There was virtually no domain of knowledge that Kircher left unstudied, no language in which he did not claim some degree of competence. Kircher’s thirty-six books enticed the mind with their vast and encyclopedic erudition and dazzled the eye with gorgeously engraved images of myriad curiosities, antiquities and enigmas: obelisks, mummies, Aztec temples, lotus gods, Brahmins, Buddhas, volcanoes, fossils, magnetic devices, sunflower clocks, tarantulas, Aeolian harps and Alexander’s horn, to name a few. The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change.įor most of his seventy-eight years, Kircher had lived and worked at the Roman College, the principal seat of Jesuit learning, where he established himself as its greatest and most curious polymath and one of the most prolific and versatile thinkers of the century.
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