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. This was a man who, about one of his earlier works, once wrote:

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 he 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 were happy to limit their writings on volcanoes to repeating the views of Greek and Roman scholars, for instance, but Kircher descended into the smoking craters of Etna and Vesuvius — perhaps 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.

The baby of nine children, Kircher was born in 1602 to a pious but scholarly family. 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.

Kircher was eventually summoned to Rome to teach mathematics. He 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), 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. (In Kircher's case, Jesuit censors didn't criticize his subject matter so much as his propensity for bragging.) 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.

Besides teaching mathematics in Rome, Kircher was also charged with interpreting Egyptian hieroglyphs, a job that suited him perfectly. Considered well-versed in more than 20 languages, both living and dead, he saw all of nature as a divinely inspired hieroglyph. He considered Egypt — not Greece — the true source of Western learning. Like others of his day, he was 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 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 from London all the way to the new world looked for his China Illustrata. In all, Kircher published almost 40 treatises during his lifetime. 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, hieroglyphs (inaccurately, given the Rosetta Stone's discovery was more than a century away — though he did realize that Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians, was a crucial key), and Mundus Subterraneus about the subterranean world. His two volumes of Mundus Subterraneus meandered over an amazing variety of subjects: herbs, astrology, mining, dragons, demons, poisons, antidotes, weather, eclipses, fireworks, fossils, gravity, bioluminescence, the sun and moon, and other topics. In the words of one modern observer, "Kircher did not so much cross boundaries as ignore them." He did, however, focus the separate volumes of Mundus Subterraneus on different topics, and dedicate them to different patrons. Volume I, concentrated on "the admirable structure of the terrestrial globe," was dedicated to Pope Alexander VII. Volume II, focused on how humans could make the most of the planet's bounty, was dedicated to Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.

Kircher is remembered in a large part for misunderstanding the origin of fossils, but 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 the "creative force" inherent in the cosmos, and some to the work of human hands. But he also 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.

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 explained as a camel-leopard mix. 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).

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'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. 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. 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. 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.

Many of the major hypotheses Kircher championed were wrong, but if he lacked the rigorous approach of modern science, he delighted in his research, and apparently his whole life. Visitors to the Kircherianum (his impressive museum, and possibly the largest curiosity cabinet of the 17th century) 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, 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.

Kircher was 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.

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
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 issue
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" in Notes and Records of the Royal Society by Alan Cook, 2004
"The Museum of Jurassic Technology" in Technology and Culture by Matthew W. Roth, 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 issue
"Mapping the World Below: Athanasius Kircher and his Subterranean World" in Mercator's World by Louis De Vorsey, March-April 2003
"The Snakestone Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate" in Isis by Martha Baldwin, 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