Where Tigers Are at Home (95 page)

THE NEXT DAY
, Ulrich Calixtus told us afterward, when the guards went in to Chus’s cell it was to find him hanging from the bars of his window. From a cut he had made in his arm with the buckle of his belt, the unfortunate man had managed to squeeze out enough blood to scribble on the wall one final message in his enigmatic language.

Kircher was furious at the news. “Through the fault of your incredible negligence, Signor Calixtus, not only a man has disappeared, but a language—what am I saying, language itself. For the sake of your salvation & that of mankind, may Heaven grant that there is another of these primitive people in the world! If that is not so, we will never be able to restore the link with our origins & we must see that as a sure sign of our general damnation.”

Calixtus did not even try to justify himself & just shamefacedly handed Kircher the piece of paper on which he had copied the two lines written by Chus,

“
Tyerno aliou fougoumba. Gorko mo waru don …
”
¹
Athanasius read out with interest, suddenly succumbing to his passion for deciphering again. “Odd, very odd.

He concentrated on the text for a long time, while the professor gave me beseeching looks, hoping I would intercede on his behalf with Kircher. I was extremely sorry for the unfortunate position in which his negligence had placed him & would willingly have done so, but there was no point, for Kircher’s face suddenly lit up with a reassuring smile.

“Now, now, pull yourself together my friend. These lines tell me that you are not at all to blame & that a decision from on high alone is responsible for that which for a moment struck me as the most disastrous of misfortunes. The time had not yet come, that was the decision made by the One who governs our destinies in such a merciful manner. These words that He, in His infinite kindness, intended to come into our hands speak of hope & urge us to be patient. Be patient, then. And without fear, for the day of reconciliation is not far off. That which is scattered & varied will in a short while return to its original cohesion. God has ordained it so. Just like the negro, in His hands we are nothing but passive instruments of His divine will.”

These encouraging words concluded this surprising episode without my master losing his conviction that he would restore in full that “Adamic language” of which he had had a mere foretaste.

The year 1676 saw the appearance of his
Sphynx Mystagoga
, the final work Kircher devoted to Egypt & its hieroglyphs. In it he provided for the first time a faithful representation of the
pyramids & the underground graveyards that can be seen in the region of Memphis.

Hampered by severe impairment of his hearing, tormented by insomnia and more & more frequent headaches, Athanasius Kircher saw, not without some annoyance, that his strength was declining. His hand had started trembling so badly that it was only with the greatest difficulty that he could still write, forming misshapen or incomplete letters & ruining the formerly perfect layout of his manuscripts with irregular lines, crossings-out or even ink blots. But he bore his ills with exemplary patience & thanked Our Savior for having granted him enough time to finish his work.

At the approach of summer we went, as we did every year, to make our retreat in Mentorella. Kircher had great hopes of the beneficial effect of this stay in the country on his health but the extreme heat beating down on the land only aggravated his problems. Prostrate with his migraines & an attack of gout that lasted several months, my master could not take any of those country walks that revived his body as well as his mind. His forehead on fire, his legs horribly swollen, he would spend his nights in prayer until weariness & opium, which he took in stronger & stronger doses, finally granted him a few hours rest. And whenever his illness gave him some respite, he devoted his time to the pilgrims & the visitors, receiving them with a good humor and joviality that seemed to increase with every day, as if in defiance of the aggravation of his physical woes.

In the autumn of 1677, just after we had returned to Rome, my master told me about an invention he had imagined while lying awake with insomnia. Determined to fight against his physical deterioration, he had worked out plans for an ingenious chair designed to move his members without the aid of his muscles. Mounted on spiral springs intended to agitate
his hardened nerves vertically, this machine, or “jiggler,” was propelled by a clockwork movement that made you lift your legs & arms in the rhythm of a forced march. I set to work straightaway & as soon as it was finished, a few weeks later, Kircher could take some exercise without having to leave his room. Truly it was a very odd sight to see him wriggling about, though with a serious look on his face, while sitting down & with a young novice reading St. Augustine to him. Nevertheless, these gymnastics were extremely good for his headaches & toward Christmas he could walk normally again.

Kircher was too astute, however, not to know that physical health, however important, was nothing compared with the state of one’s soul. Faithful to St. Ignatius & the precepts of our Society, he threw himself with all his heart—& for what he assumed would be the last time—into the practice of the
Spiritual Exercises
. By way of a general examination & so as to prepare his soul to appear before God, he judged it necessary to go over the smallest details of his past life, asking his soul to give an account, hour by hour, period by period since the day of his birth, of his thoughts, then of his words & deeds. To assist this holy enterprise he started, despite the great difficulty he had in writing, to put the story of his life down on paper himself, giving me once again cause to admire his magnificent strength of will.

On the first day of 1678 he put on his hair shirt & subjected himself to a regular fast, then let his hair & beard grow as a sign of contrition. It was no use warning him about the dangers of an austerity that was incompatible with his great age; he stuck to this regime without flinching, alternating his sessions of discipline with those in the jiggler, humbling himself every night in cold & prayer without, for all that, ceasing to receive visitors and friends with a selflessness & cordiality that drew tears of wonder from even the hardest of hearts.

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.”