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physical expression o the idea that God is Love; even the
rocks and the planets love one another … . [As is true or
Giordano Bruno] … the entire universe [is] inused with
a great …world-soul that extend[s] to ininity, an emana-
tion o the ininite power o divinity. (Rowland 2000, 74)
Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus o 1678 is a
book that belonged to my ather. My ather, a sensible man, was
interested in the book as a natural history and regarded its many
alchemical images as a detriment to its credibility as a scientic
document. I have lived with this book since I was a child, and in
many ways it became a vessel or the redemption o my relationship
with my ather.
Jung Journal: culture & psyche , F all 2007, Vol . 1, No. 4, 18-31
Dorothy Nissen, mfa, is a painter and book artist who also works as a graphic designer.Te series o prints shown above right, Caes, Awe, and My Mother and Father, combines
photographs o her ancestral amily — many rom the late 1800s — with images rom a book o her ather’s, Athanasius Kircher’s 1678 Subterranean Atlas, in a personal attempt at “cosmic
bonding.” Correspondence: [email protected] or 1012 Creston Rd., Berkeley, CA
94708. See www.studiodotwiz.com
T Earth Is an Ambic an ‘imaginal’ reading of the images in
Aanasus Krcr’s
or Mundus subterraneus
[Atlas of the Underworld]
Au K (1662 –1680), Mundus subterraneus[Atlas of the Underworld], XII libros digestus,
o touch with rst ngers; a svn-yar-d’s ttr t hr distant athr. (Was this an attmpt tbnd ith him thrugh a shard ing a tard natur?) T spira path th bird’s ight is rmth frst bk th tv hich is ntitd Middelpunt’s Beschryving [Describing the Midpoint] . mthis rrrd t th act cating th cntr th Earth, th Axis Mundi. My athr’s intrst in maps
and d bks may hav bn drivn by th dath his immigrant athr hn h as just t. Hcannt hav knn him, and sury h spnt many hurs imagining and cating his n pac rigin.Fr m th spira vss shn n th right is a calcinatio imag having t d ith inking ths riginamtins ( nging) ith thir archtypa surc. (In act this imag is rm Bk IV, Beschryvende de Wateren, and sms t b an apparatus r xtracting sat rm sa atr.) (MS, Bk. IV, 200).
A sel-avowed mystic and scientist, Kircher took his chair in Mathematics at
the Jesuit Order’s Collegio Romano, which (with some synchronistic prevision) had
been built on top o the ruins o an ancient temple o Isis. It was 1635, just two years
aer Galileo had been charged with “vehement suspicion o heresy” or espousing the
Copernican view that the Earth circles the Sun, and it was just weeks aer Galileo’s
sentence had nally been commuted to house arrest (Rowland 2000, 1).Kircher’s 1656 Itinerarium exstaticum is a ctional account o a Dantesque
journey to the outer reaches o a Sun-centered cosmos. Under the pseudonym
Teodidactus (diinely taught), Kircher is guided by an angel named Cosmiel
(honeyed thing), whose words are said to be more acerbic than his name implies.
Ever honing his skill at poetic subteruge, Kircher managed to avoid more concrete
allusion to his agreement with Copernicus. When expedience demanded, he called
upon his Jesuit devotion and obedience to obuscate contradictions in the view in
which he was trained — that is, ycho Brahe’s Earth-centered universe, in which the
Sun, orbited by the planets other than Earth, orbits the Earth and xed stars. At othertimes he illustrated Newton’s ideas on gravity and shared Kepler’s view o a central re
in the Earth. Kircher requently declares his Christian devotion, yet he presents many
conicting ideas, including a complex theory o correspondences (see page 30). A
person o prodigious interests and learning, Kircher pretended more knowledge — in
philology, or example — than he actually possessed. His translation o the Egyptian
hieroglyphs on the Pamphili Obelisk that had been exhumed rom the sanctuary o
Isis beneath the Collegio — as well as his insistance on the existence o secret links
between pagan and Christian belies — were declared by no less than Leibniz to have
been simply made up. It must be said in Kircher’s deense though, that his sources in
the case o the obelisk were themselves simulacra, the key one having been copied
rom a prior manuscript by someone with no knowledge o the language
Kircher was not only a showman, but a ormidable designer and packager o books.
He published more than orty handsome tomes, all the while producing a staggering
array o baroque spectacles that entailed magic lanterns, a working clock in the orm o
a mechanically-heliotropic sunower, and other illusionistic devices (Findlen 2004, 6).
a radiant gure who could be Apollo, but whose rays may be the panspermian energy
Kircher believed emanated rom the Sun itsel. Kircher took the idea o panspermia,
the universal seed, rom Giordano Bruno, who had been burned at the stake by the
Inquisition in 1600, not or his Copernican astronomy but or “obstinance.” Kircher
wisely concealed some o his avorite sources, however, especially i they were on the
papal Index (Rowland 2004, 196). o the le o the emale scribe, a winged puti
holds up a portrait o Kircher as i to suggest that the scribe is mediating or chan-neling Kircher’s energy. Te presence o Hermes together with Apollo in a chamber
ruled by Artemis, the goddess o the Moon, suggests that somehow the empirical
method — proposed by Aristotle and promoted in Kircher’s Jesuit education (as long
as it complied with the idea o an Earth-centered universe) — will be conjoined in
this work with another orm o knowledge whose source, alchemical or not, is the
hermetic arts. Trough an archway in the background, a cave is revealed in which
stone workers wielding pick axes are working to uncover the messages etched into the
walls o the cave. Does this reect the alchemical belie that the elements in stones
come rom meteorites that are actually allen gods? Te elements in alchemy carry the attributes o these gods; copper carries and expresses desire, and so on (Coudert
1980). Behind the statue o Artemis is an opening to a second room, a laboratory
Te Frontispiece d’Od-Aads Wd anticipatesthe book’s contents
D’Onder-Aardse Weereld inwaal Boeken Natuurkundig
Verhandeld [Te Underground
World. A Physics reatise in
welve Books] is the 1678 post-
humous Dutch translation o
Mundus subterraneus, rst pub-
lished in Latin in 1665. In the
rontispiece o this second edi-
tion (shown on the le), a statueo the many-breasted Artemis,
similar to the one at Ephesus
except or the reindeer adorn-
ing the irst row o her skirt,
presides over a scene in which
a woman, perhaps Kircher’s
muse or alter-ego, is attended
by three gures: Hermes holds
a wand-like caduceus over her
head, and is himsel assisted by
Frontispiece 1678 Duc dn. Curusy, rs r rnd anmas n ddss’s skrar anrd dr; r rs ar bus nasscas mr Mdrranan cuurs.
in which a robed man, perhaps a magus, conducts experiments at the hearth o a
replace. He is surrounded by various alembics and vessels and books.
Te handwriting in stones in Kircher’s Mudus subausTe rst book o Mundus subterraneus is not a mathematical locating o the
the Earth’s center, as I had imagined, but rather an attempt at a mathematical proo
o ycho Brahe’s theory that the Sun orbits the Earth; the second book describes
the gravitational relationship o the Sun, Moon, and tides; the third book explores
the nature o water and the oceans; the ourth, the power o undergound re; the
h, underground springs, ountains, and seas; the sixth, minerals that come rom
water; and the seventh, mining and metallurgy. Te subject o the eighth book,
Handelende an de Steenige Sto des Aardryks, is the behavior o the “stoney stuf ” in
the Earth, in other words, paleontology. It is in this book that Kircher seems most
reckless (or divinely-driven) in practicing his own art o combining observation with conabulation. Deeply embedded in a baroque worldview in which notions
o divinely-wrought spontaneous generation and other aspects o evolution were
in a lively state o revision in the basement laboratories o ecclesiastical centers o
learning, Kircher appears to believe that ossils not only record geological history,
but also prevision mythical and human history as well. He appears to imagine
evolution as a process that is ueled by human and divine imagination, mimesis and
experiment. Late in the book, in a contrasting eeling tone, he reveals an expansively
comic view o alchemical apparatus and process (see below right rom Bk. XII).
Kircher’s iew o alchemyKircher’s expressed view o alchemy
is much more antagonistic than thato his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton(who practiced alchemy in his spare
time between writing treatises on reli-gion, and — what were o less impor-tance to him personally — treatises onthe laws o mechanical physics).
Kircher is known or mocking alchemy and reviling, while at thesame time borrowing rom, Paracelsus.Rowland does not speak o Kircher asan alchemist, but in a book published
beore the urry o interest in Kircherin the 1990s, Jocelyn Godwin describesas an alchemist. Godwin classiiesalchemists into our types:
(1) those who believe transmutationimpossible but conduct chemicalexperiments or other purposes; (2)the metallurgists; (3) sellers o imita-tion gold and silver; (4) those who or
personal gain raudulently pretend toachieve transormation. He himsel
was o the irst category; clearly he wasascinated by chemistry. ... He wrestledinconclusively with the two standarddivisions o substance: the classicalquaternary o earth, water, air and ire,and the Paracelsian ternary o salt, sul-phur and mercury, wanting to acceptthem both but unable to make the
mental biurcation necessary to accepttwo dierent levels or modes o being (Godwin 1979, 85).
Why does Kircher seem so alchemically-minded then, when he attacked the alchemists?
A split is oen seen between the Platonic
worldview that is or some the jumping of
point or the modern orm o Western thought
emerging in the Enlightenment period, and Pre-
socratic thought with its various pre-alchemical
ideas: initially o a single originary material
element — Tales’s water, Heraclitus’s re (as
well as ux), and Anaximenes’s air; at roughly the
same time, the more idealist notion o an originary
substance — Anaximander’s apeiron and Parmen-
ides’s nöos; and nally, the idea o our elementsintroduced by Empedocles. Tis split must have
sms assca mummcan vun crysa s. Pras s mas rfc s b n palingenesis, ransmran sus, snc can sn a r sms say “a ns can
b ransrmd (bcm r) n sns!”
Let: Human aces imagined in the expressiono stones. Krcr ss sss rcrd andrvsn uman sry. Accrdn Sn Jay Gud, Krcr dd bv n cran nsancs snanus nran (Gud 2004, 210).
Below Let: T as ma b smd m say a aab and mrc rms ar dvnsns rn n sn and vn us by ans (MS, Bk. VIII, Van de Steenen [On Stones], 21). A sam m Mundus subterraneus as many usrans
sss a r rmd nauray.
Te Earth is an alembic Kircher’s Atlas o the Underworld
seems to imagine the Earth itsel as an
alembic. Tis idea, along with his shi in
ocus to the natural sciences, could well
have seized him when he witnessed the
eruption o Mount Ætna in 1637. Te act
that the Earth’s creation and existence aremiraculously improbable een om the most
scientifc perspectie, and that its survival
requires our attentive participation, is
an idea that is crucial in our own time o
ecological crisis.
When I rst tried to parse the meaning
o this book, it seemed to trace an alchemical
process, that is, an attempt to reconcile
certain opposites within the author.Although I cannot read the Dutch text and
can only parse the Latin captions with a
reckless and playul use o guess work, I eel
a deep connection with the view expressed
in at least the wholeness o this book that
the geological Earth is a wondrous alembic
as it undergoes changes in temperature and
pressures within. In these pages I wantedto make a connection between the awe, as
Below from left: My Father’s Father s assr rm 1875 and Krcr’s Fornax Spag y-rica (acuay an ccsasc s!). My Mother’s Mother rad cnsany (Ausn and Dckns),accrdn my mr, and r srv rcs s ckd rm Sar’s ma rdrcaa. My Father’s Mother Augusta m and cam s by rs n a ran rmCncnna n s as nnn. Hr ra s ayrd rc r Snay rand an s manad mr rm Hambur n 1901 and Krcr’s ma a brd a srn’s a c m rrsns Mzar’s Paan — my ar ayd u.
Teory o correspondences. Fr Krcr, srucur mcrcsm bdy rfcs a macrcsm avns.Ts car ss symac ransbn varus mdcna ans and rbs,
ars bdy, asrca sns, and avns.
instead generally deended ycho Brahe’s
compromise cosmic structure. O equal
or more ofense to the church than the
idea o a Sun-centered universe, howev-
er, was the idea o an infnite universe that
was in constant motion. Much o the Atlas o the Underworld is actually based on
this notion o a universe in which every-
thing including the waters and re be-
neath Earth’s surace is roiling in motion.
Tat universe is also one in which muta-
tion and change are a result o a constant
reconguration o the our elements.
My ather, a successul businessman
who had to orego college to go to
work at sixteen to support his widowed
mother, was not the strictly sensate
person I implied he was in the rst
paragraph o this article. Even though
he was a Republican and took me to
meet Nixon in the Senate when I was
seven, he seems actually to have been a
closet Marxist, unbeknownst to himsel,in that his avorite diversion was to
discover in his reading o old geographies the impact o geography and climate
on demographic movements, and on economic conditions such as quality o lie
and education. It was rom him that I learned o a kind o “contextualism,” the
act that inormation is always skewed by the economic perspective and interests
o the inormer. He loved to point out distortions in medieval maps, and it was
this view actually coupled with my mother’s interest in grammatical syntax that
seeded my own lie-long preerence or the history o ideas, that is or looking at an
idea in its historical context, to looking at it in some discrete way independent o the rich and meaningul convolutions, reversals, and vagaries o its history.
Tis predilection or considering the context and the psychological
determinants o an idea, and an openness to a semiotic perspective which would
see the representation o those ideas as somehow encoding their psychological
and social determinants, is or me analogous to Kircher’s idea that in every
expression o nature there is an encoding o mystic knowledge. Rowland speaks
o the appearance (when Kircher was writing about the Pamphili Obelisk) o the
Pythagorean gure o Harpocrates, the “inant god who raises his nger to his
lips as an injunction to silence.” For Pythagoras, as well as or Kircher, this gure
signaled the idea that the surace meaning o something can at once conceal and
nurture the hidden knowledge beneath (Rowland 2000, 15).
3 1Tus it was in the perusal and study o this book that my relationship with
my ather was transormed. In the encounter with a book o my ather’s that he
understood in a literal way as an incomplete but none-the-less objective record o
natural science, while I understood it as a book with a subterranean undercurrent
o mystic and alchemical knowledge, I elt that we could live in the same universe.
Second, in musing over the personied image o the theory o correspondencesthat appears near the end o the Atlas (see opposite page), I discovered in the law o
analogy and correspondences an antidote to what I elt was his literalism. Te idea
o correspondences, or analogy, seems to be not only the root source o metaphor,
but key to awakening our collective potential as humans to imagine in a much
needed more pluralistic way. Tis capacity to imagine seems or Kircher and Bruno
to be embedded in the very structure o the cosmos. In time could my ather have
shared Kircher’s idea that there a generative encoding o some originary knowledge
in every level o nature’s sel expression?
BibliographyCoudert, Allison. 1980. Te Philosopher’s Stone. London: Wildwood House.Findlen, Paula. ed., 2004. Athanasius Kircher: Te Last Man W ho Knew Eerything.
& Hudson, Ltd.Gould, Stephen Jay. 2004. “Father Athanasius on the Isthmus o the Middle State;
Understanding Kircher’s Paleontology.” Athanasius Kircher: Te Last Man Who Knew Eerything. Ed. Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge.
Kircher, Athanasius 1678. d’Onderaardse Erde, or Mundus subterraneus [Atlas o the Under-world], 2nd edition, Amsterdam: Joannem Janssonium à Waesberge & Filios.
Rowland, Ingrid. 2000. Te Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome. Chicago:University o Chicago Library.
——, 2004. “Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, and the Panspermia o the InniteUniverse.” Athanasius Kircher: Te Last Man Who Knew Eerything. Ed. PaulaFindlen. New York: Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, Tomas A. P. Spring 2004. Te Underground World o Semi-Consciousness, in“Te Magic Stove,” a compendium o articles accompanying the Projective Teory seminar series with Tomas A.P. van Leeuwen. Netherlands: Te Berlage lnstitute. www.berlage-institute.nl/03_postgraduate/Magic%20Stove/ms_art2.html.
Wilson, David, curator. 2000. Te World is Bound with Secret Knots:Te Lie and Work o Athanasius Kircher, 1602 –1680. Los Angeles,Te Museum o Jurassic echnology. Ongoing exhibit.
AbstractDorothy Nissen, “Te Earth Is an Alembic; an ‘imaginal’ reading o the images inAthanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus [Atlas o the Underworld].” Te article describesa transormative personal experience in growing up with a seventeenth century book thatbelonged to her ather. [Athanasius Kircher (1662-1680), Mundus subterraneus (Atlas o the Underworld), XII libros digestus, Amsterdam, Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678.] Jung Journal: culture & psych e, 1:4, 18-31.
Key Wordsalchemy, “as above, so below,” Athanasius Kircher, Atlas o the Underworld, awe, caves, Mundus subterraneus, palingenesis, seventeenth century worldview, spontaneousgeneration, theory o correspondences.