Free Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Robles Page B

daystar. A needle attached to the center of its corolla indicated the hours on the fixed ring which crowned this curious device.
    “But above all this machine,” Kircher said when he presented it to the college authorities, “or, to be more precise, this
biological engine
in which art & nature are so perfectly combined, shows us how our soul turns toward the divine light, attracted to it by an analogous sympathy or magnetism of a spiritual order when we manage to free it from the vain passions that impede this natural inclination.”
    The heliotropic clock was soon known through Provence & contributed greatly to the spread of his fame.
    My master also found it a valuable advantage to be living close to the port of Marseilles. Thus it was that he had the good fortune to meet David Magy, a merchant of Marseilles; Michel Bégon, treasurer of the Levant Fleet in Toulon; & Nicolas Arnoul, master of the galleys, who had been commissioned to go to Egypt & bring back various objects for the King of France’s collections. It was through these people, who purchased all the curiosities the Jews & Arabs could bring them, that Kircher saw any number of little dried crocodiles & lizards, vipers & serpents, scorpions & chameleons, stones of rare color engraved with ancient figures & hieroglyphs as well as all sorts of Egyptian images made of glazed terracotta. He also saw some sarcophagi & a few mummies at the house of Monsieur de Fouquet, idols, stelae & inscriptions, of which he always begged to be allowed to make an impression. Athanasius never wearied of going around the country to visit these people and admiretheir collections. He bought, exchanged or copied everything that was directly relevant to his researches, especially Oriental books or manuscripts that reached the continent in Provence. Thus it was that one day he had the great good fortune to exchange an old astronomical telescope for an exceedingly rare Persian transcription of Saint Matthew’s Gospel.
    Conjecturing that the Coptic still spoken in Egypt was like the petrified language of the ancient Egyptians & that it would be useful in penetrating the secrets of the hieroglyphs, Kircher immediately started to study it & became very knowledgeable in it within a few months.
    My master seemed to have forgotten Germany & all his ties with Fulda; he never ceased to learn, nor to put his astonishing ingenuity into practice. Thus it was that, shortly after our arrival in Avignon, he had the idea of illustrating his knowledge of catoptrics by constructing an extraordinary machine. Working day and night in the tower of the
Collège de la Motte
he assembled, with his own hands, a device capable of representing the whole of the heavens. On the appointed day he astounded everyone by projecting the entire celestial mechanics onto the vault of the grand staircase. As if impelled by their own motion, the Moon, the Sun & the constellations moved in accordance with the rules established by Tycho Brahe, & by a simple & swift contrivance he was able to reproduce the precise state of the sky at any date in the past. In response to requests from teachers and students he thus presented the horoscopes of Our Lord Jesus Christ, of Pyrrhus, of Aristotle & Alexander.
    It was on that occasion, as Pierre Gassendi recounts in his memoirs, that Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, councillor at the parliament of Aix and a native of Beaugensier, was informed of Kircher’s researches. When he learned that my master wasalready well known for his knowledge of hieroglyphs, he insisted on meeting him.
    A strange man, this Provençal country squire: fascinated by the sciences & the friend of some of the most distinguished scholars, he had conceived a passion for the antiquities of Egypt and their enigmatic script. He spent a fortune acquiring any object of importance in that area. Not long previously Father Minutius, a missionary in Egypt & the Levant, had offered him a papyrus roll covered in hieroglyphs that had