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

by Glassie, John

  Ficino became very involved with this magia naturalis, or natural magic—especially in the use of talismans to draw down astral power and in the use of music as incantation. Sometime later, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, one of Ficino’s fellow scholars, wrote his Oration on the Dignity of Man. “If rational,” he wrote, man “will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.” The oration is often referred to as a manifesto of worldly Renaissance humanism, a document that helped put the focus on human capacity rather than the spiritual afterlife. But it was written to introduce Pico’s nine hundred theses, largely a compendium of mysticism and magic by which he believed it was possible to grasp “everything knowable.”

  Pico gave short shrift to Aristotle, but embraced the philosophy of the Platonists, the numerology of the Pythagoreans, the oracular poetry of the Chaldeans, the Hymns of Orpheus, the astral magic of Hermes Trismegistus, and, most especially, the Kabbalah of the Hebrews. Kabbalah was compatible with Christianity, too. One of Pico’s sections was titled “[Seventy-two] Cabalistic Conclusions According to My Own Opinion, Strongly Confirming the Christian Religion Using the Hebrew Wisemen’s Own Principles.”

  For Pico, magic was “the practical part of natural science,” and also the “noblest part.” It was within this context that learned people began to consider all manner of magical and mystical texts. The authority that this fake Hermes lent to Plato helped put a general premium on the immaterial: invisible bonds, unseen correspondences within the natural world. These things were “occult,” but not in the modern sense; occult originally meant just “hidden,” “concealed,” or “secret.”

  And so a century later it was possible to be an Aristotelian, Catholic, Hermetic, and generally mystical mathematician who believed that it just might be your calling to achieve a universal understanding of things, to uncover or to discover hidden truths. After all, Hermes instructed you to “believe that nothing is impossible for you, think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being.”

  Notwithstanding the Vatican’s censure of various kinds of magic and strict adherence to Aristotle in natural philosophy, the Jesuits contemplated these ideas as well—though as one Jesuit philosopher wrote, “Scarcely any mortal or certainly very few indeed, and those men of the keenest mind who have employed diligent observation for a long time, can attain to such natural magic.”

  Young Kircher believed he might be one of these very few.

  4

  Scenic Proceedings

  As part of their preparation for lives of obedience, Jesuit scholastics were, and still are, frequently uprooted and reassigned. Pretty soon this newly immodest young man was sent off again, to a place called Heiligenstadt, in a relatively remote part of Saxony, to teach what Kircher rather condescendingly called “the rudiments of grammar.” It may be that his superiors hoped to reintroduce him to the humility they had only recently urged him to leave behind. But it was probably too late for that. As one Jesuit historian has said about Kircher’s previously humble pose, “later he tended to over-compensate at times for his early behavior.”

  The route to Heiligenstadt—where, as it happened, Kircher’s father had once been a lay instructor to Benedictine students—passed through Fulda. His father and his mother had both died since he’d been gone, and his brothers were out in various rectories and monasteries, but his sisters (their names were Agnes, Eva, and Anna Katharina) still lived in the region. One or more of them may have warned him about the rest of the way.

  “I was advised by many to change my religious garb,” he remembered, “since the area to be traversed was infested with heretics.” But Kircher refused, saying that he would rather die in his black cassock than make his way safely in any other clothes—perhaps also thinking that the last time he’d worn secular attire, mendacious Düsseldorfers had seen fit to trick him, and he’d almost drowned in the icy Rhine.

  Kircher left with a messenger as his hired guide and headed through the region of the Eichsfeld, the “field of oaks,” a rustic source of some of the fairy tales later collected by the Brothers Grimm. At one point Kircher and his companion entered “a certain dark and bristling valley,” as he described it in his memoir, “which from its formidable appearance had earned the name the Valley of Hell.” Suddenly they were “surrounded by heretic horsemen,” who focused on Kircher’s robes. “Upon recognizing from my clothes that I was a Jesuit, they immediately stripped me of everything, save my undergarments,” he wrote. “After I was robbed of all my clothes, traveling provisions and books, and broken down with blows and lashings to boot, they prepared my death by hanging.” He was dragged between two horses to a tree.

  “When I saw that they were acting in earnest, so fierce and howling in their implacable hatred of Jesuits that they had utterly resolved to kill me,” he remembered, “presently, with spirit composed, knees bent on the ground, and eyes raised toward the sky with tears, I passionately entrusted myself to God and Mary, giving thanks to divine goodness, which had rendered me worthy of enduring death on behalf of His own most sacred name. As the tears copiously welled up, I felt myself replete with as great an abundance of consolation as I had ever experienced in my life, nor any longer did fear seize me, prepared as I was to pour out life and blood for God.”

  According to Kircher, this display had an immediate effect on one of the soldiers. Such was the power of the one true faith over the heretical kind. This soldier then gave a speech (“What are we doing, comrades?”) that persuaded the others to drop the project completely and even to give back the things they’d taken.

  Kircher thanked God profusely for protecting him. On the other hand, he felt some disappointment: “The unique and so longed-for opportunity to die on behalf of His glory had been lost.”

  Two days later, they finally reached little Heiligenstadt with its college and its old castle, built in the tenth century by a Frankish king named Dagobert. Heiligenstadt means “Holy City.” It’s now called Heilbad Heiligenstadt, literally “Spa Holy City,” and in the twenty-first century, people go there for rejuvenating soaks in brine.

  Kircher taught Latin there, and renewed his study of languages and mathematics with what he described as “the utmost zeal.” He built another sundial, on the tower of the Church of St. Mary’s. He immersed himself in the literature of the Neoplatonists and the practitioners of natural magic, and there’s little doubt he became familiar with a volume called Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic) by Giambattista della Porta. The author, a sixteenth-century polymath from Naples, had written plays, made optical devices, designed military fortifications, and collected, as he claimed, “more than 2,000 secrets of medicine, and other wonderful things.” The book, published in many different editions and languages over a number of decades, served as a guide on everything from cooking to the occult correspondences within nature.

  “The Wolf is afraid of the Urchin,” della Porta explained in one section. “Thence, if we wash our mouth and throats with Urchin’s blood, it will make our voice shrill, though before it was hoarse and dull like a Wolf’s voice. A Dog and a Wolf are at great enmity. And therefore a Wolf skin put upon anyone that is bitten by a mad Dog assuages the swelling of the Humor. A Hawk is a deadly enemy to Pigeons, but is defended by the Kestrel, which the Hawk cannot abide either to hear or see. And this the Pigeons know well enough.”

  Natural Magic went into detail on the spontaneous generation of small creatures from various forms of putrefaction—specifying what kind of dung produced which kind of insect, for example. It also told readers how to hybridize flowers and preserve fruit, distill oils and essences, extract tinctures, breed dogs, lure animals, tenderize meat, temper steel, write with invisible ink, and send secret messages. It covered medicines and remedies for common wounds, poison, and the pox, plus ways to engender sleep and different kinds of dreams. Della Porta knew how to pu
t “a Man out of his senses for a day.” And he spent thirty chapters on how “to Adorn Women, and Make them Beautiful,” including how to dye hair, remove hair, curl hair, and “take away Sores and Worms that spoil hair.”

  Readers like Kircher learned in Natural Magic about various “experiments” related to light and heavy bodies, wind, air, music, and sound. Della Porta devoted many chapters to “Looking-Glasses,” spectacles, and lenses—some that could be used to project “diverse apparitions of images,” others to “see very far, beyond imagination.” (In the years before he died in 1615, della Porta even claimed, with some reason, to have invented the telescope.) There were fifty-six chapters on “the Wonders of the Lode-stone,” or the magnet. And there was a big section on “Artificial Fires,” including “Fire-compositions for Festival days” made from potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, which Kircher put to use there soon enough.

  —

  AROUND THIS TIME, the region of Eichsfeld came under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop and Prince-Elector of Mainz, Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg. As the head of the electoral college that chose each new emperor, he was the most powerful Catholic official in German lands. He planned to send a formal embassy of representatives to Heiligenstadt, which in turn prepared to greet the officials with a proper reception and entertainment. As Kircher recalled, “A magnificence not to be scoffed at was being deemed appropriate for rightly receiving this group.” Twenty-four-year-old Kircher was apparently so well versed in the natural magic of della Porta and others that he took charge of the “scenic proceedings.”

  On the evening of the event, he produced “optical illusions on a grand scale as well as a pyrotechnic display” for the visiting dignitaries, sending “fiery globes” and “shooting stars” sailing through the night sky. Most dramatic of all: an illuminated flying dragon. In general, as Kircher himself recalled, “I was exhibiting things which seemed to smack of something beyond the ordinary.”

  Among most of the members of his audience, these things were “stirring up the greatest admiration,” as he put it. But they were causing other reactions too: “Several accused me falsely of the charge of magic,” he remembered.

  “Magic” was a loaded and changeable term in the early seventeenth century. As the title of della Porta’s book suggests, his magic was thoroughly natural, even if some of it was “occult,” since the natural world was full of concealed features. But the ability to manipulate these properties was hardly commonplace, and for some, a flying dragon or “artificial fire” signaled communion with “bad angels”—demonic magic.

  “In order to free myself from this lowly charge,” Kircher remembered, “I was forced to reveal for these legates the methods and knowledge behind the display. I satisfied this request to their utmost and complete satisfaction; indeed, from that time on I was barely able to separate myself from them.”

  He may have feigned irritation, but the “lowly charge” against him was a form of compliment. Essentially they had taken his bait. And Kircher capitalized on the opportunity of their interest to show them some “new discoveries of curiosities of mathematics” and to present them with a “panegyric of exotic languages which bore a written dedication of praise to them.” This panegyric wasn’t something he just had lying around. He’d worked it up to impress them. In the end, according to Kircher, “those men departed completely satisfied in every way.” And when they returned to the court of the archbishop and prince-elector, they “noised about to such a degree concerning my trifles that the Prince was struck with the greatest desire to meet me.”

  5

  Chief Inciter of Action

  The Prince-Elector of Mainz was old, and in engravings he looked portly and somewhat paranoid. He’d recently built himself an immense new second residence on a high embankment above the Main River in Aschaffenburg—about fifty miles from Mainz itself. Made out of red sandstone, with five stout towers, six hundred windows, and a moat, it was part palace and part fortress. Some historians say that the assets of people killed in the ongoing hunt for witches helped fund the construction. At least fifteen hundred people were executed during Kronberg’s twenty-two years as elector, a statistic that puts the legates’ initial charges of demonic magic into sobering context. And now Kircher was there essentially to entertain him. But he must have succeeded, because he earned himself a place in the elector’s court.

  Once in residence at Aschaffenburg, Kircher devoted himself to the “private recreation” of the elector—“wholly occupied with exhibiting to him those curiosities in which he was so greatly delighting.” These included a mysterious clock that Kircher said was powered by a sunflower seed, and a trick in which a small figure of Christ walked on water and saved a figure of Saint Peter from drowning. “When a strong magnet is placed in Peter’s breast,” he later wrote by way of instruction, “and with Christ’s outstretched hands or any part of his toga turned toward Peter, made of fine steel, you will have everything required to exhibit the story. With their lower limbs well propped up on corks so that they don’t totter about above the water, the statues are placed in a basin filled up to the top with water, and the iron hands of Christ soon feel the magnetic power diffused from the breast of Peter.”

  In the seventeenth century, even a simple magnetic trick like this had the potential to impress: here was true natural magic. As opposed to astral influence, devil incantation, godly intervention, and other invisible forces whose existence could only be assumed, magnetism, an invisible and apparently immaterial power, produced very real, reliable effects on the material world. It was believed by many to function, on earth and everywhere, almost as a living spirit.

  As a thirteenth-century tract had it, for example, the lodestone “restores husbands to wives and increases elegance and charm in speech.” It also cured “dropsy, spleen, fox mange, and burn.” Magnetic plasters, made from shavings of iron or lodestone, were commonly applied to the body to draw out ill humors; magnets themselves were swallowed to draw them up from within. A kind of magnetic attraction, or sympathy, was also assumed to be behind the widely accepted healing action of weapon salve, used to treat men wounded on the battlefield. To make it, blood or tissue of the victim was mixed into the salve and then applied—to the weapon that had injured him. It was supposed to heal the wound from almost any distance. For his part, the Renaissance magus Paracelsus had promulgated the notion that disease and illness could be transferred “magnetically” to a lower life-form—that gout, for instance, could be drawn away by taking the afflicted person’s toenails and implanting them in the trunk of a tree.

  In 1600 a physician in the court of Queen Elizabeth of England published what is often called the first real work of experimental science, on this same subject of magnetism. In the Latin text of De Magnete (On the Magnet), William Gilbert explained how he systematically tested and debunked many commonly held notions about the lodestone. It wasn’t true, for instance, that if a magnet was “anointed with garlic” it ceased to attract iron. To check the claim made by della Porta in Natural Magic that diamonds can magnetize iron, Gilbert conducted “an experiment with seventy excellent diamonds, in the presence of many witnesses, on a large number of spikes and wires, with the most careful precautions.” It didn’t work.

  Gilbert’s investigations resulted in a great deal of real information about the actual properties of magnets and how they behaved. When it came to questions about what magnetism was or how it worked, however, he took a more spiritual turn. (In some senses it was an Aristotelian-sounding turn, but it was made in the direction of Copernicus.) Gilbert concluded that a “stupendous implanted vigour”—“very like a soul”—was responsible for magnetic action and attraction, and that the earth itself was a giant magnet. He used a magnetic sphere he called a terrella, a “little earth,” to perform his experiments. When the terrella was set at an angle toward the plane of another magnet, for example, it rotated. Gilbert believed the sun, “the ch
ief inciter of action in nature,” brought about the rotation of Earth in a similar way: Earth’s “astral magnetic mind” responded when the sun sent forth its living energies, rotating steadily for uniform access to the vitality of its rays.

  This idea influenced Kepler, who wrote that he “built all Astronomy” on the work of Copernicus, Brahe, and Gilbert, and adopted the notion of a sun that emanated a magnetic force, causing the planets to move. Magnetism seemed to explain why the planets traveled in elliptical orbits, as he’d correctly calculated. According to Kepler, “the variety of all planetary motions derives from a very simple magnetic force just as all the motions of a clock derive from a simple weight.” Galileo was also influenced by the idea, and used the analogy of magnetism to explain why Earth held its axis through daily and annual motions.

  Kircher’s own work with magnetism extended beyond parlor tricks. In order to chart a portion of the elector’s territory (newly “restored” to him through politics associated with the larger upheaval of the Thirty Years War), Kircher invented—or rather, claimed to invent, as it was subsequently revealed—a cartographic instrument that integrated a magnetic compass with measurement and drafting tools. He called it the pantometrum, or pantometer, a name that suggested it “measured all things.” It was later described as a device for calculating “length, breadth, heights, depths, areas, of both earthly and heavenly bodies, etc.”

  Kircher finished the survey quickly, and the elector was “delighted to such a marvelous degree” that he “commanded that the other disputed states of the Archbishopric . . . be charted with like diligence.” But the elderly elector died about a year into Kircher’s service, and his successor, one Georg Friedrich von Greiffenklau, either was unimpressed with Kircher or didn’t require his services, so he was assigned to what must have felt like square one, the Jesuit college at Mainz, site of his hernia-inducing skating accident, to resume the regular path to ordination.