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essay |
BETWEEN THE
DEMONIC AND THE MIRACULOUS:
Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque
culture of machines
Unabridged draft of essay published in abridged form in The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, ed. Daniel Stolzenberg, Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2001, pp. 59-70
From the magnetic Jesus
walking on water described in his very first published book, the 1631 Ars Magnesia, to the unfortunate cat
imprisoned in a catoptric chest and
terrified by its myriad reflections shown to visitors to his famous
museum, the peculiar mechanical, optical, magnetic, hydraulic and pneumatic
devices constructed by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) continue to defy the
analytical categories used in both traditional museum history and history of
science.[1]
Although Filippo Buonanni (1638-1725) later attempted to reduce the machines of
the Kircherian museum to the status of mechanical demonstrations, even adding
some of his own[2], it is clear
that for Kircher and his immediate entourage, these machines were, in some real
sense, magical. Far from being trivial addenda to a collection of antiquities
and naturalia, the documents suggest that Kircher’s machines were
utterly central to any seventeenth century visit to the Musaeum Kircherianum.
But, from the point of view of traditional histories of science, Kircher’s
machines remain defiantly perplexing. Their emblematic, ludic, and deceptive connotations sit ill with any
attempt to place them within grand histories of “experimental science”
emphasizing the demise of Aristotelianism through the triumph of an
“experimental method” during precisely the period in which the Kircherian
museum enjoyed its exhuberant heyday. From the point of view of the history of
collections, the machines accumulated by Kircher and his disciples in Rome
cannot merely be treated as objects removed from circulation, or from their
original context of usage, as these machines had no original context of usage,
and did not circulate prior to their display in the museum.[3]
Rather, we are dealing with purpose-built installations, constructed ad hoc
by Kircher and his changing body of assistants, technicians and disciples in
the Collegio Romano.
So what are we to make of
these magical machines? This article attempts to situate Kircher’s machines in
a Baroque culture of artificial magic. Using contemporary accounts of visits to
Kircher’s museum and other documents, it aims to recover the purpose of these
devices, to understand how they worked, not only by peering inside them to
examine their secret workings, but also by looking outside them at how people
responded to them, and at how Kircher and his Jesuit companions placed this part
of their output in a rich tradition of artificial magic that has commonly been
overlooked or trivialised by historians of science. We will argue that
Kircher’s machines found their meaning in a flourishing Baroque culture of
special effects. In the same way that
“inside jokes” confirm the identity of a particular social group, while
excluding the majority of people who are not privy to the assumptions on which
the joke is based, the machines of Kircher and his disciples provided an elite
social group with self-defining puzzles and enigmas.
The game of deducing the
natural causes behind the strange effects produced by Kircher’s magical
machines, such as a clepsydra apparently pouring water upwards into a “watery
heaven”, really caused by a hidden mirror, was somewhat akin to fox-hunting or
golf in our society: if you could play the game, your identity as part of a
particular social elite was confirmed. If you could not play the game, and had
to assume that demonic forces were responsible for the strange effects you were
witnessing, you were doomed to the ranks of the vulgar masses. In this respect,
Kircher’s machines had much in common with courtly emblems and enigmas, and the
culture of “sprezzatura” which countless behaviour-manuals vainly
attempted to divulge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[4]
Like many types of joke, Kircher’s machines are, we argue, inherently
conservative. They rest on a shared mystery – the hidden causes behind the
visible effects. To challenge the received picture of the causes operating in
the natural world in response to such a machine would thus amount in a strong
sense to spoiling the joke for everybody else.[5]
At the core of Kircher’s
marvellous machines, then, lies a robust epistemological conservatism.
Kircher’s machines thus offer us an alternative to conventional stories of the
inevitable collapse of Aristotelian natural philosophy through direct
experimentation, and require us to refine our understanding of the roles played
by machines, experiments and instruments in seventeenth century natural
philosophy. The culture of the elite audience for which Kircher’s machines were
designed is inscribed graphically on the machines themselves – one need only
consider such items as the water-vomiting two-headed Imperial Eagle (fig. 1, see also fig. 2), or the
perspectival trick unjumbling an image of Pope Alexander VII. Indeed, one could
arguably take this further and view the Musaeum Kircherianum as a whole
as something of a self-portrait of an elite, primarily a Roman Catholic elite
centered around the twin poles of the courts of Rome and Vienna. This elite was
not a “given” quantity when Kircher’s museum came into existence – rather the
museum helped to construct and consolidate the elite while the elite helped to
construct the museum by corresponding with Kircher and providing him with
portrait medals, natural curiosities and other objects for his collection.
At the centre of a vast
correspondence network, and increasingly famous through his lavishly
illustrated encyclopedic publications, Kircher wielded considerable power to
shape the social group represented in his museum. Limited only by his religious
poverty, Kircher extended his network at will to include powerful Protestants
such as Duke August of Brunswick-Lüneburg or Queen Christina of Sweden, prior
to her conversion. In a revealing letter to Duke August’s librarian Johann
Georg Anckel, Kircher wrote that he had immediately had Duke August’s portrait
“framed in gold and put up in my Gallery as a Mirror of the magnanimity, wisdom
and generosity of the high-born prince”, adding that “my Gallery or museum is
visited by all the nations of the world and a prince cannot become better known
in hoc Mundi theatro than have his likeness here. And if the expense
were not so great I would do this for all Germans, but I must cut my coat
according to my cloth”.[6]
As well as holding up a
trick-mirror to an elite audience, Kircher’s museum also emblematized the
Jesuit order itself. Many of the curious natural objects and artefacts of
remote cultures present in the museum were sent to Kircher by Jesuit
missionaries, who constitute the single most numerous group of his
correspondents. Some of Kircher’s machines provide striking emblematic
depictions of his order – his universal catholic horoscope of the Society of
Jesus was a large sundial representing the Jesuit order as an olive tree, with
the different Assistancies or administrative divisions of the order represented
as branches, and the different colleges represented as leaves. Tiny sundials
placed in each province give the local time, and the shadows of the gnomons of
the sundials, when aligned, spelled “IHS”, the abbreviated name of Jesus and
symbol of the Jesuit order, which appears to “walk over the world” with the
passing of time (fig. 3).[7]
In Kircher’s museum, visitors were also shown “a large crystalline globe full
of water representing the resurrection of the Saviour in the midst of the
waters”.[8] One of the aims of this article is to
understand the relationship between such artefacts and Kircher’s position in
the Jesuit Collegio Romano. The moment of the creation of the Musaeum
Kircherianum coincided with a disciplinary crisis in Jesuit education that
led the superiors of the order to condemn departures from Aristotle in
philosophy, including natural philosophy or physics, and from Thomas Aquinas in
theology. The works of Jesuit authors on natural philosophy during this period
were closely scrutinized for anti-Aristotelian views.[9]
The exotic publications of Kircher and his disciples seem to contradict this
doctrinal fundamentalism, but we will suggest that the contradiction is only
apparent. The treatment of machines and instruments, even those associated with
criticisms of Aristotle, in the works of Kircher and his Jesuit apprentices in
magic was designed to avoid conflict with fundamental Aristotelian principles.
The machines
Before taking a look at the
the magical and mathematical traditions from which Kircher’s machines emerged
and the functions, mechanical and social, that they performed, it might be
opportune to have a first glance at the machines themselves. In 1678 Giorgio de
Sepibus (fl. 1678), Kircher’s “assistant in making machines” published the
first catalogue of the Musaeum Kircherianum.[10]
Little is known about De Sepibus, from the Wallis (Valesia) canton in
Switzerland, who seems to have been an intermittent companion of Kircher, and
is first mentioned ten years earlier in a letter from the Oratorian priest
Francesco Gizzio to Kircher. In 1670 Kircher sent De Sepibus to Naples, where
he brought a number of machines to perfection, with the exception of a
“versatile pulpit” that was left incomplete. It is not clear when De Sepibus
left Kircher’s service, but by 1674 Kircher seems to have feared him dead, so
with all likelihood the catalogue was completed well before its publication.[11] De Sepibus provides us with a summary list
of the machines present in Kircher’s museum, which may serve as our starting
point:
1.
Two helical spirals most skilfully measuring cycles
with the twisted coils of snakes. An organ, driven by an automatic drum,
playing a concert of every kind of birdsong, and sustaining in mid-air a
spherical globe, continually buffetted by the force of the wind.
2.
A hydrostatic-magnetic machine, representing the
hours, zodiac, planets and the whole fabric of the heavens. The hours are
described by means of a very simple motion, in which images of the Sun and Moon
alternately ascend and descend vertically. The divisions of the hour are marked
by the sympathetic motion of the flight of small birds.
3.
A magnetic-hydraulic machine displaying the time all
over the world, as well as the astronomical, Italian, Babylonian and ancient
hours.
4.
A little fountain moving the globe weighing down on the
head of Atlas in a circle by hidden movements.
5.
A fountain lifts a genie fixed in the water up and
down, with a perpetual motion of tossing about and turning.
6.
A fountain in which the Goddess Isis, contained in a
crystalline sphere, is sustained, and greets guests by spraying water
everywhere.
7.
A hydraulic machine that apes perpetual motion,
recently invented by the Author, consisting of a clepsydra that flows out when
it is inverted, and again when it is turned the right way up, wetting a watery
heaven with its spray.
8.
A hydraulic machine most skilfully representing the
Primum Mobile, and violently impelling a brass snake resting on top of the
water in twists and turns by water.
9.
A water-vomiting hydraulic machine, at the top of
which stands a figure vomiting up various liquids for guests to drink.
10.
A hydraulic
clock urging or carrying globes or genies up and down inside crystal tubes of
five palms in height, indicating the different times.
11.
A hydraulic
machine, which supports a crystal goblet, from one side of which a thirsty bird
drinks up water, that a snake revomits from the other side while opening its
mouth
12.
A
hydrotectonic machine moving armed knights from one place and a crowd returning
from another by means of continual drops.
13.
A
two-headed Imperial Eagle, vomitting water copiously from the depths of its
gullets.
14.
A crowd of
dancing genies driven by the silent approach of water
15.
The dove of
Archytas reaching towards a crystalline rotunda and indicating the hours by its
free flight.
16.
The
catoptric theatre, completely filled with a treasure of all sorts of
delicacies, fruits, and precious ornaments
17.
An
architectural perspective representing the arrangement of the rooms inside a
magnificent palace.
18.
A perpetual
screw, the invention of Archimedes, by which it is an easy matter to lift 125
pounds with the strength of a very weak small boy.
19.
A large
crystalline globe full of water representing the resurrection of the Saviour in
the midst of the waters.
Various
thermoscopes, or thermometers which indicate the daily growth of simples, the
mutations of the air, the ebb and flow of the tide, and the variation of the
winds, together with experiments on the origins of springs.
An
extremely large concavo-convex burning mirror, with a collection of many
mirrors, some of which show ghosts in the air, others show objects unchanged,
others show them multiplied and others reconstitute completely undetermined
species from a confused series into a beautiful form. Amongst these there is
one which reconstitutes the effigy of Alexander VII.
....
A
large number of mechanical clocks, one of which plays harmonious music by a
concert of bells with an elaborate movement, at any hour it plays the sound,
also every half-hour with a marvellous harmony of notes and sweetness of sound
it plays the hymn Ave Maris stella. Another one indicating the time of
day by the movement of a pendulum. Another , finally, giving the minutes and
seconds of time. The part of the world illuminated by the sun, the increase and
decrease of day and night. The current sign of the zodiac, the astronomical and
Italian hours, as well as the ancient hours, or the unequal hours, which it
describes along a straight line by a singular artifice. Many sundials.
...
Armillary
spheres, and celestial and terrestrial globes, equipped with their meridians
and pivots.
Astrolabes,
Planispheres, Quadrants, a very full collection of mathematical instruments.
...
The
Delphic Oracle, or speaking statue.
A
Divinatory Machine for any planetary influence at the circumference of two
glass spheres by genies moved uniformly by a mutually sympathetic motion.
Twisting themselves to the same degree at a large distance, each of them in his
sphere indicates the same point of the sign.
Various
motions of solid globes bearing a resemblance to perpetual motion.
A
hydraulic perpetual motion by rarefaction and condensation, an Archimedean
screw carrying globes up with a continual motion through helical glass
channels.[12]
This list is both illuminating
and opaque – while allowing us to form an idea of what some of the machines may
have looked like or sounded like, it gives us little or no idea of how they
were perceived by contemporaries. Let us take one of them at random -- “the
Delphic Oracle, or speaking statue”, the description of which De Sepibus leaves
to the final chapter of his catalogue of the museum’s contents, stating that
“we have rightly left the greatest machination of art until the final course”.
What was this great “machination”? How did it work? Why was it made? De Sepibus
gives the following description of the oracle:
Kircher
has [sic, for “had”] a tube in the workshop of his bedroom, arranged in
such a way that the porters, in order to call him to the door when business
demanded it, used not have to take the trouble to go all the way to his
bedroom, but merely called him in a normal voice at the door that gave access
to the open-air garden. He heard their
words as clearly as if they had been present in his bedroom, and answered in the
same way, through the tube [...] Later he transferred this tube to the Museum,
and inserted it into a statue in such away that the statue, almost breathing
life, is seen to speak with its mouth open, and its eyes moving. He named this
statue the Delphic oracle, as it was in the same way, by the ingenious trick of
stuffing tubes into the mouths of idols, that the ancient priests of the
Egyptians and Greeks deceived the people consulting the oracle and made
superstitious men give valuable offerings[13]
A manuscript draft of De
Sepibus’ description (in Kircher’s handwriting incidentally, suggesting that he
had a rather active role in the composition of the 1678 catalogue), is
conserved amongst Kircher’s manuscripts in the Pontifical Gregorian University,
in which he sometimes calls the machine the Oracle of Apollo, but otherwise
describes it almost identically.[14]
Kircher’s earlier 1673 work on sound and acoustics, the Phonurgia nova,
gives us a more detailed account of the machine, and its changing role in the Collegio
Romano:
There
was a repository in my Museum, between the wall and the door. At the end of the
repository was an oval shaped window, looking out over the domestic garden of
the Collegio Romano, which is about 300 palms in length and width.
Inside this repository, or workshop, I adapted a conical tube to the length of
the space, made from a length of 22 palms of sheet-iron, the speaking hole of
which did not exceed ¼ of a palm in diameter. The tube, however, had a diameter
of one palm at its aperture that then grew gradually by continuous and
proportional increments in diameter so that the orifice of the part extended
out of the oval window towards the garden had a diameter of three palms. We
have seen how the tube was made, now we will also explain its effect.
Whenever
our porters had to inform me of something, either of the arrival of guests or
of any other matter, so that they would not be inconvenienced by having to come
to my Museum through the labyrinthine corridors of the college, while standing inside
the porters’ lodge they could talk to me while I remained in the remote
recesses of my bedroom, and, as if they were present, they could tell me
whatever they wanted clearly and distinctly. Then I too could respond in the
same tone of voice according to the demands of the matter, through the orifice
of the tube. Indeed nobody could say anything inside the garden in a clear
voice that I could not hear inside my bedroom, and this was a thing seen as
completely new and unheard of by the visitors to my museum, when they heard
speech, but couldn’t see who was talking. So that I would not be suspected of
some prohibited Art by the astonished people, I showed them the hidden
structure of the device. It is difficult to say how many people, even including
many Roman Nobles, were attracted to see and hear this machine.
...
It
happened later that I was required to transfer my Private Museum into a more
suitable, and open space in the Collegio Romano, that they call the
Gallery. Here, the tube that I have briefly described before was also moved,
and even now it is looked at and listened to under the name of the Delphic
Oracle, with the following difference: the tube that previously propagated
clearly spoken words plainly into a distant space, now acts secretly in ludic
oracles and false consultations with a hidden and quiet voice, so that nobody
present is able to perceive anything of the secret technique of the reciprocal
murmured conversation. And when it is exhibited to strangers even to this day,
there are not lacking those who harbour a suspicion of demons among those who
do not understand the machine, for the statue opens and closes its mouth as if
it was speaking, and moves its eyes. Therefore I built this machine in order to
demonstrate the impostures, fallacies and frauds of the ancient priests in the
consultation of oracles. For while they gave their answers through secret tubes
(described in the Oedipus), they urged the people to give offerings
extravagantly, if they wanted their prayers to be answered. And consequently,
by this fraud, they were able to greatly increase their wealth. In any case I
would not deny that they also secretly involved demons in their works.[15]
Kircher’s Delphic oracle
reveals much about the role of machines in his Museum, and also much about the
history of the museum itself. We are told that Kircher had a “private museum”
before he transferred his collection to the Gallery of the Collegio Romano
after the “official” founding of the museum with Alfonso Donnini’s 1651 bequest
of his collection of antiquities to the Collegio Romano.[16]
Where was this “private museum”? In the passage cited from the Phonurgia
Nova, Kircher identifies it explicitly with his “cubiculum”, or
bedroom in the Collegio Romano. So, even before Kircher was in charge of
the Gallery of the Collegio, his own bedroom functioned as a museum,
containing within it a storage area or workshop, from which his speaking-tube
originally allowed him to communicate with, or occasionally eavesdrop on,
people in the College garden and the college porters, who, one imagines, must
have been pleased with this labour-saving device. In England, at around the
same time, another prominent mathematical magician, John Wilkins (1614-1672),
made a similar speaking-tube in the gardens of Wadham College, Oxford. One day,
a certain Mr. Ashwell was strolling through the college, shortly after Cromwell
had urged the Fellows of Oxford University to bring the Gospel to Virginia. As
he passed the statue of Flora, he was astonished to hear it say to him “Ashwell goe preach the Gospel in Virginia”,
in a Puritanical translation of Kircher’s Jesuit machine.[17]
To return to Kircher’s
multi-purpose bedroom in the Collegio Romano, however, it may appear
strange that this domestic space also functioned as a museum, and clearly
attracted enough visitors to warrant the development of an intercom system. In
fact, there was a long tradition in the Collegio Romano before Kircher’s
arrival of describing the bedroom of the senior mathematician of the college as
the musaeum mathematicum. Christoph Clavius (1538-1612), famous for his
commentary on the Sphere of Sacrobosco, and for his extensive activities as a
Jesuit mathematical pedagogue, kept mathematical instruments, clocks and
manuscripts in this space, a space that also served as the focus for the
activities of the private mathematical academy of the Collegio Romano.
Unlike the normal mathematics lectures that formed part of the College’s public
curriculum in philosophy, often taught by a junior professor, the mathematical
academy was founded with the specific aim of teaching mathematics professors
for the Jesuit colleges in the different provinces of the Order. Generally, the
bedrooms of Jesuits were not provided with keys, but, along with the rooms of
the Superiors and the Procurator (responsible for the financial affairs of the
College), the room of the senior mathematician of the College formed an
exception.[18] The added
security of a key meant that the mathematics professor could store valuable
mathematical instruments in his domestic space. The musaeum mathematicum
of the Collegio Romano then, formed a space for advanced level
mathematical teaching and for the formation of close relationships between
master and disciples, relationships which generally continued through
correspondence after the apprentice mathematicians left to teach the
mathematical disciplines in the provinces. When Christoph Clavius died, in
1612, his correspondence, manuscripts, instruments and position as the most
senior mathematician of the Collegio Romano were inherited by the
Tyrolese Jesuit Christoph Grienberger (c. 1564-1636). After Grienberger’s death
in on 11 March 1636, the manuscripts collected by Clavius and Grienberger,
their “archive” of correspondence, and their instruments seem to have all
passed to Kircher. So, although Kircher only occupied the position of public
mathematics professor for a short time, he inherited the musaeum
mathematicum, a space in which the building of instruments and machines was
already an established tradition. Indeed, Kircher’s far more modest predecessor
Grienberger was rumoured to have invented a speaking statue himself.[19]
We find ample references in the works of Kircher to the documents and objects
Kircher inherited. In Kircher’s 1641 book on magnetism, the Magnes, for
example, Kircher states clearly that “I have collected together many
observations concerning magnetic declination that are not to be rejected [...]
partly from the Archive that I possess of mathematical letters sent from the
different parts of the globe to Clavius, Grienberger and my other predecessors
as Roman mathematicians of the Society of Jesus”.[20]
Emulating the private
mathematical academy directed by Clavius and Grienberger before his arrival in
Rome, Kircher gathered private disciples around him who were also able to avail
of the instruments and documents that Kircher had inherited from his
mathematical predecessors. While
working as Kircher’s assistant in Rome between 1652 and 1654, Kaspar Schott
(1608-1666) seems to have spent much of his time leafing through the papers of
Clavius and Grienberger: “In the manuscripts of the most learned man Fr.
Christoph Grienberger [...] that I found in the Clavius and Grienberger archive
”, he wrote in his Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica, “I came across the
following words about this Machine made by Bettini, and an opinion about
perpetual motion”.[21]
Describing a machine in which a sphere was suspended in the air and rotated
about its centre, Schott wrote “I found the following machine amongst the
papers of Fr. Christoph Clavius and Fr. Christoph Grienberger, once professors
of mathematics in this Roman College of ours. However it was in the handwriting
of neither of them, nor was it composed by them, as it smelled of neither of
their lanterns. I suspect that it was sent to Clavius by one of the disciples
of Francesco Maurolico, the Abbot of Messina, for it cites a small unpublished
treatise of his. But, whomsoever’s manuscript it is, I have judged it fitting
that it should be inserted here, since it can be applied to many things by an
industrious artisan”.[22]
Schott also borrowed items from the Clavius and Grienberger “mathematical
archive” that he did not acknowledge – a demonstration of how to lift a golden
earth using the force of one talent, using a system of toothed wheels published
in his Magia Universalis is lifted directly from an unpublished
manuscript by Grienberger that Kircher would have possessed, as is a passage
extolling the powers of mathematics and the extraordinary achievements of
Archimedes in the same work.[23]
Schott and De Sepibus also
inform us about instruments, experiments and machines that Kircher had
inherited from Clavius and Grienberger, and subsequently transferred to the
Gallery after 1651, such as a trick-lantern made by Grienberger that performed
in the same way when filled with water as with oil, and a sample of water from
the river Jordan that Clavius had sealed hermetically in a glass vial, perhaps
the most undramatic of Kircher’s museum exhibits, demonstrating the
incorruptibility of water by remaining forever unchanged. A wooden astrolabe
made by Grienberger was also displayed prominently in the museum, though by the
time Sepibus compiled his catalogue it had been almost completely eaten away by
woodworm.[24] From all
these examples, it should be clear that Kircher effectively inherited a space,
complete with manuscripts, instruments and experiments, that already had a
well-established role in the Collegio Romano – the musaeum
mathematicum, and that many of the functions of this space did not change
dramatically with Kircher’s arrival in Rome, when the space became his “private
museum”. Indeed, it seems that most Jesuit colleges where mathematics was
taught in the mid-seventeenth century had a mathematical museum of some
description, which was normally the bedroom of the senior mathematician of the
college where the mathematical instruments could be locked away, though most
would have been far more modest than that of the Collegio Romano. An example
is Valentin Stansel’s mathematical museum in Prague, where Jakob Johann
Wenceslaus Dobrzensky de Nigro Ponte saw a hydro-magnetic fountain clock, that
he described in his Nova, et amaenior de admirando fontium ... philosophia.[25]
The descriptions of Kircher’s
Delphic oracle quoted above also reflect on other aspects of his machinic
installations. Kircher claims to have built the device in order to expose the
“impostures, fallacies and frauds of the ancient priests”, so the ludic machine
bears a moral burden. The corruption of the good magic given by God to Adam
into a tool of deception and evil-doing in the hands of the post-diluvian
Egyptians is a theme that crops up frequently in the works of Kircher and
Schott, and we shall return to it. In the house of a certain Francesco Serra,
Kircher and Schott had seen an example of an Egyptian speaking statue (fig. 4) designed to contain just such a speaking-tube as
that hidden in Kircher’s Delphic Oracle, illustrated in the Oedipus
Aegyptiacus.[26] The section
of this work dealing with Egyptian mechanics contains many examples of the
tricks employed by Egyptian priests to deceive worshippers, and many of the
machines in Kircher’s museum relate to the debunking of Egyptian magic (see
e.g. fig. 5, fig. 6). A “multimammary
Goddess”, for example, spraying forth liquid from her multiple breasts (fig. 7), is described both in the Oedipus Aegyptiacus
and in Schott’s Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica, where Schott writes:
“many thought that this work was constructed with the art of prestidigitation
and of demons, but Fr. Kircher clearly showed that this was a devious
machination of the priests [...] and he has a small machine in his museum that
he displays to this end”.[27]
Describing another Egyptian device, an altar on which small gods or demons
dance (fig. 8), Kircher writes “A devious invention
elaborately contrived by either Priests or evil demons in order to enslave the
stupid and ignorant plebs in idolatrous servitude, so that nothing more
effective or powerful could be devised for the cult of false gods”.[28]
It is interesting that, while exposing the fraudulence of the magic of the
Egyptian priests, Kircher will nonetheless not rule out their involvement with
demons. One might have thought that the priests’ impressive technical skills
would have removed any need for traffic with real demons. Regarding Kircher’s
own performances with his Delphic oracle, we are also told that he was
frequently suspected of involvement with demons by his less perceptive
visitors, and that he explained the functioning of the machine in order to
remove suspicions of him practicing “some prohibited Art”. Traffic with demons
was no laughing matter in the mid-seventeenth century, at the height of the
European witch-craze. One could well imagine that a less well-inclined audience
might well view Kircher’s wonders in an altogether different light. Indeed, on
one of the few occasions when Kircher performed in front of a larger audience,
this was precisely what happened. Kircher, in his early twenties, had recently
arrived in Heiligenstadt after being stripped of his clothes and nearly killed
by heretical soldiers who recognised him as a Jesuit, and a legation sent by
the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz was about to be received in the town. The
following excerpt is from his posthumous autobiography:
And
because it was decided to spare no magnificence to provide an appropriate
welcome for the legates, I was commissioned to arrange a theatrical performance.
When I exhibited this, as they saw some things that went beyond common
knowledge, the legates who witnessed the performance were so excited to great
admiration that some of them accused me of the crimes of Magic, with some
people say other things against me. In order to free myself of such an ugly
crime I was obliged to expose the mechanisms of all of the things that I had
exhibited. And when this task was discharged to everybody’s great satisfaction,
so that they could hardly be separated from me, I also gave them a new
collection of Mathematical Curiosities together with a laudatory panegyric in
exotic languages composed in their honour, by which things resulted no small
increase in their benevolence towards me.[29]
It is clear from this episode
that Kircherian magic flirted dangerously with the boundaries between technical
ingenuity and the “prohibited art” of demonic magic. The Elizabethan magician
John Dee (1527-1608), similarly came under suspicion of demonic magic in
England when he constructed an automatic “scarabeus” that flew up to Jupiter's
palace during a performance of a comedy by Aristophanes, when in fact the
theatrical trick was achieved by "pneumatithmie" or by
"waights”.[30] Perhaps
this very flirtation with the black arts was a source for titillation for the
princely and religious audience of Kircher’s wonders – an audience directly
involved in the persecution of popular magic during the same period – allowing
them to experience the “armchair-thrills” of magic without being morally implicated.[31] Jesuit theatrical productions during this
period were particularly famous for their stage-machinery – convincing
representations of hell were a speciality – and for their hard-hitting moral
didacticism, both features that they shared with Kircher’s
machinic-performances, as we have seen in the case of the Delphic oracle.[32]
Other inventions of Kircher’s also appear to have come under suspicion of
demonic magic, including the magnetic anemoscope that he built in Malta (fig. 9), while he was supposed to be providing spiritual
guidance to Landgrave Ernst of Hessen-Darmstadt, relied, like many Kircherian
machines, on a hidden magnet. The magnet, rotated by a wind-vane, caused a
figure of Aeolius, the god of winds, suspended in a glass sphere, to point to
the direction of the wind marked on the outside of the sphere. Some of the
Knights of Malta who witnessed Kircher’s machine apparently suggested that it
must contain a real demon, and Kircher, yet again, had to take pains to
demonstrate that his brand of magic was entirely natural.[33]
Anatomies of machines and
mechanical anatomies
By the time that De Sepibus’
catalogue was published, the Musaeum Kircherianum had entered a dramatic
phase of decline, only to be resurrected through the efforts of Filippo
Buonanni in the early years of the eighteenth century. The famous frontispiece of
De Sepibus’ work, and many of its contents are misleading, as they represent
Kircher’s museum as occupying a space that it had long abandoned, due to
General Oliva’s decision to transform it into a library for the Jesuit
“scriptors”, excused from teaching duties in order to devote themselves to
writing works for publication. The frescoed lunettes and large windows of the
space depicted and described in De Sepibus’ catalogue had long been forsaken
for a dark corridor, much to the dismay of the ageing Kircher. The catalogue
thus presents immediate problems as a historical document of Kircher’s museum.
By 1678, Kircher, depicted on the frontispiece of De Sepibus’ catalogue warmly
welcoming a pair of visitors to his museum, was nearing death, and spending
almost all of his time in the Marian shrine of the Mentorella in the hills of
Lazio, where his heart was soon to be buried.[34]
De Sepibus’ catalogue of the
museum, then, crammed with illustrations culled from Kircher’s other works,
must be regarded as a monument to a dead, or at least dying and transfigured
institution. In order to understand the magical nature of the machines on
display in the museum, many of which had fallen into disrepair by 1678 we will
have to look elsewhere. Long before De Sepibus published the catalogue,
repeated attempts to publish a description of Kircher’s gallery had been made
by Kircher’s close disciple Kaspar Schott.[35]
Schott’s association with Kircher had begun in 1630, when he was studying in
Würzburg, a city that both Schott and his master had to abandon with the
onslaught of the Swedish troops of Gustavus Adolphus in 1631. Whereas Kircher
fled to the South of France, arriving in the Jesuit province of Lyon along with
40 other Jesuit refugees, Schott made for Tournai, and then began a series of
wanderings through Sicily, where he completed his studies and taught in a
number of Jesuit colleges.[36]
Between late 1652 and 1654, Schott was finally reunited with Kircher in Rome
for an extraordinarily intense period of activity centered around the recently
founded museum, a period that was to fuel his prolific output in the years that
followed.[37] In addition
to assisting Kircher in the museum, Schott performed a number of other tasks.
While Kircher laboured to complete his monumental Oedipus Aegyptiacus,
Schott patiently edited the third edition of Kircher’s Magnes. An
anonymous foreword by the “Author’s colleague in literary matters” inserted
into this edition gives a graphic picture of the conscientious approach taken
by Schott to this task:
I
examined and emended all of the calculations and arithmetic tables with great
care. I inspected the words in Latin, Greek and Hebrew of authors who were
cited in the original sources and where they had been corrupted I restored
them. I compared the magnetic declinations and inclinations, and other
observations sent here to the Author (who had asked for them by letters) with
the autographs, and eliminated typographical errors. I inspected the diagrams
even engraved on brass or wood, and emended the mistakes, restoring the missing
or erroneous letters, lines and signs. For several elevations I substituted
more accurate ones. From time to time I eliminated words, or added them, or
changed them, when I noticed that the sense was either false, altered or
unclear. In arranging the Appendices, Paradoxes, Problems, and new Experiments
and Machines written by the Author, or given to me to write, I conserved an
order that altered the order of the previous editions as little as possible
[...] I omitted, finally, no task that I felt would contribute to the splendour
of the Work.[38]
Modern editors may take note.
As well as working as Kircher’s editor, Schott was deeply involved with the
machines of the museum, and it is to his works that we will turn to attempt to
situate Kircher’s machines in a magical tradition. Schott’s Mechanica
Hydraulico-Pneumatica was published in 1657, shortly after his return to
Germany. Apart from the appendix, which dealt with the new “Magdeburg”
experiment carried out by Otto von Guericke to demonstrate the existence of a
vacuum, Schott had composed the book while he was still in Rome with Kircher,
as he explains in a “Notice to the Reader”, excusing himself for often writing
as if he was still living in Rome. Schott writes that he plans “to compose a
Natural Magic, collected from the printed works and manuscripts of the most
learned man Athanasius Kircher, of world-wide fame, and also from all of his
notes and loose pieces of paper that are in my possession, as well as from the
works of other approved authors and the inventions of ours (i.e. Jesuits),
composed in all trustworthiness and as the result of much study, established
through my own experiments and those of others”. His promised work,
subsequently published as the Magia Universalis Naturae et Artis, will
contain “various, curious and exotic spectacles of admirable effects, wonders
of recondite inventions, that are rightly called magic, free from all imposture
and suspicion of the forbidden Art”.[39]
In the meantime, Schott’s Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica consists in an
exhaustive description of the hydraulic and pneumatic machines found in
Kircher’s museum. As he writes in the preface to the work:
There
is, in the much-visited Museum (that we will soon publish in print) of the Most
learned and truly famous Author mentioned above (i.e. Kircher), a great
abundance of Hydraulic and Pneumatic Machines, that are beheld and admired with
enormous delight of their souls by those Princes and literati who rush
from all cities and parts of the world to see them, and who hungrily desire to
know how they are made, and so that I can satisfy their desire to know the
construction of the machines, I have undertaken to show the fabric, and almost
the anatomy of all of the Machines in the said Museum, or already shown
elsewhere by the same author.[40]
Schott promises to give his
readers detailed instructions on how to make instruments “for garden pleasures,
for the utility of houses, for the commodities, and ornaments, particularly of
Princes, who derive greater pleasure of their eyes and souls from these things
than they might expect profit for their estate. Neither will we be satisfied
with delighting only the eyes, we also prepare a feast for the ears, with
various self-moving and self-sounding organs and instruments, that we will
excite to motion and sound only by the flow of water and the stealthy approach
of air, with no less ease than skill”.[41]
Schott’s Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica,
then, provides an eloquent “identikit” picture of the ideal audience for
Kircherian wonders, a leisured, decadent class of princes and cardinals, quite
happy to turn their minds away from pressing matters of church and state in
order to delight their minds, eyes and ears with the sensual pleasures provided
by Kircherian machines. From the rich study of the intellectual culture of the
Habsburg monarchy carried out by R.J.W. Evans, we see that this description was
entirely consonant with the consuming interests of the prominent members of the
Viennese courts of Ferdinand III and Leopold I.[42] The wonders described in Schott’s work give
us a vivid picture of how Kircher and his disciples went about satisfying the
remarkable thirst for hydraulic and pneumatic curiosities of a Catholic elite
on a daily basis. In one instance, Schott describes an incident in which the
two Jesuit companions came across the marvellous spectacle of a “water-vomiting
seat” in a Roman villa:
Lately
Father Kircher and I were wandering through the fields of Rome to take the air,
and we went into a suburban villa, on the facade of which an elegantly made
sciatheric sundial was painted. While we were looking at this curiosity, we
were invited by a Noble Frenchman to inspect the building and garden more
thoroughly. We entered, and first saw a most delightful pleasure-garden, filled
with flowers and fruit, and ornamented with statues of all kinds. We then
entered a most elegant house, ornamented with paintings, emblems, epigrams, and
epigraphs in Latin, Greek and Arabic, and thoroughly filled with statues and
artificious machines, so that even Pope Innocent X, as he was being carried
through the same fields with the delight of his soul, entered the same house
and garden, and was not reluctant to honour it with his presence. The villa
belongs to Jean Laborne, a French Presbyter and Knight of the same Pope.
Amongst the other things, by which I was most delighted, was a seat known as
hydratic or water-vomiting because of its effect.[43]
If we are to take De
Sepibus’s list of machines as a guide, we are forced to conclude that the
predominantly German princely audience of the productions of Kircher and Schott
had a peculiar fascination with regurgitation. From the two-headed Imperial Eagle
(fig. 1), belching water copiously from its twin
gullets, to the “water-vomiting hydraulic machine, at the top of which stands a
figure vomiting up various liquids for guests to drink”, not to mention the
various birds and snakes ingesting and throwing-up water from goblets, the
spectacle of retching, puking, and spewing seems to have been the very epitome
of good taste and noble amusement for the visitors to Kircher’s museum (see
e.g. fig. 10). Schott further confirms this impression
of an “emetophiliac” Catholic elite. One of the most endearing machines of his Mechanica
is a “cancer vomitor” (fig. 11), illustrated as
a nauseous lobster, bending forlornly over the edge of a goblet in its unhappy
state. One is left unsure whether sea-sickness or the drinking of the goblet’s
contents is responsible. Like a number of the machines illustrated in Schott’s
works, this device was adapted from the popular work by Daniel Schwenter
(1585-1636), later expanded by Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (1607-1658), the Deliciae
Physico-Mathematicae.[44]
Perhaps the most graphic demonstration of the cult of emesis is in Schott’s
description of a French visitor to Rome with an unusual talent:
While
I was writing this, Jean Royer, a Frenchman from Lyon, who is superior to all in
the art that we have been discussing, arrived here. From his stomach he brought forth twelve or fourteen differently
coloured perfumed waters, most perfect liquors, distilled wine that could be
set alight, and rock oil that burned with a lamp-wick, lettuces and flowers of
all kinds, with complete and fresh leaves. He also exhibits a fountain by
projecting water out of his mouth into the air for the time of two Misereres.[45]
The description of this
technicolour spectacle is followed by a letter from Kircher, in which he
reassures worried readers that the digestive system of Mr. Royer was entirely
free of demonic interference, and that his stomach-churning feats were carried
out purely through the manipulation of natural causes. Royer, it transpires,
had even entertained the Emperor at Regensburg, also exhibiting his “art”
before “five kings and many princes and learned men”. In Schott’s work, Royer
himself is classified as a machine – “Machina VII”, included with other
incontinent “hydropota”. Moreover, in order to ensure that his talent was
entirely natural, Kircher had studied his act closely in the Musaeum
Kircherianum itself, so he certainly earns his place in a discussion of the
museum’s hydraulic machines.[46] The Miserere, incidentally, appears
to have been a commonly used and even somewhat standardized unit of time
measurement for seventeenth century Jesuit experimenters. Elsewhere, Schott
describes one of his more dangerous experiments involving heating a sealed
glass tube full of mercury, recounting that “after about the time in which
Psalm 50, Miserere mei Deus, can be recited, it opened a way for itself
with great violence and noise” When Schott performed this experiment in front
of the son of the Duke of Holstein, the noise of the explosion brought the
young nobleman’s servants running in fear of an assassination attempt. Jesuits describing Manfredo Settala’s
burning mirrors in Milan remarked that “the smaller mirror, that burns at a
distance of 7 braccie, works in barely an Ave Maria, whereas for
the one that burns at 15 or 16 braccie, which works more slowly, you
have to wait for a whole Miserere”. One can imagine the groups of
Jesuits as they recite the rosary and sing hymns while incinerating objects
with burning glasses, causing terrifying explosions or witnessing Jean Royer’s
superhuman feats of projection.[47]
The catoptric cat
Robert Darnton has remarked
that the torture of cats was a source of constant amusement in early modern
Europe, and that the historical investigation of arcane forms of humour has
much to offer our understanding of major historical transformations. His famous
study of the “great cat massacre” carried out by a group of Parisian printer’s
apprentices allowed him to investigate the social tensions that formed the
historical prologue to the French Revolution.[48]
More recently, Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman have used Darnton’s insights
in an original study of some of the more ludic machines and instruments
produced by Kircher and others, in particular the sunflower clock (fig. 12) that Kircher displayed to Nicholas Claude Fabri
de Peiresc in Aix, and the “cat piano”, a grisly musical instrument, said to
have been invented by Kircher, that worked by prodding the tails of cats with
spikes driven by a keyboard.[49]
Whereas for Darnton’s Parisian apprentices, the torture of cats was a humorous
means for an abused community of labourers to score a symbolic victory over
their wealthy bosses, for Kircher and his princely clients the manipulation of
animals and automata was arguably a symbolic means of reinforcing the political
and philosophical status quo. Schott recounts that one of the most
“artificious and delightful” machines in Kircher’s museum was a catoptric
chest, presumably identical with the “catoptric theatre” described by De Sepibus
(fig. 13). Two other catoptric chests existed in Rome,
according to Schott, one in the Villa Borghese and the other in the “villa of
some other Prince”, and both exhibited wonderful spectres of objects – forests
of pine trees, cities, elegantly furnished houses, treasures of gold and silver
vases and pearls and infinite libraries of books, that seem so real that even
those who were knowledgeable in catoptrics were sometimes fooled, and less
intelligent people frequently held out their hands and attempted to take hold
of the “species of things”, to the great amusement of spectators. Kircher’s
catoptric chest, however, far surpassed the competition, both in multiplying
species and in displaying illusory scenes. It could display infinite
colonnades, tables covered with all sorts of delicacies, inexhaustable
treasures, to the great torment of avaricious visitors who often, according to
Schott, attempted to make off with the infinite quantities of money contained
in the chest, only to be left with a handful of air. “You will exhibit the most
delightful trick”, Schott informs us, “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, some of them standing
close to him and others spread very far away from him, 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
the other cats, until finally, with various noises, and miserable whines he
declares his various affectations of indignation, rage, jealousy, love and
desire. Similar spectacles can be exhibited with other animals”.[50]
The catoptric chest, then, is an instrument for the manipulation and revelation
of the passions. It is a theatre of social distinction, using visual illusion
for the detection and display of baser human traits such as avarice and the
instinctual passions of animals. An understanding of the magical art of
catoptrics can allow one to trick people (and cats) into revealing their hidden
natures. Kircher’s emotionally confused catoptric cat is thus very different
from the pampered aristocratic cats slaughtered by the Parisian artisans
described by Darnton. By making a spectacle out of incivility or popular
superstition, devices such as the catoptric theatre, the Delphic oracle and the
various vomiting-machines shown to visitors to Kircher’s museum contributed to
a particular definition of early modern European civility.[51]
Many of Athanasius Kircher’s machines were thus civilizing machines. Descartes’
Treatise on the Passions of the Soul, published in 1649, attempted to
provide a manual to instruct his readers both to combat the effects of the
passions on the soul and to dissimulate their outward manifestations.[52]
The vogue for automata and machine-models of the human body in the seventeenth
century was closely connected to the desire to exercise control over the body
through discipline and manners. The Jesuit educational system, experienced by
Descartes as a schoolboy at La Flèche, laid great emphasis on bodily
comportment and behavioural discipline, epitomized by the choreographed
movements of Jesuit ballet. The limits of the man-machine metaphor
exercised a powerful fascination over Kircher’s contemporaries. While Marin
Mersenne (1588-1648) theorized about mechanised musical ensembles, and instruments
such as the “Archiviole”, allowing a single player to play multiple
musical instruments simultaneously, and shortly after Justus Lipsius
(1547-1606) had theorized about the well-disciplined army as a war-machine,
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) opened his Leviathan,
published in the very year that the Musaeum Kircherianum was officially
founded, with the famous metaphor of the commonwealth as a giant automaton,
manipulated by a single monarch.[53]
Peter Dear has recently evoked the close links between the mastery of the
passions, the rise of European absolutism and the culture of automata in early
modern Europe.[54]
We have frequently been led
to discuss the wonders produced by Kircher and Schott in magical terms. But
just what was the magic practiced by Kircher, that he took such pains to
distinguish from the illicit arts that invoked the aid of demons? What were its
boundaries? How did it intersect with natural philosophy, and with the
mathematical arts? How did it find a home in the bosom of the Jesuit order and,
especially, in Kircher’s Museum?
Kircherian magic: The
roots of a paradigm
Kircherian machines, we have
suggested, like Jesuit rhetorical devices, emblems and learned orations, helped
to draw a boundary between elite and vulgar. To mount an attack on the causal
knowledge at the core of the Kircherian culture of machines on physical grounds
was comparable to challenging the authenticity of the Corpus Hermeticum
and the traces of the prisca sapientia contained in Egyptian
hieroglyphics on philological grounds. Both challenges threatened the mystical
core of a structure of political power in which the Jesuit order constituted
the cement linking the Counter-Reformation Papacy to the Habsburg court in
Vienna through a sophisticated network of intermediaries. The intellectual
project of Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, supported by Ferdinand III,
cannot be separated from Kircher’s artificial magic.[55]
Kircher’s marvellous machines took their place alongside his wooden
reconstructions of Egyptian obelisks in the Musaeum Kircherianum. A
letter from Schott inserted into the first volume of Kircher’s Oedipus
Aegyptiacus gives us a revealing picture of the mutual legitimation that
characterised Kircher’s close relationship with his Habsburg-linked clients:
In
Kircher’s archive, I discovered an enormous number of letters, many of which
were sent by him at every moment by Princes of the Christian world, and the
supreme heads of the Roman Empire, and the Most Wise Emperor FERDINAND III, the
Most Serene and Most Wise Queen of Sweden Christina, many Most Eminent
Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, Most Serene Electors of the Holy Roman
Empire, Most Distinguished and Illustrious Dukes, Princes, Counts, Barons and
innumerable Nobles of the same Empire and other Nations, all of whom admire and
praise Kircher’s learning, and thank him for the books he sent them and for his
other enormous productions, they urge and solicit him to print other monuments
to erudition, they offer him help and protection, they communicate secrets, and
ask for arcana, and for the unravelling of arcane matters, they seek the
interpretation of exotic languages, strange inscriptions, and unknown
characters, and various questions. I would have appended here various long
letters from Emperors, other Princes and almost all the learned Men of this
century, showing singular affection and respect if the small space and the
Author’s modesty had permitted and if I had not reserved that for a different
time and place[56]
While Kircher provided
princes, young and old, with enigmas, puzzles, emblems and arcane knowledge
that confirmed their social distinction, they provided him with financial
support and conferred authority on his works. Elsewhere Schott tells us of a
revealing dream that Kircher had in the Collegio Romano while suffering
from a serious bout of illness. After requesting a strong sleeping-mixture of
his own specification from the college pharmacy, Kircher fell into a deep
sleep, and dreamt that he had been elected to the Papal throne and was overcome
with joy. He received legations and congratulatory messages from all the
Christian princes, applause from all peoples, and, in his dream-role as Pope,
built colleges and churches in Rome for the different nations of the world, and
established “many other things for the propagation of the Catholic faith”.
Schott is particularly interested in the healing capacities of Kircher’s dream
– the older Jesuit pronounced himself to be restored to full health the
following morning. However, without too much imagination, his dream might also
be seen as hinting at more than a modicum of personal ambition on Kircher’s
part. Although some of Kircher’s other nocturnal visions were later transformed
into reality, most dramatically a graphic vision of the imment destruction of the
Jesuit college in Würzburg by the Swedish armies of Gustavus Adolphus in 1631,
his narcotically-induced dream of the papal tiara was never to be realized,
although one is tempted to wonder what directives he might have issued in this
role.[57] Despite the fact that Kircher was never
elected Pope, he was arguably the ruler of his own invented polity. The Oedipus
Aegyptiacus contains no less than thirty-one separate letters of dedication
for its different sections and provides us with a suggestive map of Kircher’s
political universe. Prominent dedicatees include: the holy Roman Emperor
Ferdinand III, Pope Alexander VII, Ferdinand IV King of the Romans, the Grand
Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand II de’ Medici, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, Elector
of Mainz; Archdukes Leopold Wilhelm and Bernhard Ignaz of Austria, Johann
Friedrich Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, and a host of other princes, cardinals,
counsellors and confessors of the Holy Roman Empire.
Kircher’s Oedipus
Aegyptiacus provides an ancient pedigree of magic that justified its
revival amongst his distinguished dedicatees and their peers, a pedigree echoed
in Gaspar Schott’s Magia Universalis.
In its broad lines,
legitimate magic was first given by God to Adam, along with the other forms of
knowledge. However, true magic was corrupted, through the “Cainite evil”,
leading to the division between “licit” and “illicit” magic. The architect of
the corruption of magic was, as Pliny recounts, Zoroaster. But which Zoroaster?
A number of different Zoroasters appear in the history books. On this subject,
many learned authors were in disagreement, but Kircher and Schott, aided by a
manuscript of the apocryphal Book of Enoch studied by Kircher in the Greek
library of Messina, are in agreement that Zoroaster is identifiable with Noah’s
rebellious son Cham, who learned this art from the impious Cainites before the
Flood and inscribed it on stones and columns so that it would not be destroyed
in the deluge, transmitting it to his followers once the waters had abated.
These columns were the very columns described by St. Augustine, when he wrote
in the City of God that Cham, Noah’s son, erected fourteen columns
bearing the canons of the arts and the sciences, seven made of brass and seven
of bricks. After propagating his magic in Egypt, where he had settled after the
flood and the linguistic confusion of the Tower of Babel, Cham left his kingdom
to his son Misraim, and departed to spread the astrological and magical arts to
Chaldea, Persia, Medea and Assyria, eventually obtaining the name “Zoroaster”,
meaning “living star” as he appeared to be consumed with celestial fire in his
zeal to spread magical knowledge.[58]
What is magic? Schott tells
us that magic is whatever is “marvellous and goes beyond the sense and
comprehension of common men”. Common men because to “wise people or those who
are more learned than the common people the causes of magical effects are
normally apparent”. Natural magic, according to Schott, is “a recondite
knowledge of the secrets of nature, that applies things to things, or, to speak
philosophically, actives to passives, in the correct time, place and manner, by
the nature, properties, occult powers, sympathies and antipathies of individual
things, bringing about some marvels in this way that appear magical or
miraculous to those who are ignorant of the causes”. An example of natural
magic is asbestos that resists combustion in flames, as Kircher had
demonstrated very frequently in Rome. Other examples of natural magic include
the magnetic marvels described by Gilbert, Cabeo and Kircher, and the effects
of music on the venom of the tarantula, also described by Kircher. However, one
must beware, as not all magic said to be natural is truly so, the sunflower’s
supposed capacity to make men invisible being an example of something that
couldn’t possibly happen naturally. Schott’s encyclopedia of natural and
artificial magic comprises four parts: Optics (“that is those things regarding
sight and objects that are seen, and whatever in Optics, Catoptrics, Dioptrics,
Parastatics, Chromatics, Catoptro-Dioptro-Caustics, Catoptrologics, and other
similar sciences, arts, practices and secrets is rare, portentous and beyond
the understanding of the common people, when they perceive rays directly,
relected or refracted at the eye”), Acoustics (“that is, whatever pertains to
hearing, and the object heard, and it will explain all of hearing, sound, the
human voice, harmony, the Oeconomy of music, by analogy to the oeconomy of
sight and vision, colours, lights, and their appearances, but only the rarer,
less obvious ones that fall under praxis and operation”), Mathematics (“that is
Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Statics, Hydraulics, Pneumatics, Pyrobolics,
Gnomonics, Steganography, Cryptology, Hydrography, Nautical matters, and many
other things, but only the rarer and more amusing and wonderful matters, and
most of the practical things that come under human industry”) and Physics (“
whatever is wonderful, paradoxical or portentous in Nature. Of this kind are
magnetism, sympathy, physiognomy, metallurgy, botany, stichiotics, medicine,
meteorology, the secrets of animals, stones and innumerable other things”).[59]
Natural magic has two
branches in Schott’s system: operative and divinatory. The latter include such
arts as physiognomy, allowing a person’s character to be determined by
examining their features, colour and voice. Divinatory natural magic, however,
cannot be used to find supernatural gifts or sins, as these don’t depend on
nature but on free human will.
Artificial magic, or operative natural magic, is, in Schott’s definition
“an art or a faculty of producing some wonder through human industry, by
applying various instruments”. Schott’s
examples of this art, culled from an assortment of classical sources, include the glass sphere of Archimedes
described by Cicero, which depicted the motions of the different planets (fig. 14), the flying wooden dove of Archytas, the small
golden birds singing to the Byzantine emperor Leo, and the flying and singing
birds and hissing serpents of Boethius. More recent pieces of artificial magic
included the eagle of Regiomontanus that reportedly flew to meet Charles V when
he was arriving in Nuremberg, and accompanied him to the gates of the city, and
an iron fly also made by Regiomontanus that flew out of the hands of its
artisan, and flew around the assembled guests, and a statue in the shape of a
wolf that walked around and played a drum, that Schott had heard about from an
eyewitness. The talking head reportedly made out of brass by Albertus Magnus
was a further example of artificial magic for Schott. Whereas some claimed that
this was a mere fable, and others suggested that it was the work of the devil,
Schott disagreed, arguing that it was made by human industry alone. Kircher
himself, Schott had just heard in a letter sent from Rome, was in the process
of making just such a speaking statue for the visit of Queen Christina of
Sweden to the Musaeum Kircherianum, “a statue that will have to answer
the questions that it is asked”. The Delphic Oracle, then, places Kircher’s
magical productions in a highly respectable historical series of artificial
wonders, and rids Albertus Magnus of the suspicion of sorcery that allegedly
led Thomas Aquinas to destroy his talking statue of Memnon.[60]
The machines in Kircher’s
museum occupy a central place in Schott’s exhaustive account of the licit
magical arts. But what exactly were the boundaries of these arts? Where is the
point of transgression? Schott’s answer is simple: illicit magic involves pacts
with demons rather than the mere application of human industry and artifice to
natural causes. Following the principal Jesuit authorities on the matter, the
humanist Martin del Rio (1551-1608) and the philosopher Benito Pereira
(1535-1610), Schott insists that demons are restricted to the manipulation of
natural causes. Only God can effect
miracles that go against the natural order. Demons are, effectively, just very
good artificial magicians, manipulating natural causes with greater dexterity
than even the most adroit instrumentally-enhanced human being.[61]
But what exactly is the order
of nature that even demons cannot pervert? Schott’s answer is unequivocal:
demons are bound to obey the laws of Aristotelian natural philosophy! “They
cannot create anything, as this exceeds the power of acting naturally. Neither
can they derive a substantial form immediately from a subject, without a prior
alteration, because this cannot be done naturally”. Demons cannot even create a
vacuum, “as Nature abhors this and no experiment carried out until now proves
that a vacuum has been made, as we have said in the Mechanica
Hydraulico-Pneumatica”. If demons could not make a vacuum, what chance did
Evangelista Torricelli, Valeriano Magni or Otto von Guericke stand of doing so?
Schott’s account of the absolute limits of artificial magic reveals its
staunchly Aristotelian core. The artificial magic practiced and described by
Schott and Kircher relied on an unchanging body of assumptions about the normal
behaviour of the natural world. Schott’s Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica had opened with a list of the four
fundamental principles underlying all hydraulic machines: the “attractive power
to avoid a vacuum”, the “power of expulsion, avoiding the penetration of
bodies”, the rarefactive power (i.e. the “expulsion or attraction of water by
rarefaction and condensation”) and the weight of the water seeking equilibrium.
The purpose of Schott’s work is not to investigate the truth of these
principles, which have the status of axioms. Instead, his aim is to catalogue
the surprising effects that can be obtained by combining these causes in
different ways.[62]
In discussing Otto von
Guericke’s experimental demonstration of the existence of a vacuum using his antlia
pneumatica, Schott remarks casually that of course, the plenitude of nature
is invulnerable even to an angel, and thus Guericke’s device could never have
produced a real vacuum. A refusal to allow the instrument to produce new
natural philosophy did not put an end to Jesuit discussions of hydraulics.
Instead, the device was removed from circulation in the philosophical domain
and relocated within the context of the Wunderkammer. Schott's Mechanica-Hydraulico
Pneumatica includes the experiments performed by Evangelista Torricelli and
Gasparo Berti to demonstrate the existence of the vacuum in a section entitled De
machinis hydraulicis variis, where they are surrounded by a ball made to
spin in the air, a perforated flask for carrying wine known as the "Sieve
of the Vestal Virgin ", and a "phial for cooling tobacco smoke".
Unhealthy philosophical readings of Machina VI (the Torricelli and Berti
tubes) are dismissed by Schott as the writings of "Neotherici
Philosophastri" and "insolent and unmannerly braggarts
proclaiming a triumph before victory".[63] To situate the Torricellian experiment in
the context of trick fountains and water-vomiting seats was to insulate it from
the Aristotelian philosophy taught in the classrooms of Jesuit colleges. In a
strong sense, then, the Aristotelian physics at the basis of the artificial
magic of Kircher and Schott was invulnerable, except to occasional Divine
intervention. Machines combined a pre-established set of causes to produce
surprising effects, leaving the spectators to attempt to decipher the
combination of natural causes underlying the appearances.
Schott’s accounts of natural
and demonic magic drew heavily on the comprehensive treatment of magic composed
by the Antwerp-born Jesuit Martin del Rio, the Disquisitionum Magicarum
Libri Sex, first published in 1599. Del Rio was a scholarly prodigy before
he joined the Jesuit order. At the tender age of twenty he published a work on
the Latin grammarian Gaius Solinus, later attacked by Claude Saumaise. Shortly
afterwards, he published a work on Claudius Claudianus that cited more than
1,100 authors. Before he joined the Jesuit order he occupied the important
public offices of Senator of Brabant, Auditor of the army, Vice-chancellor and
Procurator General. Del Rio’s three-volume treatment of magic was an enormously
influential work, the influence of which was felt in witch-trials as much as in
the scholarly arena.[64]
Chapter IV of Del Rio’s work deals with artificial magic, which Del Rio divides
into “mathematical magic”, deploying the principles of geometry, arithmetic and
astronomy, and “prestidigitatory magic”, involving deliberate deception and
sleight-of-hand. The former includes all the the famous mechanical marvels that
Schott listed. Del Rio’s approach to magic is to build an impenetrable wall
between supernatural phenomena, which are the prerogative of God alone, and
artificial and preternatural phenomena, which can be produced by men, by demons
and by angels. Preternatural phenomena are those which appear to most people to
go beyond nature’s capacities, but are in fact achieved through the combination
of natural causes by human, demonic or angelic agents. The belong not to the
“Order of Grace”, the realm of true miracles brought about by divine
intervention in opposition the laws of nature, but to the Prodigious Order,
reserved for phenomena that resemble miracles, but are in fact carried out
through the manipulation of natural forces.[65]
Kircherian thaumaturgy, then, appears to transcend what can be achieved through
the human manipulation of natural powers, thus leading some to view them as
being produced by demonic means. Good angels do not collaborate in magical
works, according to Del Rio, so any magical feat that goes beyond human
capacities, such as the production of healing effects through incantations,
must be due to the “ministry of bad angels”, that is to say the companions of
Lucifer, as “no words have a natural power of healing wounds or illnesses, or
driving away other injuries”.[66]
Incantations employed by Catholic priests in sacraments and exorcisms did not
work naturally, but through the concurrence of divine grace, and thus belonged
to the Order of Grace, and are thus excluded from the natural order.
Kircher’s machines ludically
encouraged spectators to read them as wonders achieved through angelic or
demonic concurrence. Many of the machines described in De Sepibus’ list even
contained small genies, angels and demons, moved by occult forces to point at
letters, scales and inscriptions, a miniature automated population that positively
cried out to be interpreted as preternatural, and belonging to Del Rio’s
prodigious order. While Descartes hypothesised
a single evil genie to demolish the basis of scholastic metaphysics in
the first of his Méditations Metaphysiques, Kircher and Schott employed
an obedient army of them to uphold the core of Aristotelian physics (see figs. 8, 15, 16, 17).
Benito Pereira, Schott’s
other chief authority on magical matters, was one of the most influential
philosophers of the Jesuit order in the late sixteenth century, despite coming
under suspicion of heterodoxy for his sympathy for the philosophy of Averröes.[67]
Pereira’s textbook on natural philosophy, De Communibus omnium rerum
naturalium principijs & affectionibus, went through a great number of
editions, and was widely used for teaching in Jesuit colleges. His widely read
work on magic and divination, the Adversus fallaces & superstitiosas
artes, id est, De magia, de observatione somniorum, et de divinatione
astrologica, argued that demons could not pervert the natural order of the
Aristotelian elements or create a vacuum, and this may have been the source for
Schott’s similar assertions. Pereira insists that men skilled in knowledge of
nature can work great wonders by natural magic, but those who are either wicked
or ignorant may only learn this art from demons, “for scarcely any mortal or
certainly very few indeed, and those men of the keenest mind who have employed
diligent observation for a long time, can attain to such natural magic”.[68]
Kircher clearly considered
himself to be one of the latter, and offers us his own working definition of
natural magic in his Magnes, a definition that is pretty close to those
provided by Del Rio, Pereira and Schott:
Here I call natural magic that which produces unusual
and prodigious effects through natural causes alone, excluding any commerce,
implicit or explicit, with the Enemy of humankind. Of this kind are those
machines that are called for this reason “thaumatourgikai”, that sometimes
transmit prodigious movements to an effigy from air and water contained in
siphons by a subtle art, and sometimes blow spirits into an organ arranged in a
certain way to make statues burst forth in speech, and similar things, that can
seem like miracles to people who are ignorant of their causes.[69]
Kircherian machines thus
walked a tightrope between the demonic and the miraculous. To understand how
the magical aspects of Kircher’s machines were experienced by contemporaries,
it may be helpful to look at how Kircher’s Musaeum was visited.
Visiting the machines
The frontispiece of the
fourth volume of the first edition of Kaspar Schott’s Magia Universalis
depicts a crowned man pointing a magic wand at a flowerbed, making a clear
visual link between social status and the practice of natural magic. The
opening of Schott’s work provides a justification of magic that places
Kircher’s machines directly in the context of aristocratic visits to the Jesuit
Collegio Romano:
In
my various long journeys through Germany, France, Italy and Sicily, and in my
frequent occupation teaching mathematics both in public and in private, I have
always found that almost everybody, especially Nobles and Princes, not only
youths, but also men conspicuous for their learning, prudence, worldly experience
and dignity displayed a propensity towards those disciplines that promise and
set forward things that are marvellous, curious, hidden and beyond the
comprehension of the common people. I
hardly ever saw anyone, who, when he had achieved a little mastery of these
matters, or had examined devices constructed from their prescription, was not
thereby incited to continual study and did not surrender himself entirely to
this discipline, or wish to do so if other occupations had permitted. Witnesses
to this, to omit other examples, are the whole of Rome, and the most celebrated
Roman College and Athenaeum of our Society, the seat and residence of
Athanasius Kircher, a man of great fame in the whole world. For, every day the
inhabitants of both [city and college] look at and admire (as I myself beheld
with amazement and delight of my soul when I was [Kircher’s] assistant in
literary matters for a few years) those works that many people hasten at every
moment to behold, excited by the fame of his learning and the desire of seeing
the things that he displays in his famous Museum. These works, constructed from
the recondite arts and sciences, are truly deserving of wonder. The visitors
are drawn from the most illustrious ranks, in doctrine and dignity, including Royalty
and Cardinals, foreigners as often as natives. How many of them are instructed
privately by him, even if occupied by other most grave matters, particularly
the sons of Princes, recommended by very polite letters, with profit flowing
into their whole nations and even into the whole Roman Church as a result![70]
Here Schott suggests that
Kircher’s museum in Rome functioned as a powerful magnet for a Catholic elite,
attracting princely visitors to the Collegio Romano, and encouraging them
to send their sons to be privately educated in arcane matters by Kircher.
Kircher’s aristocratic apprentices in magic would then return to their
countries of origin, having acquired a taste for curiosity, and this would
bring clear benefits both for their countries and for the Catholic church as a
whole. Schott’s description of the social function of the museum is consonant
with the apostolic goals of the Jesuit educational system, as developed since
the mid-sixteenth century. Ignatius Loyola’s Majorcan assistant Jerónimo Nadal
(1507-1580), famously remarked that “for us lessons and scholarly exercises are
a sort of hook with which we fish for souls”.[71]
In 1594 Christoph Clavius had argued that excellence in the mathematical
disciplines would aid the Jesuits to gain precious ground on the Protestant
pedagogues that were enticing aristocrats away from the Catholic church,
writing that
[T]here
is no one who does not perceive how much it is central to every objective of
the Society to have some men who are most outstandingly erudite in these minor
studies of mathematics, rhetoric, and language [...] who would spread the
eminent reputation of the Society far and wide, unite the love of noble youths,
curb the bragging of the heretics in these arts, and institute a tradition of
excellence in all those disciplines in the Society.[72]
The creation of a private mathematical academy, along with similar academies for rhetoric, Greek and Hebrew, would, Clavius argued, create Jesuit experts in all of these disciplines, who, “when they are distributed in various nations and kingdoms like sparkling gems [...] will be a source of great fear to all enemies, and an incredible incitment to make young people flock to us from all the parts of the world, to the great honour of the Society”.[73] We have argued above that Kircher inherited Clavius’s musaeum mathematicum. Schott’s description of the function of Kircher’s museum as a magnet for a curious princely elite suggests that it had much in common with Clavius’s prophetic vision of the Jesuit educa