Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (5 page)

He was called “Trismegistus” because as a great priest, philosopher, and king, he was “thrice great.” Other texts attributed to him had been known since the days of the early Church; concerned largely with astral energies and hidden sympathies between natural phenomena, they were also thought to contain prophetic statements about the coming of Christianity. Hermes—Mercurius to the Romans, or Mercury—was said, despite his pagan status, to have had access to a secret tradition of original wisdom, and to have lived around the time of Moses.

The exact chronology was unclear, to say the least. Saint Augustine wrote, for instance, that Hermes lived “
long before the sages and philosophers of Greece, but after Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, yea, and Moses also: for at the time when Moses was born, was Atlas, Prometheus's brother, a great astronomer, living, and he was grandfather by the mother's side to the elder Mercury, who begat the father of this Trismegistus.”

For his part, Ficino sometimes said Hermes was the same person as Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, known today as a prophet of Persia, and sometimes said that Zoroaster had been his predecessor. Either way, in his preface to the translations he called Hermes “
the first author of theology” and traced a line of teaching that went almost directly from Hermes to Orpheus to Pythagoras to Plato. That is, according to Ficino, Plato based his philosophy on the wisdom of Hermes, who based his on even earlier knowledge. “Hence there is one ancient theology,” Ficino wrote, one original theology to which the one true Christian religion was an entirely compatible heir. Hermes “
foresaw the ruin of the antique religion, the rise of the new faith, the coming of Christ, the judgment to come, the resurrection of the world, the glory of the blessed, and the torments of the damned.”

The dialogues attributed to Hermes are a conglomeration of mystical philosophy and poetic religiosity. But along the lines of the actual works of Plato and the Neoplatonists, they asserted that matter, the physical world, the body, was a kind of unreality. Reality, truth itself, was in the immaterial essence of things, and existed as an emanation or divine force from God. On one hand, each physical thing or phenomenon was a limited, more or less vulgar incarnation of an unlimited, pure idea. On the other hand, this immaterial truth was in all things; all matter had the immaterial energy of God within it. And though human beings lived in physical bodies, they were at least partly divine, because they had immaterial intellect. As stated by the nonexistent Hermes, this godly intellect allowed man to move through the material world “
as though he were himself a god,” tapping into the subtle energies that continually streamed down from above, and engaging with the invisible interconnections among stars, plants, stones, and animals.

Ficino became very involved with this
magia naturalis
, or natural magic—especially in the use of talismans to draw down astral power and in the use of music as incantation. Sometime later, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of Ficino's fellow scholars, wrote his
Oration
on the Dignity of Man
. “
If rational,” he wrote, man “will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.” The oration is often referred to as a manifesto of worldly Renaissance humanism, a document that helped put the focus on human capacity rather than the spiritual afterlife. But it was written to introduce Pico's nine hundred theses, largely a compendium of mysticism and magic by which he believed it was possible to grasp “everything knowable.”

Pico gave short shrift to Aristotle, but embraced the philosophy of the Platonists, the numerology of the Pythagoreans, the oracular poetry of the Chaldeans, the Hymns of Orpheus, the astral magic of Hermes Trismegistus, and, most especially, the Kabbalah of the Hebrews. Kabbalah was compatible with Christianity, too. One of Pico's sections was titled “[
Seventy-two] Cabalistic Conclusions According to My Own Opinion, Strongly Confirming the Christian Religion Using the Hebrew Wisemen's Own Principles.”

For Pico, magic was “the practical part of natural science,” and also the “noblest part.” It was within this context that learned people began to consider all manner of magical and mystical texts. The authority that this fake Hermes lent to Plato helped put a general premium on the immaterial: invisible bonds, unseen correspondences within the natural world. These things were “occult,” but not in the modern sense;
occult
originally meant just “hidden,” “concealed,” or “secret.”

And so a century later it was possible to be an Aristotelian, Catholic, Hermetic, and generally mystical mathematician who believed that it just might be your calling to achieve a universal understanding of things, to uncover or to
dis
cover hidden truths. After all, Hermes instructed you to “
believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.”

Notwithstanding the Vatican's censure of various kinds of magic and strict adherence to Aristotle in natural philosophy, the Jesuits contemplated these ideas as well—though as one Jesuit philosopher wrote, “
Scarcely any mortal or certainly very few indeed, and those men of the keenest mind who have employed diligent observation for a long time, can attain to such natural magic.”

Young Kircher believed he might be one of these very few.

4

Scenic Proceedings

A
s part of their preparation for lives of obedience, Jesuit scholastics were, and still are, frequently uprooted and reassigned. Pretty soon this newly immodest young man was sent off again, to a place called Heiligenstadt, in a relatively remote part of Saxony, to teach what Kircher rather condescendingly called “
the rudiments of grammar.” It may be that his superiors hoped to reintroduce him to the humility they had only recently urged him to leave behind. But it was probably too late for that. As one Jesuit historian has said about Kircher's previously humble pose, “
later he tended to over-compensate at times for his early behavior.”

The route to Heiligenstadt—where, as it happened, Kircher's father had once been a lay instructor to Benedictine students—passed through Fulda. His father and his mother had both died since he'd been gone, and his brothers were out in various rectories and monasteries, but his sisters (their names were Agnes, Eva, and Anna Katharina) still lived in the region. One or more of them may have warned him about the rest of the way.

“
I was advised by many to change my religious garb,” he remembered, “since the area to be traversed was infested with heretics.” But Kircher refused, saying that he would rather die in his black cassock than make his way safely in any other clothes—perhaps also thinking that the last time he'd worn secular attire, mendacious Düsseldorfers had seen fit to trick him, and he'd almost drowned in the icy Rhine.

Kircher left with a messenger as his hired guide and headed through the region of the Eichsfeld, the “field of oaks,” a rustic source of some of the fairy tales later collected by the Brothers Grimm. At one point Kircher and his companion entered “
a certain dark and bristling valley,” as he described it in his memoir, “which from its formidable appearance had earned the name the Valley of Hell.” Suddenly they were “surrounded by heretic horsemen,” who focused on Kircher's robes. “Upon recognizing from my clothes that I was a Jesuit, they immediately stripped me of everything, save my undergarments,” he wrote. “After I was robbed of all my clothes, traveling provisions and books, and broken down with blows and lashings to boot, they prepared my death by hanging.” He was dragged between two horses to a tree.

“When I saw that they were acting in earnest, so fierce and howling in their implacable hatred of Jesuits that they had utterly resolved to kill me,” he remembered, “presently, with spirit composed, knees bent on the ground, and eyes raised toward the sky with tears, I passionately entrusted myself to God and Mary, giving thanks to divine goodness, which had rendered me worthy of enduring death on behalf of His own most sacred name. As the tears copiously welled up, I felt myself replete with as great an abundance of consolation as I had ever experienced in my life, nor any longer did fear seize me, prepared as I was to pour out life and blood for God.”

According to Kircher, this display had an immediate effect on one of the soldiers. Such was the power of the one true faith over the heretical kind. This soldier then gave a speech (“What are we doing, comrades?”) that persuaded the others to drop the project completely and even to give back the things they'd taken.

Kircher thanked God profusely for protecting him. On the other hand, he felt some disappointment: “The unique and so longed-for opportunity to die on behalf of His glory had been lost.”

Two days later, they finally reached little Heiligenstadt with its college and its old castle, built in the tenth century by a Frankish king named Dagobert. Heiligenstadt means “Holy City.” It's now called Heilbad Heiligenstadt, literally “Spa Holy City,” and in the twenty-first century, people go there for rejuvenating soaks in brine.

Kircher taught Latin there, and renewed his study of languages and mathematics with what he described as “
the utmost zeal.” He built another sundial, on the tower of the Church of St. Mary's. He immersed himself in the literature of the Neoplatonists and the practitioners of natural magic, and there's little doubt he became familiar with a volume called
Magia Naturalis
(
Natural Magic
) by Giambattista della Porta. The author, a sixteenth-century polymath from Naples, had written plays, made optical devices, designed military fortifications, and collected, as he claimed, “
more than 2,000 secrets of medicine, and other wonderful things.” The book, published in many different editions and languages over a number of decades, served as a guide on everything from cooking to the occult correspondences within nature.

“The Wolf is afraid of the Urchin,” della Porta explained in one section. “Thence, if we wash our mouth and throats with Urchin's blood, it will make our voice shrill, though before it was hoarse and dull like a Wolf's voice. A Dog and a Wolf are at great enmity. And therefore a Wolf skin put upon anyone that is bitten by a mad Dog assuages the swelling of the Humor. A Hawk is a deadly enemy to Pigeons, but is defended by the Kestrel, which the Hawk cannot abide either to hear or see. And this the Pigeons know well enough.”

Natural Magic
went into detail on the spontaneous generation of small creatures from various forms of putrefaction—specifying what kind of dung produced which kind of insect, for example. It also told readers how to hybridize flowers and preserve fruit, distill oils and essences, extract tinctures, breed dogs, lure animals, tenderize meat, temper steel, write with invisible ink, and send secret messages. It covered medicines and remedies for common wounds, poison, and the pox, plus ways to engender sleep and different kinds of dreams. Della Porta knew how to put “
a Man out of his senses for a day.” And he spent thirty chapters on how “
to Adorn Women, and Make them Beautiful,” including how to dye hair, remove hair, curl hair, and “take away Sores and Worms that spoil hair.”

Readers like Kircher learned in
Natural Magic
about various “experiments” related to light and heavy bodies, wind, air, music, and sound. Della Porta devoted many chapters to “Looking-Glasses,” spectacles, and lenses—some that could be used to project “diverse apparitions of images,” others to “see very far, beyond imagination.” (In the years before he died in 1615, della Porta even claimed, with some reason, to have invented the telescope.) There were fifty-six chapters on “the Wonders of the Lode-stone,” or the magnet. And there was a big section on “Artificial Fires,” including “Fire-compositions for Festival days” made from potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, which Kircher put to use there soon enough.

—

AROUND THIS TIME,
the region of Eichsfeld came under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop and Prince-Elector of Mainz, Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg. As the head of the electoral college that chose each new emperor, he was the most powerful Catholic official in German lands. He planned to send a formal embassy of representatives to Heiligenstadt, which in turn prepared to greet the officials with a proper reception and entertainment. As Kircher recalled, “
A magnificence not to be scoffed at was being deemed appropriate for rightly receiving this group.” Twenty-four-year-old Kircher was apparently so well versed in the natural magic of della Porta and others that he took charge of the “scenic proceedings.”

On the evening of the event, he produced “
optical illusions on a grand scale as well as a pyrotechnic display” for the visiting dignitaries, sending “fiery globes” and “shooting stars” sailing through the night sky. Most dramatic of all:
an illuminated flying dragon. In general, as Kircher himself recalled, “
I was exhibiting things which seemed to smack of something beyond the ordinary.”

Among most of the members of his audience, these things were “stirring up the greatest admiration,” as he put it. But they were causing other reactions too: “Several accused me falsely of the charge of magic,” he remembered.

“Magic” was a loaded and changeable term in the early seventeenth century. As the title of della Porta's book suggests, his magic was thoroughly natural, even if some of it was “occult,” since the natural world was full of concealed features. But the ability to manipulate these properties was hardly commonplace, and for some, a flying dragon or “artificial fire” signaled communion with “
bad angels”—demonic magic.

“
In order to free myself from this lowly charge,” Kircher remembered, “I was forced to reveal for these legates the methods and knowledge behind the display. I satisfied this request to their utmost and complete satisfaction; indeed, from that time on I was barely able to separate myself from them.”

He may have feigned irritation, but the “lowly charge” against him was a form of compliment. Essentially they had taken his bait. And Kircher capitalized on the opportunity of their interest to show them some “new discoveries of curiosities of mathematics” and to present them with a “panegyric of exotic languages which bore a written dedication of praise to them.” This panegyric wasn't something he just had lying around. He'd worked it up to impress them. In the end, according to Kircher, “
those men departed completely satisfied in every way.” And when they returned to the court of the archbishop and prince-elector, they “noised about to such a degree concerning my trifles that the Prince was struck with the greatest desire to meet me.”