About 400 years ago, the adoption of a heliocentric model of the solar system destroyed the relationship with the world on which human spirituality was based for at least 5,000 years. It is possible to affirm that all spiritual literatures were previously built on the cosmological norms of the geocentric model.
Although geocentrism was described as imprecise by rational thought and scientism, it represented an order of the cosmos on which spiritual traditions were built, linking the existence of the human world to eternity. It inspired poets and structured ancient mysteries. Geocentrism therefore offered a major spiritual insight throughout human history for thousands of years.
The geocentric planetary model was as much a scientific as a philosophical model. It was based on two principles:
– the earth is stationary at the center of the universe. The changes of the seasons, the days and the nights are made by movements external to the earth.
– The movements of the planets are perfect, therefore circular. Angular or rectilinear movements are considered abrupt and forced.
The heliocentric model places the sun at the center of the universe, the earth is then seen from the solar system. This representation remains generally accepted to describe the solar system. The basic principles are:
– the sun itself is in revolution around the galactic center, the galaxies are also in motion.
– The universe cannot admit of a center, nor even a privileged point.
The geocentric worldview became a large corpus through religious texts, the initiatory teachings of the mystery schools, but also the poetic tradition seeking an inspiring, structuring and remarkably specific topographical map. It was the structuring ground of astronomical numbers, Fibonacci sequences and the golden ratio.
The Western geocentric model has its origins in ancient Greece with Pythagoras. But it was ruled out in the 16th century by Copernicus. Because this transition from one system to another was the subject of a war between the religious & initiatory theocracies of the time and emerging modern science.
The geocentric model was then totally rejected, and with it all the spiritual literature and mystical philosophy which had been built around this basic symbolism. Emerging science erased ancient mythologies with the wave of its hand in order to impose its unique and dogmatic logic of explaining the world. All mysterious causes of the worlds disappeared, replaced by real and natural physical laws without any god or spirit involved in this new reality. Science made a clean sweep of the past and imposed itself completely and irreversibly.
Whether this new vision of the world is right or not is not the question: in fact the entire spiritual heritage of humanity suddenly became illegible because the geocentric reading grid disappeared.