Rocky Road: Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher

In May 2002, a group of distinguished scholars, writers and historians gathered at the New York Institute of the Humanities to address a burning question: "Was Athanasius Kircher the coolest guy ever, or what?" If the 17th-century German Jesuit polymath himself had been in attendance, he likely would have answered in the affirmative. After all, Kircher once wrote about one of his own books:

This earned considerable praise from intelligent readers, who were astonished by the novelty of its subject matter, but there was no lack of malicious, evil critics who attacked it with sarcastic arguments and many attempted corrections. All of these, however, were stupid or obtuse.

Modest the Jesuit was not, but if Benjamin Franklin's observation that vanity is one of life's great comforts is true, then Kircher was almost always in a good mood.

From The Ecstatic Journey by Ingrid D. Rowland

Kircher's cheerfulness might also have stemmed partly from his perceived indestructibility. Scholars who preceded him in observing volcanoes were happy to limit their writings to repeating the views of Greek and Roman scholars, but Kircher descended into the smoking craters of Etna and Vesuvius. Perhaps he was willing to risk his life for a closer look at a volcano because he had survived so many dangers unscathed. According to his own account, he was an accident-prone dimwit in his youth. By the time he was in his thirties, he had lived through shipwrecks, escaped the plague, narrowly avoided trampling by horses, even survived an accidental trip through the grinding wheel of a mill. Most foolhardy of all, he had refused to disguise himself in "worldly" clothes while traveling through Germany during the Thirty Years War. His Jesuit robes attracted the unwelcome attention of some Protestant soldiers who nearly hanged him from a tree until one of them, moved by his courage, had a change of heart. On the other hand, Kircher might have secretly hoped for eventual sainthood, and a life littered with miracles was an important prerequisite; to that end, he might have enhanced his life story a bit.

The baby of nine children, Kircher was born on the Feast of Saint Athanasius (May 2) in 1602, to a pious but scholarly family. He later recounted that, at the age of 15, he chose the Society of Jesus over other religious orders because the Jesuits were most likely to develop his intellectual talents — a recollection somewhat at odds with his description of his young self as an accident-prone dimwit. His father was independent-minded enough to have a rabbi teach the boy Hebrew, and the young Kircher remained fascinated by languages all his life. As a young man, Kircher taught at the Jesuit college of Ingoldstadt where the future first president of London's Royal Society was one of his students. Religious conflicts in Germany forced Kircher to flee to France, where he continued teaching.

Kircher was eventually summoned to Rome, ostensibly to teach mathematics. He was later relieved of his teaching duties so he could concentrate on collecting and writing. He established an impressive collection, the Kircherianum, at the Roman College Museum, and crowed that nobody who had missed his museum had truly seen the great city. Although cheerless Protestants in northern Europe often thought of Rome as Babylon, most visitors saw it as caput mundi or "the head of the world." But not everyone who wanted to visit Kircher's collection actually could. Hopeful visitors often arrived with letters of recommendation from influential friends, and Kircher and his assistants looked over the letters (and perhaps the prospective visitors) to decide who merited admission. The museum became such a hotspot for European nobility that Kircher complained about having time for almost nothing else, not even his daily prayers. The collection was so big that documenting its goodies would continue for decades after Kircher's death.

Kircher was actually called to the ancient city soon after Galileo's trial — in a large part because the Jesuits wanted someone in their camp whose flamboyance rivaled the famous astronomer's. Like a lot of bright scholars of the time, Kircher probably quietly believed Galileo was right, though he didn't dare say so in the proximity of Pope Urban VIII. These were dangerous times, when getting books printed not only required an imprimatur (permission to print the book) and the approval of Jesuit censors (who, in his case, didn't criticize his subject matter so much as his propensity for bragging) but also the patronage of someone wealthy enough to pay for the typesetting and engraving of illustrations — and the protection of someone powerful if the book ruffled feathers. Kircher navigated this tricky terrain skillfully, sometimes switching allegiances to better-positioned patrons. In later years, Pope Alexander VII, who devoted his life to reconciling the differences between Catholic and Protestant faiths, arranged to have Kircher's books published by Protestants in Amsterdam. Kircher followed the same ecumenical philosophy, collaborating with Catholics and Protestants alike. Over the years, the polymath enjoyed the patronage of four popes, two Habsburg emperors, and many German and Italian princes, although he maintained that even the nicest Protestants were likely headed for hell.

Besides teaching mathematics in Rome, Kircher was also charged with interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphs. Unfortunately, the Rosetta Stone's discovery was more than a century away, and without that artifact, deciphering ancient Egyptian writing was all but impossible. Kircher did realize, however, that Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians, was a crucial key. Blissfully ignorant of what they didn't yet know, Kircher and his colleagues believed he was perfectly positioned for hieroglyph decipherment, and he was well versed in more than 20 languages, both living and dead. He considered Egypt — not Greece — the true source of Western learning.

Kircher was likely a follower of the "hermetic tradition," based on the writings of a figure known as Hermes Trismegistus. Thought to be a contemporary of Moses, perhaps Moses himself, Hermes was said to deliver divine knowledge to mankind. Hermes's prestige rather rubbed off on all of Egyptian artifacts, so many of Kircher's contemporaries believed that in deciphering hieroglyphs, he would uncover the original language God gave to Adam, and thus reveal all the world's secrets. (Later scholarship concluded that the writings of Hermes Trismegistus likely dated from the first two centuries AD.)

At the time Kircher worked, the Jesuits ran what was probably the most sophisticated network of information exchange in the world, and he used it effectively. While Jesuits in China anxiously awaited his writings about Egypt and America, readers ranging from London to the New World looked for his China Illustrata. In all, Kircher published almost 40 treatises during his lifetime, relying on more than 30 illustrators. He wrote about the cosmos (calling his book science fiction so he could support the Copernican system and suggest an infinite universe with relative safety), magnetism and hieroglyphs. The geographically astute Jesuit even recommended a canal linking the Red Sea and Dead Sea, an idea that has been occasionally revived even into the 21st century. He also penned Mundus Subterraneus about the subterranean world. His two volumes of Mundus Subterraneus meandered over an amazing variety of subjects: herbs, astrology, mining, dragons, demons, subterranean men, poisons, antidotes, weather, eclipses, fireworks, fossils, gravity, bioluminescence, the sun and moon, and other topics. Kircher focused Volume I of Mundus Subterraneus on "the admirable structure of the terrestrial globe," and dedicated it to Pope Alexander VII. He focused Volume II on how humans could make the most of the planet's bounty, and dedicated it to Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.

Although he wrote often about fossils, Kircher is remembered in a large part for misunderstanding their origins. In his defense, he studied them at a time when a fossil could be anything dug up from the ground, so it's not ironic that he proposed multiple hypotheses for their origins. Some he attributed to "lapidifying juices" looking for something to emulate. Others he attributed to the work of human hands. But he was also aware of Steno's studies of fossils, and he acknowledged that some fossils were simply the remains of previously living organisms:

I will not speak here of the innumerable oysters, clams, snails, fungi, algae and other denizens of the sea that have been converted to stone, because these are obviously found everywhere in such a state, and hardly merit any mention.

Kircher also doubted the common belief that Roman and Greek alphabets often miraculously appeared in stone. By drying clay, he produced many "letters" — composed mostly of straight lines caused by simple cracking.

A man of his time all the same, Kircher published a detailed treatise on Noah's Ark, including a floor plan, a list of animals taken onboard, and the precise size of a cubit. When Kircher put together this work, explaining the Ark's seaworthiness had grown more challenging; the discovery of the New World presented many more passengers that would have needed accommodation. Kircher nimbly worked around some of the concern by explaining — as many believed at the time — that many modern animals were actually hybrids. A giraffe, for instance, he characterized as a camel-leopard mix. The armadillo, a rare example of which sat in his museum, might be the progeny of a turtle and a hedgehog or porcupine. Perhaps more forward-thinking, he said animals might have changed after the worldwide flood by adapting to new environments. To explain "lowly" animals, he relied on spontaneous generation, such as insects sprouting from animal dung (he even published recipes).

From "All that Glitters: Fool's Gold in the Early-Modern Era" in Endeavour by Anna Marie Roos

Francesco Redi, a contemporary of Kircher's, challenged the notion of spontaneous generation with some well-controlled experiments. It was not the only time Redi would challenge Kircher's ideas; the men also disagreed about the effectiveness of snakestones — believed to be extracted from the heads of venomous snakes, and to protect from poison. Kircher generally favored their use and Redi generally opposed it. Although arguably the better experimenter, Redi had other motives for opposing Kircher, including protecting the business interests of the Medici (his own patrons) who sold their own antidotes. And Redi certainly didn't want Kircher's competition for Medici sponsorship. Kircher basically let Redi have the Medici, and focused on other patrons.

Kircher's questionable notions didn't end with spontaneous generation and snakestones. He believed in a continual creative force within the planet and throughout the universe. He believed ideas that had circulated since medieval times about mountain ranges concealing networks of rivers and streams that were themselves linked with the world's ocean, the water occasionally forced underground by winds. He argued that subterranean sulfurous spirits seeded volcanoes. He thought mulberry trees could grow silkworms starting from the eggs of any other kind of bug. And according to science historian Paula Findlen, he was "perhaps the last naturalist to believe passionately in the reality of any papal dragon he saw." He even inspected the alleged head of a dragon that had struck down a local hunter and turned his body green with its venom.

Yet Kircher rejected many beliefs common to the times. While others pondered the existence of giants, he wondered where they could have found enough room to live and enough food to eat. He criticized virtuoso Giambattista Della Porta for promoting belief in magic. He calculated that the height required for the Tower of Babel merely to reach the moon would catapult the earth out of its orbit — an interesting assertion considering, after Galileo's trial, Kircher wasn't supposed to talk about the earth even having an orbit. He denied the existence of winged tortoises, flying cats and birds emerging from flowers (though he did write about a fish that turned into a bird each summer). He disdained alchemists who sought to transmute lead into gold. He disliked miracles on the principle that nature was miraculous enough when it played by the rules. Beyond rejecting some wrong notions, he advanced some pretty good ones. Some of his ideas about volcanism survived into the 20th century, and he was arguably the first to depict the Pacific "Ring of Fire" on a world map.

From Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin

If many of Kircher's hypotheses were wrong, and even if he lacked the rigorous approach of modern science, he delighted in his research, and apparently his whole life. Visitors to the Kircherianum sipped tasty liquids provided by mechanical barfing crustaceans and heard his disembodied voice, fed to them through a hidden metal tube he spoke through from his bedroom. He engineered megaphones that one of his buddies used to bray at wolves and start their howling. He once tricked the minister of his abbey into desperately searching for an organ that didn't exist; what the minister really heard was Kircher's aeolian harp played by the wind. He launched dragon-shaped hot-air balloons with "Flee the wrath of God" painted on their underbellies. He dressed up cats in cherub wings, to the mild amusement of onlookers, and the great annoyance of the cats. (Cats did well to avoid Kircher altogether. He wrote about a cat piano to harmonize differently pitched meows by sticking pins in the poor creatures' tails, something that "might cause the very mice to jump for joy," but he probably didn't actually build the instrument.) He championed, but probably didn't invent, the magic lantern, the forerunner of modern slide projectors and even movie theaters. He designed a "miraculous book" — maybe one of the world's earliest pop-up books — which should surely cement his status as the "coolest guy ever."

Soon after he arrived in Rome, a cardinal gave him a rudimentary compound microscope. Kircher became one of the first people to work with microscopes, and one of the first to propose the role of microorganisms in the spread of disease. Asked to help local doctors — some of whom died for their compassion — treat the sick when the plague hammered Rome in 1656, he thought he could see the bacterium responsible for the illness through his microscope. In fact, he probably saw another bacterium, but his speculations about how disease spread were correct, and his description of "little worms which propagate plague" may be the earliest clear assertion of the germ theory of disease based on microscopic observation. Even when disease wasn't a looming threat, Kircher fed his hypotheses with constant experimentation, setting perishables on his windowsill to rot then examining the decaying mass with his homemade microscope. He marveled at the minute "animals" he found:

If you examine the powder of rotten wood under the Smicroscopium, an immense pullulation of little worms will be found, of which some are outfitted with little horns, some have wings of a sort, others are not unlike centipedes, and you will see eyes like little black dots along with noses . . . Because they themselves have been placed in the world with bodies so tiny that they are beyond the reach of the senses, how tiny can their little hearts be? How tiny must their little livers be, or their little stomachs, their cartilage and little nerves, their means of locomotion?

For more information:
The Ecstatic Journey by Ingrid D. Rowland
Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything edited by Paula Findlen
Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters edited by Mordechai Feingold
Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin
Athanasius Kircher by Joscelyn Godwin
China Illustrata by Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) Jesuit Scholar by Brian L. Merrill
From Heaven to Arcadia by Ingrid D. Rowland
Possessing Nature by Paula Findlen
The Seashell on the Mountaintop by Alan Cutler
The Meaning of Fossils by Martin J.S. Rudwick
"The Last Renaissance Man: Athanasius Kircher, SJ" by Edward W. Schmidt in Company Magazine, Winter 2001-2002
Fossils: Evidence of Vanished Worlds by Yvette Gayrard-Valy
Merchants and Marvels edited by Smith and Findlen
"Account of Athanasii Kircheri China Illustrata" in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1666-1667
"Rome and the Royal Society, 1660-1740" by Alan Cook in Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2004
"The Museum of Jurassic Technology" by Matthew W. Roth in Technology and Culture, January 2002
"The World, as it Might Be: Iconography and Probabilism in the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher" by Mark Waddell in Centaurus, January 2006
"Magic and Artifice in the Collection of Athanasius Kircher" by Mark Waddell in Endeavour, March 2010
"Mapping the World Below: Athanasius Kircher and his Subterranean World" by Louis De Vorsey in Mercator's World, March-April 2003
"All that Glitters: Fool's Gold in the Early-Modern Era" by Anna Marie Roos in Endeavour, December 2008
"The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate" by Martha Baldwin in Isis, September 1995
Wonders and the Order of Nature by Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park
Cabinets of Curiosities by Patrick Mauriès
Revolutionizing the Sciences by Peter Dear
Starring T. Rex! by José Luis Sanz
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
Instruments of the Imagination by Hankins and Silverman
The Scarith of Scornello by Ingrid D. Rowland
Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents by Charles Gould
The Friar and the Cipher by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone
The Occult Tradition by David S. Katz
The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine by Horst Bredekamp
Chrysalis by Kim Todd
"Foils and Fakes: The Hydra in Giambattista Basile's Dragon-Slayer Tale, 'Lo mercante'" by Suzanne Magnanini in Marvels & Tales Magazine, 2005
"Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) on Noah's Ark" by Olaf Breidbach and Michael T. Ghiselin in Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences December 28, 2006
"Invertebrate Zoology and Parasitology during the 1600s" by Frank N. Egerton in Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, July 2005
"South American Mammal Diversity and Hernandez's Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus" by Ernesto Capanna in Rendiconti Lincei, April 2009
"Little Worms Which Propagate Plague" in The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
"Contributions to the History of Geological Sciences: Illustrations of the Kircher Museum Naturalistic Collections" by Bruno Accordi in Geol. Rom.
"New Life for the Dead Sea?" by Josie Glausiusz in Nature, April 22, 2010