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.
But at a certain point Kircher latched back on to the question of Egyptian letters, and to the notion held by Peiresc and others that Coptic might help crack the hieroglyphic code. In 1634, he persuaded Barberini to sponsor an additional translation project, despite maneuverings by Peiresc to try to secure another philologist for the job. The text, a Coptic–Arabic lexicon and grammar, had been brought back from Egypt some years before by a Roman gentleman named Pietro della Valle. He had begun his journey east in order to get over a broken heart; he then spent ten years traveling to places like Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Ormuz, and Cyprus. In Baghdad he found a bride, who died shortly after they were married, and he traveled with her corpse, many live specimens of Persian cats, and many other souvenirs, for another five years before returning to Rome.
It was subsequently reported that Kircher was preparing a manuscript for publication. “Father Atanase Kircher is having his Egyptian language dictionary printed,” one learned Frenchman wrote to Mersenne, “which will be like a precursor to his interpretation of the obelisks.” And in 1636 he did publish such a precursor, the long Latin title of which translates as The Coptic, or Egyptian Forerunner, in Which Both the Origin, Age, Vicissitude, and Inflection of the Coptic or Egyptian, Once Pharaonic, Language, and the Restoration of Hieroglyphic Literature Are Exhibited by a New and Unaccustomed Method. Although it had a main argument—that Coptic, which descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians, had many helpful similarities with that language system—it was otherwise a hodgepodge. It quoted Barachias Nephi, but it couldn’t remotely be said to contain the translation the cardinal had assigned him. It contained a sample translation of the della Valle grammar, but not the whole thing. It contained a partial, Hermes Trismegistus–sounding interpretation of the ostensibly ancient Bembine Tablet and of other artifacts that didn’t seem to relate to Coptic, or to Egyptian. One of these was a strange inscription that had been found at the foot of Mount Horeb in the Sinai Desert. Kircher said it was written in an antique form of Chaldean used by Hebrew kings. According to his wishful interpretation, these Hebrew kings somehow foretold that “God will make a virgin” and “bring forth a son.”
It’s unclear what Cardinal Barberini thought of this book, but it brought Kircher a certain amount of respect and Peiresc a certain amount of relief (before he died the following year). In the view of the papal censor, the text contained “many arguments brought forth ingeniously from the hidden sanctuaries of holy antiquity and the mysteries of the Egyptians.” The author displayed “genuine knowledge of many languages as well as erudition in secret exotic matters.” It was, in short, “a worthy beginning from which we may anticipate what will follow.”
Mainly, in the words of a twentieth-century Egyptologist, the Coptic Forerunner “unabashedly proclaimed that the decipherment of the hieroglyphs was at hand.” Kircher had given readers only a small taste of what was to come, and toward the end of the text he announced the title of his big book on the subject: Egyptian Oedipus. Before killing his father and marrying his mother, Oedipus had solved the riddle of the sphinx, and now, as Kircher declared, he was like Oedipus—on the verge of solving one of the oldest riddles of all time.
8
Habitation of Hell
In 1637, not long after the publication of the Coptic Forerunner, a young German prince, the Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt, converted to Catholicism and made the journey to Rome. Among his other honors, he was to receive the Grand Cross from the Knights of Malta, the religious military order that traced its roots back five hundred years to the First Crusade. A German-speaking priest was needed to accompany him as confessor, and so, as Kircher recalled, “it happened that, a few years after my arrival at Rome, I was sent away to Malta with the Prince Landgrave.”
Malta is really an archipelago—two big islands, Malta and Gozo, and many other small ones—about sixty miles off the southern tip of Sicily. It had been under the control of the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Fatimids, the Normans, the Sicilians, and the Aragonese. After the Knights of St. John were ousted from the island of Rhodes in 1522, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, ceded the property to the order for an annual symbolic rent payment of one live Maltese falcon.
Kircher must have wondered whether God would ever let him
stay in one place. But if he was initially upset about being dragged away with an immature prince to some rocks in the middle of the sea, his curiosity quickly kicked in. He made magnetic and astronomical readings, and studied geological formations. There were four-hundred-foot cliffs, natural arches, and a place where the tides had carved human-looking shapes into the earth. He explored Malta’s megalithic temples, catacombs, and grottoes, and was especially fascinated by its inland seas and underground passageways: how far down did they go? Kircher observed the habits of Malta’s troglodyte population, and on Gozo he climbed to one particular cave, high over Ramla Bay; some refer to it as the place where Odysseus spent seven years as the love slave of Calypso.
He also befriended a little man named Fabio Chigi, with whom he would exchange letters for the next two decades. Born into a rich and high-ranking family in Siena, Chigi was currently Malta’s papal representative and chief inquisitor, and, though it was hard to imagine at the time, he would one day become pope. A frequent deviser of new ciphers and secret codes for use in official correspondence, he enjoyed writing poetry and studying arcane Etruscan inscriptions. Kircher and Chigi shared an interest in esoteric arts, and they must have discussed the so-called combinatory method of the thirteenth-century Majorcan theologian Ramon Llull, since it seems to have been the basis for a device that Kircher built and bestowed upon the knights.
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 8