In another trial, statements made through a sixteen-foot trumpet at Cuckold’s Point could be heard in a rowboat about a mile and a half down the Thames. At the king’s direction, further experiments were conducted off the ramparts at Deal Castle up on the English coast: with the wind blowing from the shore, words spoken through a twenty-one-foot horn were understood as far as three miles out in the channel. The king, persuaded of the many uses of the speaking trumpet—among them commands to whole fleets, commands to whole armies, commands to hundreds of workers, messages of relief to citizens of besieged cities and towns, and messages of intimidation and hostility to the citizens of besieged cities and towns—ordered that a number of them be made. The speaking trumpet caused a kind of sensation. A smaller version of the horn could be purchased together with Morland’s little volume on the subject in the shop of Moses Pitt, a prominent London bookseller. It wasn’t long before the trumpets were being sold in various sizes and dimensions around Europe.
Morland accounted for the effect in (erroneous) terms reminiscent of those Kircher had used many years before. He wrote about “Rays of Sound” that reverberate and undulate within the cone, “in the same manner as the Rays of the Sun.” To Kircher—who had been experimenting with the use of conical tubes as sound amplifiers since he had installed the eavesdropping tube in his cubiculum—the notion that Morland had invented this speaking trumpet was outrageous. As if his fate rested on being remembered as the inventor of the megaphone, Kircher became determined to show how well his own brand of acoustical tube “might extend itself” if taken outdoors and put to the kind of tests Morland had conducted.
“A tube fifteen palms in length and elaborated with singular zeal” was hauled up to Mentorella, the retreat where on other occasions Kircher sought to reacquaint himself with humility. The “situation of this place was marvelously appropriate and most suitable of all for testing a tube,” he wrote, and “at a fitting and peaceful time, both during the day and at night, we tested it.”
Underlings notified the people who lived on the “circumambient throng of castles which are discerned from the very peak of this crag and are removed by distances of two, three, four and five Italian miles.” When Kircher and others began speaking through the tube “with vehement voice,” the people in the hilltop castles of the valley signaled back—in the daytime by raising a curtain or flag, at night by the “combustion of flame”—“that they had distinctly perceived the words one by one.”
Speaking trumpets, from Phonurgia Nova
After this “consummate success,” the tube was used to invite all the people within range to services for Pentecost, the feast that comes fifty days after Easter, when the Holy Spirit is said to have descended on the apprehensive disciples. As if “thunderstruck by a voice slipping down from the heavens,” Kircher claimed, twenty-two hundred people came. Moreover, “several men, conspicuous in their grandeur, had been stirred by the allurement of the polyphonic instrument from even more remote places; they hastened forth not so much for the sake of devotion as for seeing the tube.”
All of this was contained in Kircher’s next book, his twenty-seventh, depending on how you counted the various editions. Whichever number it was, the book was the first in Europe devoted exclusively to acoustics, put together almost entirely to make his case against Morland. Indeed, apart from the speaking-tube experiments, much of Phonurgia Nova (New Work on Producing Sound)—the material on echoes, the properties of sound, and so on—was rehashed from Universal Music-making.
“I deem it necessary that the following be made clear to the reader, namely that he not persuade himself that this invention new to this time was brought from England but that around twenty-four years prior it was exhibited in the Roman College,” Kircher wrote. “It was this very tube that afterwards was approved, by the stupor of all, for its propagation of voice into spaces most remote with altogether fertile success.”
If Kircher wasn’t going to get the credit, that didn’t mean Morland should. As he’d described in Universal Music-making, Alexander the Great was said to have used a giant horn to direct his armies from great distances. There was no telling the degree to which the speaking tube could help in the ongoing fight against the Turks.
—
THE OLD PRIEST did everything he could to make sure he would be remembered. He began to write the story of his early life. But in 1672, there was more bad news: an assistant to the Jesuit superior general informed him that his museum would have to be moved. Rather than remain in the long, light-filled gallery on the third floor, its home for two decades, it would now have to occupy, as one record has it, “a small dark corridor near the second floor infirmary.” The new site was “quite obscure.”
Historical accounts suggest the corridor was needed to gain access to the choir of Sant’Ignazio, the Jesuit church abutting the college; it had been under construction for many years. But as Kircher understood it, Jesuit authorities wanted to expand the library. He objected to the move in a letter to the general in May of that year, referring to the original donation of antiquities in 1651. “Thoroughly animated both by a bequest of this kind of such immense and multifarious size and variety and by the established space,” he wrote, “it was I who did nothing other than decorate it with worthy magnificence by means of expenses from my own resources, as well as those of my superiors, with pictures and with machines and with other necessary things beyond my poverty.
“It occurred then that with the passage of time . . . through this museum the Roman College acquired a celebrity of reputation so great throughout all of Europe that it seemed no foreigner who had not seen the Museum of the Roman College could say that he had been to Rome.”
Kircher pleaded with the general to at least consider modifications to the new space. He made a point of saying that his request had nothing to do with concern for his own reputation.
“For since the place is dark, so that it can have a more rich source of light, the windows must be widened by two palms, and it must be fitted with glass laminas, while also the two bed chambers, which have no use on account of the privation of light, must be broken through and made suitable for housing so many and diverse a multiplicity of objects,” he wrote.
“For should these things be done I trust that the museum may maintain its own pristine dignity.” But they weren’t done, and there’s no record of a reply.
—
KIRCHER’S GRADUAL DECLINE in reputation among Jesuits and among the intellectual elite of Europe (to the extent that they had held him in high esteem) came as others were just becoming acquainted with him.
“Does the conference of learned persons please you?” one travelogue author asked. “See Father Kircher for unknown languages and mathematics.”
Kircher passed along observations of Jupiter and Venus to Louis XIV’s astronomer royal, and word came back that the French king himself had “deep respect” for his work on hieroglyphics.
Letters continued to arrive from people like Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim, a doctor in Breslau, and Gaspard de Varadier de Saint-Andiol, the archbishop of Arles. Correspondents wanted to discuss the curative nature of warm mineral springs (were their benefits miraculous or not?), the effectiveness of amulets, and their own investigations into spontaneous generation, carried out, in at least one instance, with fish roe in tubs of milk.
The rector of the Jesuit college of Vilnius wrote to say that he was so beholden to Kircher for so much knowledge and information that he was thinking of adding “Kircherianes” to his name.
Kircher was asked to interpret the hieroglyphic inscriptions on a sarcophagus recently transported from Egypt to Lyon. The resulting text, along with Kircher’s thoughts on Egyptian burial practices and reincarnation, became the basis for yet another book, although an uncharacteristically slim one; it was only seventy-two pages long.
It was for a boy king, Charles II of Spain, t
hat Kircher took up matters of the Bible. Charles was the nephew and the grandson of Maria Anna of Spain, who had married the Emperor Ferdinand III; he was also the grandson and the great-grandson of Margaret of Austria, a queen of Spain, Ferdinand III’s aunt. The product of so much intermarriage within the Hapsburg family, he suffered not only from a grotesque example of the Hapsburg chin and lip, but also from an enlarged head and an oversize tongue that made it difficult to eat and to speak. Physical infirmities prevented him from walking until he was eight, and he had some sort of learning disability. Charles’s deficiencies later included the inability to father a child, and he would come to symbolize the end of the Hapsburg era. Kircher, now in his seventies, lent an almost childlike quality to his illustrated volumes on Noah’s ark and the Tower of Babel for this poor young reader.
Even a child might want a book on the ark to address what have been called “various practical problems” with the story—problems related to fitting two of every single living species on board a vessel built by a five-hundred-year-old man and his three sons. To help resolve these, and to try to determine the exact specifications for the ark that Noah had received from God, Kircher compared the texts in Hebrew, Chaldean, Arabic, Syriac, Latin, and Greek. Making use of Galileo’s studies of floating bodies to figure the ark’s buoyancy, he created a schematic foldout showing each animal’s assigned spot. This space-planning exercise was supported by detailed speculation on the care and feeding of the animals, as well as on issues of sanitation. Noah didn’t have to include animals that resulted, as Kircher believed, from interspecies mating, such as the mule (the real result of relations between a horse and donkey) and the giraffe (the result of intimacy, he claimed, between a camel and a panther). Deer would have been invited on board, but reindeer didn’t need to be, because, as he seemed to suggest, animals have a way of adapting, if not evolving, under different environmental circumstances.
Moreover, there was no need to accommodate lower forms of animals such as mice, frogs, and lizards because those animals arise on their own—they are “born from rot, that is, from the semen of the same animal left somewhere, or from the rotting parts of them.” (An exception was made for snakes; they were assigned to the bilge, where they would absorb the putrescent vapors that could lead to disease.) And so the story of Noah’s ark, which was not in question, gave credibility to the notion of spontaneous generation. How else to account for all these creatures roaming the earth now? They certainly couldn’t have fit on the ark.
Kircher was unsure, or unsure for the sake of a boy, about certain legendary animals. No genuine unicorn had ever been located, for example, but to Kircher it was no less improbable than a rhinoceros or a certain horned fish, now known as the narwhal. About the griffin, which was supposed to have the body of a lion and the head of a falcon, he was dubious, though recent reports from China suggested that sometimes eagles or vultures reached a frightening size. Sirens, on the other hand, if not mermaids, were real enough; the siren’s “upper part has the sex and appearance of a woman, but its lower portion ends in the tail of a fish,” he explained. “There can be no doubt that such a creature exists, for in our museum we have its tail and bones.”
20
Immune and Exempt
In 1674, from somewhere in the Palazzo Pitti, and from somewhere under his courtier’s wig, Francesco Redi began exchanging letters with an intelligent young mathematics professor at the Collegio Romano, a fellow Florentine named Antonio Baldigiani. It was only natural for Redi to be interested in news of Kircher, whose gullibility about the snake stone he’d sought to expose a few years before. Baldigiani, an admirer of Redi and of the modern approach in general, was happy to oblige.
Kircher “by now is old,” he reported to Redi in April of 1675, about a month before Kircher turned seventy-three, “and because of his age, his background, and his history of hard work and in-depth study, he is not always able to be as rational as he would like.”
In fact, Baldigiani thought that it would be easy to “play a grand joke on Kircher, who is a perfect target and often comes up against various pranks,” though he made a point of not speaking to Kircher about matters of substance. “I am afraid to find myself cited someday in one of his books, as a protagonist or witness to some grand quackery.”
Baldigiani told Redi that Kircher had “written a long, rather questionable response” to the public letter Redi had published about the snake stone a few years before. But when he moved to print this counterattack, other scholars at the Collegio Romano intervened, presumably to save Kircher, and the Jesuits as a whole, from the embarrassment of arguing against such overwhelming experimental evidence. Kircher was asked to submit his treatise for a reworking by a venerable colleague: Daniello Bartoli, the author of books on tension and pressure, harmonics, and coagulation, as well as a six-volume history of the Society. But Kircher refused to allow his defense to be revised. “Prof. Kircher is as obstinate as ever in his apprehensions,” Baldigiani wrote, “and of the thirty-six books he has printed, from the majority of pages he believes he cannot take out a single line.”
Then Kircher became very ill, and for a while it looked as if the matter would resolve itself on account of his death. (“Yesterday morning he had his last communion, and yesterday evening they offered him last rites,” Baldigiani wrote later that year. “I, however, do not think him such a desperate case even though his angina is taking him over completely.”) But evidently he wasn’t ready to die, or, after his recovery, to give up the fight to preserve his legacy. He decided to secure the services of a lawyer, or rather an assistant with legal training, who would be willing to put his own name on a defense against Redi’s charges.
This particular disciple, Gioseffo Petrucci, was secular and therefore could operate free of Jesuit authority. He could even publish in vernacular Italian rather than Latin. He’d already participated in a highly visible effort to demonstrate Kircher’s greatness: Petrucci was the young student who sent the limited transcription of the Minervan obelisk to Kircher at Mentorella and who was later “thunderstruck” by his interpretation of all four sides.
Since that display several years before, Kircher’s reputation as an interpreter of ancient Egyptian wisdom had apparently dwindled within the Collegio Romano to the point where Petrucci was his only student in hieroglyphics. Petrucci was “a solitary and little-known man, dependent in everything on Prof. Kircher,” wrote Baldigiani, who was not impressed with him. They had studied philosophy together, and Petrucci had “never shown himself to be even a mediocre scholar.” But that may not have mattered much to Kircher, who was essentially going to tell Petrucci what to write anyway.
About two years passed before the product of this collaboration, Prodomo Apologetico alli Studi Chircheriani (Apologetic Forerunner to Kircherian Studies), saw the light of day. Baldigiani wrote that in Amsterdam even Jansson, Kircher’s otherwise enthusiastic publisher, didn’t want to print it: “First they pardoned themselves from the work because it was written in Italian and they couldn’t read it; then they said that the work was too small and not appropriate for their book-bindings; then they claimed to be too busy with the works of Kircher himself. . . . Finally they agreed to print it after months of correspondence.”
In his defense of Kircher, Petrucci backed up the stories that Redi had shrugged off as anecdotal evidence with even more anecdotal evidence: since the experiment with the dog in 1663, he said, Kircher had used the stone to heal another dog, a preacher in Tivoli with an insect bite, and an assistant with an infected arm. On top of this, news of seventeen instances of success with the snake stone had been relayed from the court of Emperor Leopold in Vienna. (The occult-minded Leopold, one of Kircher’s greatest patrons, was hardly an objective party. It also happened that Vienna was in the midst of a kind of snake-stone mania that had driven prices for the little stones to absurd levels.) Given all these reports of success, Petrucci wondered whether Redi, rather th
an Kircher, had been the gullible one: maybe Redi only believed he was in possession of genuine snake stones when in fact they were fakes. And wasn’t it possible, Petrucci argued, that the hens and other birds that had failed to be healed in Redi’s trials were particularly feeble?
As the title of the book suggested, its arguments were meant to apply not just to the snake-stone matter but to “Kircherian studies” in general. In his opening paragraphs, Petrucci described how he’d been stirred to defend his master from the totality of attacks against him—defend him from all the “reckless and impudent slanderers” who had breathed “the pestiferous breath of poisoned invectives” and otherwise made “malignant accusations . . . meant to hinder the perpetual studies of Father Athanasius Kircher, the deserved winner of Glory.”
Petrucci conceded that to some extent, after a lifetime confronting the cynicism and the envy of others, Kircher had “by now been made immune and exempt from the stings of zealous Critics, and the bites of malignant detractors, thanks to his great merit, recognized forever, and deserving of inestimable esteem by the most well-known Wise Men of the Universe.”
Nevertheless, on the grounds that the truth itself would never consent to the satiric and unfair shaming of his master—to these attempts to “bring down the statue erected to the glory of Father Athanasius Kircher, my most esteemed teacher”—Petrucci intended to clear away the “fumes from the muddy cesspool of ignorance” so that Kircher could live “in the memory of virtuous men,” for “all Celebrated future centuries.”
As portrayed by Petrucci, Kircher was not a credulous fool but more like a modern skeptic. In the case of the snake stones, even though various priests in India and other parts of the East “constantly insisted on the marvelous virtues of these Stones, and each one of them had their own sensory experience with them,” Kircher did not simply believe them. “He did not go according to the sentiments and testimonials he collected, blindly and obediently ceding his will to odd stories,” Petrucci wrote. “He did not permit this intellectual fraud through passionate opinions, but kept his mind uncontaminated and unalterable in the quest for truth until a more appropriate moment, in which he would be able to learn from experiment and see for himself.”
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 20
