Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (14 page)

When Kircher began his hieroglyphic studies so many years before, he had no idea that they were based on an incorrect assumption. This was now what he refused to believe. By the time Kircher began writing
Egyptian Oedipus
, he was well aware of scholarly research published in 1614 by the Swiss-born Calvinist Isaac Casaubon. Casaubon had dated the Hermetic texts to the second or third century, not to the time of Moses. There was no such person as Hermes Trismegistus, or, if there was, he was not the author of the writings and the hieroglyphic texts ascribed to him.

It's not really a surprise that Kircher wasn't willing to dismantle his sense of the sanctity of the Hermetic texts. That would have been like dismantling his sense of self, or at any rate, his life's work. On the contrary, he argued in
Egyptian Oedipus
that the kind of challenge to ancient authority that this Protestant Casaubon had made was a very dangerous thing: “Since they have been accepted by everyone, from so many centuries ago until these times,” certain historical and sacred texts “are worthy of necessary trust.”

“Without this the acts of all human affairs . . . would dissolve,” he continued, and “nothing certain could be written or said, and all would be murky and obscured by doubt.”

From a later perspective, Kircher employed some unscrupulous scholarly tactics in
Egyptian Oedipus
, but he was more concerned with what he saw as a noble intent. As a historian of the baroque period has put it, the goal was to show the “
fundamental unity of human culture and its origins” as well as the fundamental truth of Christianity. For Kircher, larger truths took precedence over smaller ones. In the hands of someone like Casaubon, Kircher seemed to suggest, even the sanctity of biblical scripture might be called into question.

13

The Admiration of the Ignorant

M
eanwhile—that is, while he was busy capping off two decades of work by producing what would later turn out to be wildly inaccurate translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions—Kircher also put together his famous museum.

During the last half of the sixteenth century, cabinets of curiosity, or wonder cabinets, had become popular all over Europe. Galileo had mocked the “
curious little men” who displayed, say, “a petrified crab, a desiccated chameleon, a fly or spider in gelatin or amber, those small clay figurines, supposedly found in ancient Egyptian burial chambers.” But his was the minority opinion. In 1651, when a wealthy Roman gentleman donated his trove of art and antiquities to the Collegio Romano, the Jesuits saw an opportunity to build a collection of prominence, and they put Kircher in charge of it.

The bequest included Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Etruscan items—coins, statues, tablets, manuscripts, and more everyday artifacts from ancient or at least former Rome (household utensils, weights and measures). This gave Kircher a foundation on which to add all the curiosities he'd kept on view in his cubiculum. “
It happened,” he later recalled, “that I was compelled to transfer my private Museum to a more appropriate and accessible location in the Roman College, which they call the Gallery.” This gallery, a long corridor adjacent to the formal library on the third floor, where paintings and portraits had already been hung, was well lit with three window bays.

Fairly soon Kircher and his assistants had filled it with swords, clothes, ornaments, preserved animal specimens, and other things brought or sent back by Jesuit missionaries. The collection included the “
tail and bones” of a mermaid, which Kircher told visitors he obtained on Malta, and a brick from the Tower of Babel donated by Pietro della Valle. One Jesuit priest even contributed his own ten-ounce gallstone.

According to a catalog published years later, there were “
armillary spheres, and celestial and terrestrial globes, equipped with their meridians and pivots.” There were Archimedean screws, a number of mechanical clocks, and devices “bearing a resemblance to perpetual motion.” There was “an organ, driven by an automatic drum, playing a concert of every kind of birdsong, and sustaining in mid-air a spherical globe, continually buffeted by the force of the wind.”

Together, Kircher and Schott built a number of magnetic and hydraulic machines for the space. Some taught moral lessons, and some underscored traditional Aristotelian laws (for example, that nature abhorred a vacuum, despite recent experimental evidence to the contrary on the part of Evangelista Torricelli). Others were meant to reveal the wonders of natural magic, and a number of them “vomited” fluid, apparently to provide amusement that now seems inscrutably baroque.
These included “a two-headed Imperial Eagle vomiting water copiously from the depths of its gullets”; “a hydraulic machine, which supports a crystal goblet, from one side of which a thirsty bird drinks up water that a snake re-vomits from the other side while opening its mouth”; “a water-vomiting hydraulic machine, at the top of which stands a figure vomiting up various liquids for guests to drink.”

The Delphic Oracle

Kircher's playful nature was never more in evidence than in his museum. He entertained visitors with the catoptric theater that John Evelyn had seen, the one in which cats were fascinated to observe “an innumerable multitude” of other cats, and with his projection device, which showed “
ghosts in the air.” He also delighted them with what he called the Delphic Oracle. To make it, Kircher removed the acoustical tube from the wall of his cubiculum and installed it in a similar recess between the college courtyard and the museum; it was then connected by progressively smaller hidden tubes to a hollow statue.

Let a “statue be situated in a sure and calculated spot in such a way that the end of the tube meets precisely with the opening of the mouth and you will have a statue perfect and consummate in articulately producing whatever you will,” he instructed. “Because the orifice of the shell meets with a public place, all the words of men coming from outside into the spiral tube produce themselves drawn within the mouth of the statue.” As a result, the tube could be “employed in playful oracles and fictitious consultations with such artifice that not one of its witnesses was able to discern anything concerning its secret construction.” The
Delphic Oracle is “shown to visitors not without some suspicion of a latent demon by those who do not understand its mechanism, for the statue opens and closes its mouth in the manner of one speaking, it even moves its eyes.”

—

THE MUSEUM WASN'T
just a place for the “
investigation of the learned,” “the admiration of the ignorant and uncultured,” and “the relaxation of Princes and Magnates,” as Kircher liked to say. It was a venue in which Kircher could put himself on display. And in general, given his increasing status and celebrity, the Jesuit authorities were happy for him to do so. Schott's recollections suggest that Kircher was in his element when giving tours of the museum. Sometimes he was in such a buoyant mood that he would pull a sword down from the wall to demonstrate his thrust and parry.

Kircher began to exhibit his own books in the museum and, at some point—ostensibly to show how integral he was to the functioning of the Republic of Letters and the degree to which he was in contact with the best and most holy minds—
he also began to exhibit his personal correspondence. Before he died in 1680, Kircher exchanged letters with more than seven hundred fifty people, many of them quite prominent. The letter writing was never done: there were dispatches from Jesuits to acknowledge and forward to other learned men; sycophantic letters to send to patrons; sycophantic letters requiring response; and never-ending requests for translations. “
It can hardly be said,” Schott wrote, “how many inscriptions, sacred, profane, superstitious, magical and even diabolical . . . have been brought to him from all the parts of the world, in order to be interpreted.”

It wasn't always easy being a “master of one hundred arts,” as Kircher had begun to call himself. But indications are that Kircher felt a certain satisfaction during this period of his life (his early fifties). At least some of it had to do with the presence of his friend Schott, who worked tirelessly on Kircher's behalf.

—

MANY OF THE LETTERS
sent to Kircher around this time concern astronomy. A Jesuit named Hermann Crumbach, for example, sent observations he'd received from Malabar, in southern India. A linguist, Amatus de Chezaud, reported on the “most minute asteroids” he'd observed from Aleppo. Former student Nicolò Mascardi wrote to him about the comets he'd seen while sailing through the Strait of Magellan. Although not a great astronomer himself (he lacked the attention span, for one thing, and the mathematical rigor), Kircher forwarded a steady stream of data from his correspondents to astronomers such as Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a Jesuit in Bologna, and Johannes Hevelius, the young astronomer from Danzig he'd hosted in Avignon many years earlier. Hevelius had used the proceeds from his family's brewing business to set up an observatory on the roof of his home. In an attempt to clear away the distortions and halos produced by the refracting telescopes of the time, Hevelius kept pushing their focal lengths, using a sixty-foot telescope to make unprecedented observations of the surface of the moon. They were published in one volume in 1647, in the form of one hundred fifty steel engravings. (Years later, he built a telescope with a focal range more than twice as long.)

The astronomical evidence kept mounting in favor of a sun-centered system. Kircher had come out against the magnetic arguments for the Copernican configuration in
The Magnet
, but that was more than twenty years before. Since then, because the Church subscribed to it, he'd perfunctorily endorsed the so-called geoheliocentric arrangement of Tycho Brahe. Supporters of this cosmology essentially said:
It appears to be true that the planets revolve around the sun
—
but the sun and the stars still revolve around the Earth
.

Schott had been encouraging Kircher to write on the subject. But an insufficiently critical discussion of the new astronomy could get you in trouble with the Inquisition, if not burned at the stake, and Kircher had always made a point of steering clear of it. He wasn't the type to take on the topic without a change in political circumstances, the kind that might have transpired, for example, if one of his friends were elected pope. In April of 1655, after the death of Innocent X, one of them was.

Kircher knew Fabio Chigi from their time together on Malta, when he served as apostolic delegate. Since then, they'd kept up a correspondence based on shared interest in such things as sundials and recondite learning. Chigi, who took the name Alexander VII, had risen to become the Vatican's highest-ranking diplomat, and was somewhat meekly involved in the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia. As Kircher described it, Chigi was “
finally exalted to the supreme tip of the apostolic peak by his altogether deserving and in no way ill-matched heap of merit.” In reality, he was a compromise candidate whose election ended an eighty-day enclave.

Alexander VII was a strange little man who did “
not enjoy what one would call perfect health,” wrote a Venetian ambassador. “He is left with so few teeth that if he did not compensate the loss with false ones he would mumble.” Slight and somewhat elfin in appearance, with an upturned mustache and a chin beard, he instituted his own particular brand of Vatican reform, renouncing papal nepotism and, at first, keeping his relatives away from Rome. Alexander “
had so taken upon him the profession of an evangelical life,” recalled a canon of Canterbury assigned to Rome, “that he was wont to season his meat with ashes, to sleep upon a hard couch, to hate riches, glory, and pomp, taking a great pleasure to give audience to ambassadors in a chamber full of dead men's sculls, and in the sight of his coffin, which stood there to put him in mind of his death.”

The new pope wasn't very interested in affairs of state, but he cared about aesthetics. Although austere, he “
liked his company to be gay in reason, and he enjoyed his intercourse.” In frequent pain from kidney stones, Alexander would “speak quietly upon literature, ecclesiastical history . . . and upon the sacred sciences” such as Kabbalah and astrology and presumably also the new sciences. He spent afternoons in his apartments in such “
literary meetings” with Kircher and others, and he “
wished to have Bernini with him every day” to discuss architecture and urban-planning projects. Among other things, their conversations produced Bernini's design for the monumental colonnades that now form St. Peter's Square.

Alexander kept his favorites close, and it's possible to imagine that, for one reason or another, he was irked by Kircher's relationship with the less sophisticated, German-speaking Schott. There's no point in speculating further, but within months of Alexander's election, the Society of Jesus sent Schott all the way back to Germany—first Mainz, and then Würzburg. It was an “
abrupt and unanticipated departure,” says one historian, and was known to have caused both Kircher and Schott deep disappointment.

Whatever was said in the pope's apartments about Copernican theory, it was also within months of Alexander's election that Kircher moved forward with a book on the structure of the universe. But Kircher was under no illusions that he could simply ignore the sensitivities of the subject. Moreover, a new Jesuit ordinance included a prohibition on the discussion of magnetism (“action at a distance”) with respect to cosmology. So he wrote it as a work of the imagination—the story of a cosmic dream in which an angel named Cosmiel leads Kircher's fictional stand-in, a priest named Theodidactus (“taught by God”), on an edifying flight through the heavens.

This wasn't the world's first space travel story. More than seventeen hundred years before, for example, Cicero had described a voyage among the stars in
Somnium Scipionis
(
The Dream of Scipio
). And Johannes Kepler's
Somnium
(
The
Dream
), published a year after his death, in 1634, had taken readers on a dream visit to the moon. In Kepler's imagination, it was populated by “Privolvans,” nocturnal creatures with legs like a camel's, skin like a serpent's, and “
no established domicile.” But Kircher's
Ecstatic Journey
, published in 1656, represented another step toward modern science fiction.

The book officially, ostensibly, argued for the system of Tycho Brahe, but it debunked many old Aristotelian notions. “
You are mistaken, and greatly so, if you persuade yourself that Aristotle has entirely told the truth about the nature of the supreme bodies,” Cosmiel explained. “It is impossible that the philosophers, who insist upon their ideas alone and repudiate experiments, can conclude anything about the natural constitution of the solid world, for we observe that human thoughts, unless they are based on experiments, often wander as far from the truth as the earth is distant from the moon.”