Helisaeus Roeslin or Helisäus Röslin (17 January 1545 – 14 August 1616) was a German physician and
astrologer
Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Dif ...
who adopted a
geoheliocentric model of the universe. He was one of five observers who concluded that the
Great Comet of 1577
The Great Comet of 1577 (official designation: C/1577 V1) is a non-periodic comet that passed close to Earth during the year 1577 AD. Having an official designation beginning with "C" classes it as a non-periodic comet, and so it is not expected t ...
was located beyond the moon. His representation of the comet, described as "an interesting, though crude, attempt," was among the earliest and was highly complex.
Life
Roeslin was born in
Plieningen
Plieningen is the southernmost borough ('' Stadtbezirk'') of Stuttgart in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Plieningen is located about from the city center of Stuttgart on the Filder Plain. Schloss Hohenheim, part of the Stuttgart Airport, ...
(now part of
Stuttgart
Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the ''Stuttgarter Kessel'' (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the ...
). had known
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws ...
since their student days and was one of his correspondents. Roeslin placed more emphasis on astrological predictions than did Kepler, and though he respected Kepler as a
mathematician
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.
Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
History
On ...
, he rejected some of Kepler's cosmological principles, including
Copernican theory
Copernican heliocentrism is the astronomical model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus and published in 1543. This model positioned the Sun at the center of the Universe, motionless, with Earth and the other planets orbiting around it in circular pa ...
. Kepler criticized Roeslin's predictions in his book ''De stella nova'', on the comet of 1604, and the two kept up their arguments in a series of
pamphlet
A pamphlet is an unbound book (that is, without a hard cover or binding). Pamphlets may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths, called a ''leaflet'' or it may consist of a ...
s written as
dialogue
Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. As a philosophical or didactic device, it is c ...
s.
Roeslin's 1597 book ''De opere Dei creationis'' is regarded as one of the major works in the late 16th-century controversy over the formulation of a geoheliocentric world system.
Robert Burton
Robert Burton (8 February 1577 – 25 January 1640) was an English author and fellow of Oxford University, who wrote the encyclopedic tome ''The Anatomy of Melancholy''.
Born in 1577 to a comfortably well-off family of the landed gentry, Burt ...
refers to Roeslin in his ''
Anatomy of Melancholy
''The Anatomy of Melancholy'' (full title: ''The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Ph ...
''.
Roeslin was physician-in-ordinary to the
count palatine
A count palatine (Latin ''comes palatinus''), also count of the palace or palsgrave (from German ''Pfalzgraf''), was originally an official attached to a royal or imperial palace or household and later a nobleman of a rank above that of an ord ...
of
Veldenz
Veldenz is an ''Ortsgemeinde'' – a municipality belonging to a ''Verbandsgemeinde'', a kind of collective municipality – in the Bernkastel-Wittlich district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is the former main seat of the County of Veldenz, ...
and the count of
Hanau-Lichtenberg
The County of Hanau-Lichtenberg was a territory in the Holy Roman Empire. It emerged between 1456 and 1480 from a part of the County of Hanau and one half of the Barony of Lichtenberg. Following the extinction of the counts of Hanau-Lichtenberg in ...
in
Buchsweiler in
Alsace
Alsace (, ; ; Low Alemannic German/ gsw-FR, Elsàss ; german: Elsass ; la, Alsatia) is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. In 2020, it had ...
.
He made a prediction that the world would end in 1654 based on the appearance of a
new star in 1572.
James Randi
James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Rodrigues 2010p. ...
, ''The Mask of Nostradamus'' Page 240.
After Roeslin's death at
Buchsweiler in 1616, his unpublished astrology, theology and
kabbalistic
Kabbalah ( he, קַבָּלָה ''Qabbālā'', literally "reception, tradition") is an esoteric method, discipline and Jewish theology, school of thought in Jewish mysticism. A traditional Kabbalist is called a Mekubbal ( ''Məqūbbāl'' "rece ...
work merged into the manuscript collection of
Karl Widemann Karl Widemann or Carl Widemann or Carolus Widemann, was a German author, physician and collector of manuscripts, from Augsburg, and secretary of the English alchemist Edward Kelley, at the court of Emperor Rudolph II.
Life
Between 1587 and 1588, Wi ...
.
References
Further reading
*Akerman, Susanna. ''Rose Cross over the Baltic: The Spread of
Rosicrucianism
Rosicrucianism is a spiritual and cultural movement that arose in Europe in the early 17th century after the publication of several texts purported to announce the existence of a hitherto unknown esoteric order to the world and made seeking its ...
in Northern Europe''. Brill 1998. Limited previe
online.*Caspar, Max. ''Kepler''. Translated and edited by C. Doris Hellman. New York: Dover, 1993. Limited previe
online.*Granada, M.A. "Helisaeus Röslin on the eve of the appearance of the nova of 1604: his eschatological expectations and his intellectual career as recorded in the ''Ratio studiorum et operum meorum'' (1603-1604)." ''Sudhoffs Archiv'' 90 (2006) 75-96.
* Rosen, Edward. "Kepler's Attitude toward Astrology and Mysticism." In ''Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance''. Edited by Brian Vickers. Cambridge University Press, 1984. Limited previe
online.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roeslin, Helisaeus
1544 births
1616 deaths
16th-century apocalypticists
16th-century astrologers
16th-century German physicians
16th-century German writers
16th-century German male writers
17th-century apocalypticists
17th-century astrologers
17th-century German physicians
17th-century German writers
17th-century German male writers
16th-century German astronomers
German astrologers