Free Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie Page A

figures,” Kircher claimed. “For I was reasoning thus: imprinted characters of the ancient Egyptians have survived, indeed even genuine ones at that; therefore, the meanings of these characters will still somewhere lie hidden, scattered among the chronicles of ancient authors, and perhaps not in Latin and Greek texts but in those exotic works of the Orient.”
    Later that year, about a decade after arriving on gangrenous feet for his novitiate in Paderborn, Kircher made his final vows as a Jesuit priest—retaking vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as “perpetual solemn vows,” and making an additional vow of obedience to the pope. For his first assignment as a fully professed priest, Kircher headed back up the Rhine, past Mainz, back up the Main, past Aschaffenburg, into a region of centuries-old vineyards, to a university town called Würzburg.
    â€”
    BY THE TIME Kircher arrived in 1630, Catholic victories against Danish Protestants in the war had resulted in a peace treaty. For the time being anyway, at least according to Kircher, “high peace resided over the Catholics.” On the other hand, the witch hunt that had been going on for the last several years in the archbishopric of Würzburg wasn’t quite over. From his fortress on a high slope across the river from the city, the prince-bishop had overseen an investigation in which as many as nine hundred people were executed, including members of the clergy, many young children, and his own nephew.
    Around this time, a Jesuit named Friedrich Spee, long believed to have been a confessor to the condemned in Würzburg, wrote anonymously against the persecutions and described the “wretched plight” of someone who had been tortured into confessing her guilt. “Not only is there in general no door for her escape,” he wrote, “but she is also compelled to accuse others, of whom she knows no ill, and whose names are not seldom suggested to her by her examiners or by the executioner. . . . These in their turn are forced to accuse others, and these still others, and so it goes on: who can help seeing that it must go on without end?”
    Kircher doesn’t mention the witch hunts in his memoir. Against this dark backdrop he is known to have taught mathematics, philosophy, Hebrew, and Syriac, and to have built two new sundials, on the south and the east sides of the university’s central tower. He also developed a very close friendship with a younger, awestruck student named Kaspar Schott, with whom he apparently composed music. Neither Kircher nor Schott could have foreseen how they would be separated and reunited and separated again in the years to come.
    Kircher wrote his first book manuscript in Würzburg, although at only sixty-three pages
Ars Magnesia
(
The Magnetic Art
) was more like a pamphlet, and since modern scholars see it as “highly derivative” of Gilbert’s already famous work on the subject, perhaps it wasn’t entirely
his
. Kircher steered clear of Gilbert’s heliocentric ideas but echoed his views on magnetic attraction, describing it as “a primary and radical vigor.” And he agreed that the earth behaved somewhat like a magnet: things are drawn down toward the earth, he suggested, putting his Aristotle on display, like the natural attraction of something to that which is good for it. The entire second part of the book, however, was given over to practical and recreational uses of the lodestone, something Gilbert hadn’t really bothered with, including instructions for the trick in which Christ rescues Saint Peter from drowning.
    But the “high peace” that Kircher described, such as it was, wasn’t meant to last. The Thirty Years War was only in its twelfth or thirteenth year, and soon “new and sudden whirlwinds of wars rendered all things topsy-turvy.” The king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, had taken up the Protestant