Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (6 page)

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Chief Inciter of Action

T
he Prince-Elector of Mainz was old, and in engravings he looked portly and somewhat paranoid. He'd recently built himself an immense new second residence on a high embankment above the Main River in Aschaffenburg—about fifty miles from Mainz itself. Made out of red sandstone, with five stout towers, six hundred windows, and a moat, it was part palace and part fortress. Some historians say that the assets of people killed in the ongoing hunt for witches helped fund the construction. At least fifteen hundred people were executed during Kronberg's twenty-two years as elector, a statistic that puts the legates' initial charges of demonic magic into sobering context. And now Kircher was there essentially to entertain him. But he must have succeeded, because he earned himself a place in the elector's court.

Once in residence at Aschaffenburg, Kircher devoted himself to the “
private recreation” of the elector—“wholly occupied with exhibiting to him those curiosities in which he was so greatly delighting.” These included a mysterious clock that Kircher said was powered by a sunflower seed, and a trick in which a small figure of Christ walked on water and saved a figure of Saint Peter from drowning. “
When a strong magnet is placed in Peter's breast,” he later wrote by way of instruction, “and with Christ's outstretched hands or any part of his toga turned toward Peter, made of fine steel, you will have everything required to exhibit the story. With their lower limbs well propped up on corks so that they don't totter about above the water, the statues are placed in a basin filled up to the top with water, and the iron hands of Christ soon feel the magnetic power diffused from the breast of Peter.”

In the seventeenth century, even a simple magnetic trick like this had the potential to impress: here was true natural magic. As opposed to astral influence, devil incantation, godly intervention, and other invisible forces whose existence could only be assumed, magnetism, an invisible and apparently immaterial power, produced very real, reliable effects on the material world. It was believed by many to function, on earth and everywhere, almost as a living spirit.

As a thirteenth-century tract had it, for example, the lodestone “
restores husbands to wives and increases elegance and charm in speech.” It also cured “dropsy, spleen, fox mange, and burn.” Magnetic plasters, made from shavings of iron or lodestone, were commonly applied to the body to draw out ill humors; magnets themselves were swallowed to draw them up from within. A kind of magnetic attraction, or sympathy, was also assumed to be behind the widely accepted healing action of weapon salve, used to treat men wounded on the battlefield. To make it, blood or tissue of the victim was mixed into the salve and then applied—to the
weapon
that had injured him. It was supposed to heal the wound from almost any distance. For his part, the Renaissance magus Paracelsus had promulgated the notion that disease and illness could be transferred “magnetically” to a lower life-form—
that gout, for instance, could be drawn away by taking the afflicted person's toenails and implanting them in the trunk of a tree.

In 1600 a physician in the court of Queen Elizabeth of England published what is often called the first real work of experimental science, on this same subject of magnetism. In the Latin text of
De Magnete
(
On the Magnet
), William Gilbert explained how he systematically tested and debunked many commonly held notions about the lodestone. It wasn't true, for instance, that if a magnet was “
anointed with garlic” it ceased to attract iron. To check the claim made by della Porta in
Natural Magic
that diamonds can magnetize iron, Gilbert conducted “
an experiment with seventy excellent diamonds, in the presence of many witnesses, on a large number of spikes and wires, with the most careful precautions.” It didn't work.

Gilbert's investigations resulted in a great deal of real information about the actual properties of magnets and how they behaved. When it came to questions about what magnetism
was
or how it worked, however, he took a more spiritual turn. (In some senses it was an Aristotelian-sounding turn, but it was made in the direction of Copernicus.) Gilbert concluded that a “
stupendous implanted vigour”—“very like a soul”—was responsible for magnetic action and attraction, and that the earth itself was a giant magnet. He used a magnetic sphere he called a terrella, a “little earth,” to perform his experiments. When the terrella was set at an angle toward the plane of another magnet, for example, it rotated. Gilbert believed the sun, “
the chief inciter of action in nature,” brought about the rotation of Earth in a similar way: Earth's “astral magnetic mind” responded when the sun sent forth its living energies, rotating steadily for uniform access to the vitality of its rays.

This idea influenced Kepler, who wrote that he “
built all Astronomy” on the work of Copernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert, and adopted the notion of a sun that emanated a magnetic force, causing the planets to move. Magnetism seemed to explain why the planets traveled in elliptical orbits, as he'd correctly calculated. According to Kepler, “the variety of all planetary motions derives from a very simple magnetic force just as all the motions of a clock derive from a simple weight.” Galileo was also influenced by the idea, and used the analogy of magnetism to explain why Earth held its axis through daily and annual motions.

Kircher's own work with magnetism extended beyond parlor tricks. In order to chart a portion of the elector's territory (newly “restored” to him through politics associated with the larger upheaval of the Thirty Years War), Kircher invented—or rather, claimed to invent, as it was subsequently revealed—a cartographic instrument that integrated a magnetic compass with measurement and drafting tools. He called it the
pantometrum
, or pantometer, a name that suggested it “measured all things.” It was later described as a device for calculating “
length, breadth, heights, depths, areas, of both earthly and heavenly bodies, etc.”

Kircher finished the survey quickly, and the elector was “
delighted to such a marvelous degree” that he “commanded that the other disputed states of the Archbishopric . . . be charted with like diligence.” But the elderly elector died about a year into Kircher's service, and his successor, one Georg Friedrich von Greiffenklau, either was unimpressed with Kircher or didn't require his services, so he was assigned to what must have felt like square one, the Jesuit college at Mainz, site of his hernia-inducing skating accident, to resume the regular path to ordination.

—

DURING TWO YEARS
of teaching in Mainz to complete what is known as the Jesuit regency period, Kircher did what he could to satisfy his now impossible curiosity and to make headway in his ongoing pursuit of the divine mind. He began to make his own nighttime observations with a telescope, or a “celestial tube,” as he called it. And in order to observe the sun without staring directly at it, he used a device called a helioscope, an innovation of the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner that combined telescopic lenses with mirrors to project the image of the sun onto paper or a screen. Whether Kircher built his own isn't clear, but he claimed that on a certain day in April of 1625 he witnessed for himself what Scheiner and Galileo were arguing about, observing
twelve major and thirty-eight minor sunspots. It was “
not without wonderment,” he wrote later, that he saw “the whole heterogeneous surface of the solar hemisphere, appearing composed out of shadows and little lights.”

When the Society decided to keep Kircher in Mainz for his three-year course in theology, probably because of the war, he made the most of it. “
I was utterly occupied with this one endeavor,” he remembered, “namely that I link to my theological studies the study of oriental languages, and that I pore equally over each at all times.” In his search for the earliest Christian scripture and the ancient, divinatory theology of Hermes, Orpheus, Maimonides, Zoroaster, and others, Kircher expanded his study of languages beyond Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to Arabic and two forms of what is now called Aramaic: “biblical,” or Chaldean, written in Hebrew characters, and “Christian” written in the Syriac alphabet.

But by 1629, after being kept about five years in Mainz, Kircher grew dispirited, as would any melancholic with ambitions of grandeur. (The city had been a site of frustration for inventive, ambitious sorts before; it was where Johannes Gutenberg first employed movable type, printing one hundred eighty copies of the forty-two-line Bible before being sued by his creditor and forced to stop.) Although the war had temporarily subsided, it had dragged on for a decade, politics across the Continent had grown more intricate, and almost all the nation-states of Europe had gotten involved in one way or another. Towns and villages throughout the so-called empire had been made vulnerable to the desperate brutality, not to mention the smallpox and typhus, of ill-fed armies.
The plague had spread through that part of Europe as well; at its worst, in Prague, it wiped out sixteen thousand people. Harvests, years of them, had been ruined. Peasants had revolted by the thousands. The only piece of good news, from Kircher's point of view, was that after defeat in battle and illness from the campaign, Christian of Brunswick, the Insane Bishop, had died a few years before. He was twenty-six.
People said that his insides had been eaten away by a huge worm.

The prospects across the German provinces were generally bleak. In January of that year, Kircher brazenly addressed a letter to the superior general of the Jesuits in Rome, making a vehement plea to be sent
somewhere
as a missionary. He was finally about to be ordained into the priesthood, and he was willing to go to just about any corner of the world to propagate the faith—“
Arabia, Palestine, Constantinople, Persia, India, China, Japan, America.” But he expressed a clear preference for the Holy Lands and North Africa, places where in his off-hours from saving souls he might dig up ancient scrolls and texts containing early mystical wisdom. “
For the love of God, and the holy Virgin Mother,” he wrote, “I resolutely implore and beseech you to grant my extremely great desire to follow the apostolic pursuit. May my prayers and supplications not be made in vain, I pray—do not permit my soul to waste away cramped among the confines of this barren Germany. Stretch forth my soul, heretofore enchained, now entirely in the service of extending the divine majesty.”

“Life is short,” Kircher reminded the superior general, and he certainly didn't want to spend the rest of his in Mainz.

This wasn't exactly the humility and indifference that Ignatius of Loyola had in mind for his soldiers of God, the kind that meant you “do not desire, nor even prefer” one circumstance over another as long as they served God equally. The Jesuit authorities did not grant his request. Instead, after Kircher's ordination they reassigned him to another old city on the Rhine. This time Speyer, where he spent a customary period of spiritual probation before saying his final vows.

—

ONE DAY IN SPEYER,
Kircher was asked by a superior to find a book in the library. While looking among the stacks—“
Was it by chance or by the arrangement of divine providence?” he later wondered—he came across a volume depicting several ancient Egyptian obelisks. These particular obelisks, now in Rome, were thought to have been brought back from Egypt by conquering generals as many as fifteen or sixteen hundred years prior. Fallen into ruins over the centuries, they were restored and re-erected by a recent pope in the decade or two before Kircher was born.

“
Instantly carried away with curiosity,” Kircher assumed for a moment that the hieroglyphic markings on these structures were artistic decorations. But “when from the attached history of obelisks I learned that these figures were the chronicles of ancient Egyptian Wisdom, inscribed from time immemorial . . .” he recalled, “the desire befell me and I was goaded by the greatest hidden impulse to discover whether it was possible to attain the acquisition of knowledge of this type.”

After all, an explanation of these markings “had been offered by no one since their meaning had been destroyed over the passage of so much time.” Many believed that Hermes Trismegistus himself had devised the hieroglyphs as a way of preserving and protecting the old wisdom, encoding it in symbolic language that was universal but also indecipherable to everyone but the truly wise. “
It was the opinion of the ancient theologians,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, “that one should not rashly make public the secret mysteries of theology.” The obelisks were thought to contain some of the earliest and most sacred ideas of all: possibly this was a strain of knowledge that originated in the time of Adam, a strain that had survived the Flood and the confusion of tongues.

“
From that very moment I never turned my mind from deciphering these figures,” Kircher claimed. “For I was reasoning thus: imprinted characters of the ancient Egyptians have survived, indeed even genuine ones at that; therefore, the meanings of these characters will still somewhere lie hidden, scattered among the chronicles of ancient authors, and perhaps not in Latin and Greek texts but in those exotic works of the Orient.”

Later that year, about a decade after arriving on gangrenous feet for his novitiate in Paderborn, Kircher made his final vows as a Jesuit priest—retaking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as “perpetual solemn vows,” and making an additional vow of obedience to the pope. For his first assignment as a fully professed priest, Kircher headed back up the Rhine, past Mainz, back up the Main, past Aschaffenburg, into a region of centuries-old vineyards, to a university town called Würzburg.

—

BY THE TIME
Kircher arrived in 1630, Catholic victories against Danish Protestants in the war had resulted in a peace treaty. For the time being anyway, at least according to Kircher, “
high peace resided over the Catholics.” On the other hand, the witch hunt that had been going on for the last several years in the archbishopric of Würzburg wasn't quite over. From his fortress on a high slope across the river from the city, the prince-bishop had overseen an investigation in which as many as nine hundred people were executed, including members of the clergy, many young children, and his own nephew.