Nicolaus Copernicus, the aesthete, a kind of daydreaming astrological draughtsman, is a "mimesis" man. Johannes Kepler, who had proposed to write a book called Geometric Cabala, is a "semiosis" man, seeking to go deeper in search of concealed esoteric truths of a more or less gnostic nature. Both men as presented in these precise terms appear terrifically characteristic of their two opposed zeitgeists, Copernicus connected to the Renaissance, Kepler to Mannerism. For both Copernicus and Kepler, God must remain the loadstar.
Copernicus is very much still in thrall to Plato, Pythagoras, and Euclid, though he aspires to make his own way. He writes in lyric fashion of his love for the sun.
Kepler believed in Spinoza’s ‘principle of sufficient reason.’ Mechanics was changing because the world was busier and crazier. Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion. He said of music that it constituted "a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements."
In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, a literary device intended to help safeguard Kepler against charges of heresy—in which he imagines astrology as practiced on the moon.
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"Neither perception, nor voluntary memory, nor voluntary thought," insists Gilles Deleuze in Proust and Signs, "gives us profounds truth, but only possible truth."
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