THE EARTHMOVERS: Let us now ask just how much time did Copernicus spend studying the sun, moon, planets and stars in order to gather the data necessary to work out his system of calculation if he also had to work as a canonist, an economist and a part-time doctor?
Copernicus hardly bothered with stargazing, relying on the observations of Hipparchus and Ptolemy. He knew no more about the actual motions of the stars than they did. Hipparchus’s Catalogue of the fixed stars and Ptolemy’s Tables for calculating planetary motions were so reliable and precise that they served [the needs of the time]. (A. Koestler: The Sleepwalkers, p.73.)
Nevertheless, historically, the appearance of this work is as surprising as a mountain suddenly rising from a calm sea. (Morris Kline: Mathematics and the search for Knowledge, Oxford Uni. Press, 1986, p.81.)
And what did Copernicus find in his stargazing or in the astronomical data of Hipparchus and Ptolemy that led him to propose such a radical change of astronomical comprehension was necessary, that is, to move from a geocentric order to a heliocentric one? The answer is nothing, absolutely nothing. Yet most books on astronomy and popular history, such as in the opening quote of this chapter, asserts Copernicus ‘made new advances from studying the sun and planets and stars.’ They insist Copernicus differed from Hipparchus and Ptolemy in that unlike them, he used ‘that uncommon activity known as ‘thinking’ to prove that the sun was at the center of the universe.’ They exaggerate; Copernicus never figured out any proof for his solar system.
So then, from where did Copernicus get his inspiration for his ‘new advance’ in science if it was not by way of something found through astronomical observation and study? Perhaps the following passage from his book can give us a clue.
In the centre of all rests the sun. For who would place this lamp of a very beautiful temple in another or better place than this whereupon it can illuminate everything at the same time. As a matter of fact, not unhappily do some call it the lantern, others the mind and still others, the pilot of the world. Trismegistus calls it a “visible god;” Sophocles’s Electra, “that which gazes upon all things.” And so the sun, as if resting on a kingly throne, governs the family of stars which wheel around. - - - Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543.
Could anything be clearer? He got his inspiration for heliocentrism from the pagan cosmology of Hermēs Trismegistus. In fact all Copernicus’s ideas were long written up in the Hermetic books. One treatise explicitly states that ‘the sun is situated at the centre of the cosmos, wearing it like a crown’ and ‘around the sun are the six spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six of the planets, and the one that surrounds the earth.’ It is well known that Copernicus copied the ancient hermetic texts because it, and it alone, reflected a ‘harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs.
[Lest anyone think Copernicus advanced knowledge of the ‘magnitude of the orbs,’ he didn’t. Measuring the distance of the sun from the earth and other planets is near impossible without proper instrumentation, that Copernicus did not have. Estimates based on earth-diameters were all the early astronomers could manage. Ptolemy estimated the sun to be 610 earth-diameters away. Copernicus ‘corrected’ this estimate to 571, which was even further from the actual distance than Ptolemy. The first astronomer to achieve the realistic magnitudes for the sun and planets was Domenico Cassini. He estimated the distance of the sun from the earth – now said to be 11,500 earth-diameters – at 10,305 earth-diameters.]
Copernicus considered Ptolemy’s geocentric system, with its artificial equant, ‘lacked elegance,’ and was therefore too clumsy to be God’s design. He compared Ptolemy’s model to the hands, feet, head and other limbs of a man put together to make a monster rather than a thing of beauty. Yet what he was proposing in his heliocentric model, as can be seen in the dozens of drawings and hundreds of geometric proposals depicted through page after page in the six books of On the revolutions, was a solar system consisting of just as many, if not more, heads, ears, arms, hands, legs, knees, feet, toes and other appendages. Copernicus then, was first and foremost an out and out Hermeticist, smitten by the magic of Hermēs.