Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (9 page)

But at a certain point Kircher latched back on to the question of Egyptian letters, and to the notion held by Peiresc and others that Coptic might help crack the hieroglyphic code. In 1634, he persuaded Barberini to sponsor an additional translation project, despite maneuverings by Peiresc to try to secure another philologist for the job. The text, a Coptic–Arabic lexicon and grammar, had been brought back from Egypt some years before by a Roman gentleman named Pietro della Valle. He had begun his journey east in order to get over a broken heart; he then spent ten years traveling to places like Constantinople, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Ormuz, and Cyprus. In Baghdad he found a bride, who died shortly after they were married, and he traveled with her corpse, many live specimens of Persian cats, and many other souvenirs, for another five years before returning to Rome.

It was subsequently reported that Kircher was preparing a manuscript for publication. “
Father Atanase Kircher is having his Egyptian language dictionary printed,” one learned Frenchman wrote to Mersenne, “which will be like a precursor to his interpretation of the obelisks.” And in 1636 he did publish such a precursor, the long Latin title of which translates as
The Coptic, or Egyptian Forerunner, in Which Both the Origin, Age, Vicissitude, and Inflection of the Coptic or Egyptian, Once Pharaonic, Language, and the Restoration of Hieroglyphic Literature Are Exhibited by a New and Unaccustomed Method.
Although it had a main argument—that Coptic, which descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians, had many helpful similarities with that language system—it was otherwise a hodgepodge.
It quoted Barachias Nephi, but it couldn't remotely be said to contain the translation the cardinal had assigned him. It contained a sample translation of the della Valle grammar, but not the whole thing. It contained a partial, Hermes Trismegistus–sounding interpretation of the ostensibly ancient Bembine Tablet and of other artifacts that didn't seem to relate to Coptic, or to Egyptian.
One of these was a strange inscription that had been found at the foot of Mount Horeb in the Sinai Desert. Kircher said it was written in an antique form of Chaldean used by Hebrew kings. According to his wishful interpretation, these Hebrew kings somehow foretold that “God will make a virgin” and “bring forth a son.”

It's unclear what Cardinal Barberini thought of this book, but it brought Kircher a certain amount of respect and Peiresc a certain amount of relief (before he died the following year). In the view of the papal censor, the text contained “
many arguments brought forth ingeniously from the hidden sanctuaries of holy antiquity and the mysteries of the Egyptians.” The author displayed “genuine knowledge of many languages as well as erudition in secret exotic matters.” It was, in short, “a worthy beginning from which we may anticipate what will follow.”

Mainly, in the words of a twentieth-century Egyptologist, the
Coptic Forerunner
“
unabashedly proclaimed that the decipherment of the hieroglyphs was at hand.” Kircher had given readers only a small taste of what was to come, and toward the end of the text he announced the title of his big book on the subject:
Egyptian Oedipus
. Before killing his father and marrying his mother, Oedipus had solved the riddle of the sphinx, and now, as Kircher declared, he was like Oedipus—on the verge of solving one of the oldest riddles of all time.

8

Habitation of Hell

I
n 1637, not long after the publication of the
Coptic Forerunner
, a young German prince, the Landgrave Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt, converted to Catholicism and made the journey to Rome. Among his other honors, he was to receive the Grand Cross from the Knights of Malta, the religious military order that traced its roots back five hundred years to the First Crusade. A German-speaking priest was needed to accompany him as confessor, and so, as Kircher recalled, “
it happened that, a few years after my arrival at Rome, I was sent away to Malta with the Prince Landgrave.”

Malta is really an archipelago—two big islands, Malta and Gozo, and many other small ones—about sixty miles off the southern tip of Sicily. It had been under the control of the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Fatimids, the Normans, the Sicilians, and the Aragonese. After the Knights of St. John were ousted from the island of Rhodes in 1522, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, ceded the property to the order for an annual symbolic rent payment of one live Maltese falcon.

Kircher must have wondered whether God would ever let him stay in one place. But if he was initially upset about being dragged away with an immature prince to some rocks in the middle of the sea, his curiosity quickly kicked in. He made magnetic and astronomical readings, and studied geological formations. There were four-hundred-foot cliffs, natural arches, and a place where the tides had carved human-looking shapes into the earth. He explored Malta's megalithic temples, catacombs, and grottoes, and was especially fascinated by its inland seas and underground passageways: how far down did they go? Kircher observed the habits of Malta's troglodyte population, and on Gozo he climbed to one particular cave, high over Ramla Bay; some refer to it as the place where Odysseus spent seven years as the love slave of Calypso.

He also befriended a little man named
Fabio Chigi, with whom he would exchange letters for the next two decades. Born into a rich and high-ranking family in Siena, Chigi was currently Malta's papal representative and chief inquisitor, and, though it was hard to imagine at the time, he would one day become pope. A frequent deviser of new ciphers and secret codes for use in official correspondence, he enjoyed writing poetry and studying arcane Etruscan inscriptions. Kircher and Chigi shared an interest in esoteric arts, and they must have discussed the so-called combinatory method of the thirteenth-century Majorcan theologian
Ramon Llull, since it seems to have been the basis for a device that Kircher built and bestowed upon the knights.

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 was 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.