Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (11 page)

In a way that exemplifies the pre-modern approach to scientific matters, the existence of the disease and the efficacy of the treatment were not really in doubt. The question was not whether the music worked—or whether the bite caused such symptoms in the first place, or whether people might actually
want
to get “bitten” so that they could indulge in the cure. The only question was
how
the music worked, and many intellectuals speculated about the answer, from a great distance away, without anything like firsthand observation or methodical reports. One natural philosopher from Naples believed that the spider's venom increased the temperature of the “spirits” in the bloodstream to the level at which they would be inclined to dance and hop like a spider; the music attracted the spirits out of the body. Even Gassendi, the atomist, was happy to provide an explanation, one that was consistent with his more modern, physical philosophy: the music pushed motion onto the blood, which pushed motion onto the muscles and nerves, resulting in the dancing; the impact eventually broke down the particles of poison into ineffectual bits. Kircher, the new champion of the magnetical philosophy, held that it was the music itself that did most of the work, and that it did so magnetically—drawing the poisonous humor from the deep fibrous recesses of the body so that the sweat from the dancing could carry it out. As Kircher understood it, the same music didn't work for everybody; sanguine types, for example, were sympathetic to the soft sound of the zither, but the way to draw the poison out of cold, phlegmatic sorts was to agitate the venom with drumbeats and cymbals.

Despite what seems from a modern perspective like major susceptibility to nonsense on Kircher's part, he was skeptical about many things that Fludd, for example, was not. Fludd was a great champion of the weapon salve that was supposed to heal a wound from any distance. But Kircher didn't believe it. No natural force was without physical limitations, he argued, and the natural force of magnetic attraction was no exception. He concluded that if cures actually resulted, they were miracles performed by God or by angels, the result of some demonic art or black magic, or they were natural but unrelated to the salve.

Kircher refuted the notion that consumption could be transferred to a dog or pig by feeding the animal an egg boiled in the blood of the patient. And he dismissed commonly held beliefs about something called the
vegetable lamb plant of Tartary. By many accounts, this Central Asian plant grew actual sheep as its fruit, with a soft coat outside and bloody meat inside. The grasses around the plant always appeared to have been eaten, though usually the lamb fruit (or fruit lamb?) itself was too high off the ground to have reached the grasses, and some people theorized that magnetic forces helped draw them up within reach. Kircher had never seen one of these plants in person but conjectured that the lamb wasn't an actual lamb—the fruit just looked like a lamb, the way the fruit of a plant in distant California was said to look like a dragon. In his opinion the grass was merely stunted by the lamb plant's everyday suction of healthy substances from the soil.

—

IT WAS IN PART
because of Kircher's skepticism on matters such as the lamb plant of Tartary, his willingness to separate lore from the literal truth, that
The Magnet
“
earned not insignificant applause,” as he put it, from many intellectual quarters. The book was so well received that a second, enlarged edition was printed two years later. Among those who were adopting a more empirical approach to knowledge, however, it was valued more for the entertainment than the information it provided. After
The Magnet
appeared in printed form in 1641, a young Italian intellectual sent a report about it to Galileo, who was now old and blind. It was “
a very large volume on the magnet,” he wrote, “a volume enriched with an abundance of beautiful copperplate engravings. You will see astrolabes, clocks, wind scopes, with a flourish of extremely outlandish names. Among other things there are . . . inscriptions in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and other languages. One delightful thing is the musical score he claims is the antidote to the tarantula's venom.” In short, the Italian and his colleagues “had a good laugh.”

Others were curious to see what it contained. “
I am approaching the point where I have to deal with the lodestone,” René Descartes wrote to the polymath Constantijn Huygens in 1643. “If you think that the big book you have on the subject, of which I don't know the name, could be useful to me, and you would not mind sending it to me, I would be much obliged, and will be for the rest of my life.”

Two days later, Huygens replied, sending him “
the Magnet by Kircherus, in which you will find more grins than real substance, which is ordinary coming from the Jesuits.” He also “begrudgingly” sent along books by Gassendi, asking Descartes to return them quickly because he would not be able to learn anything from them: “The nonsense of fools takes as much time to read as the good things of the learned.”

Many years before, in a stove-heated room somewhere in Germany, Descartes had had a vision for an entirely new method for acquiring knowledge: it could be built only on what was without doubt and what was mathematically certain. What Descartes did, among other things, was to cut off consideration of immaterial influence on the material world. He didn't take God off the table—in fact he “proved” God's existence, as well as, very famously, his own (“I think, therefore I am”)—but he limited explanations of natural phenomena to physical, mechanical causes, cutting off the realm of the body and the physical world from the realm of the mind and soul and spiritual world. And yet
Descartes's own explanation for magnetic attraction and polarity was utterly speculative and highly uncertain; it involved the constant flow of particles that he imagined to be threaded like screws. The threading was such that the particles could enter one pole of the magnet only through entry holes that were likewise threaded and exit only through threaded exit holes at the other end.

A week after receiving the books, having spent some time “
flipping through them,” Descartes sent them back. “I believe that I have seen everything that they contain, even if I have hardly read anything but the titles and margins. The Jesuit is quite boastful; he is more of a charlatan than a scholar.”

Descartes went on to comment about the material that Kircher said he'd gotten from the Arab merchant in Marseille and that was supposed to turn toward the sun day and night. “If it were true, it would be interesting, but he does not explain at all what the material is,” he wrote. He remembered that “Father Mersenne wrote to me in the past, about eight years ago, telling me that it was from the sunflower seed, which I do not believe, unless the seed is more powerful in Arabia than it is in this country.”

It was absurd, and yet not impossibly absurd. Descartes tried it himself, he wrote, “but it did not work.”

10

An Innumerable Multitude of Catoptric Cats

P
ope Urban VIII died in the summer of 1644, and was succeeded by Pope Alexander VI's great-great-great-grandson. (Alexander VI was evidently not a great believer in celibacy.) Choosing the name Innocent X, Giovanni Battista Pamphilj took quick legal action against the Barberinis for embezzlement, forcing Cardinal Barberini and other members of his family to flee to Paris for a time.

During the fall of that year, a young English traveler watched the procession of the new pope on its way to the Basilica of St. John Lateran. According to his report, first came “a guard of Switzers” and the “avant-guard of horse carrying lances.” Next came (putting his words into line):

• those who carried the robes of the Cardinals, two and two
  
• then the Cardinal's mace-bearers
  
• the
  caudatari
  , on mules
  
• the masters of their horse
  
• the Pope's barber, tailor, baker, gardener, and other domestic officers, all on horseback, in rich liveries
  
• the squires belonging to the Guard
  
• five men in rich liveries [leading] five noble Neapolitan horses, white as snow, covered to the ground, with trappings richly embroidered, which is a service paid by the King of Spain for the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, pretended feudatories to the Pope
  
• three mules of exquisite beauty and price, trapped in crimson velvet
  
• three rich litters with mules, the litters empty
  
• the master of the horse alone, with his squires
  
• five trumpeters
  
• the
  armerieri estra muros
  
• the fiscal and consistorial advocates
  
• capellani
  ,
  camerieri de honore
  ,
  cubiculari
  and chamberlains, called
  secreti
  
• four other
  camerieri
  , with four caps of the dignity-pontifical, which were Cardinals' hats carried on staves
  
• four trumpets
  
• a number of noble Romans and gentlemen of quality, very rich, and followed by innumerable
  staffieri
  and pages
  
• the secretaries of the
  chancellaria
  ,
  abbreviatori
  -
  accoliti
  in their long robes, and on mules
  
• auditori di rota
  
• the dean of the
  roti
  and master of the sacred palace, on mules, with grave, but rich foot-clothes, and in flat episcopal hats
  
• more of the Roman and other nobility and courtiers, with diverse pages in most rich liveries on horseback
  
• fourteen drums belonging to the Capitol
  
• the marshals with their staves
  
• the two syndics
  
• the conservators of the city, in robes of crimson damask
  
• the knight-confalionier and prior of the R. R., in velvet toques
  
• six of his Holiness's mace-bearers
  
• the captain, or governor, of the Castle of St. Angelo, upon a brave prancer
  
• the governor of the city
  
• on both sides of these two long ranks of Switzers
  
• the masters of the ceremonies
  
• the cross-bearer on horseback, with two priests at each hand on foot
  
• pages, footmen, and guards, in abundance
  
• the Pope himself, carried in a litter, or rather open chair, of crimson velvet, richly embroidered, and borne by two stately mules; as he went, he held up two fingers, blessing the multitude who were on their knees, or looking out of their windows and houses, with loud
  viva
  s and acclamations of felicity to their new Prince
  
• the master of his chamber, cup-bearer, secretary, and physician
  
• the Cardinal-Bishops, Cardinal-Priests, Cardinal-Deacons, Patriarchs, Archbishops and Bishops, all in their several and distinct habits, some in red, others in green flat hats with tassels, all on gallant mules richly trapped with velvet, and led by their servants in great state and multitudes
  
• the apostolical
  protonotari
  , auditor, treasurer, and referendaries
  
• the trumpets of the rear-guard
  
• two pages of arms in helmets with feathers and carrying lances
  
• two captains
  
• the pontifical standard of the Church
  
• the two
  alfieri
  , or cornets, of the Pope's light horse, who all followed in armour and carrying lances
  
• innumerable rich coaches, litters, and people
  

The detail-oriented observer was John Evelyn, a former Oxford student who would rather have gardened than serve in the Royalist army. Although the English king Charles I was in the midst of a civil war against Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarian forces, the twenty-four-year-old Evelyn had been given leave to travel, and he was now satisfying his curiosity about Rome. Later in life he wrote thirty books on such topics as forestry and the cultivation of fruit trees, the smoke and smog of London, copper engravings, English customs, French fashion, and ancient architecture. A couple of weeks prior to the papal procession, Evelyn sought out an introduction to Kircher, who, despite the smirks of the more astute new philosophers, had realized at least some of his ambition for fame as the author of
The Magnet
.

Not that Kircher had given up his sense of himself as the new Oedipus. He never really lost interest in anything, and almost ten years after starting it, he'd recently published the Latin translation of the Coptic lexicon and grammar that Pietro della Valle had brought back from his travels east. Roman dignitaries and foreign visitors such as Evelyn came to see him. Jesuit missionaries around the world sent him astronomical observations, reports of unusual phenomena, specimens of flowers, animals, and shells.

“
Father Kircher . . . showed us many singular courtesies,” Evelyn wrote in his diary, “leading us into their refectory, dispensatory, laboratory, gardens, and finally . . . through a hall hung round with pictures . . . into his own study, where, with Dutch patience, he showed us his perpetual motions, catoptrics, magnetical experiments, models, and a thousand other crotchets and devices.”

Kircher's catoptric (mirrored) displays included his “catoptric theater,” a cabinet with a reflective interior that appeared to multiply infinitely whatever was set inside it. It's possible that Evelyn had already seen one of these in Rome; there was one at the Borghese family villa and one at the palazzo of another prince. It was very amusing to watch uninitiated guests grab at the air where they thought they saw, say, stacks and stacks of gold coins. But Kircher's chest “
far surpassed the competition,” says historian Michael John Gorman. And he used it to fool all types of susceptible creatures.

“
You will exhibit the most delightful trick,” an assistant to Kircher later wrote, “if you impose one of these appearances on a live cat, as Fr. Kircher has done. While the cat sees himself to be surrounded by an innumerable multitude of catoptric cats . . . it can hardly be said how many capers will be exhibited in that theatre, while he sometimes tries to follow the other cats, sometimes to entice them with his tail, sometimes attempts a kiss, and indeed tries to break through the obstacles in every way with his claws so that he can be united with them.”

A magic lantern

Evelyn didn't mention any cats in his diary (or any capers), but by the early 1640s, Kircher's interest in mirrors, reflection, and optics had only intensified. There is evidence that during this period he began to entertain, or frighten, his visitors with a primitive type of
magic lantern, projecting images of Satan and death onto the walls of his darkened cubiculum. He is also known to have
dissected the eyeballs of bulls in order to understand the way vision works. All these activities informed the production of his next book,
The Great Art of Light and Shadow.

The title in Latin,
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae,
was intended as a play on words: “
We say ‘Magna' on account of a kind of hidden allusion to the magnet,” Kircher wrote in his introductory pages, meaning that the title could also be read as “The Magnetic Art of Light and Shadow.” He'd begun to see everything in more or less magnetic, almost binary, terms: attraction and repulsion, positive and negative, friendship and strife, light and dark. To Kircher the connection between light and magnetism seemed clear; it was the magnetic attraction of the sun's rays, after all, that made the sunflower turn toward it—and that, at least in theory, might make a sunflower seed turn toward it too.

Like
The Magnet
, this book was conceived as an encyclopedic work, an “encirclement” of the entirety of its subject, one that in almost a thousand pages, plus dozens of engravings, diagrams, maps, and illustrations, would provide readers with all they could possibly want to know about light, color, vision, and related matters. It also provided some impressive evidence of mystical erudition. The book's ten-part structure, as Kircher explained it, connected to the ten-stringed harmony of the Greek instrument the decachord. This in turn represented the well-ordered harmony of nature, and the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, and the Pythagorean notion of the number ten as the number of the universe and perfection, as well as the Sefirot, the ten emanations of God, by which, according to Kabbalah, the universe was created. “
For just as the wise men of the Hebrews claim a world built from ten rays of divinity,” Kircher wrote in his preface, “so we completed ten separate themes or books, as it were, ten books in ten parted rays, the world of light and shadow, that is, our art.”

Kircher wrote like Hermes Trismegistus himself when it came to describing God's purpose with respect to the sun: “
He has established the Sun, I claim, as a kind of heart or soul, or a sort of intelligence and, I may also say, as the principal control and will of nature, in order that the world be governed by it, and that in order that the hidden sacraments of God's wisdom be revealed torn out of the chaos and abyss of darkness, and in order that, from the latter visible and material will, the majesty of the former invisible super-mundane will become known to mortals.”

The book devoted hundreds of pages to sundials, and to Kircher's own theories about fireflies (they appear to have voluntary control of their flashes), chameleons (they stop changing color once they are dead), and phosphorescent jellyfish (they've simply been endowed with the ability to produce light so that they can see in the darkness of deep water). It provided readers with a calculation of the “
thickness of the atmosphere”—forty-three thousand paces—undertaken by measuring “the refraction of sunlight in air,” and offered advice to artists on perspective as well as “
rules which must be followed in painting scenes and drawing pictures.” There were musings on the color of angels, and on
why the sky is blue: in order to provide a proper visual background for everything, it had to be “a kind of unequal mixture of light and dark,” and, after all, blue is “a color by which the uninterrupted sight may contemplate that most agreeable space of the heavens.”

Among other information on optical curiosities and devices,
The Great Art of Light and Shadow
significantly included one of the earliest published descriptions of a microscope. (Della Porta described magnifying lenses in
Natural Magic
, and Galileo wrote about the use of a telescope “adjusted” to see things close up. He'd made a gift of one to the experiment-minded members of the Accademia dei Lincei, or Academy of the Lynx-Eyed in Rome, who in turn had published descriptions and images of magnified bees. The Linceans, as they were called, may have been the source of Kircher's device.) Although Kircher's
smicroscopus
was not much more than a short tube with a magnifying lens, or lenses, inside it, he claimed to have seen “
mites that suggested hairy bears” and minute organisms in cheese, vinegar, and milk. If the worm-like forms that can be seen through a microscope are “
so tiny that they are beyond the reach of the senses,” he wondered later, “how tiny can their little hearts be? How tiny must their little livers be, or their little stomachs, their cartilage and little nerves, their means of locomotion?”

But Kircher wasn't very accurate when it came to optical specifications for others to follow, and there's doubt about his technical expertise.
In 1645, after he sent some kind of image-projection assembly to the emperor in Vienna, a Jesuit in the court wrote him twice for more precise instructions because he couldn't get it to work. Years later an Englishman reported that “
an eminent man of optics” in Nuremberg “spoke bitterly to me against Father Kercherius, a Jesuit at Rome . . . saying that it had cost him above a thousand pounds to put his optic speculations in practice, but he found his principles false, and showed me a great basket of glasses of his failings.”

Meanwhile, a Minim friar named Emmanuel Maignan complained in correspondence that Athanasius's work on catoptrics was a little too similar to his own. And after the censors approved the text of
Light and Shadow
, a satiric work called
Monarchy of the Solipsists
began circulating around Rome. Written by an obviously fictitious author, Lucius Cornelius Europeaus, the pamphlet made fun of the Jesuits of the Collegio Romano, and of Kircher, depicting him as an “
Egyptian wanderer” who “broadcasts trifles about the Moon.” The “Solipsists” consider theological questions, such as “whether the souls of the Gods have color,” as well as philosophical questions, such as: