Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) is a transitional figure in the history of thought. He stands between two worlds: On the one hand, he is still deeply rooted in the Renaissance's magical-mythical understanding of the cosmos; on the other hand, he anticipates a modern understanding of the natural sciences by relying on systematic observation and data measurement. I call him a “borderline figure.”
His Uraniborg Palace was not only an observatory, but also a laboratory for alchemical experiments, similar, incidentally, to Newton's place of work. The intellectual innovation, however, was his empirical radicalism. With unprecedented empirical radicalness, he measured the orbits of planets and stars without a telescope, using a simple quadrant – for decades. In doing so, he broke the boundaries of speculative mystification and paved the way for Johannes Kepler and later Isaac Newton. Without Brahe's Rudolfine Tables, Kepler would never have been able to discover the planetary laws, which also made him one of the first proponents of a newly emerging worldview.
Today, at a time when the primitive-materialistic worldview is beginning to disintegrate, the seeker of truth finds himself in a similar situation. However, the paradigm of the spirit—as already encapsulated in the structured symbolic landscape of the Sermon on the Mount—demands a similar radicalness and strength to overcome the materialistic worldview. The temptation is great to pour the new wine of the spirit into the old wineskins of materialism, which usually amounts to esoteric syncretism. Ken Wilber and many others send their regards...
Perhaps the "Stella Nova" was something like a kairos moment for Tycho Brahe. Until then, the celestial vault, with its eternal cycle of phenomena, seemed to be irrefutable proof of the immutability of the cosmos. While the cosmos didn't collapse, Tycho Brahe's worldview certainly did. Did the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård have Tycho Brahe in mind when he wrote the novel "The Morning Star"? Tycho certainly came to mind for me when I was looking for a domain name for this website.
