Read Online Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie - Free Book Online

globes” and “shooting stars” sailing through the night sky. Most dramatic of all:an illuminated flying dragon. In general, as Kircher himself recalled, “I was exhibiting things which seemed to smack of something beyond the ordinary.”
    Among most of the members of his audience, these things were “stirring up the greatest admiration,” as he put it. But they were causing other reactions too: “Several accused me falsely of the charge of magic,” he remembered.
    â€œMagic” was a loaded and changeable term in the early seventeenth century. As the title of della Porta’s book suggests, his magic was thoroughly natural, even if some of it was “occult,” since the natural world was full of concealed features. But the ability to manipulate these properties was hardly commonplace, and for some, a flying dragon or “artificial fire” signaled communion with “bad angels”—demonic magic.
    â€œIn order to free myself from this lowly charge,” Kircher remembered, “I was forced to reveal for these legates the methods and knowledge behind the display. I satisfied this request to their utmost and complete satisfaction; indeed, from that time on I was barely able to separate myself from them.”
    He may have feigned irritation, but the “lowly charge” against him was a form of compliment. Essentially they had taken his bait. And Kircher capitalized on the opportunity of their interest to show them some “new discoveries of curiosities of mathematics” and to present them with a “panegyric of exotic languages which bore a written dedication of praise to them.” This panegyric wasn’t something he just had lying around. He’d worked it up to impress them. In the end, according to Kircher, “those men departed completely satisfied in every way.” And when they returned to the court of the archbishop and prince-elector, they “noised about to such a degree concerning my trifles that the Prince was struck with the greatest desire to meet me.”

5
    Chief Inciter of Action
    T he Prince-Elector of Mainz was old, and in engravings he looked portly and somewhat paranoid. He’d recently built himself an immense new second residence on a high embankment above the Main River in Aschaffenburg—about fifty miles from Mainz itself. Made out of red sandstone, with five stout towers, six hundred windows, and a moat, it was part palace and part fortress. Some historians say that the assets of people killed in the ongoing hunt for witches helped fund the construction. At least fifteen hundred people were executed during Kronberg’s twenty-two years as elector, a statistic that puts the legates’ initial charges of demonic magic into sobering context. And now Kircher was there essentially to entertain him. But he must have succeeded, because he earned himself a place in the elector’s court.
    Once in residence at Aschaffenburg, Kircher devoted himself to the “private recreation” of the elector—“wholly occupied with exhibiting to him those curiosities in which he was so greatly delighting.” These included a mysterious clock that Kircher said was powered by a sunflower seed, and a trick in which a small figure of Christ walked on water and saved a figure of Saint Peter from drowning. “When a strong magnet is placed in Peter’s breast,” he later wrote by way of instruction, “and with Christ’s outstretched hands or any part of his toga turned toward Peter, made of fine steel, you will have everything required to exhibit the story. With their lower limbs well propped up on corks so that they don’t totter about above the water, the statues are placed in a basin filled up to the top with water, and the iron hands of Christ soon feel the magnetic power diffused from the breast of Peter.”
    In the seventeenth century, even a simple magnetic trick like