Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Read Free Page B

tides; the attraction and repulsion in animals and plants; and the magnetic attraction of music and love. He also explains the practical applications of magnetism in medicine, hydraulics, and even in the construction of scientific instruments and toys. In the epilogue Kircher moves from the practical to the metaphysical (and Aristotelian) when he discusses the nature and position of God: the central magnet of the universe.” 2
    Here is the weltanschauung of a man standing astride two continents of thought, one of them sinking fast. Despite his scientific instincts, Kircher resolutely wrapped his investigations, and especially his conclusions, in the theological fabric that had dominated intellectual pursuits for hundreds of years, one sun setting and another rising in a single mind. The end-of-an-era quality of his work is probably why he is little known now—that and the fact that he contributed virtually no original thought to the new science. But at the time his books were widely read and discussed, and Halley was certainly aware of Magnes. (Four of Kircher’s books were listed in the inventory of Halley’s library at his death.)
    Another of his books had a certain relevance to Halley’s hollow earth theory, the encyclopedic two-volume Mundus subterraneus, published in 1665 and something of a best seller in scientific circles—a work that Halley and the other Royal Society fellows would have known intimately. As Magnes compiled everything under the sun that Kircher could find or dream up about magnetism, Mundus subterraneus was a massive miscellany of knowledge and speculation about the earth’s interior that included many knockout etchings by Kircher himself illustrating his theories.
    Kircher’s interest in things below stemmed from a long visit to Sicily, where in March 1638 he had close-up views as the famous volcanoes Aetna and Stromboli erupted. On returning to Naples, the enterprising priest arranged to have himself lowered into the crater of Vesuvius, active at the time, to see what he could see. One thing led to another. Nearly thirty years later, Mundus subterraneus gathered in eight hundred pages everything that was known about geography and geology, along with discourses on, for example, underworld giants, dragons, and demons; the spontaneous generation of insects from dung; mining and metallurgy; sections on poisons, astrology, alchemy, fossils, herbs, weather, gravity, the sun and the moon, eclipses, and fireworks. In addition to his writing, Kircher claimed to have performed palingenesis by restoring a plant from ashes to its original form.
     

    Illustration by Athanasius Kircher showing pockets of interior fire scattered in a network beneath the earth’s surface. (Reprinted with permission of the Mineralogical Institute, University of Würzburg, Germany)

    Amid this swirl of observed data and charming crackpottery was at least one speculation closer to truth than not: his notion about pockets of fire down below and the idea that the earth has a fiery center. If he wanted to put underworld giants down there too, he was simply carrying on a tradition that went back to Dante and beyond. His drawings of the earth’s interior were probably the first visual cross-sections attempting to suggest in a scientific way what it might be like inside.
    Kircher’s thoughts regarding the world’s hydraulics take a cue from a thirteenth-century encyclopedist known as Bartholomew of England, who believed a huge whirlpool opening existed at the North Pole. Kircher envisioned the earth as a sort of vast hot water tank. Icy water from the ocean poured in at the North Pole in a great vortex, percolated southward through the earth’s interior, heated by a central fire (provided by alchemical cosmic rays), and emerged on the surface, comfy as bathwater, at the South Pole—a system of heating and circulation he believed kept the oceans from either freezing or turning putrid. As Jocelyn Godwin points out in Arktos,