Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (17 page)

Charles II was himself a dabbler; he outfitted a laboratory in Whitehall, from which the noise of mechanical instruments and the smell of chemical (or alchemical) experiments could often be detected. After a while, in foppish imitation of the king, his court and courtiers went from “
baiting Puritans, place jobbing, flirting, and gambling,” as one nineteenth-century writer put it, to “discussing the pneumatic engine, the ponderation of the air, blood transfusion, and the variations of the compass.”

Links to Kircher were widespread among the Royal Society's members and their experiments. Robert Boyle, who in 1661 published
The Sceptical Chymist
, an attempt to sort Hermetic alchemical fictions from experimental chemical facts, is also known for his work on vacuums, atmospheric pressure, and the properties of air, conducted in the late 1650s. Only fifteen years or so before, the jury was still out on whether vacuums even existed. Kircher, obliged to deny the possibility of a vacuum (vacuums were abhorred by nature, per Aristotle), had been present at an inconclusive experiment involving a siphon, water, and a very long lead tube, conducted in Rome sometime in the early 1640s. Kircher disingenuously reported that it had failed. But that experiment helped inspire Evangelista Torricelli, who in 1644 not only created a vacuum but essentially invented the mercury barometer—and
that
experiment inspired a great deal of discussion and trial by Boyle and others. In 1657, two years after Kircher's friend Kaspar Schott returned to Germany, Schott published the first of his own books, an aggregation of information on mechanics, hydraulics, and pneumatics. He somewhat unenthusiastically included a report on the air pump recently invented by Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg, which Boyle read. Boyle and his assistant, Robert Hooke, made an improved version of it, which allowed them to carry out their unprecedented series of experiments, published in 1660. And so it wasn't Kircher but his disciple who helped put old notions about the impossibility of a vacuum to rest.

“
Father Kircher is my particular friend, and I visit him in his gallery daily,” Robert Southwell, who later became president of the society, wrote to Boyle while visiting Rome in 1661. “He is likewise one of the most naked and good men that I have seen, and is very easy to communicate whatever he knows. . . . On the other side he is reported very credulous, apt to put into print any strange, if plausible story that is brought unto him. He has often made me smile.”

Conflicted feelings about Kircher were fairly common. In the late 1650s, before becoming the organization's secretary, Henry Oldenburg dutifully tried to get to the bottom of the
vegetable phoenix that Kircher had put on display for Queen Christina in 1656, but failed. Later, as the editor of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, the world's first scientific journal, Oldenburg published long summaries of Kircher's new volumes when they became available. The problem was that attempts to reproduce his experiments frequently didn't succeed, and Kircher's claims and propositions frequently didn't hold up. No one at the time thought to give him credit for playing what can now be seen as a very valuable role: providing so many statements to test against, a means by which to determine what wasn't true.

If some of these Englishmen begrudged him, it wasn't for his fascination with magnetism. Despite the general success within England of new ideas, including the Cartesian notion that only material explanations of natural phenomena could hold weight, interest in this apparently immaterial power of attraction was still high. Christopher Wren believed it must be responsible for the motion of the planets. King Charles II was fascinated by magnetism and presented the Royal Society with a special terrella for use in its work. Boyle's own theological musings made use of the analogy of the lodestone to describe God's ways. And John Milton's
Paradise Lost
, begun in 1658 and published in 1667, contains language about the magnetic rays of the sun that might even be called Kircherian:

. . .
magnetic beam, that gently warms

The universe and to each inward part,

With gentle penetration, though unseen

Shoots invisible virtue ev'n to the deep . . .

Wren, Boyle, Wilkins, and others certainly shared Kircher's fascination with the microscope. Their interest may have been spurred in the first place by discussions of the instrument in
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
and
Examination of the Plague
. But, starting in 1663, it was Robert Hooke, himself diminutive, and by then the Royal Society's curator of experiments, who really opened up the microscopic world. Hooke's book
Micrographia
, published in 1665, included observations and beautiful copperplate engravings of dozens of items, including, as Oldenburg's account in
Philosophical Transactions
described it:

Edges of Rasors, Fine Lawn, Tabby, Watered Silks, Glass-canes, Glass-drops, Fiery Sparks, Fantastical Colours, Metalline Colours, the Figures of Sand, Gravel in Urine, Diamonds in Flints, Frozen Figures, the Kettering Stone, Charcoal, Wood and other Bodies petrified, the Pores of Cork, and of other substances, Vegetables growing on blighted Leaves, Blew mould and Mushromes, Sponges, and other Fibrous Bodies, Sea-weed, the Surfaces of some Leaves, the stinging points of a Nettle, Cowage, the Beard of a wild Oate, the seed of the Corn-violet, as also of Tyme, Poppy and Purslane. . . . Hair, the scales of a Soal, the sting of a Bee, Feathers in general, and in particular those of Peacocks; the feet of Flies; and other Insects; the Wings and Head of a Fly; the Teeth of a Snail; the Eggs of Silk-worms; the Blue Fly; a water Insect; the Tufted Gnat; a White Moth; the Shepherds-spider; the Hunting Spider, the Ant; the wandring Mite; the Crab-like insect, the Book-worm, the Flea, the Louse, Mites, Vine mites.

The book also included a few brief references to Kircher, which may be seen as either an understated admission of his significant influence or a true indication of his minor role.

A few months after
Micrographia
was published, the plague came to London. From June 1665 to March 1666, the Royal Society's weekly Wednesday meetings were canceled. As many as a hundred thousand people died. Then, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London burned for four days, destroying thirteen thousand houses and eighty-four churches. About the churches: Christopher Wren, better known today as an architect than as an astronomer, rebuilt fifty-one, as well as St. Paul's Cathedral.

A louse, from Hooke's
Micrographia

16

Underground World

J
ust before Hooke published his microscopic observations of everything from the “Edges of Rasors” to “Vine mites,” Kircher published
Mundus Subterraneus
(
Underground World
), a two-volume tome of atlas-like dimensions, intended to lay out “
before the eyes of the curious reader all that is rare, exotic, and portentous contained in the fecund womb of Nature.” This was the first of his books to be printed by his eager new partners in Amsterdam, and while it was traditionally deemed unworthy of natural philosophy to delve below the surface of the earth, into its nether regions, Kircher believed it was all part of God's sometimes incomprehensible and yet perfect creation, a dark realm whose relationship to the light he wanted to explicate. There is an “idea of the earthly sphere that exists in the divine mind,” he proclaimed, and in this early work on geology he tried to show that he had grasped it.

Kircher believed he was in a special position to reveal the hidden world below. After all, he wrote, referring to himself, “
the author was present with great danger to his own life” during the horrible earthquakes of Calabria in 1638. It was during that time that he “learned the great secrets of Nature,” and this firsthand experience provided the pseudo-empirical proof he needed to conclude—as Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Vitruvius, Cicero, and many others assumed—that some type of central fire existed deep inside the earth.

In Kircher's view, volcanoes, however awful and awe-inspiring, “
are nothing but the vent-holes, or breath-pipes of Nature.” Earthquakes are merely the “proper effects of subterrestrial cumbustions” that are sure to go on constantly. The “prodigious volcanoes and fire-vomiting mountains visible in the external surface of the earth do sufficiently demonstrate it to be full of invisible and underground fires,” he wrote. “For wherever there is a volcano, there also is a conservatory or storehouse of fire under it; it is certain that where there is a chimney or smoke, there is fire. And these fires argue for deeper treasuries and storehouses of fire, in the very heart and inward bowels of the Earth.”

Not only are there fires underground but great waters, which travel and pass through their own channels and estuaries, and according to Kircher, “the fire and water sweetly conspire together in mutual service.” The tides, caused by the nitrous effluvia of the moon, push “an immense bulk of water” through “hidden and occult passages at the bottom of the Ocean” and thrust it “forcibly into the intimate bowels of the Earth.” The resulting winds “excite and stir up” and otherwise feed the subterraneous fire like a huge bellows. The seas, which would stagnate and freeze without the heat, keep the fires going and also keep them from getting out of hand, preventing “unlimited eruptions,” which would “soon turn all to ruins.” Mountains, as suggested by Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, are hollow, and function as huge reservoirs. Hot baths, hot springs, and fountains are produced where underground water passageways come near or interconnect with the fire channels.

More than once, Kircher compares the movement of the earth's water to the circulation of the blood as described by William Harvey. The water of the oceans follows “secret motions,” known today as currents, leading up and around the globe toward the North Pole. Somewhere off the coast of Norway (the actual site of a major whirlpool system called the Moskenstraumen), he declares, is a giant maelstrom through which the water enters the earth, as if passing through a great drain. It runs through the earth's passageways, cooling it down, and providing it with elements and nutriments in particulate form before being eliminated through an opening at the South Pole. Sometimes the analogies refer more to the continuing process of the digestive system than to the cycling of blood, but no matter: “You see therefore the manner and way of the Circulation of Nature.”

Fire and water work like light and shadow, consonance and dissonance, attraction and repulsion, playing their part in a more or less mystical totality that Kircher calls the “cosmos of the Earth” or the “geocosm.” It is God's intent, he claims, for “both elements to be in perpetual motion, for admirable ends.” Indeed, according to his scheme, the water provides the moisture and the fire provides the heat necessary to “fructify” the earth. The “fire in the belly of Nature,” as he put it, is especially “necessary to the internal economy or constitution” of the earth, acting as a great furnace in which the “juices” of minerals, marbles, stones, and gems are melted and cooked, then mixed with the waters and cooled into their more familiar hardened forms.

Kircher's network of fires

—

KIRCHER'S NETWORK
of oceans and fires had its idiosyncrasies, but his understanding of the way metals and various stones are made represented fairly common thinking of the period. It included the belief that subterranean processes of this kind, over time, eventually “
ripened” base metals into gold. The idea that these processes might somehow be imitated and accelerated in the laboratory fueled much of the alchemical experimentation of the day. In the seventeenth century there was no clear distinction between alchemical practices and what might today be called legitimate chemistry. The
al
in
alchemy
is just an Arabic definite article (“the”), and
chemy
comes from
khymeia
, the Greek word for “fusion,” which often referred to medicinal mixtures of organic substances, so
alchemy
really just meant “the chemistry.” In
Underground World
, Kircher placed his lengthy discussion of all related studies, from metallurgy to medicinal chemistry, under that heading—alchemy.

He had read all the alchemical authors, including Zohara, Zadith, and Haled, but most notably Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus, a Renaissance magus whose own sources included the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and other ancient magicians. But in all of that research Kircher had never found anything reliable about the legendary prime material known as the philosopher's stone.

“
The alchemists describe it as something wonderful and mysterious, which not only can cure the human body of all ills and keep it healthy, but can change base metals into gold and silver,” he wrote. “They say it is a pure, unchanging, most simple metallic substance, and that it is effective in infinitesimal amounts.” But in a statement all the more meaningful coming from someone not remembered for disciplined thinking and restrained language, he proclaimed: “I came to the conclusion that nothing was easier than to write in such a way, putting down the first things that occurred to them, the most ridiculous fantasies of the human mind, in twisted words, solely to confuse whoever tried to read them.”

Kircher debunked a number of Paracelsus's claims through his own experiments—following his instructions for making copper, for example, and for converting various metals into quicksilver, with no success. “Can one metal really be transmuted into another?” Kircher asked. “In theory such a transmutation is possible, but in practice I think it could only be accomplished with the help of devils or angels.” Moreover, he had no tolerance for the “frauds, deceits and other means by which the alchemists have pretended to make pure gold.”

—

KIRCHER'S DISTASTE
for what might be called improper alchemy didn't stop him from incorporating alchemical ideas into the rather amazing extended discussion of spontaneous generation that appears in
Underground World
, which is to say that he added alchemical language to the spiritual, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, perhaps even atomic, and magnetic language he used to try to explicate the concept. In addition to repeating much of the material that had appeared in
Examination of the Plague
, and bolstering his argument with new experiments and new anecdotal evidence, he took his theorizing about
panspermia
to a new level: for all intents and purposes, universal sperm was the force of life. It was what Plato called “
the world's seed,” what Aristotle called “the moving power of all things,” what Hermes called “the seed of Nature.”

In the beginning, Kircher wrote, God created “
a certain matter that we rightly call ‘chaotic,'” out of which everything except the human soul was drawn, and in which is hidden this seminal power. “I say that a certain material spiritus was composed of the subtlest celestial breath, or from a portion of the elements, and that a certain spirituous salino-sulfuro-mercurial vapor, a universal seed of things, was created along with the elements by God as the origin of all things established in the world of corporeal entities.” Where did Kircher get the idea that salt, sulfur, and mercury were principal? Paracelsus.

It's through this seminal power, quite simply, that nature propagates itself. Presumably, this power, both material and alive, is contained within the sperm of animals that procreate by mating. In other cases, the “salino-sulfuro-mercurial vapor” somehow individualizes itself as a kind of seed within whatever matrix of being it finds itself—animal, vegetable, or mineral. As Kircher described it, it consists of both a plastic power, which provides for physical form to take shape, and a magnetic power, about which he is rather vague.

Life can be engendered within the decay of a living being, Kircher claimed, because this vapor, or power, this “
something” of the material soul, remains in the corpse, “not as a form but as spirituous corpuscles of this living being.” Make no mistake, whether inside the decaying body or floating around seed-like, as it often does, it is in a highly degenerated and degraded state. That's why the living beings that grow from it are lower beings. But since these living things are not arising from utterly nonliving matter, he argued, it wasn't really proper to call this generation “spontaneous.”

If it was difficult to articulate precisely how the life force functioned, it was nevertheless clearly at work when worms or maggots grew from rotting flesh—as everyone knew they did. It was at work when bees grew from the dung of bulls. It was at work when flies were engendered from the dead bodies of other flies. (Kircher said it helped to put them on a copper plate, sprinkle them with honey water, and expose them to the heat of ashes.) It was at work when live scorpions were born from the carcasses of dead scorpions. (You could assist with a little sunshine and sweet basil water.) And it was also at work when the mulberry tree produced the silkworm, which it did “on being impregnated with any chance animal.”

—

AS A 1679
French write-up of
Underground World
put it, “
It would take a whole journal to indicate everything remarkable in this work.” The book included detailed charts of those “secret” oceanic currents, among the first ever published. Kircher's more or less correct explanation of how igneous rock is formed was also arguably the first in print. One modern scholar writes that
Kircher “understood erosion,” and his entries “on the quality and use of sand” and his “investigations into the tending of fields” had their practical use.

Underground World
identified the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis (something that modern science hasn't been able to accomplish) and the source of the Nile: it started in what is now South Africa as a number of little streams flowing down from the “Mountains of the Moon,” then ran northward through “Guix,” “Sorgola,” and “Alata” and on into “Bagamidi” before reaching Ethiopia and Egypt.

Kircher offered a lengthy discussion on, for example, people who lived in caves (their societies and their economy), including the troglodytes he'd encountered in Malta. He reported on the remains of giants (also mainly cave dwellers) found in the ground, and went into detail on the kinds of lower animals who belong to the lower world, including dragons. “
Since monstrous animals of this kind for the most part select their lairs and breeding-places in underground caverns, I have considered it proper to include them under the heading of subterraneous beasts,” he explained. “I am aware that two kinds of this animal have been distinguished by authors, the one with, the other without wings. No one can or ought to doubt the latter kind of creature, unless perchance he dares to contradict Holy Scripture.” After all, “Daniel makes mention of the divine worship accorded to the dragon Bel by the Babylonians.”

In short,
Underground World
covered almost every subject that might relate to the earthly sphere, as well as some that wouldn't seem to, such as the sun and “its special properties, by which it flows into the earthly world” and the “nature of the lunar body and its effects.” These correspondences and influences were nothing new, but perhaps only Athanasius Kircher would choose to publish a series of moon maps in a book about the world below.