Kircher was actually a great proponent of the magnetic power of the sun, and so incurred some contradictions and difficulties of his own. The Magnet was meant to serve not only as a weighty testament to its author’s own world-class intellectual capacity but as a major argument for the pervasiveness of the magnetic principle, for the natural presence of the unseen. As Kircher saw it, the magnet was “that prodigal of nature, the true ape of the skies, the Idea of the universe in which whole new worlds are hidden, a divining rod and key to the unexhausted and undiscovered riches of the world.” In many areas, Kircher shared or lifted the views of Mersenne’s nemesis, the famous Dr. Fludd. Fludd believed the universe itself possessed a kind of magnetic or sexual energy, operating through attraction and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy, on a spiritual and physical level. Magnetic attraction was a “coition or union” between bodies caused by the similarity of their nature. The lodestone, Fludd wrote, “sucketh and attracteth from his center the body of Iron unto it, drawing forth of it his formal beams, as it were his spiritual food.” In a sense, for Fludd and Kircher, it wasn’t the earth that was a magnet; the magnet was God, and God worked in magnetic ways.
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KIRCHER AGREED with Gilbert that magnetic polarity made young seedlings send their shoots up and their roots down. He likened the emanation of a flower’s invisible fragrance to the emanation of a lodestone’s invisible magnetic rays; that is, they were both somehow living spiritual emissions. And he believed, as he had previously attempted to show with his sunflower-seed clock, that trees and plants grew toward the sun (and in some cases toward the moonlight) by virtue of invisible magnetic attraction. He’d exchanged letters with Jesuits in Africa and Asia about exotic species that might manifest this principle. At the Collegio Romano he’d observed acacia, whose leaves opened up with the sun and closed at night. But of course it was the sunflower, brought to Europe from the Americas (the Incas venerated it as part of their sun worship), that figured most prominently in his thinking. Kircher admitted that his attempts to make workable clocks from sunflowers and sunflower seeds had been somewhat beset by complications. But he was apparently so convinced of the truth of the principle that a new fib was in order to help make his case. He wrote that he’d procured a “kind of material”—the root or seed of a heliotrope of some type—from an Arab merchant on the docks of Marseille. This material was more sensitive to the sun, he claimed, and worked much better than a regular sunflower seed did to drive a clock.
As Kircher described it, herbal and mineral remedies operated by magnetic action; ingested medicine “pulls what is similar to its own nature and ultimately draws and purges it.” Antidotes worked in the same way. The best treatment for snakebite: eating the meat of a snake, preferably the one that bit you. (Kircher claimed that he’d seen this work back in Germany, on a traveling salesman from Erfurt.) Even the poison in snake venom itself arrived there in the first place through magnetic means; it was taken up through snakes’ bellies as they slithered around on the ground. By its (Aristotelian) nature the snake had an appetite for the toxic mineral and vegetable excretions in the soil that were “putrid, contagious and noxious to men.” The natural job of all venomous creatures was to siphon up poisonous vapors and emissions, leaving the earth safe for human beings.
Spiders drew in their venom from the very air. In a section of The Magnet that Kircher said was worth the price of the whole book, he argued that magnetism was at work in the well-known cure for the bite of a certain spider found around the southern Italian town of Taranto. This “tarantula,” as it is called, has almost nothing in common with the much larger, hairy, and dangerous North American spider that was later given the same name. In fact, the Italian tarantula is now known to be basically harmless. But in Kircher’s time, every summer, people who claimed they were bitten by the tarantula exhibited an array of troubling symptoms: delusions (imagining themselves as expert swordsmen, for example, or as ducks or fish), listlessness, jumpiness, twitchiness, giddiness, lethargy, unusual and excessive thirst for wine. Afflicted women ran around exposing themselves. Men experienced unrelenting erections. They could be cured only by certain kinds of up-tempo songs, “tarantellas,” to which they responded involuntarily in the form of a frenetic dance. The playing and dancing went on for hours. The cure could take anywhere from three to eight days. During this time villagers who had been bitten in previous years often experienced a recurrence of the disease from hearing the music, and began dancing as well.
The tarantula and its musical antidote, from The Magnet
In a way that exemplifies the pre-modern approach to scientific matters, the existence of the disease and the efficacy of the treatment were not really in doubt. The question was not whether the music worked—or whether the bite caused such symptoms in the first place, or whether people might actually want to get “bitten” so that they could indulge in the cure. The only question was how the music worked, and many intellectuals speculated about the answer, from a great distance away, without anything like firsthand observation or methodical reports. One natural philosopher from Naples believed that the spider’s venom increased the temperature of the “spirits” in the bloodstream to the level at which they would be inclined to dance and hop like a spider; the music attracted the spirits out of the body. Even Gassendi, the atomist, was happy to provide an explanation, one that was consistent with his more modern, physical philosophy: the music pushed motion onto the blood, which pushed motion onto the muscles and nerves, resulting in the dancing; the impact eventually broke down the particles of poison into ineffectual bits. Kircher, the new champion of the magnetical philosophy, held that it was the music itself that did most of the work, and that it did so magnetically—drawing the poisonous humor from the deep fibrous recesses of the body so that the sweat from the dancing could carry it out. As Kircher understood it, the same music didn’t work for everybody; sanguine types, for example, were sympathetic to the soft sound of the zither, but the way to draw the poison out of cold, phlegmatic sorts was to agitate the venom with drumbeats and cymbals.
Despite what seems from a modern perspective like major susceptibility to nonsense on Kircher’s part, he was skeptical about many things that Fludd, for example, was not. Fludd was a great champion of the weapon salve that was supposed to heal a wound from any distance. But Kircher didn’t believe it. No natural force was without physical limitations, he argued, and the natural force of magnetic attraction was no exception. He concluded that if cures actually resulted, they were miracles performed by God or by angels, the result of some demonic art or black magic, or they were natural but unrelated to the salve.
Kircher refuted the notion that consumption could be transferred to a dog or pig by feeding the animal an egg boiled in the blood of the patient. And he dismissed commonly held beliefs about something called the vegetable lamb plant of Tartary. By many accounts, this Central Asian plant grew actual sheep as its fruit, with a soft coat outside and bloody meat inside. The grasses around the plant always appeared to have been eaten, though usually the lamb fruit (or fruit lamb?) itself was too high off the ground to have reached the grasses, and some people theorized that magnetic forces helped draw them up within reach. Kircher had never seen one of these plants in person but conjectured that the lamb wasn’t an actual lamb—the fruit just looked like a lamb, the way the fruit of a plant in distant California was said to look like a dragon. In his opinion the grass was merely stunted by the lamb plant’s everyday suction of healthy substances from the soil.
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IT WAS IN PART because of Kircher’s skepticism on matters such as the lamb plant of Tartary, his willingness to separate lore from the literal truth, that The Magnet “earned not insignificant applause,” as he put it, from many intellectual quarters. The book was so well received that a second, enlarged edition was printed two years later. Among those who were adopting a more empirical approach to knowledge, however, it was valued more
for the entertainment than the information it provided. After The Magnet appeared in printed form in 1641, a young Italian intellectual sent a report about it to Galileo, who was now old and blind. It was “a very large volume on the magnet,” he wrote, “a volume enriched with an abundance of beautiful copperplate engravings. You will see astrolabes, clocks, wind scopes, with a flourish of extremely outlandish names. Among other things there are . . . inscriptions in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages. One delightful thing is the musical score he claims is the antidote to the tarantula’s venom.” In short, the Italian and his colleagues “had a good laugh.”
Others were curious to see what it contained. “I am approaching the point where I have to deal with the lodestone,” René Descartes wrote to the polymath Constantijn Huygens in 1643. “If you think that the big book you have on the subject, of which I don’t know the name, could be useful to me, and you would not mind sending it to me, I would be much obliged, and will be for the rest of my life.”
Two days later, Huygens replied, sending him “the Magnet by Kircherus, in which you will find more grins than real substance, which is ordinary coming from the Jesuits.” He also “begrudgingly” sent along books by Gassendi, asking Descartes to return them quickly because he would not be able to learn anything from them: “The nonsense of fools takes as much time to read as the good things of the learned.”
Many years before, in a stove-heated room somewhere in Germany, Descartes had had a vision for an entirely new method for acquiring knowledge: it could be built only on what was without doubt and what was mathematically certain. What Descartes did, among other things, was to cut off consideration of immaterial influence on the material world. He didn’t take God off the table—in fact he “proved” God’s existence, as well as, very famously, his own (“I think, therefore I am”)—but he limited explanations of natural phenomena to physical, mechanical causes, cutting off the realm of the body and the physical world from the realm of the mind and soul and spiritual world. And yet Descartes’s own explanation for magnetic attraction and polarity was utterly speculative and highly uncertain; it involved the constant flow of particles that he imagined to be threaded like screws. The threading was such that the particles could enter one pole of the magnet only through entry holes that were likewise threaded and exit only through threaded exit holes at the other end.
A week after receiving the books, having spent some time “flipping through them,” Descartes sent them back. “I believe that I have seen everything that they contain, even if I have hardly read anything but the titles and margins. The Jesuit is quite boastful; he is more of a charlatan than a scholar.”
Descartes went on to comment about the material that Kircher said he’d gotten from the Arab merchant in Marseille and that was supposed to turn toward the sun day and night. “If it were true, it would be interesting, but he does not explain at all what the material is,” he wrote. He remembered that “Father Mersenne wrote to me in the past, about eight years ago, telling me that it was from the sunflower seed, which I do not believe, unless the seed is more powerful in Arabia than it is in this country.”
It was absurd, and yet not impossibly absurd. Descartes tried it himself, he wrote, “but it did not work.”
10
An Innumerable Multitude of Catoptric Cats
Pope Urban VIII died in the summer of 1644, and was succeeded by Pope Alexander VI’s great-great-great-grandson. (Alexander VI was evidently not a great believer in celibacy.) Choosing the name Innocent X, Giovanni Battista Pamphilj took quick legal action against the Barberinis for embezzlement, forcing Cardinal Barberini and other members of his family to flee to Paris for a time.
During the fall of that year, a young English traveler watched the procession of the new pope on its way to the Basilica of St. John Lateran. According to his report, first came “a guard of Switzers” and the “avant-guard of horse carrying lances.” Next came (putting his words into line):
those who carried the robes of the Cardinals, two and two
then the Cardinal’s mace-bearers
the caudatari, on mules
the masters of their horse
the Pope’s barber, tailor, baker, gardener, and other domestic officers, all on horseback, in rich liveries
the squires belonging to the Guard
five men in rich liveries [leading] five noble Neapolitan horses, white as snow, covered to the ground, with trappings richly embroidered, which is a service paid by the King of Spain for the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, pretended feudatories to the Pope
three mules of exquisite beauty and price, trapped in crimson velvet
three rich litters with mules, the litters empty
the master of the horse alone, with his squires
five trumpeters
the armerieri estra muros
the fiscal and consistorial advocates
capellani, camerieri de honore, cubiculari and chamberlains, called secreti
four other camerieri, with four caps of the dignity-pontifical, which were Cardinals’ hats carried on staves
four trumpets
a number of noble Romans and gentlemen of quality, very rich, and followed by innumerable staffieri and pages
the secretaries of the chancellaria, abbreviatori-accoliti in their long robes, and on mules
auditori di rota
the dean of the roti and master of the sacred palace, on mules, with grave, but rich foot-clothes, and in flat episcopal hats
more of the Roman and other nobility and courtiers, with diverse pages in most rich liveries on horseback
fourteen drums belonging to the Capitol
the marshals with their staves
the two syndics
the conservators of the city, in robes of crimson damask
the knight-confalionier and prior of the R. R., in velvet toques
six of his Holiness’s mace-bearers
the captain, or governor, of the Castle of St. Angelo, upon a brave prancer
the governor of the city
on both sides of these two long ranks of Switzers
the masters of the ceremonies
the cross-bearer on horseback, with two priests at each hand on foot
pages, footmen, and guards, in abundance
the Pope himself, carried in a litter, or rather open chair, of crimson velvet, richly embroidered, and borne by two stately mules; as he went, he held up two fingers, blessing the multitude who were on their knees, or looking out of their windows and houses, with loud vivas and acclamations of felicity to their new Prince
the master of his chamber, cup-bearer, secretary, and physician
the Cardinal-Bishops, Cardinal-Priests, Cardinal-Deacons, Patriarchs, Archbishops and Bishops, all in their several and distinct habits, some in red, others in green flat hats with tassels, all on gallant mules richly trapped with velvet, and led by their servants in great state and multitudes
the apostolical protonotari, auditor, treasurer, and referendaries
the trumpets of the rear-guard
two pages of arms in helmets with feathers and carrying lances
two captains
the pontifical standard of the Church
the two alfieri, or cornets, of the Pope’s light horse, who all followed in armour and carrying lances
innumerable rich coaches, litters, and people
The detail-oriented observer was John Evelyn, a former Oxford student who would rather have gardened than serve in the Royalist army. Although the English king Charles I was in the midst of a civil war against Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian forces, the twenty-four-year-old Evelyn had been given leave to travel, and he was now satisfying his curiosity about Rome. Later in life he wrote thirty books
on such topics as forestry and the cultivation of fruit trees, the smoke and smog of London, copper engravings, English customs, French fashion, and ancient architecture. A couple of weeks prior to the papal procession, Evelyn sought out an introduction to Kircher, who, despite the smirks of the more astute new philosophers, had realized at least some of his ambition for fame as the author of The Magnet.
Not that Kircher had given up his sense of himself as the new Oedipus. He never really lost interest in anything, and almost ten years after starting it, he’d recently published the Latin translation of the Coptic lexicon and grammar that Pietro della Valle had brought back from his travels east. Roman dignitaries and foreign visitors such as Evelyn came to see him. Jesuit missionaries around the world sent him astronomical observations, reports of unusual phenomena, specimens of flowers, animals, and shells.
“Father Kircher . . . showed us many singular courtesies,” Evelyn wrote in his diary, “leading us into their refectory, dispensatory, laboratory, gardens, and finally . . . through a hall hung round with pictures . . . into his own study, where, with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.”
Kircher’s catoptric (mirrored) displays included his “catoptric theater,” a cabinet with a reflective interior that appeared to multiply infinitely whatever was set inside it. It’s possible that Evelyn had already seen one of these in Rome; there was one at the Borghese family villa and one at the palazzo of another prince. It was very amusing to watch uninitiated guests grab at the air where they thought they saw, say, stacks and stacks of gold coins. But Kircher’s chest “far surpassed the competition,” says historian Michael John Gorman. And he used it to fool all types of susceptible creatures.
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 10