The Day the Earth Stood Still: Galileo and the secrets of Hermeticism

Galileo’s prosecution by the Church for promoting the heliocentric theory – that the Sun sits at the centre of the Solar System encircled by the Earth and other planets – is usually portrayed as a landmark battle in the war between religion and science, the moment when Galileo becomes science’s first great martyr.  However, when revisiting the story during our research for our book The For­bidden Universe, we realized that the trad­itional explanations of the Church’s determin­ation to get Galileo just don’t add up. Applying the shameless CGI of hindsight, science historians transmuted him into a modern rationalist-materialist born out of time, persecuted by superstitious – in other words cretinous – men whose intell­ects, if one could dignify them with the term, were stuck in the Middle Ages.

That’s the lazy sod’s version of history. The reality, as forteans would suspect, is that there’s much, much more to it than that. 
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The answer, we believe, lies in the Hermetic tradition – the heart of the ‘occult philosophy’, a synthesis of magical, esoteric and philosophical systems – which had a profound effect on shaping Western culture during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, but which is today shamefully marginalised. But the fact is that the Renaissance is impossible to comprehend without the Hermetic tradition. It’s like trying to write a history of the 20th century while ignoring Communism, on the logic that because it failed as an ideology, it could never have been really important.  The treatises collectively known as the Hermetica, on which the tradition is based, have had the greatest effect on Western civilisation of any texts apart from the Bible – and the greatest effect on modern Western civilisation of any texts including the Bible. Yet very few people have even heard of them. link