…Thus Ficino's whole effort of Christian Theologia Platonica, with its prisci theologi and magi and its Christian Platonism, furtively combined with some magic, was as nothing in the eyes of Giordano Bruno, who, fully and boldly accepting the magical Egyptian religion of the Asclepius (and disregarding the supposed intimations of Christianity in the Corpus Hermeticum) saw the Egyptian magical religion as really Neoplatonic theurgy and ecstasy, the ascent to the One. And this was what it really was, for the Hermetic Egyptianism was Egyptianism interpreted by late antique Neoplatonists. However, the Bruno problem is not solved by simplifying him into a late antique Neoplatonist following an Egyptian mystery cult, for the whole great apparatus set in motion by Ficino and Pico had reached him, with all its emotional force, its Cabalist and Christian associations, its syncretism of all philosophies and religions, mediaeval as well as antique, and its magic.

— Frances Yates, “Giordano Bruno and the Cabala”