Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (8 page)

The assignment was within the realm of reason: Kircher had already served at a very high level in the court at Aschaffenburg. “
Upon learning this,” Kircher recalled, “Peiresc left no stone unturned in his effort to impede this journey; for he was fearing that, while I was occupied with my mathematical studies in the halls of Caesar, I would distract all of my attention from attaining an understanding of Hieroglyphics.”

The truth is that Peiresc wanted to keep Kircher, and the Barachias Nephi text, in Provence. He wrote to the pope's nephew, Cardinal Barberini, asking him to step in and help. If Kircher went to Vienna, Peiresc explained, his translation “
will surely be delayed, and perhaps even completely confounded.” At the very least, Peiresc implored in subsequent letters, it would be better to transfer him to Rome, where he would have access to the libraries of the Vatican. Meanwhile, Peiresc kept urging Kircher to return to Aix for another visit, and Kircher kept putting it off.

During this time when Peiresc was hoping for some good news from either Barberini or Kircher, both men were otherwise occupied. Barberini was busy serving as one of ten judges in the heresy proceedings against his friend Galileo. And Kircher was busy getting caught in another waterwheel.

It happened one day when Kircher needed a break from his studies and went outside to clear his head: “There was in the college a suburban garden in which a huge wheel between two walls was driven by a horse in order to irrigate the garden,” he explained. “At the very bottom between these walls was a great supply of gushing water.” With his mind a hundred miles away, he sat down “on the aforementioned machine, which was being driven with a bar by a huge horse.” Immersed in his thoughts and “paying the toiling horse no heed,” he was “suddenly snatched away by the bar, and since I was able neither to secure the horse nor to halt between the wall and the bar without the danger of entirely crushing my body, I was suddenly by the bar cast down within the wheel. But since the wheel was moving unceasingly, nowhere could I set my foot, nor was it possible to slip away from the side on account of the narrowness of the wall, which was nearly touching the wheel.” He called out to a fellow Jesuit who was walking in the garden, but he didn't hear. “In the meantime,” he remembered, “I was being rolled around with the wheel.”

There was little question about what to do. “With my usual faith I took refuge to the Blessed Virgin,” Kircher remembered. “And, lo, the wheel stopped.” Kircher claimed that the event haunted him even in his old age: “This potential disaster was so formidable that I am not able to think on it without horror.” But because his “escape from danger was achieved with divine aid,” he claimed his resolve to serve God was reinforced “to the utmost degree.”

—

AT THE END
of summer, without any apparent success on Peiresc's part to delay or change his assignment, Kircher was left with no choice but to leave for Vienna. On his way to the seaport of Marseille in early September, he stopped in Aix, finally making the return visit to Peiresc that he'd promised.

He also finally gave a demonstration of the sunflower-seed clock he'd talked so much about. Kircher required some time on his own to set it up. Peiresc the lawyer prepared to take detailed notes. When the moment came, the seed was inserted within a cork that floated in a pot of water; the hours of the day and meridian lines were indicated around the pot's rim. The relative time was indicated by a little pointer; as recorded by Peiresc, it was “
one third of an hour after two in the evening or afternoon.” Kircher's markings also showed “by definite relation what the time it was in Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Babylon, the Indies, China, America, Peru and the Canarys, and also other places.” And, sure enough, no matter which way Kircher turned the cork with the seed, it found itself back at the place where it had been, facing in the direction of the sun.

But Peiresc began to suspect that something besides attraction between the seed and the sun was at work. “What made me doubt the certitude of his experiment and of his words was the fact that he would not swear that the sunflower seed alone was sufficient for the demonstration,” he wrote. “Thus, without actually saying it, he left me with the understanding that he required some other unknown ingredient that he did not wish to declare, and which I guess to be [a] magnet.”

In other words, Peiresc believed that the cork contained not only a sunflower seed but also a hidden lodestone. And he was right. The clock was really a compass: for the seed to face the sun, Kircher had to know in advance what the position of the sun was, relative to magnetic north, which meant that for his clock to tell time, he had to know in advance what time it was. Peiresc did not find this parlor trick “to be a miracle of any kind.”

Things didn't go any better when discussion turned to hieroglyphics. As if to prove that the Barachias Nephi treatise really existed, Kircher at long last brought out an Arabic manuscript for Peiresc to see. But he let him have a good look at only one page from the lexicon in the back. “
The bother that he made over letting me transcribe a couple of entries,” Peiresc recalled, “made me suspect that he feared that I would discover that it was nothing but a kind of translation of Horapollo.” (Horapollo was the purported author of a well-known Greek text called
Hieroglyphics
that was found in the fifteenth century; it lays out a purely allegorical, as opposed to phonetic, scheme for translating the Egyptian texts.)

At some point Kircher also presented Peiresc with a paper describing his preliminary ideas, his “protheories,” about hieroglyphic interpretation. It quoted Barachias Nephi and included a reading of the obelisk of St. John Lateran, based on an engraving he'd found in a certain book. But when Peiresc read it, it was clear that Kircher had chosen to analyze one of the more obviously unfaithful renderings of the obelisk.

“
I discovered it unfitting that the figures were all imagined at the whim of the artist, like grotesque works, that didn't have anything to do with the ancient Egyptian style, and that didn't have any connection to the real hieroglyphic figures of the obelisk of Lateran,” recalled Peiresc. “All of which I pointed out to him, and he finally admitted it, with much grief, since he had found such beautiful interpretations, and well-accredited ones, it seemed, of all the figures found there, or of most of them.”

When Peiresc pointed out another case in which Kircher failed even to recognize what real hieroglyphics looked like, “
he refused to admit it until he exhausted himself, surprised by the inaccuracy of the picture, for which he had left aside the more correct and faithful one to instead follow one which was totally conflicting and discordant with the style and antiquity that this work should give off.”

According to Peiresc, Kircher was “very ashamed after all was said and done.” But according to Kircher, who wrote about these events years later, Peiresc “
was suffused with joy” and “spoke of my work with such a sublimity of words that, in keeping with modesty, I don't think it proper to describe here.”

—

WITH PRESUMABLY AWKWARD
good-byes exchanged, Kircher headed for Marseille, where he joined up with a few other Jesuits. Together they intended to sail more than three hundred miles along the Mediterranean, first to Genoa and then to Livorno (Leghorn), on the Tuscan coast. The route allowed them to avoid the war: from Livorno he could travel overland to Venice and finally to Vienna. When they sailed off, he wrote, “we entrusted ourselves to the sea of Marseille”—and also presumably to the captain and crew of the ship, who, having been paid, ditched the seasick travelers on a small barren island several miles from their starting point.

Kircher and his companions pooled their money and paid a fisherman to return them to Marseille, where they began their journey again, this time on a felucca, the kind of low craft with a lateen rig traditionally seen on the Mediterranean and along the Nile. Soon, however, they were forced to take safe harbor in a “deserted port for three days on account of the unrest of the season and of the sea.” When they started again, so did the rough water. “The south wind began to rise and the sea swelled,” Kircher remembered, but the captain “proceeded nonetheless with immense fortitude,” until “the ship was no longer capable of sustaining the violence of the swells, the seas became so huge that I was not able to look upon them without horror, and all the while we were busy bilging from the ship all that water that had been tossed in by the force of the storm.” The priests on board began taking confession from other passengers and from one another. Soon “darkness fell as an addition to our complement of myriad suffering.”

The captain, who takes on an increasingly Odyssean cast in Kircher's telling, decided to head for the protection of a cavern along the coast “within a protraction of crags,” whose “entrance was at one moment closed off by the flux of the waves, and at the next moment opened by the retraction of the very same swells. Guided by both his wholly clear plan and his Guardian Angel, who was directing his rudder with purpose, he observed the slipping of the waves, and forthwith directed the little ship toward the mountain side, where it was hurled into the cave by the force of the waves, more by the arrangement of God than by the industry of man; for at any other moment, while the entrance was filled with waves, we all would have perished dashed against the rocks.” When they eventually got to the other side of the rocky Massif des Calanques and the port of Cassis, they had gone just eighteen miles, as the crow flies, from Marseille.

After that, Kircher made up time, taking only eight days to reach Genoa and then, after “acquiring another little boat for rent,” sailing down the Italian coast toward Livorno. But in the words of an English scholar, Kircher's “
presence alone seems to have been a certain guarantee of a storm.” And he later claimed his boat was “driven by winds and tempests” off course more than one hundred seemingly impossible miles to Corsica, and then another impossible hundred or so back to the Italian mainland near Civitavecchia, the main seaport of Rome. Left with nothing “except hunger and calamity,” Kircher walked to the city, forty-five miles away.

“And thus I reached Rome,” he recalled, “where, to my utter surprise, I was being awaited.”

PART TWO

7

Secret Exotic Matters

K
ircher couldn't really have been too surprised, either to find himself in Rome or to be expected there. He'd indicated in a couple of letters that he planned to see the city and its Egyptian obelisks before going on to Vienna. He also knew, or hoped, that Peiresc's letters to Cardinal Barberini might finally succeed, and that there was still a chance he could be reassigned to Rome. And that's exactly what happened during the time he said his boat was bobbing around like a cork on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Peiresc's opinion of Kircher's talents may have changed, but not before his original endorsement had persuaded Barberini to keep him and his mysterious manuscript for himself, and to send the astronomer Christopher Scheiner to Vienna instead. But it should go without saying at this point that Kircher wasn't above feigning a little surprise when it suited him, and this story—that he just happened to end up in Rome, only to find out that he'd been reassigned to Rome—was subsequently repeated so many times that he may have eventually believed it himself.

If not genuinely astonished by the turn of events that kept him there, Kircher might have been overwhelmed by the city he walked into that day. Among possible first sense-impressions: a whiff of the Pontine Marshes, the three-hundred-square-mile swamp district to the south of the city; it was a foul-smelling source of malaria and other diseases that engineers had been trying to drain since the time of Julius Caesar. At the gates of Rome itself, he would have been stopped to make sure that he wasn't bringing in a case of the plague, say, or anything on the Index of Prohibited Books. Once he started walking Rome's unpaved streets, to paraphrase an early-nineteenth-century traveler,
magnificence and filth frequently competed for his attention.

A little more than a hundred years before Kircher arrived, Rome was almost completely destroyed by an army of mercenaries that had gone unpaid too long. The city was physically wrecked, forty thousand people died or disappeared, and in the aftermath the population was down to about ten thousand. But Rome had been rebuilt many times, and its recent physical reincarnation, still under way, was also hugely symbolic. It was meant, in a sense, to prove all the heretics wrong: there was only one true religion and only one place where it could possibly reside. After more than a century of construction, parts of St. Peter's were still unfinished when Kircher showed up in 1633, but its dome, as re-envisioned by Michelangelo, had taken its place as the dominant backdrop of the city.

Currently the well-connected and well-educated Barberini family was involved in a twin program of papal nepotism and almost unprecedented cultural patronage, with the former helping to fund the latter. Projects in painting, sculpture, and especially architecture, by Rubens, Bernini, Borromini, and others, were bringing the baroque style into existence. In places like the Chiesa Nuova, the New Church, “
rare music” was “sung by eunuchs . . . accompanied by theorbos, harpsicords and viols.” A new musical form called
opera
, “work” in Italian, was being performed at the new Barberini family palazzo and at other places around the city.
Bernini in particular was known for special effects in the theaters: he created artificial lights and fires, and made the sun rise with a machine. For one production, he simulated the flooding of the Tiber by sending a wall of rushing water directly toward the audience; it was diverted by stage design at the last minute.

So many people made the pilgrimage to the revitalized city that even before the end of the sixteenth century, when Montaigne traveled there from France, what bothered him most was how many other Frenchmen there were. Rome had about thirty thousand visitors a year, and every conceivable kind of human being and business—though it was especially replete with priests, nuns, artisans, merchants, bankers, prostitutes, and most visibly of all, indigents. “
In Rome one sees only beggars,” an Italian traveler complained, “and they are so numerous that it is impossible to walk the streets without having them around.”

There were a hundred religious orders in Rome, and many of them tried to help the destitute and the sick, running orphanages and hospitals with thousand-bed wards. The well-off lived in the area around Trinità dei Monti—the Church of the Holy Trinity on the Pincian Hill—and off the Via del Corso. The Jewish population lived in an overcrowded ghetto in a low-lying area near the Tiber River that was prone to flooding. “
Being environed with walls, they are locked up every night,” reported an Englishman. “The Jews in Rome all wear yellow hats, live only upon brokerage and usury, very poor and despicable.” In Campo de' Fiori, the market square where “
horses, all kinds of corn, and other commodities” were sold, executions were also sometimes performed. The priest, mystic, poet, and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake there thirty-some years before as punishment for heresy. Almost anywhere in Rome you could come across a brand-new palazzo or crumbling ruin, the smell of cooked cabbage or the odor of urine.

Kircher made his way through the confusing, narrow streets to the Jesuit Collegio Romano, where the previous pope, the current pope, and a host of cardinals had been educated. It wasn't far away on Via del Pie' di Marmo (Street of the Marble Foot) from the Dominican convent where Galileo was tried in the spring and from the massive rotunda of the Pantheon. In the judgment of a visitor, the front of the
Collegio Romano gave “place to few for its architecture, most of its ornaments being of rich marble. It has within a noble portico and court, sustained by stately columns, as is the corridor over the portico, at the sides of which are the schools for arts and sciences.” The college boasted a large garden, an elaborate library, and a multiroom apothecary for making everything from candle wax to the herbal concoctions that chaste Jesuits took to dampen sexual desire.

In his first few days in Rome, Kircher sought out Peiresc's contacts. “
I paid my respects to those who in turn were greatly revivified by my arrival,” he boasted. Cardinal Barberini “received me with so great a measure of kindness that he seemed to forestall the others by offering more swiftly than they the generosity of his own services to my undeserving self.”

The Collegio Romano

Barberini was only about five years older than Kircher, but his uncle had made him cardinal a decade before. In addition to directing foreign affairs for the papacy, he'd become one of the most influential people in Rome, though he was also spending much more money than he could afford. He was a cultured, obsessive collector of old volumes and manuscripts, and had previously served as the cardinal-librarian of the Vatican. Kircher wrote to Peiresc about a second meeting with Barberini a few days later: “He questioned me about many things pertaining to letters,” especially those “concerning the interpretation of Hieroglyphics.” Barberini wanted to know “by what reasoning, by what method, by what author, by what inscriptions they are able to be extricated.” He also “requested that I tell him what I knew about the secret rites of the Cabala, what benefit each holds indisputably for human affairs.”

On the basis of his satisfying responses to such questions, Kircher came away with the cardinal's full support and an initial twofold assignment: to complete a Latin translation of the Barachias Nephi treatise and, as an example of Nephi's methodology, an explication of the mysterious Bembine Tablet. Also called the Table of Isis, the bronze tablet was elaborately inlaid with images of Egyptian figures, markings, and symbols. It had turned up a hundred years before, after the sack of Rome, and was thought to hold great, ancient secrets. If all this work went well, Kircher could proceed to a full set of commentaries on the obelisks of Rome.

There were at least two problems with this assignment. The first had to do with the questionable status of the Barachias Nephi text. The second had to do with the fact that, like the dialogues attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the Bembine Tablet was actually created a few thousand years later than anyone thought. It wasn't ancient or Egyptian so much as it was rendered in an ancient Egyptian motif. But Kircher kept the first problem to himself and neither Kircher nor Barberini knew about the second.

Barberini offered financial support as well as special access to libraries, manuscripts, and scholars of esoteric languages in Rome. As Kircher reported, the cardinal ordered his personal librarian to take him “
to the Vatican library and then to his own library and likewise to all the antiquities of the city of Rome, including all obelisks, pyramids, ruins, and statues, those scattered both in the city as well as here and there in the gardens of the Cardinals, all those things which might be able to be of use to me in order that I properly undertake this task.”

He was no doubt also taken to other sites of interest. In the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, for example, there was a relic said to be part of the crib in which the baby Jesus had been laid. At the Palazzo Farnese there was a marble head of Christ supposedly carved from life. And at the resplendent Il Gesù, the Jesuit Church of Jesus, there was not only the body of Ignatius but the right arm of Francis Xavier, the first Jesuit missionary.

A few months later, a young priest and natural philosopher named Raffaello Maggiotti wrote to Galileo, now under house arrest in Arcetri, near Florence. “
News is that there is a Jesuit in Rome who has been in the East a long time and, as well as knowing twelve languages and good geometry has brought with him very good things,” the letter said. “Among them a briar that turns according to the sun and also serves as a perfect clock.” Also among them, “Arabic and Chaldean manuscripts, with a copious display of hieroglyphs.” According to Maggiotti, Kircher affirmed that the hieroglyphics were “made before Abraham was born and he says those scripts contain great secrets and stories.”

Apparently the clock that had been a success with the Prince-Elector of Mainz and then a disappointment in Aix was working its wonders again. Or Kircher had been talking them up again. And as Paula Findlen, a modern scholar, has put it, if Kircher “
did not deliberately deceive his Roman audience,” he also probably didn't “disabuse them of the idea that he had actually been to the Orient.” After all, he'd
wanted
to go.

—

NOT EVERYONE
in Rome was impressed with the clock, or with Kircher, who wrote in his memoirs that
God “sets limits” on individual desire for glory by way of “hounding persecution.” It seems there were “men of letters” who were skeptical about him and his abilities, especially considering his age—“for indeed I was only thirty-two years old.” These people, he recalled, “not only were harboring doubts concerning my credibility, but also lodged through false accusation the charge of imposter.”

Although he'd secured an assignment to translate a manuscript whose contents he had at the very least exaggerated, Kircher was determined to prove these charges wrong. And so—“
lest I fall in with the label of fraud to the detriment of my religion”—he threw himself into his work.

During his first couple of years in Rome, it wasn't always clear
what
Kircher was doing. He spent some of his time testing his ideas about the magnetic attraction of the sun with the mimosa and tamarind plants in Cardinal Barberini's botanical garden. Beyond that, Peiresc, whose reputation was now partly on the line for recommending him, worried that he was concentrating on something more like his “protheories” than on a straight translation of that mysterious Arabic treatise. He frequently wrote to Kircher imploring him to stick to translations rather than interpretations. Sometimes he made insinuations about the text, and about Kircher's intentions.

“I am hurt that you have so small an opinion of me that you judge that I presumptuously wish to undertake a matter of which I am ignorant,” Kircher responded in one letter. “Indeed you waver about my good faith. Surely pretence, falsehood, and whatever is contrary to true and genuine sincerity are so foreign to me that I would prefer that all my scholarly labors perish, rather than commit such a crime in the Republic of Letters. . . . You may think that my works proceed from . . . vain glory and appetite for esteem, which I despise as diametrically opposed to piety; but I only undertook these matters lest I seemed to fail in my duty with respect to the talents granted to me by God in His infinite goodness.”

Even if the manuscript had been exactly what he claimed, the diversity of stimulating materials in Rome would have made it difficult for Kircher to focus on the task at hand. The Vatican kept a vast collection of Near Eastern and Middle Eastern texts brought back as booty from the Crusades several hundred years before. Kircher came across Arabic manuscripts on amulets, Jewish manuscripts in Chaldean, inscriptions in Chinese and Syriac, and inscriptions in languages unknown altogether. He briefly began an entirely different and even more immodest project, a
multivolume work he planned to call
Universal History of the Characters of Letters and Languages of the Whole World
.