A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

ceased to be circular and turned into ellipses. In fact, an English doctor named William Gilbert had
stumbled on this essential clue in writing a book called On Magnets in 1600; he had suggested that
the earth itself was an enormous magnet, and that this explained why things stuck to its surface as it
spun round instead of flying off into space. But Galileo failed to grasp the importance of Gilbert’s
idea. Instead, he wrote a book called Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems in which he
continued to insist that Copernicus was obviously correct. The new pope, Urban VIII, read it in
manuscript and insisted that Galileo should stop asserting what he could not prove; he ought to
present the two systems (Ptolemy and Copernicus) and leave the reader to make up his own mind.
To a man of Galileo’s headstrong temperament, this was intolerable. In a thoroughly underhand
way, he had the book printed with a papal seal of approval, which he persuaded out of a goodnatured
but ignorant priest. It came out in 1632. And when the pope read it, he exploded with rage.
It was not Galileo’s opinions that annoyed him so much as the fact that Galileo had quite openly
defied him. He was as headstrong as Galileo, and he had a great deal more power. So the book was
confiscated, and Galileo had to appear in front of the Inquisition. He had virtually no defence. He
had promised the pope that he would teach the Copernican hypothesis as theory, not as proven fact,
and he had broken his word. Galileo was forced to retract his statement that the sun was the centre
of the universe, although legend adds that he muttered under his breath ‘It moves all the same’
(meaning the earth). Then he was allowed to go free. Historians of science like to assert that the
episode reveals the bigotry of the Church and the honesty of the man of science. In fact, the Church
emerges from the trial of Galileo with considerable credit; it was the scientist who was entirely to
blame.
This was not how the rest of Europe saw it. Before the end of the century, Isaac Newton’s Principia
had demonstrated beyond all shadow of doubt that Copernicus was right, and did so with such a
tremendous apparatus of mathematical calculation that few people dared to raise doubts. Newton,
of course, had discovered the missing piece of Galileo’s jigsaw puzzle: gravity. He had done what
Galileo was unable to do: proved the Copernican theory, which is exactly what Pope Urban VIII
had asked Galileo to do; he should have received the credit for being an open-minded man of
science. Instead, the Church was once again left looking discredited. The spirit of Christopher
Marlowe must have chuckled sarcastically.
The century of Galileo and Newton saw the disappearance of another piece of medieval
superstition: the witchcraft craze. Witches have been known since ancient times; the evidence
suggests that they were people who happened to be possessed of what we would now call
‘paranormal powers’, the most common being the ability to heal. But it is worth noting that witches
themselves have always, in all times, claimed that their abilities are somehow involved with the
control of spirits. The so-called spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century was, in the most
precise sense, a revival of witchcraft. And the parallel of the spiritualist movement - and some of
the extraordinary effects produced by the ‘spirits’ during seances - should warn us against making
the simplistic assumption that witchcraft was pure superstition and self-delusion. (I have discussed
these questions at length elsewhere, notably in Mysteries., Part 1, chapter 3, and Poltergeist,
chapter 6.)
In ancient Greece, Rome, China, India, Egypt, Japan and Sumeria, witches (or magicians) were
regarded with fear; yet it would probably be true to say that in most rural communities, the witch or
‘seer’ was taken for granted and regarded as a useful member of the community.