So it was that later in 1661, Kircher traveled to the ancient town of Tibur “for the sake of refreshing my strength and at the same time to gather material on antiquities for my work on Latium.” It was about thirty miles east of Rome, at the foot of the Sabine Hills. Now called Tivoli, Tibur had been a famous summer residence for ancient Romans, and was the site of an enormous villa built by the Emperor Hadrian. One day during his time there, Kircher set out in search of a particular ruin: “I had heard that somewhere in the nearby mountains there was hidden the famed rubble of the city of Empolitana, referred to rather often by Livy,” he recalled.
“After procuring a travel mate I went out to survey the area, an utterly difficult journey.” They hiked many hours, but the ruins of Empolitana proved elusive. So the two began a very long climb up the slope of the highest mountain in the small range called the Monti Prenestini, which would offer the best view of the hills and valleys on either side below. The mountain was originally called Mons Vulturum or Mons Vulturella, the Mountain of Falcons. Over many hundreds of years the name had become Mentorella. It was sometimes also known as Monte Guadagnolo, after the little village that clings to its southern slope. Above the village is a weathered ridge of scrub and rocks that runs along the length of the mountain. It’s about three thousand feet above sea level, and fifteen hundred feet down to the green valley below. Little villages and towns are visible in the foothills of the range a couple of miles to the east. As Kircher and his companion made their way along this ridge, they saw signs of a building on the steep eastern face of the mountain.
The building turned out to be a church “nearly consumed with age.” It stood on a sort of shelf against a tall, craggy outcrop. “When I drew nearer I realized that formerly it had been a magnificent structure,” Kircher recalled. “Still, I marveled that it had been placed in this bristling wilderness.”
Examining the remains of the church, he found a marble inscription: this was the site of the conversion of Saint Eustace. As the story went, sometime early in the second century, a Roman commander named Placidus was hunting on the mountain when a stag came out and stood at the top of the jutting rock. Appearing between its antlers was a vision of the crucifixion of Christ. This was enough to turn Placidus from paganism to Christianity and inspire him to take the name Eustace. After he refused to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods in Rome, however, he and his family were burned to death in a brass bull. Two hundred years later Constantine the Great supposedly came across the site where Eustace had seen Christ, and built a church there. (Today the entire story has been roundly discounted.)
Kircher went up to the altar of this dilapidated church, where there was a statue of the Blessed Virgin. It was “venerable in its antiquity” but “very neglected” and “covered by a filthy rag.” And then “with a certain marvelous impulse from an inner spirit She was seeming to address me,” he wrote. How “deserted by all in this horrible place” she was; how in the past she “was blooming abundantly with great devotion in this very spot.”
Kircher was “thoroughly moved” to his “innermost viscera” by his experience. The view from high up on that mountain was like a more dramatic version of the hilltop view from Geisa. He returned to Rome determined to undertake a restoration of this very remote little church.
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WHILE KIRCHER WAS up on the mountain, members of the newly formed Royal Society of London, an entity that has taken on legendary status for its role in the development of Western science, were trying to figure out how to contend with Kircher’s work.
Some of the founding members of the Society had begun meeting less formally in the 1640s, in the midst of the English Civil War, and some at Oxford in the 1650s. (They were mostly Parliamentarians rather than Royalists, though the founding group was a mix of both.) After lectures at Gresham College in London, they got together in the lodgings of one professor or another, or in taverns such as the Mitre on Wood Street and the Bull Head in Cheapside, to talk about everything from the “Copernican Hypothosis,” and the “weight of the Air” to “Valves in the Veins” and the “Descent of Heavy Bodies.” One of them maintained an “operator” in his lodgings to grind glasses for telescopes and microscopes; they also had access to the chemicals and instruments of an apothecary.
As described in an early history of the Royal Society, most of the people in this fairly astonishing group were “gentlemen, free and unconfined,” meaning that with “the freedom of their education, the plenty of their estates and the usual generosity of noble blood” they had the means and the wherewithal to pursue their interests. Collectively, they had studied Descartes, or met him in Paris, and engaged in correspondence with such people as Mersenne, Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens, and Hevelius. They admired William Gilbert’s De Magnete, William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart), and Francis Bacon’s vision for an entirely new approach to knowledge based on inductive reasoning and the experimental method. Many of them also had a connection to Kircher.
In a letter written in early 1651, Dr. William Petty—a physician, chemist, economic theorist, and professor of music who also directed a comprehensive land survey of Ireland, designed double-hulled boats, and later became a founding member of the Society—described the initial approach of the Oxford group: to try to establish what had been achieved to date within various areas of knowledge. “The Club-men,” he wrote, in pre-standardized English, “have cantonized or are cantonizing their whole Academie to taske men to several imploiments and amongst others to make Medullas of all Authors in reference to experimental learning. Thus they intend to doe with Kircherus Workes and others.” Where else would they go, frankly, for the most complete compendia of progress in so many fields?
The society was officially founded in 1660, after a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren, to promote “Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning.” Chairing the meeting: John Wilkins, a liberal clergyman who supported the heliocentric model of the universe and believed in the possibility of space travel. Author of a 1648 book called Mathematicall Magick, or, The Wonders that May Be Performed by Mechanicall Geometry, he also joined the quest for a universal language, publishing the results of his very elaborate but doomed effort in 1668. (His classification system later inspired a short essay by Jorge Luis Borges, which in turn inspired an entire book, The Order of Things, by Michel Foucault.) During the 1650s Wilkins hosted many meetings of what was sometimes called the Invisible College in his lodgings at Oxford. According to another early Royal Society fellow, John Evelyn (who had documented the papal procession while visiting Rome in 1644), Wilkins put many “artificial, mathematical, and magical curiosities” on display in his room. These included a “monstrous magnet,” a machine that made rainbows, and a speaking statue. The statue “gave a voice and uttered words by a long concealed pipe”—and sounds an awful lot like it was modeled on the one in Kircher’s museum.
Sir Robert Moray, another founding member, had developed his interest in what would now be called scientific matters, as well as natural magic and the Hermetic tradition, by studying Kircher’s Magnes during a seventeen-month imprisonment at the hands of the Duke of Bavaria in the early 1640s. Moray, a Scot and a Freemason who had worked as a spy for Cardinal Richelieu, was captured while serving in the Scots Guard with the French in the Thirty Years War. Moray had a lot of time on his hands and began a correspondence with Kircher that lasted decades. He later wrote to Kircher about the extreme tides of the Western Isles, and referred others to Egyptian Oedipus. (He also seems to have incorporated symbols and ideas from Egyptian Oedipus into the imagery and rituals of Freemasonry.) After working behind the scenes at a very high level to help effect the Restoration of the English monarchy and bring Charles II to power in 1660, Moray was given his own house to live in on the grounds of Whitehall Palace. He secured the charter from the king that gave the Royal Society its name.
Charles II was himself a dabbler; he outfitt
ed a laboratory in Whitehall, from which the noise of mechanical instruments and the smell of chemical (or alchemical) experiments could often be detected. After a while, in foppish imitation of the king, his court and courtiers went from “baiting Puritans, place jobbing, flirting, and gambling,” as one nineteenth-century writer put it, to “discussing the pneumatic engine, the ponderation of the air, blood transfusion, and the variations of the compass.”
Links to Kircher were widespread among the Royal Society’s members and their experiments. Robert Boyle, who in 1661 published The Sceptical Chymist, an attempt to sort Hermetic alchemical fictions from experimental chemical facts, is also known for his work on vacuums, atmospheric pressure, and the properties of air, conducted in the late 1650s. Only fifteen years or so before, the jury was still out on whether vacuums even existed. Kircher, obliged to deny the possibility of a vacuum (vacuums were abhorred by nature, per Aristotle), had been present at an inconclusive experiment involving a siphon, water, and a very long lead tube, conducted in Rome sometime in the early 1640s. Kircher disingenuously reported that it had failed. But that experiment helped inspire Evangelista Torricelli, who in 1644 not only created a vacuum but essentially invented the mercury barometer—and that experiment inspired a great deal of discussion and trial by Boyle and others. In 1657, two years after Kircher’s friend Kaspar Schott returned to Germany, Schott published the first of his own books, an aggregation of information on mechanics, hydraulics, and pneumatics. He somewhat unenthusiastically included a report on the air pump recently invented by Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg, which Boyle read. Boyle and his assistant, Robert Hooke, made an improved version of it, which allowed them to carry out their unprecedented series of experiments, published in 1660. And so it wasn’t Kircher but his disciple who helped put old notions about the impossibility of a vacuum to rest.
“Father Kircher is my particular friend, and I visit him in his gallery daily,” Robert Southwell, who later became president of the society, wrote to Boyle while visiting Rome in 1661. “He is likewise one of the most naked and good men that I have seen, and is very easy to communicate whatever he knows. . . . On the other side he is reported very credulous, apt to put into print any strange, if plausible story that is brought unto him. He has often made me smile.”
Conflicted feelings about Kircher were fairly common. In the late 1650s, before becoming the organization’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg dutifully tried to get to the bottom of the vegetable phoenix that Kircher had put on display for Queen Christina in 1656, but failed. Later, as the editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the world’s first scientific journal, Oldenburg published long summaries of Kircher’s new volumes when they became available. The problem was that attempts to reproduce his experiments frequently didn’t succeed, and Kircher’s claims and propositions frequently didn’t hold up. No one at the time thought to give him credit for playing what can now be seen as a very valuable role: providing so many statements to test against, a means by which to determine what wasn’t true.
If some of these Englishmen begrudged him, it wasn’t for his fascination with magnetism. Despite the general success within England of new ideas, including the Cartesian notion that only material explanations of natural phenomena could hold weight, interest in this apparently immaterial power of attraction was still high. Christopher Wren believed it must be responsible for the motion of the planets. King Charles II was fascinated by magnetism and presented the Royal Society with a special terrella for use in its work. Boyle’s own theological musings made use of the analogy of the lodestone to describe God’s ways. And John Milton’s Paradise Lost, begun in 1658 and published in 1667, contains language about the magnetic rays of the sun that might even be called Kircherian:
. . . magnetic beam, that gently warms
The universe and to each inward part,
With gentle penetration, though unseen
Shoots invisible virtue ev’n to the deep . . .
Wren, Boyle, Wilkins, and others certainly shared Kircher’s fascination with the microscope. Their interest may have been spurred in the first place by discussions of the instrument in The Great Art of Light and Shadow and Examination of the Plague. But, starting in 1663, it was Robert Hooke, himself diminutive, and by then the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, who really opened up the microscopic world. Hooke’s book Micrographia, published in 1665, included observations and beautiful copperplate engravings of dozens of items, including, as Oldenburg’s account in Philosophical Transactions described it:
Edges of Rasors, Fine Lawn, Tabby, Watered Silks, Glass-canes, Glass-drops, Fiery Sparks, Fantastical Colours, Metalline Colours, the Figures of Sand, Gravel in Urine, Diamonds in Flints, Frozen Figures, the Kettering Stone, Charcoal, Wood and other Bodies petrified, the Pores of Cork, and of other substances, Vegetables growing on blighted Leaves, Blew mould and Mushromes, Sponges, and other Fibrous Bodies, Sea-weed, the Surfaces of some Leaves, the stinging points of a Nettle, Cowage, the Beard of a wild Oate, the seed of the Corn-violet, as also of Tyme, Poppy and Purslane. . . . Hair, the scales of a Soal, the sting of a Bee, Feathers in general, and in particular those of Peacocks; the feet of Flies; and other Insects; the Wings and Head of a Fly; the Teeth of a Snail; the Eggs of Silk-worms; the Blue Fly; a water Insect; the Tufted Gnat; a White Moth; the Shepherds-spider; the Hunting Spider, the Ant; the wandring Mite; the Crab-like insect, the Book-worm, the Flea, the Louse, Mites, Vine mites.
The book also included a few brief references to Kircher, which may be seen as either an understated admission of his significant influence or a true indication of his minor role.
A few months after Micrographia was published, the plague came to London. From June 1665 to March 1666, the Royal Society’s weekly Wednesday meetings were canceled. As many as a hundred thousand people died. Then, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London burned for four days, destroying thirteen thousand houses and eighty-four churches. About the churches: Christopher Wren, better known today as an architect than as an astronomer, rebuilt fifty-one, as well as St. Paul’s Cathedral.
A louse, from Hooke’s Micrographia
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Underground World
Just before Hooke published his microscopic observations of everything from the “Edges of Rasors” to “Vine mites,” Kircher published Mundus Subterraneus (Underground World), a two-volume tome of atlas-like dimensions, intended to lay out “before the eyes of the curious reader all that is rare, exotic, and portentous contained in the fecund womb of Nature.” This was the first of his books to be printed by his eager new partners in Amsterdam, and while it was traditionally deemed unworthy of natural philosophy to delve below the surface of the earth, into its nether regions, Kircher believed it was all part of God’s sometimes incomprehensible and yet perfect creation, a dark realm whose relationship to the light he wanted to explicate. There is an “idea of the earthly sphere that exists in the divine mind,” he proclaimed, and in this early work on geology he tried to show that he had grasped it.
Kircher believed he was in a special position to reveal the hidden world below. After all, he wrote, referring to himself, “the author was present with great danger to his own life” during the horrible earthquakes of Calabria in 1638. It was during that time that he “learned the great secrets of Nature,” and this firsthand experience provided the pseudo-empirical proof he needed to conclude—as Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Vitruvius, Cicero, and many others assumed—that some type of central fire existed deep inside the earth.
In Kircher’s view, volcanoes, however awful and awe-inspiring, “are nothing but the vent-holes, or breath-pipes of Nature.” Earthquakes are merely the “proper effects of subterrestrial cumbustions” that are sure to go on constantly. The “prodigious volcanoes and fire-vomiting mountains visible in the external surface of the earth do sufficiently demonstrate it to be full of invisible and underground fires,” he
wrote. “For wherever there is a volcano, there also is a conservatory or storehouse of fire under it; it is certain that where there is a chimney or smoke, there is fire. And these fires argue for deeper treasuries and storehouses of fire, in the very heart and inward bowels of the Earth.”
Not only are there fires underground but great waters, which travel and pass through their own channels and estuaries, and according to Kircher, “the fire and water sweetly conspire together in mutual service.” The tides, caused by the nitrous effluvia of the moon, push “an immense bulk of water” through “hidden and occult passages at the bottom of the Ocean” and thrust it “forcibly into the intimate bowels of the Earth.” The resulting winds “excite and stir up” and otherwise feed the subterraneous fire like a huge bellows. The seas, which would stagnate and freeze without the heat, keep the fires going and also keep them from getting out of hand, preventing “unlimited eruptions,” which would “soon turn all to ruins.” Mountains, as suggested by Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, are hollow, and function as huge reservoirs. Hot baths, hot springs, and fountains are produced where underground water passageways come near or interconnect with the fire channels.
More than once, Kircher compares the movement of the earth’s water to the circulation of the blood as described by William Harvey. The water of the oceans follows “secret motions,” known today as currents, leading up and around the globe toward the North Pole. Somewhere off the coast of Norway (the actual site of a major whirlpool system called the Moskenstraumen), he declares, is a giant maelstrom through which the water enters the earth, as if passing through a great drain. It runs through the earth’s passageways, cooling it down, and providing it with elements and nutriments in particulate form before being eliminated through an opening at the South Pole. Sometimes the analogies refer more to the continuing process of the digestive system than to the cycling of blood, but no matter: “You see therefore the manner and way of the Circulation of Nature.”
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 16