THE EARTHMOVERS:
Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa Italy on 15th February 1564. He was the eldest of seven children of musician Vincenzio Galilei and Guilia Ammananti. The family, poor in those days, remained in Pisa until he was about ten years old when they moved to Florence. It was here, at the Monastery school at Vallombrosa, that he spent a time as a novice. In 1581, Galileo entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, spent a lot of his time contradicting the professors there and, not surprisingly, failed to win one of the forty scholarships for poor students.
It was only after he left university in 1585, that Galileo began studying mathematics and physics privately under a man named Ostilio Ricci. By 1586 he was capable of writing a treatise on hydrostatic balance and later a work on gravity in solids. Arising from this, Galileo was invited to speak at the Florentine Academy on the dimensions of hell as depicted in Dante’s Inferno. From then until 1589 Galileo grew in academic stature, especially with the Marquis del Monte. For this he was given a three-year contract as mathematics teacher at the University of Pisa that carried a small salary of 60 florins a year. Once there he lectured on an assortment of subjects, all the time gaining a reputation as an argumentative person.
Meanwhile he attended lectures given by other professors of the college and built up a substantial notebook on the subject of philosophy. Once Galileo’s contract ran out in 1592, on the strength of his physics at Pisa and his influence among certain patrons who advanced his career, Galileo was offered the chair as professor of mathematics at the University of Padua that would have gone to Bruno had he not been arrested in Rome and put on trial. For this, Galileo was paid 120 florins a year. In all, Galileo spent 18 years in Padua.
It is said that Galileo’s public career as an astronomer began in 1604 when he gave a lecture on a supernova that appeared at that time. We know however, from a letter written to Kepler in 1597 by Galileo (who was 33 years old at the time), that he was a convinced Copernican for ‘many years,’ even then.
In this same correspondence he wrote: ‘I indeed congratulate myself in having an associate in the study of truth who is a friend of truth.’ Exactly why Galileo, in his twenties then, placed his belief in a ‘truth’ that the earth orbits the sun, few have speculated. What we do know is that Galileo landed in Padua in 1592 where he would have been well introduced to heliocentrism by the Hermeticists residing there. Here below we record the Padua of Galileo’s time, described in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew as ‘fair Padua, nursery of arts.’ (Act I, sc. I).’
The role of Padua in the scientific revolution was clearly a crucial one. In the 16th century Copernicus, Harvey, [Bruno and his friend Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601)], Vesallus and Galileo, were all connected with it, the former two as students, and the latter as teachers. (Derek Gjertsen: Classics of Science, L. Barber press, Inc. N.Y. 1884, p.144.)
In October 1592, Campanella came to Padua, six months after Bruno had left it. He stayed there for a year or two and met Galileo there . . . The two magician-philosophers, universal reformers, and heretical Dominicans just missed one another. Yet may not Bruno have left behind him in Padua an atmosphere, or a circle, or a reputation, which affected Campanella? (Frances Yates: Gordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p.363. )
On December 7th 1592, Galileo [gave] his inaugural lecture in front of his robed peers . . . He initially stayed at Pinelli’s house where he met the leading intellectuals of the university, who questioned everything in the established truths of the time. He met rebels such as himself, and what happened to them did not go unnoticed by Galileo. One was Tomasso Campanella who wrote Philosophy demonstrated by the Senses , in 1592 . . . Another person Galileo may have met at that time was Giordano Bruno, who later influenced Galileo’s thinking considerably. Bruno was the first who since the triumph of Christianity preached a return to the independence of Greek thinkers. (David Whitehouse: Renaissance Genius: Galileo & His Legacy to Modern Science, Sterling Publishing Inc. 2009, p.40.)
Another professor awaiting Galileo at Padua was none other than Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631). Aristotelian Philosophy was Cremonini’s game and they paid him 2,000 florins a year for it. But Cremonini was also Emperor Master of the Rosicrucian Socinians from 1604 to 1617 when he retired as the Superior Guardian of these proto-Freemasons whose ideas and methods we have seen earlier. It was Cremonini who taught his pupils that if Rome condemned it, that was enough to pursue it:
One was Cesare Cremonini, professor of philosophy at Padua and a good friend of Galileo who in 1608 had arranged for Galileo to receive a large personal loan from the university. Cremonini was no servile traditionalist; indeed, he was the kind of critical and independent Aristotelian the Church felt distinctively uncomfortable with. In 1611 he was investigated by Cardinal Bellarmine and the Holy Office but released ominously. It was on this occasion that Rome began to take an interest in Galileo. Their first step was to see if there were any link between Cremonini and Galileo. (D. Gjertsen: Classics of Science, p.155. )
It was also in Padua that Galileo acquired himself a mistress, Marina Gamba, who bore him two daughters, Virginia and Livia, and a son he named Vincenzo. Galileo, lauded today as a ‘good Catholic,’ scandalised many with this relationship. Galileo’s small salary meant he was very short of money in Padua. Cremonini however, arranged some financing for him. Thus Galileo became beholden to the Rosicrucians whether he knew it or not.
It's the same old story, age after age: Find a Catholic man who is argumentative and arrogant, and then take him down to hell through debt-sharking and free sex. Obstinate, reckless, pertinacious, jihadist rebellion and heresy is always the result.
The two girls, because they were born out of wedlock, were not considered by their then father to be eligible for marriage. Instead he put them into a convent at a young age where they spent their lives in abject poverty and neglect while he lived the high-life, mixing with the hob-knobs of society and even royalty.
As fate would have it, whereas Galileo’s son did not figure in his life, and his daughter Livia eventually became a recluse, Virginia - who took the name Sister Maria Celeste - would later provide her disgraced father with that kindness and spiritual comfort that came from her life as a nun, a saint by all accounts.
[In 1928 James Brodrick S.J. wrote ‘His correspondence with his – be it said, illegitimate – daughter, the loving and lovable nun, Sister Maria Celeste, would be enough to make anybody sympathetic towards Galileo. This, the sweetest and most attractive chapter in his stormy career, is narrated in full by his great modern devotee, Professor Antonio Favaro, in Galileo Galilei e Suor Maria Celeste, Florence, 1891. Dava Sobel in her Galileo’s Daughter (Fourth Estate, 1999) republished these letters and presents Galileo as the much maligned and loving father with every truth on his side being comforted by the daughter who encouraged him, did his laundry, and worried endlessly about his health.]