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

by Glassie, John

  Like Kircher and many others, Peiresc was fascinated by the notion that the hieroglyphic texts represented very early learning. According to Gassendi, Peiresc’s most prized library possession was a papyrus scroll “all written with Hieroglyphick Letters” that had been “found in a Box at the feet of a certain Mumie.” Peiresc theorized that Coptic, the language of the early Egyptian Christians, might shed light on the workings of the hieroglyphic system. He’d been corresponding with a pair of Capuchin monks in Egypt and working through agents in Cairo to purchase anything he could that was in Coptic or about Coptic.

  Several months after he and Peiresc first met, Kircher sent him a sample from his translation of the mysterious Arabic text. Peiresc wrote that it “made me more hopeful than I used to be of the discovery of things that have been so unknown to Christianity for close to two thousand years.” When the next sample came, he wasn’t quite as effusive, but urged Kircher to come for an extended visit and to bring the manuscript with him for Peiresc to see. Kircher was uncharacteristically slow to accept the invitation of such an important person, but finally went to stay for four or five days in the spring of 1633.

  —

  ALTHOUGH THIN and prone to sickness, fifty-two-year-old Peiresc was a man of “rare courtesie and affability.” During Kircher’s visit Peiresc wrote that he and Gassendi were having “great pleasure in taking him around.” It wasn’t just the three of them: Peiresc kept dozens of cats “by reason of mice,” and when he went outdoors, a servant “waited upon him with an Hand-Canopy, to keep off the Sun-beams.” In his gardens and sunrooms he grew black locust from America, jasmine from Persia, ginger from India, rare vines from Damascus, and one China rose. He owned five telescopes and a large treasure of books, with which Kircher demonstrated his facility with languages.

  There was plenty to discuss (they probably spoke Latin), and these French were sophisticated: They took an empirical, mathematical approach to the study of nature and had pretty much given up on Aristotle. They were generally skeptical, especially when it came to fantastic explanations for physical phenomena. Peiresc had withheld judgment some years before, for example, when the bones of a giant were discovered in an ancient tomb; many years later he was able to determine that they actually belonged to an elephant.

  Gassendi and Mersenne had recently been involved in a public feud with a physician, alchemist, astrologist, cosmologist, and Kabbalist named Robert Fludd. Fludd believed in the idea of a “world soul,” invisible harmony between microcosm and macrocosm, the divinity of Hermes Trismegistus, and the ability of the weapon salve to heal wounds from a distance. Mersenne, remembered today for the prime numbers named after him, wrote that Fludd was “an evil magician, a doctor and propagator of foul and horrendous magic.” Gassendi had been a little more gracious. A devoutly pious priest, he happened to believe that everything was composed of basic units of matter called atoms—a material theory he got from his own ancient sources, Epicurus and Lucretius.

  On some of these topics, Kircher kept his mouth shut—on others, not as much. Fludd’s ideas were closer to his own than he might have been willing to admit. But after more than a decade of rigorous scholarship, Kircher could impress with his erudition, and his storytelling had a disarming effect on people. In the end, the skeptics were taken with him. “He has beautiful reports and beautiful secrets of nature,” Peiresc said in a letter. Kircher told them about his sunflower-seed clock, and it sounded “very marvelous” to Peiresc, who added: “He promises to show us proof.”

  As Kircher described it, the clock told time because the sunflower seed always turned toward the sun, the way the flowers do, by virtue of magnetic attraction. “And he says he has shown proof of it in good company at the dinner table, in the presence of the Elector of Mainz,” Peiresc wrote, “and even if one was in the house and out of the sunlight or if the sky was covered with clouds, the clock would never stop showing the most precise time, as much as is possible in the arc that the sun makes in our horizon. Even if it weren’t so exactly precise, and if it showed no other change than turning successively at sunrise or at noon or at sunset, more or less, I would still hold it as a great miracle of nature and one that well deserves to be seen.”

  Kircher may have intended the clock to suggest the degree to which invisible forces—of the kind that Fludd endorsed—were natural enough. But other implications weren’t lost on Peiresc. That same month, Galileo was standing trial in Rome. (His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems had not only espoused the Copernican model but also made some fun of arguments for an Earth-centered universe and, at least it appeared, of the pope.) Peiresc understood that evidence of the sun’s magnetic action or attraction could help make the case for Earth’s rotation and revolution. After Kircher’s visit, Peiresc wrote about the sunflower-seed clock to Marin Mersenne in Paris, who wrote about it to, among others, René Descartes.

  “If the experiment that you describe to me of a clock without sun is certain, it is quite curious, and I thank you for having written to me about it,” Descartes replied from Deventer in the Netherlands. “But I still have doubts about the effect; even so, I don’t judge it impossible.”

  Strangely, the original purpose of Kircher’s visit had to be postponed. When the time came to begin a discussion about hieroglyphics, it turned out that Kircher had failed to bring along the Barachias Nephi manuscript. This is probably because, to one degree or another, he’d exaggerated its very being. As historian Daniel Stolzenberg writes in his doctoral dissertation on Kircher’s Egyptological efforts, “No such author or text is known to exist.” Kircher didn’t make it up entirely—perhaps there was a compilation of old writings—but it wasn’t quite what he said it was.

  Kircher left with a trunk-load of books Peiresc had given him to help with his translation. In return, he promised to come back again to demonstrate the clock and to be sure to bring the manuscript with him when he did.

  —

  SOON AFTER RETURNING to Avignon, Kircher received a letter from the superior general of the Jesuits containing news about another reassignment. In his memoir, Kircher rendered it as if taking it in for the first time: “I am called to Vienna, Austria, where I have been designated Mathematician of Caesar.”

  The statement sounds almost delusional. But it seemed that “Caesar,” by whom he meant Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was looking for a replacement for Johannes Kepler, who had died a couple of years before. (Kepler had his share of early-modern-age trouble. His mother had been accused of witchcraft—he’d used his influence to have her released. Six out of the eleven children from his two marriages died in infancy or childhood. Now, just a few years after his death, his bones were said to be lost; the churchyard in which he was buried was blasted and trampled into nothingness during the Swedish siege of Regensberg.)

  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 a
t 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

  Kircher 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.