Clues beneath the Lamp: On Copernicus's Magical "Other"

The extended scholarship on Copernicus and the new scholarship on objectification and visualization of nature have not yet intersected. In this paper I would like to present preliminary findings that bring these two scholarships together into one story, showing that questions about the visualization of the sun unexpectedly contributed to one of the most important scientific insight – the shift of the sun to the center of the universe. I will start in investigating some peculiarities in the text that Copernicus chose to encircle the heliocentric diagram in which he stirred up metaphors of astral magic; then I will point out on a possible source for such metaphors; and at the end I will excavate the modes of readings of such astral-magical source in Copernicus’s habitat – Cracow University. This exploration shows that the most critical question that Copernicus faced was the discrepancy between the astral-magical functional description of the sun as the most powerful object in nature and the astronomical-mathematical structural description of the sun as merely a marginal planet. The perception of the sun as an object enabled Copernicus to shift it to the center, resolving the contradicting descriptions of the sun and generating for the first time a unified visualized paradigmatic language for both, practitioners of astral-magic and astronomers.