and the sorcery of popular belief, and grounds them in a single world soul and spirit that runs through all things. For Bruno, magic is the knowledge of how this spirit binds things together: through sympathy and antipathy, images and signs, sound, sight and imagination. A key text for the Renaissance view of nature as a living web of forces, translated by Richard J. Blackwell in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy volume Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic.
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