The Earth is an Alembic

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Underground spring . Krcr bvd r as a vas nrk arays and srns bna Ear’s surac. Ima s rad rm Krcr, (MS [Mundus subterraneus], Bk. V, 291).

What is this strange sphere that Kircher places at the heart o the volcano?

A l l i m a g e s i n t h i s a r t i c l e © 2 0 0 7 D o r o t h y N i s s e n



For Kircher … cosmic bonding is the most basic

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,

A, J-W, 1678.

Dorothy Nissen



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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).

D o r o t h y N i s s e n

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b t e r r a n e u s

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Below: Rprsntatin

rm xhumd bns undrarth giant cmpardt histricay knn giants..



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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.




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Let: Pacn mnsa

bna ras a dn

sd r I n ak,

I u rds

War Cv s

qud n Asn Cudr’s

Te Philosopher’s Stone:

“T mnrs aracd

mns sa,aru a y ud

brn u a vn,

bran n br

s ru m.”

(1980, 200) (MS, Bk. X,

“Van de Gelegentheid der

Mynen” [Te Location

and Development of Mines])

Right: An anima-d v acmca rcss.

(MS, Bk.XII, 346)

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).



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2 4 Kircher witnessed the

eruption o Mount Ætna

in 1637. He wrote that

it was the proound

emotional impact o

this experience that caused him to shi his

ocus om philology

and mathematics to the

empirical sciences. Surely

the idea o a central

subterranean re —

which he took om

Kepler — was also acore inspiration or this

book — along with his

notion o a ast network o

underground waterways

nourishing the planet.

Soon aer he wrote Tuis

Bab [T Bab].

Could this choice o

topics be a response tothe conficting voices

that emerged in writing

Mudus subaus?

In either case, it seems that

his conversion to empirical

obseration, which had

been occasioned by iewing

the eruption o this volcano,

was not permanent!

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

been experienced as a kind o continuum in

the seventeenth century worldview. Even the




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conceptual organization o Kircher’s Atlas o the

Underworld is steeped in alchemical ideas.

Te more striking dichotomy in the

seventeenth century worldview, however, is revealed

in the tension between belie in church doc-trine and an increasing ascination with science.

According to Tomas van Leeuwen, “in the

manner so typical o ecclesiastic scholarship …

Kircher existed in a kind o dream state, a

succession o hallucinations, where hallucination

and objectivity are orced to go hand-in-hand”

(2004). Hallucination? … Perhaps it was the idea o

the universal seed, panspermia, that Rowland tracesto Bruno and to Aristotle’s entelechia, that enabled

him to navigate between these contradictory

realms with unagging humor (2004, 196-8).



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2 6 op let: In mas sn n Krcr

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

well as a kind o atavistic darkness, that I

elt as a child in relation to my parents and




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2 7a eeling that our lineage as humans reaches

back to the earliest geological lie in our planet

eons beore human existence.

Conclusion: My Father, Kircher and Me,

… and Who? Last night, perhaps in response to the

need I have been eeling to make a coherent

ending and thereore narrative or this article,

I dreamt that the nipple o my le breast was

bleeding during a meeting I had with Kircher’s

colleague Gaspar Schott. Was I slighting some

eminine aspect o mysel by leaving no room

or a eeling conclusion to this article, by notsaying just how this book somehow redeemed

my ather or me? Schott, whom I am meet-

ing with in the dream, was Kircher’s assistant,

apologist, in my mind, his lover, and proba-

bly the person on whom the angel Cosmiel,

Kircher’s guide in Ecstatic Journey, was based

(Rowland 2000, 21-22). He was an excel-

lent experimentalist upon whom Kircher re-

lied or the working out o his ideas, and wasno less a person o great acumen, since it is he

who urged Kircher to write something that

would reveal his Copernican view o astron-

omy. Tat something turned out to be the

Itinerarium exstaticum coeleste [Ecstatic Celestial

Journey], the ctional account discussed

on page 21, which was based on a visionary

dream Kircher actually had — as he tells the

story — o a journey to the outer reaches o auniverse in motion. It was only some years lat-

er in Schott’s annotated re-publication o this

book, newly entitled Ecstatic Journey, that men-

tion was made o Kircher’s intellectual indebt-

edness to Giordano Bruno. Moreover this c-

tionalItinerarium exstaticum was Kircher’s only

oray into the endangered area o Copernican

astronomy. With his extroverted ocus on circum-

venting censure (though Ecstatic Journey

was itsel soon added to the Index), Kircher

Top: Solaris. A ma sar rsKrcr as ab bsrv rus sc.

Center: Te Moon.

Bottom: Te creation in seen days.

Pras s s an ausn panspermia, unvrsa sd a manasrm Sun and nsmnas ary rd.



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Page or my Mother. I vd Kich’s ia h Vii ad Chid ud “xssd ” i a

d-ik s. Kich aay as ih h gsic vi ha a as h Mays

iv i a cav i Suh Fac. I a su i as h Mh gd, huh iis Sh h “k hs his ad dd h i h ha,” (as ih d i a cav). I

sc I hik ha y ida i his i as sh ha ’s /y bdy cs

a chhic suc.




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2 9 My Cousins in onder

in Southern Denmark.

Wn I m my cusns

durn summr

br I nrd

sc, n as a

Luran mnsr and

rs r armrs.

r vs r cs

Ear, and r

anmas r k n a

sd nar kcn

r arm. I s r s

rasn a I ncudd

Krcr’s manary

ss a uman anda I nd rn.

O cnra ma

Krcr smd m

say a aab

and mrc rms

ar dvn sns a

cm us rm

ans and ar

rn n sns.

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.



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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).




A a a u

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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.

New York: Routledge.Godwin, Jocelyn. 1979. Athanasius Kircher (Art & Imagination), London: Tames

& 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.

The Earth is an Alembic

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