The Master of Errors

In the heart of Baroque Rome, in a museum of his own creation, Athanasius Kircher would display his marvels. Here, a 'cat-piano', a bizarre instrument designed to treat melancholy, which used the graded meows of cats whose tails were pricked by keys. There, a magnetic clock, a sunflower that supposedly followed the sun, and a supposed key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. Kircher was a celebrity of the 17th century, a polymath hailed as the 'master of a hundred arts'. His books were lavishly illustrated, his theories ambitious and all-encompassing. The only problem was that he was almost invariably, and often spectacularly, wrong. Kircher was a product of his time, the last flowering of the Renaissance ideal of a universal man, and the first stirrings of the scientific revolution. He was a German Jesuit priest who spent most of his life in Rome, at the center of a vast network of correspondence that fed his insatiable curiosity. He wrote some 40 major works on everything from geology and medicine to Egyptology, acoustics, and the biblical Flood. His magnum opus on Egyptology, 'Oedipus Aegyptiacus', was a massive, multi-volume work that claimed to have deciphered the ancient Egyptian language. Kircher believed that hieroglyphs were not phonetic letters, but complex allegorical symbols, each containing a universe of esoteric meaning. His 'translations' were elaborate, mystical fantasies. A simple cartouche of the pharaoh Apries, for example, which we now know simply spells his name, Kircher translated as: 'The benefits of the divine Osiris are to be procured by means of sacred ceremonies and of the chain of the Genii, in order that the benefits of the Nile may be obtained.' It was complete nonsense, but for over a century, his work was considered authoritative. His scientific theories were equally imaginative. He believed that the Earth was a hollow sphere with a central fire, connected to volcanoes and hot springs. He proposed that diseases were caused by 'minute living bodies', a prescient idea that anticipated germ theory, but he then veered into fantasy, claiming to have seen these animalcules through a primitive microscope and describing them in lurid detail. He designed a 'vomiting machine' to cure the plague and believed that 'weapon-salve', an ointment applied to the weapon that caused a wound, could heal the wound itself, no matter how far away the patient was. It is easy to dismiss Kircher as a charlatan or a crank. But that would be to misunderstand him and his era. He was not a fraud. He was a man of immense learning and genuine intellectual passion. His mind was a cabinet of curiosities, filled with the wonders and oddities of the natural world. He was a supreme synthesist, weaving together classical learning, biblical exegesis, and the latest reports from Jesuit missionaries into grand, unified theories of everything. His method was not empirical in the modern sense. He did not test his hypotheses through rigorous experimentation. Rather, his was a world of analogy and correspondence, where the patterns seen in a seashell could reflect the orbits of the planets. His work was more an act of artistic creation than of scientific discovery. He was trying to map the mind of God, to show how all of creation was interconnected in a vast, symbolic web. In the end, the scientific revolution, with its emphasis on mathematics, measurement, and empirical evidence, would render Kircher's work obsolete. Jean-François Champollion's decipherment of the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s would definitively prove Kircher's Egyptology wrong. Geology, biology, and medicine would advance along different paths. Yet, there is something magnificent about Kircher's failures. His boundless imagination and his drive to understand everything, however flawed his methods, are evidence of the power of human curiosity. He was one of the first scholars to create a public museum, to believe that knowledge should be shared and displayed. His work on volcanoes was based on a courageous descent into the crater of Vesuvius. His interest in so many different fields prefigured the interconnectedness of modern science. Kircher's story is a reminder that the history of knowledge is not a straight line, but a labyrinth of brilliant mistakes and fortunate accidents. For every Newton or Galileo, there are a dozen Kirchers, whose work, though now forgotten or ridiculed, was a important part of the conversation. They remind us that even in our own age of supposed enlightenment, our most cherished theories might one day seem as fanciful as a cat-piano. The pursuit of knowledge is a journey, not a destination, and sometimes the most interesting paths are the ones that lead nowhere.