Magic and artifice in the collection of AthanasiusKircher

Mark A. Waddell

Lyman Briggs College, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA

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Situated at the center of intellectual life in baroque Rome,the museum administered by the Jesuit naturalist Atha-nasius Kircher (1602–1680) simultaneously instructed andbemused its audiences with an exuberant mix of exoticanimals, classical art and technological marvels. Kircher’splayful use of spectacle and his irrepressible fondness for‘‘magic’’ were derided by contemporaries as frivolouswonder-mongering, but the lavish machines at the heartof his museum were more than mere showpieces.Instead, they presented audiences with a compellingvision of the natural world in which the hidden founda-tions of the universe could be captured and displayed byartifice. Kircher’s collection was in itself a vast instrumentof revelation, conceived on a grander scale than the tele-scope of Galileo but rooted all the same in contemporaryscientific culture.

Dilettante and wonder-mongerSeventeenth-century visitors to the Jesuit house of learn-ing in baroque Rome, the Collegio Romano, almost cer-tainly would have found themselves at some point in theastonishing collection of Athanasius Kircher. There, theymay have watched as a small mechanical figure, perchedatop a complex hydraulic machine, forcefully vomited avariety of liquids for the delectation of Kircher’s guests,which they could then sip as they strolled through the restof the collection. For their religious edification they weretreated to the spectacle of Christ’s resurrection, tastefullyre-imagined in the center of a crystalline globe filled withwater. Nearby, invisible forces propelled a statue around asmall stage, leading some to wonder, with a touch ofunease, whether their host had gained the supernaturalcooperation of captive demons.

Themuseumof theCollegioRomano, which housed thesewonders, was an eclectic, almost overwhelming miscellanyof natural specimens, elaborate technologies and artistictreasures. In its entirety, the collection testified to theinfluence andwealth of the Jesuit order-tributes and exoticaflowed into Rome from every corner of the world to begathered here. Ancient Egyptian obelisks vied for spacewith monuments covered in Chinese script or with collec-tions of antique Roman coins; nearby, visitors would havefound animals native to the Indies and Mexico, brightlycolored birds from Brazil and a stuffed crocodile sent all theway from Java.

The true heart of the Kircherian collection, however,was a dizzying array of hydraulic, magnetic and optical

Corresponding author: Waddell, M.A. (waddellm@msu.edu).Available online 19 January 2010

www.sciencedirect.com 0160-9327/$ – see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserve

machines. Scattered amongst the obelisks and crocodiles,visitors discovered more feats of mechanical regurgitationfrom two-headed Habsburg eagles and dyspeptic lobsters(Figure 1), rotating crystalline spheres that mimicked therevolutions of the heavens, and mirrored cabinets thatoffered a range of startling optical illusions. Thesemachines, as well as numerous splashing fountains andelaborate clocks, demonstrated both the virtuosity ofseventeenth-century engineering and the sumptuous artis-try of the period.

At the same time, however, these devices were pre-sented as mysteries: their inner workings were carefullyhidden behind facades of metal and wood, and the causesbehind their observed behaviors were deliberatelyobscured, often byKircher himself, who delighted in callingthese machines ‘‘magical’’ and in forcing his visitors toguess how they worked. His fondness for mystery andobfuscation was not appreciated by everyone, however.Like some of Kircher’s visitors, the Knights of Malta onceaccused him of trapping a demon inside a magnetic ane-moscope, a device used to indicate the direction of the wind,because they could not fathom how the machine actuallyworked. Kircher’s idiosyncrasies also earned him the scornand ridicule of more sober-minded contemporaries, whoderided him as a dilettante and wonder-monger.

These were more than frivolous and bizarre pieces ofentertainment, however. Kircher’s spectacular machinescaptured and emulated the invisible foundations of theuniverse, transforming these devices into powerful instru-ments of revelation. As he beguiled and bewildered hisvisitors, Kircher also instructed them in how to study thenatural world, demonstrating both the limits of the sensesand the power of the imagination. Kircher’s ‘‘magical’’machines thus offer an intriguing glimpse of scientificinnovation in baroque Rome.

Collection and curatorAthanasius Kircher was one of the most well-known andflamboyantmembers of the Jesuit order in the seventeenthcentury (Figure 2). As the author ofmore than 30 books andthe curator of the collection in theCollegio Romano, he hada tremendous impact on the scientific and philosophicalculture of his day, not merely among his fellow Jesuits butconsiderably further afield as well. He was a deeply, evenwildly imaginative thinker – he once proposed a harpsi-chord that employed cats in place of strings, with keyboard-operated spikes that would poke the tails of the unfortu-nate animals and encourage them to ‘‘sing’’ – whose moreimplausible ideas sometimes met with open derision from

d. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2009.11.003

Figure 1. One of the many mechanical wonders in the Kircherian museum: the

cancer vomitor, or vomiting crab (though portrayed here as a lobster). From

Gaspar Schott’s Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica (Wurtzburg, 1657, p. 181).

Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford

University Libraries.

Figure 2. Athanasius Kircher, S.J., at the age of 62. From his Mundus Subterraneus

(Amsterdam, 1664). Courtesy of the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library of

the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

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contemporaries. In spite of this, his works were widelyread, even making their way to libraries in the Americas.

Kircher’s influence, however, was greatest within thewalls of his museum. He once boasted in a letter that ‘‘noforeign visitor who has not seen themuseum of theCollegioRomano can claim that he has truly been in Rome,’’ and hisguests included popes, cardinals, princes and a parade ofscientists and philosophers from across Europe.1 The col-lection was originally housed in Kircher’s own cubiculum,or private apartments, in the Collegio Romano, and wasexpanded in 1651 by the addition of another private collec-tion belonging to Alfonso Donnino, a Roman patrician.Even after the expanded collection moved to more spaciousquarters in the Collegio, however, it remained in manyrespects Kircher’s private domain. This was not a publicmuseum in the modern sense; one gained admissiondirectly from Kircher himself.

We find an illustration of this fact in the cataloguepublished in 1678 by Giorgio de Sepibus, Kircher’s erst-while assistant (Figure 3). On its frontispiece we are givena glimpse of the museum as it existed in its heyday, itsvaulted ceilings decorated with elaborate frescoes and itswalls crowded with innumerable objects. In the foregroundwe see Kircher himself speaking with a pair of visitors,

1 Findlen, Paula (2003) Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircherand the Roman College Museum. In Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters(Mordechai, F., ed.), p. 225, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA).

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presumably greeting them as they enter; the letter withwhich he has been presented is probably an introduction.The tableau, and particularly the letter, are themselvesexpressions of the carefully-regulated social conventionsthat dictated such encounters, and reinforce the fact that itwas Kircher himself who met with and guided his visitors.There were no unaccompanied strolls through the collec-tion, and as a result the museum provided Kircher with anexcellent opportunity to present his idiosyncratic view ofthe world to a select but influential public.

In fact, there is compelling evidence that Kircher sawhis collection as more than a simple repository for rareand unusual objects. In the preface to his catalogue, DeSepibus described the Kircherian museum as ‘‘theepitome of philosophical practice.’’2 His choice of wordswas no accident; it suggests that Kircher intended hiscollection to be a tangible demonstration of how best topractice natural philosophy, rather than merely anassemblage of rarities and puzzles. Other, contemporarycollections were used to demonstrate the erudition orwealth of their owners as well as to organize or system-atize the world in a way that permitted investigation andunderstanding. The Kircherian museum, however, por-trayed the world as fundamentally mysterious, criss-crossed by invisible forces that could be revealed onlyby Kircher’s lavish and complex machines. His collection,then, did not so much organize the world as expose thedifficulties inherent in studying it.

2 De Sepibus, Giorgio (1678) Romanii Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum Celeberri-mum (Amsterdam), Praefatio: ‘‘Artis itaque & Naturae ergasterium, disciplinarumMathematicum gazophylacium, philosophiae practicae epitomen, Musaeum Kircher-ianum hisce. . ..’’

Figure 3. An idealized portrait of the Kircherian collection in the Collegio Romano,

showing Kircher himself greeting a pair of visitors. Frontispiece to Giorgio de

Sepibus’ Romanii Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum Celeberrimum (Amsterdam,

1678). Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives,

Stanford University Libraries.

Figure 4. The legendary planetarium of Archimedes, labeled here as ‘‘The Sphere

of Archimedes, exhibiting the motion of the heavens by magnetic artifice.’’

Mentioned by classical authors such as Cicero, the planetarium was one of the

centerpieces of the Kircherian collection. From Kircher’ Magnes; Sive, De Arte

Magnetica, 2nd ed. (Cologne, 1643, p. 305). Courtesy of Department of Special

Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

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Secret knots and chainsPerhaps the most mysterious of natural objects was themagnet, which fascinated Kircher as it did many of hiscontemporaries. De Sepibus referred to it as the center-piece of the museum before lavishing it with still moreelaborate descriptions, such as ‘‘the prodigy of Nature’’ and‘‘the labyrinth of hidden and inscrutable virtues.’’3 Thecollection contained more than a dozen machines thatoperated by means of magnetism, each a delightful expres-sion of baroque spectacle. For example, the first magneticdevice described by De Sepibus featured a tiny representa-tion of Typhus, the Greek god of wind, seated at the tiller ofa crystalline boat that travelled around a miniature oceanby means of a ‘‘secret power,’’ thereby exhibiting a ‘‘mostpleasing spectacle’’ to the eyes. The ‘‘wind’’ that propelledthe tiny boat was, of course, a small magnet hidden underthe water. Other magnetic machines were reiterations ofwell-known feats of ancient ingenuity, such as the woodendove fashioned by Archytas that reputedly was capable offlight, and De Sepibus took some pains to mention that thecollection boasted ‘‘not one, but three’’ reproductions of thefamous rotating planetarium of Archimedes mentioned byCicero and other classical authors, displayed on the pro-menade in the middle of the museum (Figure 4).

Themagnet wasmore than an exotic curiosity, however;for Kircher, it embodied the unseen forces and correspon-dences that governed the universe. ‘‘The world is bound bysecret knots,’’ he once proclaimed, and he was fond of

3 De Sepibus, Giorgio (1678) p. 18: ‘‘Magnes subtilium cos ingeniorum, prodigiumNaturae, mirabilium thaumaturgus, reconditae virtutis inscrutabilis Labyrinthus,Kircheriani Musæi medulla, lapis est. . ..’’

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waxing eloquent about the invisible chains that he believedsupported the very fabric of the universe. Any science thatsought to unlock the structure of the world must necess-arily concern itself with these invisible foundations, andwith the assistance of the many spectacular machines thatfilled his museum Kircher sought to present his visitorswith a glimpse of these unseen chains. The goal was notmerely to entertain but, at the same time, to establish thepower and behavior of the correspondences that webbedthe world.

The magnetic machines that filled the Kircherian col-lection would have been troubling for baroque audiences,and not only because their operations could be comparedwith the invisible activity of demons or other spirits. If, asKircher claimed, his museum was a theatrum mundi, atheater or reflection of the world, then his visitors wereforced to grapple with the notion of a world in which muchwas obscured or hidden. Their senses were repeatedlycalled into question by the machines at the heart of theKircherian collection, either deceived by clever opticalillusions or rendered useless altogether by the ‘‘secretknots’’ that Kircher claimed to have placed on display.But as their senses failed, these audiences were exhortedbyKircher to exercise their imaginations instead, to use hisspectacular machines as ameans of ‘‘seeing’’ the world as itreally was. Just as Galileo had used the telescope decadesearlier to open the collective eyes of Europe to the hiddenmarvels of the solar system, Kircher used his devices toforce into view the unseen foundations of the world.

However high-minded Kircher’s goals may have been,however, his museum also demonstrated a fondness fortrickery and bemusement, a pattern of behavior that datedback to Kircher’s first appearance on the philosophical

Figure 5. Kircher’s fabled sunflower clock, labeled prominently as ‘‘the

conjunction of art and nature.’’ From his Magnes; Sive, De Arte Magnetica, 2nd

ed. (Cologne, 1643, p. 644). Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and

University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.

4 Gorman, Michael John (1999) From ‘‘The Eyes of All’’ to ‘‘Usefull Quarries inphilosophy and good literature’’: Consuming Jesuit Science, 1600–1665. The Jesuits:Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773 (John W. O’Malley, S.J., Gauvin Alex-ander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, S.J., eds.), University ofToronto Press (Toronto), p. 183.

5 Golinski, J.V. (1989) A Noble Spectacle: Phosphorus and the Public Cultures ofScience in the Early Royal Society. Isis 80(1), pp. 11–39.

6 Wilkins, J. (1648) Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be performedby Mechanical Geometry (London).

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stage. Having fled the religious instability in northernEurope, he arrived in southern France in 1631 and thenquickly sought to cement his reputation as a unique andinnovative thinker by exhibiting his marvelous ‘‘sunflowerclock’’ (Figure 5). Rotating to follow the sun’s path as itfloated in a basin of water, the sunflower was presented asa kind of living sundial, a melding of the natural and theartificial that was hailed by Kircher as an example of thepre-eminent science, harnessing the hidden powers of theworld in service to humanity. His audiences were suitablyimpressed, until they realized that the plant’s constantmotion was caused by a tiny magnet rather than by anynatural correspondence between the sun and the plant, asKircher had claimed. By then, however, Kircher hadalready been summoned to Rome and a prestigious pos-ition in theCollegio Romano, where he adroitly refused therequests of eminent philosophers – including the ailingGalileo – to examine his marvelous botanical sundial.

The machines at the heart of the Kircherian collection,like the sunflower clock, were presented as puzzles in needof a solution. At the same time, by ostensibly mirroring oremulating natural processes these examples of artificepresented the natural world itself as a vast puzzle, itsdepths concealed just as Kircher had concealed the innerworkings of his machines. But like thosemachines, too, theworld could be exposed and dismantled, its operations firstimagined and then confirmed by observation and exper-

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iment. For Kircher, the investigation of nature was aninherently pious exercise, a means of celebrating divineCreation, and this was the ultimate lesson offered by theKircherian museum: to know God through His works, oneneed only turn to artifice, experiment, and the basic prin-ciples of natural philosophy.

Magic, spectacle, and instructionIn 1663, shortly before one of the rare visits of Charles II tothe Royal Society of London, Christopher Wren (1632–

1723) pondered how best to capture the notoriously fickleattention of the King. Ultimately, he decided that ‘‘toproduce knacks only, and things to raise wonder, suchas Kircher. . .and even jugglers abound with, will scarcebecome the gravity of the occasion.’’4 Mere ‘‘knacks’’ andwonders were deemed by Wren too frivolous for seriousphilosophical demonstration, but it is telling that helumped Kircher together with ‘‘jugglers,’’ implying thatboth were concerned more with entertainment than edifi-cation.

Publicly, members of the Royal Society were leery ofexploiting spectacle in service to science. Thomas Sprat(1635–1713), who chronicled the early Society, claimed inhis History that the Society ‘‘spurned the examination ofmonstrous, extravagant, and rare phenomena’’ for fear ofmerely gratifying the senses without edifying the mind.Spectacle was acceptable only if it led to a judicious con-sideration of physical properties or other philosophicalmaterial. To indulge in spectacle for its own sake was toengage in the kind of behavior of which Kircher in particu-lar was deemed guilty.5

Of course, what Sprat wrote for public consumption didnot always square with the actual practices of the RoyalSociety. In 1648, John Wilkins (1614–1672) – who, withSprat and Wren, would become one of the founders of theSociety – published hisMathematical Magick, a work filledwith disquisitions on the lever and the wheel but, also, onan array of imaginative, speculative machines: the flyingartificial dove of Archytas, ‘‘spheres representing the hea-venly motions,’’ submarine vehicles, flying chariots, anddevices that supposedly demonstrated perpetual motion.6

He even constructed a ‘‘speaking statue’’ to startle andamaze his friends.

At the same time, Kircher was filling the museum of theCollegio Romano with many of these same artificial won-ders: the dove of Archytas, rotating celestial spheres,supposed perpetual motion machines such as the Archi-medean screw, and his ‘‘Delphic Oracle,’’ another speakingstatue with which he greeted visitors as they entered themuseum. It was also around this time that John Evelyn(1620–1706), another founder of the Royal Society, visitedKircher’s collection in Rome and returned to London withstories of ‘‘Father Kircher’s’’ astonishing machines. One

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wonders whether those stories inspired some of the mar-vels described in Wilkins’ Mathematical Magick.

Wilkins claimed to have used the word ‘‘magick’’ todescribe these amazing devices because ‘‘vulgar opi-nion. . .doth commonly attribute all such strange oper-ations unto the power of Magick.’’7 In fact, he was one ofnumerous natural philosophers in England who exploitedthe ‘‘vulgar’’ association between wonder and magic tomake their ideas more interesting to a wider audience.8

Later members of the Royal Society, including Wren, cameto rely on some of the same ‘‘vulgar’’ associations thatWilkins exploited, particularly the use of spectacle andshowmanship in the dissemination of ideas. For example, anumber of phosphorus demonstrations engineered by theSociety in the latter decades of the seventeenth centurywere designed as elaborate public-relations exercises thatdepended largely upon spectacle andwonder. As exotic andunusual phenomena, phosphorescent substances made forideal spectacles, and members of the Society invited otherscientists as well as women and children to a variety ofsuch demonstrations in the 1670s and 1680s in an effort tocement the reputation of the Society as a scientific institu-tion.

Upon closer inspection, then, the high-minded rhetoricof Christopher Wren and Thomas Sprat seems a touchhypocritical. So, too, does their willingness to dismiss themethods of Athanasius Kircher, particularly once we rea-lize that Kircher anticipated the philosophical spectacles ofthe Royal Society by some 30 years, a fact that has goneunremarked by historians. In his ‘‘Great Art of Light andShadow’’ of 1646, Kircher suggested that philosophersshould exploit the spectacular character of phosphorescentsubstances in order to ‘‘excite vehemently’’ the study ofnatural phenomena.9 Thus, two years before John Wilkinspublished his compendium of spectacular machines, anddecades before Wilkins’ contemporaries in the RoyalSociety hit upon spectacle as a tool of intellectual disse-mination, Father Kircher was already outpacing them all.

7 Wilkins, John (1648) Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be per-formed by Mechanical Geometry (London), p. 3.

8 Zetterberg, J. Peter (1980) The Mistaking of ‘‘the Mathematicks’’ for Magic inTudor and Stuart England. Sixteenth Century Journal, 11(1), pp. 83–97.

9 Kircher, Athanasius, S.J. (1646) Ars magna lucis et umbrae, in decem librosdigesta (Rome), pp. 26–27: ‘‘Huius igitur lapidis prodigiosi spectacula, uti maximamapud Philosophos excitarunt admirationem, ita animos quoquemultorum illa luce suamirabili, ad tam rari effectus causam omni studio vehementer accenderunt; undequidem, uti in rebus novis & raris fieri solet, variae emerserunt variorum opiniones.’’

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Clearly, the line between Kircher’s spectacular andmysterious practices at work in his museum and thepractices of contemporaries in ‘‘progressive’’ institutionslike the Royal Society was more tenuous than historianshave suggested. WhileWren, Sprat and others wrung theirhands over the use of spectacle and ‘‘magic’’ in the dis-semination of ideas, Kircher transformed the Jesuit centerof learning into a spectacular marvel that both enthralledits audiences and instructed them in the fundamentalnature of the world as well as the mysteries of its divineCreator.

Even as he sketched the outlines of an uncertain andmysterious universe, however, Kircher evinced a joyfuloptimism in humanity’s eventual comprehension of nat-ure’s secrets. His unswerving faith in a providential Godmade him certain that, no matter how shrouded in dark-ness the foundations of the worldmight be, humanity couldandwould come to see them. TheKircherianmuseum, withits elaborate machines and its repeated exhortations to seewith the eyes of the mind as well as those of the body,exemplified the means whereby, in Kircher’s own words,‘‘the hidden is led from the most profound shadows into theastonishing light.’’10

Further readingFindlen, P. (1994) Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting,and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, University ofCalifornia Press (Berkeley).

Lugli, A. (1986) Inquiry as collection: The AthanasiusKircher Museum in Rome. Res 12(3), pp. 109–124.

Gorman, M.J. (2001) Between the Demonic and theMiraculous: Athanasius Kircher and the Baroque Cultureof Machines. The Great Art of Knowing: The BaroqueEncyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher, (Daniel, S., ed), Stan-ford University Libraries (Stanford), pp. 59–70.

Stafford, B.M. and Frances T. (2001) Devices of Wonder:From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen, GettyPublications (Los Angeles).

10 Kircher, Athanasius, S.J. (1646) Ars magna lucis et umbrae, in decem librosdigesta (Rome), p. 834: ‘‘Haec autem est divina illa Optice scientia, quae quod abditumest e profundissimis tenebris in admirabile lumen educit.’’