In Search Of Athanasius Kircher

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1602, the year of Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher’s birth, the study of nature was called natural philosophy. At his death in 1680 natural philosophy died with him; “science,” as we understand it today - the investigation of the natural world through rational, evidence-based means - had overtaken the old world and Kircher, the most celebrated figure in the world of knowledge of his time.

The 17th century was the most fascinating era in the history of scientific inquiry. It was an estuary for science, the rivers of ancient and medieval thinking about nature meeting and mixing with the nascent sea of rationalism in a fertile zone of transition, diversity, and productivity. Athanasius Kircher was in the middle of it all, a towering figure whose reputation for wisdom, knowledge, and erudition awed his contemporaries of the century’s first generation. The strange, the curious, and the marvelous were his stock and trade. Kircher was the Einstein of his age, a genius, the man with  all the answers, the most famous “scientist”  in the world.

The second generation remained in thrall of him but began to perceive cracks in his work (Leibnitz went from adore to abhor), which covered everything: astronomy, linguistics, microscopy, geology, chemistry, musicology, Egyptology, horology, medicine, magnetism, optics, pneumatics, mathematics, Hermeticism, you name it. He was, as characterized by scholar Paula Findlen, “The Last Man Who Knew Everything,” a grandiose statement yet not without truth. In Kircher’s time, the sciences had not yet split into separate and distinct entities and what was known about each was fairly limited. An omnivorous, insatiably curious intellect could be aware of all that was going on. Kircher was that man, an encyclopedia with legs.

From his base in the Vatican in Rome he stood at the center of The Republic of Letters, the vast international Jesuit network of correspondents. He was the hub through which knowledge from the four corners of the earth passed, collecting information and then distributing it through his letters and books.

By the time the century’s third generation of scientists began to assert themselves, however,  Kircher was old news, his reputation tattering, his life’s work derided. As time passed he was relegated to the scrap-heap and became a curious footnote in the history of science.

That changed in 1966, the year that John E. Fletcher completed his 900-page Master’s thesis on Kircher (published in 2011), the first in-depth inquiry into the man, his work, and his world. The thesis - more a doctoral dissertation - Athanasius Kircher, ‘Gernamus Incredibilia’: A Study of his Life and Works with a Preliminary Report upon his Unpublished Correspondence, opened a big door in academia. By the 1990s, scholars from around the world had rushed through it and the Kircher renaissance was in full flower. His importance in the history of science has been firmly re-established. It is impossible to understand the 17th century without coming to terms with Athanasius Kircher and his legacy.

Now, John Glassie, a former contributing editor to The New York Times Magazine, has written a biography, A Man of Misconceptions, to introduce Kircher to a popular readership. This is important. When we think of science in its modern beginnings we think of Isaac Newton, its father. But Kircher was Newton’s scientific grandfather; he influenced everyone in his heyday and immediate wake, even his dissenters, who were inspired to correct his mistakes. He was ultimately proved wrong about just about everything he wrote about, and he wrote a  lot, over thirty books, each, for the most part, huge tomes lavishly illustrated with some of the century’s finest, most dramatically designed copperplate engravings, all created under Kircher’s direct supervision. His books were must-reads for the 17th century cognoscenti.

It is what he was so wrong about and why that makes Kircher one of the most fascinating characters to have ever trod the world stage.

First edition, 1658.

He believed that inner Earth was populated by demons and goblins - but not pygmy men; don’t be silly. He believed in palingenesis, which has nothing to do with the origins of a certain ex-governor of Alaska but everything to do with regenerating plants from their ashes; he claimed to have done it; alas, no one could replicate his success. A method to heal a wound at a  far distance from the wounded without direct intervention? Sure. A machine that organized the chaos of knowledge into an easily comprehensible order? Done that. Sunflower seeds that tell time? You betcha. Snake stones with magic properties? Why not? Rivers of fire within Earth? You doubt it? Christianity in ancient China,  way before the Jesuits arrived in the 16th century? Kircher saw evidence. The lost mysteries of the universe found in Egyptian hieroglyphics? Kircher was sure he’d discover them.

These are the sorts of things that Kircher whole-heartedly embraced. It was not unreasonable, then, for Glassie to have subtitled his bio, The Life of an Eccentric in a World of Change.

Third edition, 1678. (First edition, 1664, i.e. 1665).

Yet “eccentric”  is a misnomer. It is only in retrospect that Kircher can be viewed so and only out of context. The comic possibilities in his life and work are certainly apparent - Kircher, in his autobiography, a posthumously published (1684), slight octavo volume of 78 pages, inadvertently keys into them, his early years related as a sort of Perils of Pauline as told by a somewhat pompous dignitary astonished at every footstep by each adventure, his survival, and the grace of God and the Virgin Mary. Glassie often tends to mine the comedy of Kircher, a rich vein to be sure but not the mother lode.

When Kircher was wrong, he was very wrong. His published a formula for squaring the circle that met with scorn and outright amusement by his fellow mathematicians. Contemporaries, often friends, wrote entire books refuting Kircher. Italian poet and scientist, Francesco Redi (1626-1698), devoted his Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti (1668) and Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali (1671) to demolishing Kircher’s ideas on regeneration and spontaneous generation. When he later wrote a letter to Kircher outlining the negatives in Kircher’s claim of the miraculous healing powers of the snake-stone, that did it.

From Kircher's Arca Noë (Noah's Ark, 1675).

Kircher never responded to his challengers; he had surrogates handle the dissenters. His disciple and assistant, Guiseppe Petrucci, wrote Prodromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (1677) to attack the “envious and strident ignorance of his unjust accusers.” As seen in  the book's engraved title-page, Petrucci is writing a very long scroll to the heavens while sitting on the back of Kircher's critics, symbolized by a crocodile with a cherub on its beak to keep its mouth shut, Kircher's books at his feet with vultures picking at them; there was a lot to defend.

But when Kircher was right, he was dead-on correct. In Scrutinium Physico-Medicum...Pestis (1658), he was the first to propose the germ theory of contagion, the most significant contribution to medicine since William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in 1628 (De Motu Cordis). He correctly gleaned the relationship between heiroglyphics and the Egyptian Coptic language. There are other examples. His convictions were absolute and unshakeable.

Engraved title page to  Petrucci's
Prodromo apologetico alli studi Chircheriani (1677).

He had, however, a soft-spot for the curious and strange, and was often persuaded by the slimmest evidence of the incredible. But he was not alone in that. To one degree or another, every natural philosopher and serious thinker of the 17th century was fascinated by what nature was revealing to them in their observations and studies. It was a world of marvels and wonders all to the glory of God and the majesty of His creation, often strange and bizarre but, as was slowly becoming manifest, knowable in a reliable way.

From the early 1630s through the late 1660s, Kircher’s influence was felt everywhere in the sciences and other areas of intellectual inquiry. He was the elephant in the Vatican, second only to the Pope in public awareness but probably more interesting as a tourist attraction for visiting dignitaries, of which there was a steady stream. Making the pilgrimage to see him and his museum of natural curiosities and marvelous machines was like a trip to Disneyland with Walt as personal guide. (He loved building ooh-ahh sundials, clocks, and machines; he was a gadget freak. Born in the 20th century but with 17th century perspective, Kircher might have invented Magic Fingers: A Miraculous Device to Bring the Muscles of the Human Body and the Mind Into a State of Complete Blissful Relaxation While in a Supine Position Upon a Mattress in a Cheap Roadside Hostelry). Kircher can be accused of many things but eccentric is not one of them. He was completely of his time and no one thought him nutty. He was the most distinguished citizen of the  world of knowledge. The rationalists of the era did not grow up in a vacuum.

For the last six years it has been my ongoing privilege to be deeply involved in building the world’s finest collection, public or private, of Kircher’s books in all significant editions and translations and more: first editions of books that influenced him, that he influenced, were dedicated to him, referred to him and his work, positively or negatively, and/or were written by a significant friend or correspondent (there were many), in the finest copies obtainable. The client is a man of vision. One day Athanasius Kircher and His World will be donated to the collector’s alma mater where it will dwarf in size and scope the Kircher collections at Stanford and Brigham Young universities. Reading all the significant literature in English about him including many of Fletcher's papers, identifying, finding, putting each book into perspective within Kircher’s universe and writings, and composing a compelling story for the client continues to be a personal joy as well as a professional responsibility.

Glassie’s book was a pleasure to read, even if, at times, I was frustrated by his reliance on entertainment to put Kircher across. After six years of immersion I feel as if I know the man. But readers who love interesting non-fiction narratives, are attracted to the unusual (which is just about all of us), love to learn about fascinating people and interesting times and have some fun, too, will enjoy A Man of Misconceptions.

MATHER, Cotton. The Christian Philosopher:
A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature,
With Religious Improvements.
First edition, London: 1721.
Second edition, Boston: 1815.

In 1721, forty-one years after Kircher’s death, the esteemed Jesuit came to America via the first book written by an American (and the first book, period) to introduce the new world of science and its marvels to the Colonies. The Christian Philosopher: a Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature with Religious Improvements cites Kircher and often, his work presented on a par with that of Robert Boyle, Hooke, and Newton, with some of the dubious claims of Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) accepted at face value. It was written by Cotton Mather, the Puritan pastor of Boston’s North Church, prolific writer, controversial figure in the Salem Witch Trials, and proud member of the Royal Society of Science perhaps best known as Ichabod Crane’s favorite author. In 1815, just shy of a hundred years after its initial publication, The Christian Philosopher was reprinted in an edition published in Boston in 1815, an early year in the Second Great Awakening, the religious revival movement that swept through the United States during the  the 19th century. 

With this book Kircher’s shadow has stretched across the centuries to influence modern Americans. How else to explain Marshal B. Gardner’s A Journey to the Earth’s Interior (1913, reprinted 1920) “showing the Earth bisected centrally through the polar openings and at right angles to the Equator, giving a clear view of the central sun and interior continents and oceans,” a work of pure gibberish and pseudo-science all dressed-up with charts, diagrams, and yes, an illustration of a “working model” of Marshall’s Earth with central Sun. Pyramid power, magnetic bracelets with curative powers, magic rocks in Sedona, Arizona, healing crystals - the New Age movement - is Kircher-land, the 17th century re-asserting itself to declare, I'm still here. Significantly, within Mather’s subtitle was an ill-omen of things to come: “With Religious Improvements,” science mediated by dogmatic faith, the very thing that doomed Kircher. His belief that the world of nature was a magical place whose laws conformed to Catholic tradition was the achilles heel that lamed his thinking,  ultimately too loose and credulous.

There is evidence that toward the end of his life Kircher may have understood that science had changed forever and his critical thinking left something to be desired.

"In the forty years in which I have played a role in this theater of all people," he wrote to the mystic poet Quirinus Kulmann (1651-1689), "I have learned from frequent experience how much trouble may result from an inconsidered piece of writing."

Receipt for a cashed letter of exchange signed by Kircher,
April 21, 1667.

In the end, if Kircher was eccentric it was only in his belief that alchemy was nonsense and its practitioners charlatans at a time when it was still popularly accepted. In later life and after his death Kircher was accused by some of being a charlatan.

It is the supreme irony of seventeenth century science that its greatest paragon of rationalism, the man whose work changed the world and whose methodology became standard, had a dark secret that the Royal Society kept hidden for hundreds of years, suppressing his manuscript papers on the subject lest his towering contributions be stained and deeply discounted. His first and foremost passion, which he pursued to the end of his life, was scorned. It was an embarrassment.  It was so Old World. It was charlatanism. It was a scandal.

Isaac Newton was a dedicated alchemist. You can take  a man out of the 17th century but you can't take the 17th century out of  the man.

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All images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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The Comic Case Against Junk Science, 1715

by Stephen J. Gertz

Frontispiece.
"Scientists" as theatrical performers dazzling a crowd with B.S.

It is an extremely rare book, with only three copies of the first edition (and no subsequent editions) coming to auction within the last thirty-six years, the most recent in 1980. It is De Charlataneria eruditorum declamationes duae by Johann Burkhard Mencke, a scathing satire deriding the affectations and pretensions of the world of science past, to wit, the pre-Newtonian and Leibnitz universe of mid-seventeenth century scientific inquiry when science was groping toward reason and rationalism while still bound to ancient, unproven theories and religious doctrine. It is a world personified by the great Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680).

At the time of his death in 1680, Athanasius Kircher, the most famous scientist of his day, had already begun to fade from importance as a new generation, weaned on a strict, rigorous, and rationalistic approach to scientific inquiry and rejecting the imprecise and often credulous approach and flat-out wrong conclusions to the sciences that Kircher represented, came to prominence. Within a generation, Kircher, whose books had once marveled the world, had fallen into such disrepute that a strong backlash against him became manifest and he was made the subject of satiric ridicule. Whispering had begun while he was still alive. After his death, the community cranked up the volume.

"In 1715, a year before Leibniz dismissed Kircher's famous interpretative translations of the hieroglyphs, Johann Burkhard Mencke (1674 - 1732) immortalized the image of Kircher as the most foolish of polymaths in his De Charlataneria eruditorum (The Charlatanry of the Learned) when he described three different pranks played on the German Jesuit... Mencke's devastatingly funny portrait of Kircher... limit[s] our vision only to what people saw in retrospect..." (Findlen, The Last Man Who Knew Everything, p. 7-8).

Mencke writes: "But how some people will allow themselves to be imposed on witness those wheeler dealers in all antiquity, to name none but the biggest by far, Athanasius Kircher and Jacobus Gronovius. There were at Rome some high-spirited young men who heard that a building was to be erected somewhere in the city and decided to test Kircher's intelligence. So they arranged for a dirty old stone to be buried secretly on that site and scribbled on it with various amazing figures made up for the occasion. What could it be? The foundations of the new building were thrown up and the stone was removed - a new record of antiquity to be admired for its very integrity. Ask Oedipus, go to Kircher. He took one look at the stone and jumped for joy, tapping the ground with his feet. He instantly began to interpret the circles, crosses and all the signs together so grandly and plausibly that the like was never seen before" (English translation of 1937).

He goes on; the Jesuit Kircher as the clown prince of science, an idiot in its village, which, at the time, certainly  seemed a fair assessment of a man who stood astride the old and new in the sciences, forward-thinking yet unyieldingly and hopelessly wedded to the past, natural magic, and to Catholic orthodoxies that clouded his judgment and hamstrung his conclusions, more a fascinating and flawed Merlin than modern scientist. When the Renaissance crashed into the Age of Reason the collision occurred at Kircher's doorstep and the wizard's wand was bent out of shape.

De Charlataneria eruditorum remains the most searing public rebuke of Kircher and his ilk, certainly the most popular evidence (it went through six editions, the sixth and last issued in 1786, with early translations into French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and  Italian)  of how far the mighty had fallen in so short a period of time, but, in retrospect, an unfair and parochial view of the man and his place in the stellar firmament of the history of knowledge. Once rejected and derided he can no longer be dismissed; the laughs must be stifled and the man given his just and well-earned due as the bridge between the old and new. Though he was often mistaken (sometimes wildly so), his influence upon contemporary science and scientists cannot be underestimated; his work inspired many of the "new" crop of scientists who, by rejecting Kircher, were led to deeper understanding and ultimate truths. Indeed, it was through Kircher's dissemination of scientific knowledge through his vast network of correspondents that scientists throughout Europe knew what their fellows were up to.

H.L. Mencken, who spent a great deal of his time debunking nonsense and quackery but was not, despite sharing the same name and similarity of  interests, related to Mencke (often known as Mencken), edited, provided notes, and wrote the preface to the first translation into English (1937) of De Charlataneria eruditorum.

"De Charlataneria eruditorum was a great success. 'It produced in its time,' says Conrad Müller, 'a veritable firestorm (einen wahren Sturm). Leibnitz, in a Latin letter to Mencke on December 15, 1715, hailed it as 'elegantissime'" (H.L. Mencken).

Mencke was a renowned scholar in Leipzig. His father-in-law, J.F. Gleditsch - the most respected printer-publisher in Leipzig - published De Charlataneria eruditorum, which was immediately banned in the city due to indelicate references to persons past with close relatives present.

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Title page.
(Image skewed to reflect content).

[KIRCHER, Athanasius]. MENCKE, Johann Burkhard. De Charlataneria eruditorum declamationes duae. Lipsiae: J.F. Gleditsch, 1715.

First edition. Octavo. [xiv],154, [vi] pp. Engraved frontispiece.

Graesse IV, 485. Goedeke III, 350, 14.5.

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The Monsters Among Us (1665)

 by Stephen J. Gertz

Well, the first thing is that I love monsters, I identify with monsters.
Guillermo del Toro

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich 

I strongly suspect Guillermo del Toro will love this book. Ms. Rich might want to rethink her sleeping arrangements.

In the ancient world, both the sophisticated and the credulous, and the knowing and the ignorant, believed in monsters. Monsters were considered a part of the natural world, representing punishment for sin or the diversity and fecundity of life. In a world whose religions and mythology accepted belief in demons, spirits, the afterlife of ancestors into the present, and legendary beasts, monsters fit right into the scheme of things.

During the Renaissance in the West, with its revival of ancient learning and lore, and curiosity and quest to discover all that could be known about the world, the emerging flood of  information about new lands and animals created a sense that anything was possible. Within that context, human and animal monstrosities were considered probable, the consequence of human vice, curses, human and animal sexual congress, or magic.

Curious natural objects such as strangely shaped horns, fossils, skins, and minerals, human artifacts such as gravel stones from the bladder, and Siamese twins (not then known as Siamese twins) were all subjects for allegory and commentary. Folklore, cultural history, medicine, morality stories, and scientific curiosity mingled together, as reflected in the thinking of the seventeenth century Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher, and the works of his assistant, Gaspar Schott.

The fervor over fantastic creatures began with Fortunato Liceti’s 1616 volume, De Monstris, not the first but certainly the most influential and respected survey of such, reissued in 1634 in a second edition edited by Flemish anatomist Gerard Blasius (1626-1692). This edition, the first to include illustrations, was certainly seen by Kircher. Schott's classic, Physica Curiosa (1st ed. 1662), based upon Kircher's notes and observations, deals with the marvels and curiosities of natural history and myth, including monsters.

Indeed, Physica Curiosa contains engravings (by a different hand) of some of the same "monsters" found here, i.e., the elephant man at p. 582 of Physica Curiosa (1662) is seen here at page 185;  others, such as those seen in the plate at page 593 in Schott, are here in the engravings on pages fifty-eight and sixty; and more.

Figure Explanation
A  A shamed woman's genitals.
B A membrane of the flesh, feeling shame, a church
attached to a woman  firmly on all sides, after childbirth
becoming too much like a purse, flaccid...

Treatises by other learned writers appeared in the wake of Liceti’s De Monstris, and soon museums and collections of curiosities in which monstrosities took a central, edifying role became popular throughout Europe, often enjoying courtly patronage; Kircher's museum at the Collegio Romano in Rome drew visitors from around Europe. Pygmies, mermaids, crocodiles, mandrakes, deformed fetuses, and other natural marvels were displayed and discussed in many similar places throughout the seventeenth century. They were the menageries, side-shows, the circus freak-shows of their era, evoking fear, wonder, fascination, and repulsion, proto-Barnum museums without the crassness and ballyhoo that Phineas  T. brought to the subject in the nineteenth century.

Liceti (1577-1657), however, took a different, more nuanced, positive view of the origins of monstrosities.

"The Paduan physician Liceti contested the 'vulgar' opinion that identified monsters with errors or failures in the course of nature. Liceti likened nature to an artist who, faced with some imperfection in the materials to be shaped, ingeniously creates another form still more admirable.

"On this view, monsters revealed nature not as frustrated in her aims but as rising to the challenge of recalcitrant matter, a constricted womb, or even a mixture of animal and human seed. 'It is said that I see the convergence of both Nature and art,' wrote Liceti, 'because one or the other not being able to make what they want, they at least make what they can,'" (Daston & Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature).

Lazarus Colloredo and his parasitic twin, Johannes.

"One of the earliest classifications of deformities Liceti's work was still under review in works on malformation in the 19th century. Includes both real and imaginary cases [as Physica Curiosa] and accurate descriptions of cases observed in the years following the first edition" (Garrison & Morton).

The Satyr Indica, aka an Orangutan.

This, the second illustrated edition (1665), is the most desirable, the first edition to  contain Gerard Blasius' fifty-three page Appendix of new and rare monstrosities including an additional fifteen engravings absent in the first illustrated edition of 1634, not the least of which are the famous plates of Lazarus and his parasitic twin, and the Satyr Indica, an orangutan mistaken for a deformed human, and the earliest, it appears, depiction of that now endangered primate.

Alas, this copy, as with most of this book and so many other antiquarian volumes with famous, wondrous and stunning illustrations ripe for excision, lacks a key plate. We have, however, with the covert assistance of a secret agent librarian at a major institution, gained possession of  a reproduction of the missing plate, an ominous portent of monsters too frightening to contemplate living amongst us as jus’ folks, the family of man corrupted by a family of monsters in our midst:

Televisionicum Familia Munstris, w/strange blond humanoid at right.

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LICETI, Fortunio. De Monstris. Ex recensione Gerardi Blasii, M.D. & P.P. Qui Monstra quaedam nova & rariora ex recentiorum scriptis addidit. Editio Novissima. Iconibus illustrata. Amsterdam: Sumptibus Andrae Frisii, 1665. Second illustrated edition (third, overall; first edition 1616; second and first illustrated, 1634), complete. Quarto. [16], 316, [28] pp [*4(f 1 as frontispiece), **4, ***1, A-z4, Aa-Pp4, Qq8, Rr-Tt4]. Seventy-three woodcut engravings.

Garrison & Morton 534.52. Osler 3235. Wellcome III, 514. Thorndike VII, pp. 52-53. Waller 5779. Rosenthal, Bibl. Magica 4375.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Who the Heck is Herwart von Hohenburg?

The Mensa Isiaca. Engraved plate number one
from Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum.

No copies have come to auction within the last thirty-five years. OCLC/KVK note only seven copies in institutional collections worldwide, only one of which is complete, in the Bibliothéque National - France. But another complete copy recently appeared out of nowhere and into the marketlace, unheralded, without fanfare.

The book is Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum, published in 1610 by Johann (aka Hans) Georg Herwart von Hohenburg (1554-1622). It is one of the earliest works on Egyptology.


It is a book that profoundly influenced Athanasius Kircher, one of the most fascinating individuals of the seventeenth - or any other - century.

Come with me now to those halcyon days of yesteryear, a few thousand yesteryears ago, when the land of the pharaohs would, a few thousand yesteryears later, in 1955, inspire one of film director Howard Hawks’ few stinkers, Land of the Pharaohs, a rotten ibis notable only for Joan Collins fulfilling the wardrobe and promise she amply demonstrated in her screen debut, Lady Godiva Rides Again (1951), and as William Faulkner’s last screenplay credit, aka A Nobel Prize Don’t Pay the Rent.

Having time-caromed from 2010 all the way back to Khufu, then zipped forward to the Cold War’s worst screen crime, we now whiplash backward again, to the seventeenth century where scholars are wondering what’s up with ancient Egyptian writing, and what does it mean? What’s with the guy with a falcon where his head is supposed to be?

These questions burned in Athanasius Kircher’s mind. The most prominent scientist of his era, Kircher (1601-1680), a Jesuit priest, had to know all there was to know and made it his business to learn it. He was indeed, as Paula Findlen titled her biography of the polymath, The Last Man Who Knew Everything at a time when was possible for an individual to do so, before general science grew into the distinct branches with specialties within each that we know today and the exponential growth of knowledge precluded deposit into one brain without subsequent explosion.

"...In 1628, after [Athanasius Kircher's] ordination as a Jesuit priest in Speyer, Germany...he developed a keen interest in hieroglyphics, having seen a copy of Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum (1610) by the famed German scholar from Bavaria, Johann Georg Herwart von Hohenburg" (Alastair Hamilton. The Copts and the West, 1439-1822: The European Discovery of the Egyptian Church (New York: 2006, p. 203).

The Mensa Isiaca. Engraved plate number three
from Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum

"Another influence on the young German was Johann Georg Herwart von Hohenburg's work Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum (which contains an illustration of the Mensa Isiaca, thought to be a major source of Egyptian images, but now known to be a Roman or Alexandrian work of the early Imperial period in the Egyptianizing style). The result was Kircher's Prodromus Coptus sive Aegyptiacus (1636), the first Coptic grammar and the foundation for all subsequent Coptic studies: in it, he argued (correctly) that Coptic was related to the language of the Ancient Egyptians" (James Curl, review of Anthanasius Kircher's Theater of the World by Joscelyn Godwin, in Times Higher Education, 7 January 2010).

The Mensa Isiaca. Engraved plate number six
from Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum

The first eleven plates in the Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum are of the Mensa Isiaca aka the Bembine table of Isis. This remarkable table was produced sometime in the first century AD, probably in Rome at the height of the Egyptomania then consuming it. The hieroglyphs are nonsense and the cult scenes are Egyptianesque, but do not depict true Egyptian rites. Some of the scenes are so bizarre that it is unclear whether the figures are gods or kings and queens; it's a hieroglyphic hash. Egyptian motifs appear helter-skelter throughout. Nevertheless, the central figure in a chapel scene is clearly recognizable as the Egyptian mother goddess Isis, suggesting that the table originated somewhere the Isis cult was celebrated. It is a testament to Kircher's keen intellect that he was able to gain valuable insights from this Egypto-gobbldy-gook.

The Mensa Isiaca. Engraved plate number four
from Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum

The Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum was "one of the richest sources for Athanasius Kircher... Kircher drew heavily on the Mensa Isiaca for his sources" (Curl, James. The Egyptian Revival, pp. 59 and 112).

"These engravings were appropriated by Athanasius Kircher” (Oudheidkundige mededeelingen, Volumes 65-66, p. 24).

Stolzenberg discusses the Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum in his Kircher study, The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encylopedia of Athanasius Kircher (2001).

Johann Georg Herwart von Hohenburg (1553-1622) was a prominent Bavarian statesman and scholar of distinction. He was acknowledged for his accomplishments in astronomy, chronology, mathematics and philology. His work in chronology earned him the admiration of intellectuals such as Kepler's teacher, Michael Mästlin, who commended his "extraordinary industry," and his efforts in mathematics proved fundamental to the early formulation of logarithms by clockmaker Jöst Bürgi and John Napier. As a person of political prestige and intellectual prominence, Herwart stood at the center of a scholastic correspondence network that included the leading scientists of the day, amongst whom were Tycho Brahe, Johannes Praetorius, Helisaeus Röslin, and Johannes Kepler. In this last respect, he would provide a model for Kircher, who, a generation later, would fulfill the same role with 760 members of Europe's scientific and medical community, as well as the international Jesuit network; his hunger for knowledge of all kinds was insatiable.

Engraved plate number fifteen
from Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum

For most of his professional life, Athansius Kircher was one of the scientific stars of the world. His early life is highlighted by being shipwrecked and marooned. He dried off rapidly, made it back home, and soon was "the first scholar with a global reputation," writes Findlen. He combined his original experimentation and research with information learned from his correspondence - the Encyclopædia Britannica calls him a "one-man intellectual clearing house" - to publish thirty-five principal works that range from astronomy, optics, phonology, music, mathematics, natural history, geology, medicine, to Egyptology, and more; if it was interesting, he was on it. His books, illustrated with commissioned engravings, were influential and sold well; he was the first scientist to earn a living from his books. He, along with his acolyte, assistant, and fellow Jesuit, Gaspar Schott, popularized science.

Kircher's scientific career occurred during an important transition period in science, when reason, rigor, measurement, and experimentation began to overthrow superstition, harebrained hypothesis, wacko explanation, and unprovable theory. Kircher stood with a foot in each world, making recognized advances in optics while at the same time, for instance, clinging to a belief in the powers oif certain stones.

Much of Kircher's work would be forgotten in the generations that followed Isaac Newton, of the immediate generation succeeding Kircher, his contributions built upon or confirmed (or rejected) by others using a refined and wholly rational scientific method. He was wrong about so much yet right about enough that he was rediscovered by science historians in the later twentieth century and given his just due.

Herwart von Hohenburg who? He influenced Kircher and more than a few.

Vintage publicity still from Land of the Pharaohs.
Joan Collins (2d from left) as Princess Nellifer
sacrificing to Isis, a scene that would prepare her
to later portray many castrating bitches. Jack Hawkins
(far right) as Khufu: "Don't get near me with that thing.
Audience, I'm outta here. You?"

(The Mensa Isiaca. Engraved plate number eight
from Thesaurus hieroglyphicorum)

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HERWART von HOHENBURG, Johannes Georgius. Thesaurus Hieroglyphicorum è Museo Joannis Georgii Herwart ab Hohenburg, utriusque juris doctoris, & ex assessore summi Tribunalia Imperatorii, atque ex Calncellario supremo serenissimi utriusque Bavariae Principis... Munich (Ausberg?): n.p., 1610.

First (only) edition, complete. Oblong folio (13 3/4 x 20 7/8 in; 350 x 530 mm). Printed title page with four small mounted engravings, and twenty-six large engravings (one folding) mounted on twenty-five leaves. Engravings cut to plate lines.

Eighteenth century quarter calf over boards. Manuscript notes in ink (17th century) and pencil (19th -20th century?) to front free endpaper.

Graesse III, p. 262. Bibliotheca Augustana p. 150.

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Books about Athanasius Kircher here.
If in Los Angeles, see the permanent display devoted to Kircher at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.