  Cardano’s cosmological views belong to a long-established system of astro-biological doctrines whose origins go back to Aristotelian physics, Hippocratic vitalism, and fundamental assumptions underlying the tradition of astrological and meteorological learning, reshaped through a series of Hebrew and Arabic mediations. His account of the supralunary world combines elements from Neoplatonic philosophy and Christian theology. In line with many of his contemporaries, Cardano maintains that there is a clear division between the supralunary and sublunary world. The life of the universe is the result of varying degrees of celestial energy overflowing from the One, i.e., God. From God to matter, cohorts of the most disparate souls mediate between these two extremes. From a material point of view, the connective element between heaven and earth is celestial heat. The principal constituents of the sublunary world are matter (earth, water and air), celestial heat, and a wide variety of souls (spanning from demonic minds to substantial forms understood as specific principles of life).