MM #18: My Athanasius Kircher
Mabel muses on taylor swift, athanasius kircher, & more
In 2006, a young Taylor Swift sang about a boy and a girl riding around in a car in the throes of a first love. Everything is perfect, until the girl realizes that they don’t have a song. Shouldn’t all perfect couples in love have a song? The boy comforts her, saying:
Our song is the slamming screen door
Sneakin' out late, tapping on your window
When we're on the phone, and you talk real slow
'Cause it's late, and your mama don't know
Our song is the way you laugh
The first date, "Man, I didn't kiss her, and I should have"
And when I got home, 'fore I said, "Amen"
Asking God if he could play it again
I am not here to debate the merits of Swiftiedom. I wouldn’t touch the topic with a ten foot pole (at least not in public). But I do think this song evidences Swift’s precocious lyricism. “Our Song” featured on Swift’s debut album Taylor Swift, whose runaway single “Tim McGraw” was another meta song about a song. Two decades before Swift entered her Eras era—embarking on a million-city tour whose resounding thesis is that the singer inhabits a universe of her own, wherein she is the only point of reference—Swift sang herself into the musical pantheon. “Tim McGraw” indelibly linked Taylor to one of Country music’s biggest stars and made the bold proposition that she was on his level. “Our Song” suggested that Swift’s music was divine, beyond human creative powers. Who needs a couple song when you have the sound of a slamming screen door or a resonant belly laugh?
I actually find “Our Song” very moving. There is a music inherent to life. And all couples, best friends, and, dare I say it, independent press co-founders/best friends have “Our Song[s].”
So today’s Mandylion Musing is about OUR SONG.
MANDYLION’S SONG.
MADELINE AND MABEL’S SONG.
There are lots of things I would call “Our Song.” Madeline and I frequently discuss the ways in which the nineteenth century anticipated the internet. We like to text each other the morning a newsletter is due and say that our newsletter is psycho, illegible, truly the worst that’s ever been written. We like to bicker about where we’ve saved files or who hasn’t read whose emails. We like to talk about the best places to buy tank tops. We like to promise each other that we will stay up all night working and then go to sleep at 10pm. Hell, the FaceTime jingle is effectively “Our Song,” a siren call to drop whatever we are doing and bask in one another’s digital glory. Basically, we are in love and every day is the best day yet. <3
My favorite “song” is Madeline’s insistence that I write a newsletter about Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath and multihyphenate (thinker, mathematician, inventor of the Katzenklavier ("cat piano"), Egyptologist, curator, sinologist, etc.) who produced some of his era’s most spectacular and challenging scholarship. This is a deep cut “Our Song.” A long con of my own devising, wherein I constantly renege on my promise that I will discuss Athanasius on Substack. See Evidence A, below.
Evidence A: Texts Between Madeline and Mabel Dated to 8/13/2023.
Today’s Mandylion Musing goes out to my muse, Madeline. Yes, I told her, “I honestly won’t do it,” over a year ago. But I am finally ready, and as always, she was right. What a great fun thing to write about in a newsletter! I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed procrastinating!
My Athanasius Kircher
In 1985, Susan Howe wrote a book with a really good title, My Emily Dickinson, that sought to place the elusive New England poet in her full literary context. The book is more than a gesture of recontextualization, it is also a manifesto of Howe’s (a poet herself) very personal and particular relationship with Dickinson. In the opening pages, she cites other scholars’ interpretations of Dickinson and casts them all away: “Not my Emily Dickinson,” she says to the likes of William Carlos Williams.
Howe invites me to introduce my Athanasius Kircher. While it was necessary for Howe to establish her own Dickinson because the latter’s legacy has been so bowdlerized by careless editors and sexist scholars (see my previous post about this), the story is a little different with Athanasius. When it comes to Kircher, it’s useful to define my version because there are simply so many Kirchers to choose from.
Born around 1601/1602 in Thuringia, Germany (see another one of my past posts), Kircher entered the Jesuit system as a tween and quickly became an omnivorous scholar with a wide-range of interests, as evidenced by his selected bibliography:
Ars Magnesia (The Magnetic Art) (1631) - a book on magnetism
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (The Great Art of Light and Shadow) (1646) - a study of illumination and image projection, includes a description of the magic lantern
Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-54) - his magnum opus about Egypt
Scrutinium Physico-Medicum Contagiosae Luis, Quae Pestis Dicitur (A Physico-Medical Examination of the Contagious Pestilence Called the Plague) (1658) - a book about the bubonic plague outbreak in Rome of 1656
Mundus subterraneus, quo universae denique naturae divitiae (The subterranean world, all its riches) (1663) - a geographical textbook
Phonurgia Nova (New Science of Sound Production) (1673) - a book about sound in which Kircher defended his role in the invention of the speaking trumpet
Arca Noë (Noah's Ark) (1675) - a book about…Noah’s Ark
Etc., etc., etc.
He spent his career in Rome, from which he received frequent missives sent by the Jesuit’s vast global network of missionaries. From his comfortable seat at the Roman College, where he served as Professor of Mathematics and curator of the Musaeum Kircherianum, Kircher devoured reports from far flung corners of the world. Put simply, Kircher’s task was to imbibe all of this information and—like any committed seventeenth-century polymath—produce a syncretic theory of the entire world, including all people, ideas, objects, and religions, encompassing all history and extending seamlessly into the future. Given Kircher’s Jesuit foundations, it follows that he sought to make all of the world legible through the lens of the Bible.
This was not such an easy task (probably because it was impossible :). In his contribution to Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2004, ed. Paula Findlen), Anthony Grafton explained that by the sixteenth century the “[timeline] of the Bible began to fray. Aztec and Chinese chronologies, which scholars avidly collected and discussed, stretched back, apparently, as far as ten or twenty thousand years before the birth of the Messiah.” But this didn’t stop Kircher and his buddies from trying to reconcile newly discovered places, populations, and cultures into preexisting narratives of world history.
This is where my Athanasius Kircher appears. I found him a few years ago, whilst reading an essay that referenced Oedipus Aegyptiacus and excerpted one of Kircher’s strangest illustrations from the four-volume, 2,000-page epic. In the foreground is a stepped, pyramidal structure with runs of stairs shimmying up the sides. The monument is topped by twin towers, far more ornamented than its monolithic base. The towers have round arches surrounded by columns, two layers of little windows, and shingled roofs peaked by fluttering flags, reminiscent of something you might see on a European medieval castle. In the background are three human figures. Two of them are on their knees, arms flung toward opposite corners of the sky. The sun and the moon (each with faces, Teletubbies style) are out simultaneously. Closer to the pyramid stands a third figure, larger than the sun- and moon-worshippers. He carries a shield and sword and wears a helmet and a fringed skirt. His arms and legs are spread broadly.
Since the illustration appears in Oedipus Aegyptiacus, one would assume that it (poorly) represents an Egyptian pyramid. Not so fast. Oedipus Aegyptiacus is about a lot more than just Egypt. Over the course of two thousand pages, Kircher sought not only to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs (he never cracked the code, as he was working 150 years before the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone), but also to develop a theory of world history that reconciled the achievements of ancient Egypt with his view of a continuous Christian past. He found ways of weaving Egypt into biblical history and argued that Egyptian religion had touched the belief-systems of Greece, Rome, India, China, Japan, and the Americas. The pyramid with the twin towers was “evidence” that Egyptian culture had disseminated across the world, including to what was then called New Spain. The pyramid was meant to represent an Aztec temple in Mexico, the likes of which Kircher learned about through the reports of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés—and supported Kircher’s harebrained argument that ancient Egyptians were, in fact, responsible for the cultural achievements and architectural monuments of societies newly encountered by Europeans.
Why go to all this effort, over the course of four volumes and hundreds of illustrations, to connect such diverse cultures? There was an ideological bent to the project, of course. He reduced all the world’s complexity to one epistemological system that happened to be the one he believed in and that motivated, rationalized, and excused the Jesuit mission of conversion, as well as the concomitant creation of exploitative colonial and capitalist relationships between Europeans and the rest of the world. Arguing that Egypt and all other world cultures were integrated within Christian history was also politically advantageous in seventeenth-century Rome. In the decades preceding the publication of Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Galileo Galilei was put on trial and condemned by the Catholic Inquisition for his support and study of heliocentrism, the astronomical model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus, which argued that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the universe. Heliocentrism offended the Church, since various biblical sources appeared to support the geocentric view. After his 1633 trial, the Inquisition charged Galileo with heresy and sentenced him to house arrest. In this highly charged environment, it paid to couch the study of “pagan” topics within an accepted theological framework.
Today, we may look at Kircher’s global theory of architecture as we do his mistranslations of Egyptian hieroglyphs—as fascinating failures. The ambition of his theories, as well as the breadth of his scholarship, also reflect a foregone mode of study that I find rather inspiring, albeit problematic. Rapacious, syncretic, creative, greedy—Kircher gobbled up the world. While I may aspire to be the renaissance man of the Mandylion realm, I sincerely hope one of my theories never denies entire cultures their agency or reduces a complex world to a single viewpoint. Since my theories have less to do with connecting Eden to Egypt to Mexico, and more to do with connecting Taylor Swift to Emily Dickinson to Athanasius Kircher, I think we’re probably in the clear, but thanks for looking out! (It was recently revealed that Taylor and Emily are sixth cousins, three times removed, so now I just need to focus on linking Kircher to their family tree.)
Okay, Madeline, I hope you’re happy with my Kircher newsletter. You’ve been asking me to do this for so long that now I don’t remember if this is what you wanted me to talk about, but I think it’s an acceptable first step. When I find the next My Athanasius Kircher, I’ll be back!
P.S. Don’t forget that we launched a podcast!!!! It’s called 1-800-1800 and you simply must listen!!! Here’s the link.
P.P.S. This is what a cat piano is:
Katzenklavier
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