Golem

Prague was once ruled by a sad eccentric, Emperor Rudolf 2nd. He filled his court with alchemists, astrologers, mystics, exotic beasts, cabbalists and cranks....The astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler found refuge there....this was Prague's golden age, despite the tragedies of the royal family ....the magico-occult sentiments extended to the local protestant population...Rudolfs sucessor became embroiled with Emperial and Catholic forces, and the 'mystics' were routed by a numerically superior force at the battle of White Mountain, in 1620. This clash helped decide the political direction all of Europe would eventually take, being the first battle of the 30 years war...one of the soldiers fighting against the rebels was the soon to be famous Rene Descartes.

Descartes went on to have a profound influence upon Western culture, and he helped mold (albeit reluctantly) Isaac Newton. Our dominant scientific paradigm- epiricism, reductionism, rational materialism- ....can be largely characterized as being created by these events.
Imagine if the Czechs had prevailed in 1620, and Descartes had been killed.- then the magico-occult philosophy of Prague might have become the West's inheritance, and we could quite possibly be using a different, more humane, technology- the Hermeticists believed that all matter was alive, thus it was accorded respect.

(The occult view was never completely suppressed- Swedenborg in the 18th century, Jung in the 20th, and others have kept the fire alive...- hopefully holism will soon overtake the dead mechanistic sentiment)