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

by Glassie, John

  Llull’s system, set down in his tome Ars Magna (The Great Art), was itself derived from an Arabic technique for consulting astrological tables and from the practice of Kabbalah—in which, for example, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are combined, contemplated, recombined, and contemplated again. His goal was to create a perfect language by which the entire universe, and the righteousness and inherent logic of Christianity, could be communicated to anyone. The tools included what are sometimes called volvelles, or wheel charts, concentric discs labeled with concepts or categories; the discs could be turned and aligned with one another to create a seemingly endless supply of new syllogistic statements about such things as God, goodness, greatness, and the nature of creation.

  What is known about Kircher’s device comes from an instructional guide he wrote titled Specula Melitensis (Maltese Observatory), which, as one historian says, mostly conveyed Kircher’s “enthusiastic capacity for fatiguing detail.” The apparatus had “the form and figure of an observatory,” or watchtower, hence its name, and it evidently employed the Llullian discs. Beyond that, it’s hard to say precisely what this instrument looked like or how it worked. A “universal chronoscope” was on “the first cubical side.” A “cosmographic mirror” was on the second. A “physico-mathematical mirror” was on the third, and the fourth cubical side was used for “medical-mathematical” purposes. The top of the structure was a pyramid. In all, the device had one hundred twenty-five functions. Among other things, it could be used to determine:

  the “amount of dusk”

  the “flux and reflux of the seas”

  the astrological houses of the planets

  the signs of disease and “simple medicines for healing”

  the best times to go fishing and to give birth

  “Receive it, Generous Knights,” Kircher implored his Maltese hosts in the instruction book, “and receive it with favorable minds and eyes!” But there’s no way to know if the device was well received, or ever used.

  —

  DESPITE ALL THIS ACTIVITY, after about a year on Malta in the service of the reportedly callow Frederick, and away from his work on hieroglyphics, Kircher started to worry that his potential would go unfulfilled. New thoughts about traveling to the source of ancient texts began to develop. As he’d done almost a decade before when feeling trapped in Mainz, Kircher wrote to the superior general of the Jesuits asking for a reassignment to Egypt or to the Holy Land. This request was denied, too, but another priest was found to replace him as Frederick’s confessor, and Kircher was allowed to travel back to Rome. Once he was free of the prince and his retinue, however, he lost his sense of urgency, and he took his time getting there.

  Kircher lingered in Sicily for a long while. Maybe this had something to do with wanting to reunite with Kaspar Schott, his younger friend from Würzburg. After fleeing from the Swedish army, Schott spent a few years in Tournai, and had ended up at the Jesuit college in Palermo. But there’s no doubt that Kircher was fascinated by the natural formations and phenomena of the place. “I found such a Theater of Nature, displaying herself in such a wonderful variety of things, as I had with so many desires wished for,” he wrote later. “Whatever thing occurs in the whole body of the Earth that is wonderful, rare, unusual, and worthy of admiration, I found contracted here.”

  He was especially intent on exploring Sicily’s outcroppings, cliffs, and volcanoes. And he wanted to look into stories about a type of fish that lived in the Strait of Messina, the body of water that flows between Sicily and Calabria on the Italian mainland. The fish was supposed to be susceptible to a certain kind of song “by which,” Kircher wrote, “mariners are wont to allure it to follow their vessels.” But those plans had to be put aside because of the earthquakes that devastated much of Calabria in the spring of 1638. Kircher’s account of events was published almost thirty years later and paid homage to Lucretius, Virgil, Lucan, and Dante.

  Kircher recalled that the earthquake began on March 27, as he and some others crossed the strait by boat. The sea was “raging beyond what is usual” and—somewhere between mythical Scylla and Charybdis—began “stirring up huge whirlpools.” The island volcano of Stromboli was “throwing up huge billows of smoke,” and there was “a certain subterranean lowing, if you will, which we were reckoning to be the cracking of the earth and which seemed to conspire with the odor of sulfur to insinuate the complete, fatal and funereal destruction of Calabria and Sicily.”

  Despite a “cracking racket” and a “noisome odor,” and the fact that the “sea itself was boiling,” Kircher and his party made it across to Tropea on the mainland side, where there was, as there always seemed to be, a Jesuit college. They were there only a short time when “to such a degree did the violent and fearsome movement of the earth raise up a subterranean racket and din, similar to chariots driven at top speed, that the college along with the town at the foot of the mountain seemed to totter in the balance.”

  The earth “leapt up from below with so forceful a motion that I, no longer able to stand on my feet, was laid low, suddenly dashed down with face flat on the ground.

  “O how at this point of crisis did the joys of the earth seem void of understanding!” Kircher wrote. “How at the bat of an eye did all honor, dignity, power and wisdom seem nothing other than smoke, a bubble, or straw snatched up by the wind!”

  Amid “the crashing of the falling tiles and the creaking of the gaping walls,” Kircher prepared to hand over his soul, even sensed it being “loosened from its corporeal fetters in order to take hold of the enjoyment of an unsullied existence.” It was only after some time that he realized he wasn’t hurt, and “resolved to venture for safety,” running as fast as he could back toward the water again. “I reached the shore, but almost terrified out of my reason,” he remembered. “I did not search long here, till I found the boat in which I had landed, and my companions also, whose terrors were even greater than mine.”

  On the next day, after experiencing “the intolerable frenzy of the earth” again in the form of an aftershock, Kircher’s group sailed farther up the Calabrian coast. Stromboli was “raging in an uncustomary manner,” and “the entire island seemed full of fires.” They were coming ashore near another town when a groan from within the earth grew louder and louder. Finally it “struck the ground with such noise and indignation” that all were knocked off their feet, and the town they had been approaching was enveloped in a giant cloud of dust and debris. “After the cloud had dissipated little by little, we sought the town, but we did not find it,” Kircher wrote. “A most fetid lake had been born in its place.”

  Through subsequent days of walking, they “came upon nothing but cadavers of cities and the horrific ruins of castles,” he remembered. “Considering the men straggling through open fields as if extinguished for their fear, you would have said that at that very moment the day of final judgment was looming.”

  —

  KIRCHER’S FIRSTHAND EXPERIENCE of this earthquake, which killed something like ten thousand people, might have put him off his investigations into the “miracles of subterraneous nature.” But these horrible occurrences had also presented him with an opportunity for study. He was beginning to develop theories about the structure and workings of things below the surface of the earth and was eager to test them. “After having diligently searched out the incredible power of Nature working in subterraneous burrows and passages,” he wrote, “I had a great desire to know whether Vesuvius also had not some secret commerce and correspondence with Stromboli and Aetna.”

  There was only one way, in his view, to find out. Vesuvius at that time was merely smoking. But its first major eruption in centuries had occurred fairly recently, in 1631. Kircher hired “an honest country-man, for a true and skillful companion,” and the two began hiking their way up to the forty-two-hundred-foot summit at midnight. (Perhaps the reason for leaving at that hour wa
s to be able to see in the dark anything that might be molten. Or maybe the idea was to allow for a full day of exploration once they got there.) The way was “difficult, rough, uneven, and steep.”

  When they finally reached the top, Kircher looked down into the crater. “I thought I beheld the habitation of Hell,” he wrote, “wherein nothing seemed to be much wanting besides the horrid fantasms and apparitions of Devils.” He heard “horrible bellowings and roarings” and there was “an unexpressible stink.” The smoke and fire and stench “continually belch’d forth out of eleven several places, and made me in like manner belch, and as it were, vomit back again, at it.”

  Mount Vesuvius, from Kircher’s Underground World

  When the morning light came, Kircher recalled, “I chose a safe and secure place to set my feet sure upon, which was a huge Rock, of a plain surface, to which there lay open an avenue, by a descent of the mountain very far. . . . And so I went down unto it.”

  The inside of the volcano was “all up and down everywhere, cragged and broken.” But there was no gradual decline; the volcano’s chamber was “made hollow directly and straight.” The bottom was “boiling with an everlasting gushing forth, and streamings of smoke and flames, and employed in decocting Sulphur, Bitumen and the melting and burning of other kinds of Minerals.”

  Because the vapors and gases “know not how to be contained” within the molten matter, they did so “scatter the burden that lay upon them, with such great force and violence, accompanied with horrible cracklings and noises, that the mountain seemed to be tossed with an earthquake or trembling.” Those spewings caused “the softer parts of the Mountain,” made of, Kircher suggests, ashes, cinders, rains, and “the refuse of minerals,” to be shaken to pieces and loosened; they fell “like Hills, into the bottom of the Hellish gulph.” And that made the kind of sound that even “the stoutest and most undaunted heart would scarce venture to suffer.”

  Within this hollow mountain Kircher began to imagine what it might be like even deeper within the earth, and how the mountains and fires and rivers and oceans might somehow all be connected, as if they belonged to a kind of organism, or “geocosm,” to use a word he would later coin.

  9

  The Magnet

  Kircher arrived back in Rome with manuscripts and souvenirs for Cardinal Barberini, only to find that the cardinal wanted nothing more to do with him. As Kircher later spun the story in correspondence, it was Barberini who “delayed” him in Rome in the first place and charged him with producing “a hitherto unattempted work,” and now he had “not only abandoned all memory of me, but also abandoned any concern for all the studies and books that he had promised.”

  Barberini’s growing debts certainly had something to do with the decision to cut off Kircher’s funding. It didn’t help that Kircher planned to use the cardinal’s money for an ostentatious work with a self-aggrandizing title. But there was also the question of Kircher’s competence. He admitted that some people ascribed Barberini’s decision “to my powerlessness and incapability and insufficiency.” Humiliated and reduced to very dark “states of spirit,” Kircher may have wondered whether the entire trip to Malta had been Barberini’s way of getting rid of him.

  But Kircher had a way of falling up. He found himself relegated to accepting one of the most prestigious scholarly positions in the Society of Jesus or anywhere else: the chair of mathematics at the Collegio Romano, the position formerly held by Christopher Clavius (deviser of the Gregorian calendar). Kircher moved into the quarters Clavius once occupied, a series of rooms off the college’s second-floor colonnade. His cubiculum, as it was called, was much bigger than the professional cubicle of the twenty-first century. It was the place where he worked and slept: his bedchamber, laboratory, library, and workshop. When he first occupied the space, it already contained astrolabes, sextants, telescopes, clocks, and certain curiosities. There was a trick lantern, for example, that worked whether filled with oil or with water. Kircher added his own instruments, books, and manuscripts, as well as limestone stalactites, ostrich eggs, samples of pumice stone, and other things he’d collected on his trip south.

  As long as circumstances “held me in Rome,” Kircher wrote in his autobiography, “I decided that I ought to attain a reward for my trouble.” That is to say that if his spectacular work on the hieroglyphs had to wait, he would in the meantime do some spectacular things in the field of mathematics.

  Although distraught over Jesuit involvement in Galileo’s prosecution, certain intellectuals in Europe had recently decided that it was the Jesuits who might be able to solve one of the biggest scientific problems of the era: how to figure out longitude at sea. Latitude, how far north or south you were, could be determined by the position of the sun at noon, the duration of daylight, or the height of the North Star above the horizon. But determining degrees of longitude, how far east or west you were, was extremely problematic. In 1598 the Spanish king had offered a major monetary prize—today’s equivalent of about half a million dollars, plus almost two hundred thousand a year for life—to the person who could discover a reliable way of doing it. One possibility hinged on better information about magnetic variation, the degree to which the compass needle differs, according to geographical location, from the true north of the North Star.

  About a year after Kircher returned from Malta, the intellectual instigator Marin Mersenne wrote from Paris to urge him to coordinate an effort from Rome: the Jesuits needed to get “someone in each college of the entire Society, by whatever means possible, to note accurately the variation of the magnet and the height of the pole star,” meaning the variation at each latitude. “If this task were completed and if the authority of the supreme pontiff should lend itself to it,” he wrote, “the result would be that at some time under the happy auspices of Urban VIII we would know the magnetic variation of the whole world, the altitudes of the pole, and the longitudes so long sought after.”

  Over the next two or three years, Kircher left virtually no aspect of magnetism untouched or unconsidered, and took it upon himself to head the collaborative enterprise Mersenne had described—one of the first attempts to collect what would now be called scientific data on a worldwide basis. His letters of instruction were carried by post throughout Europe and by ship to colleges and missions in places like Goa, Guadeloupe, Macao, Manila, São Paulo, and St. Augustine. Not every venue had the right instruments or the right expertise; one Jesuit in Lithuania who sent in variation readings worked as the cook in his college. In the course of directing this project, Kircher began to establish himself as a central contact and clearinghouse for Jesuit findings and reports on all manner of natural philosophy subjects.

  After a while, when complicated inconsistencies in magnetic readings began to fade hopes for using them to determine longitude, Kircher became less interested in that particular project than in producing an impressive, elaborate, all-encompassing book on magnetism, one that would, as he put it, “rattle my adversaries’ distrust of my work.” He decided that if Cardinal Barberini didn’t want to support him, then he’d just have to go to the Holy Roman Emperor instead. Through a Jesuit in the court of Vienna, he was able to secure the help of Ferdinand III, who agreed to fund the publication of a volume with many engravings and printed with special typefaces. A student of languages and a composer of music, Ferdinand was then married to the first of two first cousins who would bear him children, Maria Anna of Spain.

  When it was published in 1641, Kircher’s finished book—The Magnet, or the Art of Magnetics, in Three Parts, in which the Universal Nature of the Magnet as well as Its Use in All Arts and Sciences Is Explained by a New Method: In Addition, Here Are Revealed through All Kinds of Physical, Medical, Chemical, and Mathematical Experiments, Many Hitherto Unknown Secrets of Nature from the Powers and Prodigious Effects of Magnetic as well as Other Concealed Motions of Nature in the Elements, Stones, Plants, Animals, and Elucescent Things—ca
me in at 916 pages.

  In addition to compiling global magnetic data, describing practical magnetic aids to cartography, coining the word electromagnetism, discussing the magnetic quality of romantic love, and many other things, The Magnet (Magnes in Latin) took on the heliocentrists. Both Kepler and Galileo had turned to magnetic principles to make their arguments for a sun-centered universe, but no one had directly refuted them on behalf of the pope, who, though he was once himself inclined toward the Copernican view, needed to strengthen the case for the decision against Galileo. Kircher, who once hinted to Peiresc that he was a Copernican, understood the position he was supposed to take. “We must always maintain that the white I see, I shall believe to be black,” Ignatius had written, “if the hierarchical Church so stipulates.”

  Gilbert had said that the Earth was a giant magnet, spun and pulled around the sun by its magnetic, spiritual, cosmic, animate rays. Kepler had agreed. Kircher declared this notion “absurda, indigna, et intolerabilis.” Earth wasn’t a magnet, he argued, it was just, in certain ways, more or less, magnetic. (In this he was, more or less, correct.) Kircher calculated that if the little terrella that Gilbert had experimented with could attract, say, one pound, a magnet the size of the earth could attract more than three octillion pounds. The figure he gave was 3,073,631,468,480,000,000,000,000,000.

  “Woe to all iron implements,” he wrote, “woe to all shod horses and mules, woe to all soldiers in armor, woe to Gilbert’s kitchen utensils.”

  Kircher argued that to the extent that there was magnetic force at work in the earth, it actually helped to hold it in place, right at the center of the universe, as the planets and the sun moved around it. Even if the sun did rotate and emit a magnetic effluvium to the planets, it wouldn’t put them into perpetual orbit; a spinning magnet wouldn’t put a magnet into orbit around itself. In general, Kircher declared, the comparisons to the magnet didn’t hold up. And if Kepler “wished to philosophize prudently and consistently,” he concluded, “he ought not to have gone beyond the limits of his analogy, lest he incur infinite contradictions and inextricable difficulties, which in truth he did.”