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

by Glassie, John

  Fire and water work like light and shadow, consonance and dissonance, attraction and repulsion, playing their part in a more or less mystical totality that Kircher calls the “cosmos of the Earth” or the “geocosm.” It is God’s intent, he claims, for “both elements to be in perpetual motion, for admirable ends.” Indeed, according to his scheme, the water provides the moisture and the fire provides the heat necessary to “fructify” the earth. The “fire in the belly of Nature,” as he put it, is especially “necessary to the internal economy or constitution” of the earth, acting as a great furnace in which the “juices” of minerals, marbles, stones, and gems are melted and cooked, then mixed with the waters and cooled into their more familiar hardened forms.

  Kircher’s network of fires

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  KIRCHER’S NETWORK of oceans and fires had its idiosyncrasies, but his understanding of the way metals and various stones are made represented fairly common thinking of the period. It included the belief that subterranean processes of this kind, over time, eventually “ripened” base metals into gold. The idea that these processes might somehow be imitated and accelerated in the laboratory fueled much of the alchemical experimentation of the day. In the seventeenth century there was no clear distinction between alchemical practices and what might today be called legitimate chemistry. The al in alchemy is just an Arabic definite article (“the”), and chemy comes from khymeia, the Greek word for “fusion,” which often referred to medicinal mixtures of organic substances, so alchemy really just meant “the chemistry.” In Underground World, Kircher placed his lengthy discussion of all related studies, from metallurgy to medicinal chemistry, under that heading—alchemy.

  He had read all the alchemical authors, including Zohara, Zadith, and Haled, but most notably Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus, a Renaissance magus whose own sources included the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and other ancient magicians. But in all of that research Kircher had never found anything reliable about the legendary prime material known as the philosopher’s stone.

  “The alchemists describe it as something wonderful and mysterious, which not only can cure the human body of all ills and keep it healthy, but can change base metals into gold and silver,” he wrote. “They say it is a pure, unchanging, most simple metallic substance, and that it is effective in infinitesimal amounts.” But in a statement all the more meaningful coming from someone not remembered for disciplined thinking and restrained language, he proclaimed: “I came to the conclusion that nothing was easier than to write in such a way, putting down the first things that occurred to them, the most ridiculous fantasies of the human mind, in twisted words, solely to confuse whoever tried to read them.”

  Kircher debunked a number of Paracelsus’s claims through his own experiments—following his instructions for making copper, for example, and for converting various metals into quicksilver, with no success. “Can one metal really be transmuted into another?” Kircher asked. “In theory such a transmutation is possible, but in practice I think it could only be accomplished with the help of devils or angels.” Moreover, he had no tolerance for the “frauds, deceits and other means by which the alchemists have pretended to make pure gold.”

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  KIRCHER’S DISTASTE for what might be called improper alchemy didn’t stop him from incorporating alchemical ideas into the rather amazing extended discussion of spontaneous generation that appears in Underground World, which is to say that he added alchemical language to the spiritual, Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, perhaps even atomic, and magnetic language he used to try to explicate the concept. In addition to repeating much of the material that had appeared in Examination of the Plague, and bolstering his argument with new experiments and new anecdotal evidence, he took his theorizing about panspermia to a new level: for all intents and purposes, universal sperm was the force of life. It was what Plato called “the world’s seed,” what Aristotle called “the moving power of all things,” what Hermes called “the seed of Nature.”

  In the beginning, Kircher wrote, God created “a certain matter that we rightly call ‘chaotic,’” out of which everything except the human soul was drawn, and in which is hidden this seminal power. “I say that a certain material spiritus was composed of the subtlest celestial breath, or from a portion of the elements, and that a certain spirituous salino-sulfuro-mercurial vapor, a universal seed of things, was created along with the elements by God as the origin of all things established in the world of corporeal entities.” Where did Kircher get the idea that salt, sulfur, and mercury were principal? Paracelsus.

  It’s through this seminal power, quite simply, that nature propagates itself. Presumably, this power, both material and alive, is contained within the sperm of animals that procreate by mating. In other cases, the “salino-sulfuro-mercurial vapor” somehow individualizes itself as a kind of seed within whatever matrix of being it finds itself—animal, vegetable, or mineral. As Kircher described it, it consists of both a plastic power, which provides for physical form to take shape, and a magnetic power, about which he is rather vague.

  Life can be engendered within the decay of a living being, Kircher claimed, because this vapor, or power, this “something” of the material soul, remains in the corpse, “not as a form but as spirituous corpuscles of this living being.” Make no mistake, whether inside the decaying body or floating around seed-like, as it often does, it is in a highly degenerated and degraded state. That’s why the living beings that grow from it are lower beings. But since these living things are not arising from utterly nonliving matter, he argued, it wasn’t really proper to call this generation “spontaneous.”

  If it was difficult to articulate precisely how the life force functioned, it was nevertheless clearly at work when worms or maggots grew from rotting flesh—as everyone knew they did. It was at work when bees grew from the dung of bulls. It was at work when flies were engendered from the dead bodies of other flies. (Kircher said it helped to put them on a copper plate, sprinkle them with honey water, and expose them to the heat of ashes.) It was at work when live scorpions were born from the carcasses of dead scorpions. (You could assist with a little sunshine and sweet basil water.) And it was also at work when the mulberry tree produced the silkworm, which it did “on being impregnated with any chance animal.”

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  AS A 1679 French write-up of Underground World put it, “It would take a whole journal to indicate everything remarkable in this work.” The book included detailed charts of those “secret” oceanic currents, among the first ever published. Kircher’s more or less correct explanation of how igneous rock is formed was also arguably the first in print. One modern scholar writes that Kircher “understood erosion,” and his entries “on the quality and use of sand” and his “investigations into the tending of fields” had their practical use.

  Underground World identified the location of the legendary lost island of Atlantis (something that modern science hasn’t been able to accomplish) and the source of the Nile: it started in what is now South Africa as a number of little streams flowing down from the “Mountains of the Moon,” then ran northward through “Guix,” “Sorgola,” and “Alata” and on into “Bagamidi” before reaching Ethiopia and Egypt.

  Kircher offered a lengthy discussion on, for example, people who lived in caves (their societies and their economy), including the troglodytes he’d encountered in Malta. He reported on the remains of giants (also mainly cave dwellers) found in the ground, and went into detail on the kinds of lower animals who belong to the lower world, including dragons. “Since monstrous animals of this kind for the most part select their lairs and breeding-places in underground caverns, I have considered it proper to include them under the heading of subterraneous beasts,” he explained. “I am aware that two kinds of this animal have been distinguished by authors, the one with, the other without wings. No one can or ought to
doubt the latter kind of creature, unless perchance he dares to contradict Holy Scripture.” After all, “Daniel makes mention of the divine worship accorded to the dragon Bel by the Babylonians.”

  In short, Underground World covered almost every subject that might relate to the earthly sphere, as well as some that wouldn’t seem to, such as the sun and “its special properties, by which it flows into the earthly world” and the “nature of the lunar body and its effects.” These correspondences and influences were nothing new, but perhaps only Athanasius Kircher would choose to publish a series of moon maps in a book about the world below.

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  WHO WOULD READ such a book? People like John Locke, Benedict Spinoza, Christiaan Huygens, and Edmund Halley, to name a few. Later, people like Cotton Mather, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jules Verne. Henry Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, looked forward to its publication for several years, and in 1664 he wrote to Robert Boyle that the volume was soon expected at a London bookseller’s. He subsequently paid more for it, fifty shillings, than for any other item in his very substantial library. Indeed a few years later, when Oldenburg made a list with the heading “Catalogue of my best books and what they cost me,” three of Kircher’s titles were included in the first five. It’s hard to say exactly what he meant by “best,” though, since Underground World presented certain problems.

  Oldenburg wrote to Sir Robert Moray about one of the book’s claims—that the moon caused the tides not by virtue of gravity but by virtue of a “Nitrous quality.” Kircher had written that he could achieve the effect himself on a small scale. “Let it be experimented . . .” Oldenburg wrote, “whether Nitrous water, mixed with common salt, exposed in a basin to ye Beams of ye moon in a free open place and a cleere Moonshiny night, will boyle and bubble up.”

  Moray admired Kircher, though sometimes he found it difficult to champion him. (Among his comments about Underground World: “I do not deny it to be long.”) He was perfectly willing to try the experiment, and studied the prepared bowl of water for the “large part of half an hour,” but observed only a few small air bubbles. Robert Boyle set up a basin of water in the same way; his assistant stayed up two nights watching it, with no detectable result.

  “’Tis an ill Omen, me thinks,” wrote Oldenburg, “yt ye very first Experiment singled out by us of Kircher, failes, and yt ’tis likely, the next will doe so too.”

  To understate the case, Oldenburg wasn’t the only one who had doubts about aspects of Underground World. In Florence, for example, a physician in the Medici court named Francesco Redi had several. When not composing poems such as Bacchus in Tuscany, his wine-celebrating dithyramb, Redi dissected animals and performed experiments in the laboratory of the Palazzo Pitti. After an education in Jesuit schools, he had taken to courtly life, and had recently begun wearing the kind of tall wig of ringlets made popular by Louis XIV of France. A leading member of the scientific society established by Grand Duke Ferdinand II, and head of the ducal pharmacy, he was a proponent of the new philosophy and the experimental method. Redi wasn’t completely modern; as a physician, he was just as apt to prescribe plant-derived purges and donkey’s milk as the next early modern doctor. But Kircher’s section on spontaneous generation struck him as dubious, and he decided to look into the age-old idea for himself.

  In his Esperienze Intorno alla Generazione degl’ Insetti (Experiments on the Generation of Insects), published three years later, Redi described a series of close observations involving a variety of rotting animal tissue: “a large pigeon,” “a sheep’s heart,” a “large piece of horseflesh,” “some skinned river frogs.” As expected, maggots appeared. But there was something else. “Almost always I saw that the decaying flesh and the fissures in the boxes where it lay were covered not alone with worms, but with the eggs from which . . . the worms were hatched.” Also a lot of flies were hovering around.

  Redi then conducted one of the very first controlled experiments ever documented: “I put a snake, some fish, some eels of Arno, and a slice of milk-fed veal in four large, wide-mouthed flasks; having well closed and sealed them, I then filled the same number of flasks in the same way, only leaving these open.” Maggots soon began to appear on the flesh in the open containers, but not in the closed ones.

  He experimented with a number of variations, sometimes covering the flasks with “a fine Naples veil,” but no maggots or worms or anything at all ever appeared inside the covered containers. He also dutifully followed Kircher’s instructions for breeding bees in the dung of an ox (“I don’t know whether that estimable author had ever carefully made this experiment, but when I made it . . . I observed no generation of any kind.”); for breeding scorpions in dead scorpions (“I risked a second and third experiment, only to be disappointed and to wait in vain for the desired young scorpions . . .”); and for breeding flies in dead flies (“I believe . . . that the aforesaid honey-water only serves to attract the living flies to breed in the corpses of their comrades and to drop eggs therein.”). He never had any luck.

  With no insects appearing in closed flasks, Redi was convinced that “no animal of any kind is ever bred in dead flesh unless there be a previous egg deposit.”

  Redi referred to Kircher somewhat patronizingly as “a man of worthy esteem,” but it had never occurred to Kircher to regulate his experiments this way—to put a lid, as it were, on his container. That was really all it took to disprove what Redi called “the dictum of ancients and moderns.” It was as if Redi were making a strangely elegant threat to all long-held assumptions everywhere, while Kircher was trying to reaffirm a conception of the world he sensed was slipping away.

  Kircher, who turned sixty-three the year Underground World came out, wasn’t willing to relinquish a thing. By 1668, when Redi’s manuscript for Experiments on the Generation of Insects was ready for publication, Kircher had already published five more books, on everything from the mystical significance of numbers to the history of the mountain shrine at Mentorella he was restoring (in his free time).

  17

  Fombom

  The experimental circumstances in which Kircher allowed a dog to be bitten by a venomous snake came about even before work on Underground World was finished.

  The snake came in a wooden crate along with other vipers destined for the pharmacy of the Collegio Romano, where, in accordance with centuries-old procedures, their meat would serve as the chief ingredient in a new batch of theriaca, the fermented concoction believed to heal or prevent all kinds of afflictions, especially the bites of snakes. (Theriaca was supposed to work by sympathetic means. Those means might also be described, in Kircherian terms, as magnetic. In modern terms, they might be called homeopathic.) Some recipes called for more than sixty ingredients, including opium, rhubarb, nutmeg, turpentine, St. John’s wort, and the yellow secretion from the castor sacs of beavers. Apothecaries liked to age their theriaca on the shelf for a number of years.

  The arrival of the vipers represented an opportunity for Kircher to test a medical curiosity. A Bavarian-born Jesuit missionary named Heinrich Roth had recently visited Rome after years at Agra, site of the recently built Taj Mahal, and on the island of Salsete, near Bombay. He’d presented Kircher with three so-called serpent stones, or snake stones. These lightweight items—about the size of a small coin and inconsistently described as reddish, green, or white, with brown or blue around the edges, or black—were said to have been cut from the heads of cobra snakes found in India, China, and Southeast Asia, and to serve as the only antidote to the cobra’s bite. (Cobra is short for cobra de capello, Portuguese for “snake with a hood.”) When applied to a snakebite, the stone supposedly adhered to the skin, drew out the venom, and fell off when saturated with poison. These little stones or bones were beginning to show up in courts and salons all over Europe. Jesuits presented specimens to the Holy Roman Emperor, and Franciscan missionaries offered a number of samples to the Medici court. The reposi
tory of the Royal Society had a stone from “Java Major,” now called Sumatra. There were reports from Jesuits that they worked.

  As Kircher described the trial, he gathered a “multitude of Fathers and other curious men” to observe, and then arranged for the hapless dog and one of the newly arrived vipers, known for the depth and tenacity of their bite, to meet. The viper struck. The snake stone was applied.

  “When this stone was placed on the dog’s snake bite, it stuck to the wound so that one could scarcely pull it away, remaining fixed to the wound for a long time,” Kircher reported. “Finally, having drained all the poison, it fell away by itself, like a leech saturated with blood. The dog was free from the poison, and although feverish for a while, was restored to his former health after about a day.”

  Kircher included the account in his very popular China Illustrated, published in 1667. But there was a problem with this experiment: Kircher may have only claimed to conduct it. His rendering of the event is a little too similar to the account of another Jesuit, published in 1656. (Kircher: “I wouldn’t believe this, unless I had done an experiment with a dog who had been bitten by a viper.” Father Michał Boym: “I wouldn’t have believed it myself unless I had performed an experiment on a dog.”)

  Perhaps because the report came from a fellow Jesuit, there was no real need to conduct that particular test, only to say that he had. Maybe he was just replicating the experiment as meticulously as possible. In whatever trials he did make, he very probably observed a tendency on the part of the snake stone to stick to an open wound. But rather than look into the porosity or absorbency of the unusually lightweight material (if not actually dried organic material, it may have been pumice stone), he saw what he was searching for, and attributed the snake stone’s apparent drawing power to magnetism.