Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

It was around this time of the year, in November 1678, that my master finished writing his memoirs. He wanted them not to be published until after his death, but with a proof of affection that touched me greatly, he authorized me to be the first to read through them. Those of you, dear readers, who have read these marvelous pages, will easily imagine my admiration. Kircher’s style appears there in all its nobility & does honor to that quality that we most appreciate in the Ancients, namely their sobriety of tone & their moderation. But even more than their literary perfection, the true value of these pages, what sends the reader into raptures, is its tone of sincerity, of a genuine & inspired confession. Kircher has opened his heart to God; he says what he has seen, what he has done, but he says it with simplicity, in a fervent outpouring. So strong is his love of truth that he refuses to embellish it for fear of misrepresenting it. As is well known, coquetry was never one of his faults. My master examines his life lucidly, quite openly, without pretense, & if occasionally there is evidence of a justified pride — that of having been the instrument by which Our Lord permitted the hieroglyphs to be deciphered — it is the profound humility of his writing that holds our attention. There is nothing more beautiful than these confessions, than his repeated avowal of love for the Virgin Mary, nothing more moving than this man on the threshold of death calmly going back over his younger days & his past.

Those who have read that confession will not find, I insist, that I am exaggerating its beauties; they will know the sublime prayer with which it concludes & will undoubtedly rank it among the most beautiful lines in honor of Our Holy Mother. What they cannot know, on the other hand, is that Kircher wrote that confession of faith in his own blood, so that after his death it would be hung on the statue of Our Lady of Mentorella as a sign of love & gratitude. One should go down on one’s knees, as I did myself, at the sight of these lines with their dark red hue! And may the blood shed by my master serve as an example to the lukewarm, to all those whose hearts have grown colder with every passing day, like a lava flow cooling down.

It was at the beginning of 1679 that Athanasius’s last book finally appeared in Amsterdam: Turris Babel . Faithful to his original intention, Kircher continued the vast study he began in Arca Noe . In it he published for the first time numerous pictures of the architectural wonders of the ancient world & the mathematical proof that the Tower of Babel would have never been able to reach the moon, thus showing that its destruction was more a result of the folly of the undertaking than of the divine will.

After much epistolary argument with the Frenchman Jacob Spon about the right word for the science that dealt with the history of our origins, Kircher had resolved to talk of archontology ; Jacob Spon was in favor of archaeology but my master rightly considered that that word did not take account of political & religious history & thus had no chance of being adopted in the future.

At the very moment when the publication of that book was arousing universal agreement & admiration, Athanasius’s health suddenly worsened. His body had always been robust & resisted the afflictions of old age quite well, but his headaches — more & more frequent, more & more insupportable — had the doctors baffled.

“It’s as if my thoughts were eating away at my brain from inside,” Kircher told me one evening when he had called me to his bedside. “My thoughts, Caspar, my very soul! Today, like little captive animals gnawing at the bars of their prison, they’re trying to destroy what is suffocating them & holding them back so as to recover their freedom as quickly as possible. They no longer have any interest in the present; they have forgotten all the old days & cannot wait for those to come and the opportunity to join Our Savior.”

Alarmed by the way my master took this comparison seriously, I tried to reassure him by relating his illness to physical causes: by its every nature the soul was impalpable, as diffuse and vaporous as the Spirit from which it came; it could not, therefore, affect the body so directly.

“Are you really sure?” my master replied with a hint of bitterness. “We are creatures & as such only possess something analogous to the divine essence. Analogous, Caspar! There is in the seed from which we come something of the universal seed, of that pansemen that gives life to the world; but in order to exist, this mystery, however impalpable it may be, requires a minimal amount of physical matter. This universal seed — which I would be happy to call Primigenia lux , first begotten primal light — possesses seminal & magnetic properties. It organizes everything, releases the forms of things, animates, nourishes, maintains & preserves everything according to the infinite arrangements & alterations of its matter. In a stone, it is stone, in a plant, it is plant, animal in an animal, element in the elements, sky in the skies, star in the stars; it is everything according to the mode of each &, on a higher plane, it is man in men, angel in the angels & finally in God, God Himself, so to speak.”

Since I had difficulty grasping how this seminal light could be implanted in bodies so as to act on them, he went on with a smile, “But through the soul, Caspar! For mankind, at least, for they are the only ones among all the creatures to possess one. As for the rest, it is through salt, that raw material of all constituted bodies. For, to tell the truth, salt is the central body of nature, the virtue, vigor, energy of the Earth, the epitome of all earthly virtues, the subject of all principles of nature. Science & the absolute knowledge of the whole of nature depend on its central essence; it is the material from which all things are made & to which, once they have been destroyed, they return. It is the first & last, the alpha & omega of mixed bodies, the well from which nature draws its riches &, as Homer testifies, something that is almost divine. The Earth, that, is the center & matrix of all things, the place where the elements discharge their seed so that it can warm, cook & digest it in its bosom, is nothing other than a salt congealed by the universal seed, a salt at the center of which that spirit is concealed that, by its virtue, forms, condenses and animates everything, so that it can justly be said to be a kind of soul of the Earth.”

Never before had Kircher reached such heights &, although flattered that he should consider me worthy of following him there, I had to confess that my mind was still confused. We seemed to have long since lost sight of the soul, which had been the starting point of our conversation, & so I tried to get back to it.

Kircher gently reproved me: “O thou man of little faith! Have you so far lost your confidence in my abilities? Well let me tell you that, contrary to what your questions suggest, we have never been closer to your concern, for what I was saying about the stars, the Earth or the planets can equally well be applied to man. It is well known that the celestial farmer left in our brain, when it was born, a certain amount of that pansemen which is concentrated in the pineal gland & merges with what we are in the habit of calling the soul . Depending on which seed each of us cultivates, that will be the only one to grow. If it is vegetable seed, the man will become a plant; if sensory seed, he will become a brute beast; rational seed, he will become a celestial being; intellectual seed, he will be an angel, et cetera. But if, not satisfied with any of these creatures, a man retires within the center of his unity, becoming one spirit with God in the solitary darkness of the Father, he will surpass all things. With the result that there is nothing in the universe that cannot be found in man, the son of the world, for whom everything was made …”