(1602-1680) German Jesuit priest and polymath, author of at leat 30 ambitious texts unified by a profound desire to detect and determine and correlate original causes in all phenomena; his influence on later generations has been severely dissipated by his conservative Christian adherence to a geocentric model of the universe (a century after Copernicus), and by the fact that – far more than other "sleepwalkers" into modernity as described by Arthur Koestler in his The Sleepwalkers (1959) his insights were occluded by fits of esoteric theorizing, though the Theatre-of-Memory-like frontispieces he inserted into his speculative texts, and which map knowledge in terms of visual imagery, retain an undeniable oneiric power in the twenty-first century. His interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs as Hermetic documents of vast import did not, however, transcend their later translation as laundry lists. His work – whether or not adequately comprehended – was apparently influential in the Theosophical movement (> Theosophy). He predicted – vaguely – the germ theory of disease. For his relevance to sf, > Mars, Mercury, Outer Planets, Religion and Venus, in each of which entries there is reference to his speculative, visionary round-trip to the planets, Itinerarium Exstaticum ["The Ecstatic Journey"] (1656 Rome; vt Iter Exstaticum 1660). Also of interest is Mundus Subterraneus ["The World Underground"] (1665 2vols Netherlands), which describes the interior of our globe as being riddled by tunnels, through which water and fire pass transformatively through a central furnace, a process Kircher suggests is the fount of spontaneous generation in creatures, and also of igneous rock formations; Atlantis is mentioned as well. Of the various categories of Hollow Earth, Kircher's is perhaps the most plausible, and is cited briefly in Edgar Allan Poe's "A Descent into the Maelström" (May 1841 Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine), and in Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before (1994). [JC/PN]
Athanasius Kircher
born Fulda, Germany: 2 May 1602
died Rome: 27 November 1680
works
- Itinerarium Exstaticum ["The Ecstatic Journey"] (Rome: Vitalis Mascardi, 1656) [published in two volumes: binding unknown/]
- Iter Exstaticum (Wurzburg, Germany: Sumptibus Joh. Andr. & Wolffg. Jun. Endterorum haeredibus, prostat Norimbergae apud eosdem, 1660) [vt of the above: binding unknown/]
- Mundus Subterraneus ["The World Underground"] (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Joannem Janssonium and Elizeum Weyerstraten, 1665) [published in two volumes: binding unknown/]
about the author
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