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The Galilean Heresy


"...If, being of opinion that Cœlestial bodies are incorruptible and eternal, he believeth that the Terrestrial Globe is not so, but corruptible and mortal."

The most controversial thinker of the century, Galileo decided to have a tough life, not shutting his ideas in his own mind.

He started numerous fires with the Roman Catholic church, and it was only the fact he also had friends in Rome that forbade his ending on the pyre. For the general population, his major and last transgression was the idea of a corruptible heaven, to propose that stars, planets and everything in existence changes and dies, an irreconcilable idea faced to the Holy Texts.

But the truth is that the deepest heresy of Galileo was hidden in another manuscript, for which all but a few copies disappeared: the Tractatus Maculae Solaribus. It is said that in this text, Galilei chronicles his findings about what he described as the dark and fickle spots and marks observed on the surface of the Sun, whose pattern and meaning escapes my understanding.

 The church rejected these ideas as the nonsense of a great mind in his last years. But then, after the Inquisition convicted him to imprisonment for suspicion of heresy in 1633, his former friends across Europe reported the harassment of unidentified groups that demanded to deliver any copy of the Tractatus Maculae Solaribus in existence to them, even using death threats.

 The copies disappeared from existence, and even now those friends are reluctant to speak about it when asked and turn the gaze away. But rumors exist of copies that Galileo himself, foreseeing this outcome, hide among people not related to him, some say even his enemies.

 The church never made an official statement about these rumors, as it were small events, lost into the vortex of incidents happening everyday in Europe. The association of the unidentified thugs was never cleared either. Some ascribe them to the Roman Church in general, others directly to the Inquisition. There are some that think they were just Galileo's enemies that profited from his conviction, or a fanatic sect, or something else completely.

 What really happened in those days to the Tractatus Maculae Solaribus is, at best, a legend.

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