This was an article for New Dawn.
The geocentric planetary model on the left was displaced by a visually simple heliocentric model, of how the solar system would look from a distance rather than from the Earth.
About 400 years ago, the move to the Heliocentric Model of the “solar system” swept away the worldview upon which human spirituality had been based for at least 5000 years. We can say that all spiritual literature was based upon the previous cosmological norms of the Geocentric Model. It is generally not realized that the Koran, New Testament, Buddhist, Tibetan, Hindu, Pythagorean, Platonic, yogic, shamanistic, and many other primary and secondary texts including Shakespeare, alluded to the details of a geocentric cosmology: a foundational framework often debunked as inaccurate yet, the geocentric was a valid ordering of the planetary cosmos. The religious values within the model were overtaken by the new scientific norm, which was inherently materialistic in its study of physical laws and processes, these universal throughout an ever-expanding vision of the universe, through observations and experiments in physics and chemistry deducing new types of knowledge. And mankind would soon use these new laws and discoveries to exploit the universe itself.
This transition from geocentrism to heliocentrism came against a backdrop of Islamic and Christian suppression of scientific discoveries, which represented a growing desire since Classical times for human reason to escape the shackles of the oral and then bookish traditions, which broadcast their own messages as if final, to be obeyed on pain of death or at least social exclusion. In this war between religious theocracies and an emerging modern science no quarter was given to the geocentric model, even though all previous traditional thought the world over relied on it. A cleric called Copernicus suggested that everything must revolve around the Sun and not the Earth. the geocentric past was soon ditched, like the baby with the bathwater and the whole of spiritual literature lost much of its foundational imagery. Science had displaced the ancient mythologies due to its own struggle to understand the physical world. The “natural philosophers” eliminated any mysterious causes for why things happened by discovering physical causes for all phenomena, these natural and real through physical laws without any gods or spirits being involved.
Continue reading “Tragic Loss of the Geocentric Arts and Sciences”
