Cloaca of the World: Geocentrism, Antropocentrism and Extraterrestrials

The modern European culture likes to declare itself as having come to its contemporary intellectual, cultural and scientific level owing to the fact that it had freed itself from prejudices and illusions. One of the most often mentioned illusions became geocentrism interpreted usually as a manifestation of the naive human desire to place man in the centre of the universe. In this paper, I want to show that neither in antiquity nor in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, geocentrism was connected with the idea of human exclusiveness in the universe. From the cosmological point of view, the Earth was the gutter of the world and from the theological one it was the devil’s place of work. Only the Copernican reform of astronomy broke existing distribution of dignity in the cosmos and it brought different evaluation of the Earth and the centre of the world. And geocentrism started to be attacked as an expression of the naive and infantile anthropocentrism which had no sense in the infinite universe inhabitated by millions of the intelligent beings.