Kircher’s influence often worked this way: in spite of the negative opinions of his readers, and sometimes in spite of himself. His incorrect assertions about the Egyptian roots of Chinese society were responsible for the fact that, for more than a century after his death, many serious scholars tried to unlock the secret of the Egyptian hieroglyphic system . . . by studying Chinese. But when Jean-François Champollion made his breakthrough with hieroglyphics (after the discovery of the Rosetta stone by Napoleon’s forces in Egypt), he did it with Kircher’s help.
More precisely, he did it with the help of Kircher’s Coptic grammar and lexicon, something that Kircher himself had largely neglected in his attempt to read messages he assumed somehow transcended mere linguistics and were mystical in form as well as meaning. As it turned out, Kircher’s hapless French mentor, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, had been right all along to push for an understanding of the language of the early Egyptian Christians. But without the Rosetta stone—which was inscribed with the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphics, a later form of Egyptian script related to Coptic, and Greek—even Champollion might not have uncovered the somewhat mundane, phonetic component of the problem. Once the hieroglyphics were at last accurately deciphered, one historian writes, “the obelisks were seen to enshrine not ‘the highest mysteries of Divinity,’ as Kircher thought, but rather a dull record, for the most part, of the acts and attributes of kings.”
This is not to say Kircher’s work on Egypt went entirely by the wayside, or was completely forgotten. As with much of what he did, it just wasn’t remembered the way he’d hoped. Kircher is still sometimes called the father of Egyptology, though as such, as with his Chinese studies, he played at least some role in creating Eurocentric perceptions about the East—had something to do with the creation of the exotic Other that, as Edward Said argued in Orientalism in 1978, went hand in hand with cultural and political power, imperialism, and colonialism.
Otherwise, the great dubious contribution of Egyptian Oedipus was that it served as a reference work on the so-called sacred sciences and occult practices. Kircher included many halfhearted disclaimers for his own sake and for the sake of the censors, but his long considerations of just about every magical and mystical tradition helped preserve them for future study. In some cases he had an effect on the traditions themselves.
In some respects, Cartesian dualism, the boundary drawn between body and spirit, helped make the world safe for religious and spiritual practices of all kinds. If occult virtues were no longer legitimate explanations for natural phenomena, then physical science was often seen not to apply, or rather to fall short of applying, to mystical matters. Kircher’s books, which provided at least some fodder for the development of the secret societies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, played an even greater role in the nineteenth century, when a fascination with spiritualism and parlor pastimes like spirit-conjuring and levitation emerged. His tree of life and many of his concepts of Kabbalah were adopted almost wholesale by such societies as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in which the poet William Butler Yeats and his wife, George, were later active. (Yeats also tried to re-create the vegetable-phoenix phenomenon that Kircher had supposedly demonstrated for Queen Christina, but was unsuccessful in producing an apparition of a flower from its ashes.)
The self-proclaimed psychic known as Madame Blavatsky built her career arguing, in effect, against the Cartesian split. In her view, both modern science and Christianity existed in arrogant isolation from larger occult truths—truths she said were well understood by (who else?) the ancients. This mysterious Russian woman became a celebrity of sorts after she arrived in New York in the 1870s. At the salons and séances held in her apartment, she espoused an all-encompassing approach she called Theosophy (which means “divine wisdom”). In what might be called the Kircherian tradition, Blavatsky published impossibly erudite tomes such as The Secret Doctrine, in which she revealed the knowledge of the ancients and certain Eastern cultures, attempting to synthesize or at least to analyze every strain of spiritual and scientific belief held throughout human history. As it turned out, her erudition was more or less impossible; to write her books, she cribbed from encyclopedic nineteenth-century histories of these teachings, some of which had been taken, at least in part, from Kircher. She even quoted Rabbi Barachias Nephi, the author of the manuscript that Kircher may or may not have invented, and which he never got around to translating. Blavatsky is generally credited, if that’s the right word, with providing the foundation for the New Age movement of the twentieth century.
To her, Kircher was a “monk” who “appeared among the mystics” with a complete philosophy of universal magnetism. “He asserted that although every particle of matter, and even the intangible invisible ‘powers’ were magnetic, they did not themselves constitute a magnet. There is but one MAGNET in the universe, and from it proceeds the magnetization of everything existing. This magnet is of course what the kabalists term the central Spiritual Sun, or God. The sun, moon, planets, and stars he affirmed are highly magnetic; but they have become so by induction from living in the universal magnetic fluid—the Spiritual light.”
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KIRCHER’S MAGNETIC PHILOSOPHY must have been a source of inspiration to the physician named Franz Anton Mesmer, whose elaborate, hypnotic cures became the rage among fashionable Parisians in the late 1770s. Mesmer studied at Jesuit universities in Bavaria and learned the art of magnetic medicine from a member of the Society in Vienna named Father Hehl (sometimes rendered in English as Father Hell), an education that must have drawn on Kircher’s works as well as the old magnetic literature. Mesmer came to believe that mere magnets, vehicles of “mineral magnetism,” as he put it, were insufficient to treat certain ailments, especially “nervous” afflictions now known as mental or psychological illnesses. He thought many sicknesses were caused by blockages and imbalances of a much more subtle, universal magnetic “fluid” that ran through all things, living and nonliving, by virtue of a force he called “animal magnetism.” He used Newton’s theories of universal gravity to bolster his arguments. Just as the moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans caused the tides, he said, the movement of planets caused changes in the levels of this invisible fluid within the body. (Animal magnetism, he wrote, acts “at a distance” on a principle of “Flux and Reflux,” though he might as well have described it as attraction and repulsion, sympathy and antipathy, or consonance and dissonance.) Mesmer developed new kinds of treatments based on his belief that this force could be “communicated, propagated, stored, accumulated, and transported,” by sound, light, touch, and even thought.
After meeting with skepticism and some high-profile failures in Vienna, he moved to Paris. The French—young French women, in particular—were somehow much more responsive to his therapies. Soon his house was so crowded with patients that he began to administer to groups of them at a time in multisensory healing rituals. There was incense, Aeolian harp music, mirrors, and colored light. Patients gathered around Mesmer’s strange apparatus—a great tub filled with “magnetized” water, out of which protruded movable iron rods that were applied to afflicted parts of the body. Wearing a long lilac robe and “a look of dignity,” he lingered with each patient, staring deeply “to magnetize them by the eye.” He stroked them “with his hands upon the eyebrows and down the spine; traced figures upon their breast and abdomen with his long white wand.” Mesmer’s protégés meanwhile gave individual care to the others. They embraced them and rubbed them “gently down the spine and the course of the nerves, using gentle pressure upon the breasts of the ladies.”
His patients, thus “mesmerized,” as it came to be known, responded by going into reveries or into convulsions, sometimes by sobbing or screaming or laughing uncontrollably. Many said the treatment made them feel better. (Critics said that while Mesmer was successful with the young ladies, he couldn’t seem to cure his own long-suffering wife.) Mesmer ins
isted that his therapy worked by acting on the magnetic fluid within his patients. He may actually have been hypnotizing them. In fact, although the concept of animal magnetism was eventually discredited, his techniques led to the development of therapeutic hypnosis. Disciples and others who practiced offshoot forms of his treatments learned to build what Mesmer called rapport, or harmony, with their patients, and began to concentrate on the role of the mind and the emotions in certain illnesses and their cures. As a result, almost every history of modern psychotherapy begins with a study of Mesmer.
Beyond this, although the influence of Kircher’s magnetic studies and philosophy has faded, magnetism itself has taken on ever-increasing significance in almost every scientific and technological field, especially after a relationship between magnetism and electricity was discovered in the 1800s. “Without the stunning progress made during the last several centuries in understanding the nature of magnetism, our modern technological civilization would not yet have come into existence,” an American professor of astrophysics named Gerrit Verschuur wrote in 1993. “Every facet of the civilized world rests, ultimately, on the widespread availability of electricity to drive the machines of industry. We would never have learned to produce electricity if it were not for the profound insights that arose from the study of magnetism.” It isn’t just that magnetism is employed in the everyday generation of electricity, or that, for instance, satellite transmissions, cell-phone calls, and wireless connections exist as a flow of electromagnetic waves—that massive amounts of data are routinely transported from one given physical location to another, electromagnetically, invisibly, through the air. Light itself is electromagnetic in nature, as is every interaction between atoms, and almost every physical phenomenon besides gravity.
The realm of unseen energies that Kircher and many of his contemporaries imagined may not exist, but there is nevertheless a realm of unseen energies. In the late twentieth century, astronomers and cosmologists came to a bizarre conclusion: Only four percent of the universe is made up of stuff we understand. Twenty-three percent is made up of something known only by its gravitational effects that they call “dark matter.” Seventy-three percent is made up of some kind of antigravitational force they call “dark energy”; it is similar to dark matter, but, in the words of one cosmological theorist, it is “more energy-like.” Maybe it wasn’t completely and totally wrong for Kircher to suggest that the world is bound with secret knots.
Usually, of course, the practice of science makes the world seem less, not more, mysterious. Today, for example, evolutionary biologists are pretty well convinced that human consciousness is a Darwinian adaptation—that awareness and sense of self evolved over a very long period of time like everything else. In which case perhaps so did the feeling that some part of us might live after the body dies. “Proof will require a lot more information about, for example, neuro-circuitry and the nature of memory and emotional inputs in reasoning,” eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson explained in 2002. Nevertheless, he thinks “the Cartesian notion of dualism between body and soul is dead forever. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
Life itself may always be a mystery, if not a miracle. As it turns out, Francesco Redi’s controlled experiments with decaying meat didn’t end the debate about spontaneous generation, or the experimentation, which was conducted on increasingly microscopic, microbial, and bacterial levels for a few more centuries by scientists such as Louis Pasteur. In the second part of the nineteenth century, arguments for spontaneous generation became an integral part of the debate over evolution. It was the Darwinists—the modern scientists, the materialists—who found they had to contend with the problem of how life could be engendered from non-living matter. (Maybe every modern Darwinist still does.) One science historian expressed it this way: “To believe in evolution and a completely naturalistic world-view required the belief that . . . living organisms must have been capable of arising from nonlife at least once on the early earth.”
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PEIRESC PUT IT very mildly when he said that Kircher’s ambitions were “a little grander than the ordinary goals of his colleagues.” This led to a lack of restraint as well as other problems, including a certain flexibility with the truth. But for Kircher there were greater truths and lesser ones; there were different measures of truth, metaphors, and multiple meanings, things for which fact-based modern science has no place. Progress required another kind of split, between the literal and the literary. But that was not a split Kircher ever would have been able to abide. And it makes sense that as his scientific reputation diminished, his work continued to capture and to fuel the creative imagination.
The baroque poetry of the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was inspired by the Hermetic language in Kircher’s books. As a librarian at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève between 1913 and 1915, Marcel Duchamp examined the optical devices in Kircher’s Great Art of Light and Shadow. Giorgio de Chirico’s illustrations for Jean Cocteau’s Mythologie owe a debt to the engravings of the Great Flood in Kircher’s Noah’s Ark. Even the Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, the one above the pyramid on the dollar bill, appears to have been drawn from the frontispieces of books such as The Magnet, The Great Art of Knowing, Universal Music-making, and The Tower of Babel. Whether Kircher first found it in a book by Robert Fludd or in an ancient or apparently ancient or another source, millions of people now carry this all-seeing eye around with them in their pockets.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “A Descent into the Maelström,” the narrator comes face-to-face with a mile-wide vortex in a northern sea, and is understandably awestruck. “Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelström is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part,” Poe says. “This opinion . . . was the one to which, as I gazed, my imagination most readily assented.”
Jules Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre (A Journey to the Center of the Earth), first published in 1864, had many influences. But the German professor, a “learned egoist,” who takes the famous subterranean trip, along with his nephew and a guide, bears a striking resemblance to the author of Underground World. The story begins when this linguist, mineralogist, mathematician, and museum curator deciphers a coded message found within a runic manuscript. Actually, his nephew deciphers it; as in the story of a trick played on Kircher, it turns out merely to be Latin written backward. The message reveals a volcanic crater on Iceland as the entryway to the realm below—for which they leave the very next day, and into which they descend, hiking through passageways, traveling by raft on underground rivers and a hot ocean, meeting with adventure and discussing the geological theories of the day, for more than two months, until they are lifted on a gigantic wave and forced out through a venthole onto the sunny volcanic slopes of Stromboli, in view of Sicily.
Roberto della Griva, the main character of Umberto Eco’s novel The Island of the Day Before, isn’t sure what to make of Father Caspar Wanderdrossel, the German Jesuit professor he meets aboard the ship on which he finds himself marooned. Was he “a sage? That, certainly, or at least a scholar, a man curious about both natural and divine science. An eccentric? To be sure.” Roberto had learned, in Paris and Provence, from Pierre Gassendi among others, to be skeptical about the kind of miraculous stories Wanderdrossel told. But he’d also learned “to concede only half of his spirit to the things he believed (or believed he believed), keeping the other half open in case the contrary was true.” Almost everything the Father said was “most uncommon,” Roberto admits. “But why consider it false?”
The truth does have a way of shifting over time. Kircher wrote in the preface of Ecstatic Journey that there has scarcely been an age of human beings that hasn’t “gladdened the World to the extreme . . . with the spectacle of its own new divine power.” After all, “venerable antiquity never knew anything about the existence of the new World; it knew nothing about th
e diffusion of Oceans around the Orb of lands; it had discovered nothing about . . . a great variety of exotic things.” And “if anyone had told these things to the ancients . . . they would hesitate even to imagine them.” The achievements of each generation have led it into “love and admiration for itself.” This phenomenon had “occurred most powerfully” in own his time, “with the great amazement of mortals,” and he understood it would continue to occur, again and again.
In the same way that many of Kircher’s misconceptions are really misconceptions only from a modern point of view, at least some of our own greatest certainties will be seen as laughingly obvious errors by people, if people are still around, three or four hundred years from now.
In the meantime, it’s clear that the modern perspective is simply not the right one to take when it comes to Kircher and to the entire, incredible Kircherian enterprise. There’s something to be said for his effort to know everything and to share everything he knew, for asking a thousand questions about the world around him, and for getting so many others to ask questions about his answers; for stimulating, as well as confounding and inadvertently amusing, so many minds; for having been a source of so many ideas—right, wrong, half right, half-baked, ridiculous, beautiful, and all-encompassing.
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 23