Again Athanasius

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A few posts back I mentioned I had originally been searching for images of those faces blowing wind, which you see on old maps. I came across these maps which happened to have been illustrated by Athanasius Kircher, who was a Benedictine scientist and authority of his time on many subjects, among them volcanology. It’s interesting to see the hypothetical depictions, circa 1668, of the views of how the earch was composed. By this time the world was known to be round. And although Jules Verne in the 19th century imagined that the core of the earth might be hollow, and even home to subterranean societies hidden from surface-dwellers, Kircher depicted the center as a seething pool of churning magma with various channels to the volcanos on the crust; which is basically accurate as we now know. He titled this piece “Pyrophylaciorum” for the fire in the middle. His second rendering depicts how water pools in subterranean depths all around the planet, the cavernous aquifers which feed the rivers at the surface, “Quo Exprimitur Aquarum”. It’s interesting that what he surmised, without being able to physically examine as we do today, with radar and ultrasound plumbing the depths. But in many ways his concepts were accurate.

The next phase in our physical understanding of our world would take us from deep within the earth, to deep within the physics of the atoms themselves. Unlike Kircher, who had no electronic means of detection, and relied on visual inspection, we now can journey deep inside matter itself. Leaping from models of atoms and molecules, we now can capture images of the particles inside of the atoms themselves, at the nano level, and even physically manipulate the atomic molecular arrangements. What’s interesting to me, is that at the micro levels of matter, patterns similar to those at the macro level are replicated reverse fractally, increasingly smaller Bucky balls of probability of energy and matter, time and empty space of particle physics….yet somehow patterned and predictable…

Which goes to show, that it is possible, to hear music in the spheres, and as the poem goes, to “see eternity in a grain of sand.”

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Legend of St. Eustace

St. Eustace and the stag by Pisanello

LEGEND OF SAINT EUSTACE

Saint Eustace, also known as Eustachius or Eustathius, was a legendary Christian martyr who lived in the 2nd century AD. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, Eustace was a Roman general named Placidus, who served the emperor Trajan. While hunting a stag in Tivoli near Rome, Placidus saw a vision of Jesus between the stag’s antlers. He was immediately converted, had himself and his family baptized, and changed his name to Eustace (Greek: Ευστάθιος Eustathios, “well stable”, or Ευστάχιος, Eustachios, “rich crop”).

A series of calamities followed to test his faith: his wealth was stolen; his servants died of a plague; when the family took a sea voyage, the ship’s captain kidnapped Eustace’s wife Theopista; and as Eustace crossed a river with his two sons Agapius and Theopistus, the children were taken away by a wolf and a lion. Like Job, Eustace lamented but did not lose his faith.

He was then quickly restored to his former prestige and reunited with his family; but when he demonstrated his new faith by refusing to make a pagan sacrifice, the emperor, Hadrian, condemned Eustace, his wife, and his sons to be roasted to death inside a bronze statue of a bull or an ox, in the year AD 118.

The saint is honored on the calendar of the Melkite Catholics on December 13, as the “Commemoration of the Holy Martyrs Eustrates, Auxentius, Eugene, Mardarius, Orestes and the Virgin Lucia.” He is also commemorated in the Orthodox Church, on September 20. The d’Afflitto dynasty, one of the oldest princely families in Italy, claims to be the direct descendant of Saint Eustace.

He is one of the patron saints of Madrid, Spain. Scenes from the story, especially Eustace kneeling before the stag, became a popular subject of medieval religious art. Early artistic depictions of the legend include a wall painting at Canterbury Cathedral and stained glass windows at the Cathedral of Chartres. There is a Church of Saint Eustace in Paris. And the island of Sint Eustatius in the Caribbean Netherlands is named after him.

Probably the saint is currently best known for his cross-and-stag symbol being featured on bottles of Jägermeister. This is related to his status as patron of hunters; jägermeisters were senior foresters and gamekeepers in the German civil service at the time of the drink’s introduction in 1935.

In 1661, Kircher discovered the ruins of a church said to have been constructed by Constantine on the site of Saint Eustace’s vision of Jesus Christ in a stag’s horns. He raised money to pay for the church’s reconstruction as the Santuario della Mentorella, and his heart was buried in the church on his death.

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Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aeguptiacus

How could you not be intrigued by a title like that? lol!

Like Leonardo da Vinci, the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-1680) was a true “Renaissance man.” Interested in both the arts and sciences, he wrote several dozen books on everything from medicine and geology to Egypt, cryptography, Noah’s Ark, and musical harmony.

Born near Fulda, in Buchonia, of the Hesse province, his name sometimes is epithet “Bucho,” “Buchonius” or “Fuldensis”. He was taught Hebrew by a rabbi, and studied philosophy and theology, although volcanoes were his passion. Several times in his life he had to flee Protestants who opposed the Catholics at the time of the Reformation. He joined the priesthood in 1628, and taught mathematics, ethics, and Hebrew/syriac at the University of Wurzburg, and developed an interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics. In 1633 he was called to Vienna by the emperor to succeed Johannes Kepler as chief Mathematician to the Habsburg court, however his ship was literally blown off course, and he ended up in Rome instead, where he based himself permanently at the Collegio Romano for several years before being fully devoted to his own research.

In 1661, Kircher discovered the ruins of a church said to have been constructed by Constantine on the site of Saint Eustace’s vision of Jesus Christ in a stag’s horns. He raised money to pay for the church’s reconstruction as the Santuario della Mentorella, and his heart was buried in the church on his death.

Kircher published a wide variety of scholarly texts at the time, with lengthy Latin names like “Physiologia Experimentalis” (1680), “Mundus Subterraneus” (1664),”Magneticum Naturae Regnum Sive Disceptatio Physiologica” (1667), “Ars Magna Sciendi Sive Combinatorica” (1669), about subjects such as “Arca Noe” (1675), “Sphinx Mystagoga” (1676), and “Obelisci Aegyptiaci” (1676). Probably his best known work is “Oedipus Aeguptiacus” (1652) one of the first truly encyclopedic resources in the field of Egyptology. He credited his sources as Chaldean astrology, the Hebrew Kabbalah, Arabian alchemy, latin philology, and Pythagorean mathematics. But the resource which was especially helpful to him, in the way the Rosetta Stone eventually would be to others that followed, was the acquisition of the Bembine Tablet–a diagram schematic identifying the host of Egyptian gods and symbols, confiscated from Cardinal Bembo after the Sack of Rome in 1527. Here it is:

Bembine Table of Isis

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Turris Babel

Turris Babel by Athanasius Kircher 1679

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I love serendipity!

I arrove at this image circuitously. As I had mentioned, in a much previous post, I had been searching to find the “blowing wind face” frequent on antiquated maps of the world. I finally did, and one of those maps I discovered, was drawn by Athanasius Kircher.

Like Leonardo da Vinci, the German scholar Athanasius Kircher (ca. 1601-1680) was a true “Renaissance man.” Interested in both the arts and sciences, he wrote several dozen books on everything from medicine and geology to Egypt, cryptography, Noah’s Ark, and musical harmony. Kircher was especially interested in the history of languages, and just a year before his death, he published Turris Babel, a history of the Tower of Babel.

According to the Bible, the people of Babylon attempted to build a huge tower that would reach all the way to heaven. After learning that they were constructing the tower for their own glory rather than His, however, God punished the Babylonians by making them all speak different languages. No longer able to communicate with each other, they stopped work on the tower, left Babylon, and went their separate ways. The tower not only became a symbol for human pride, but also helped explain the origin of languages.

In Turris Babel, Kircher suggested that rather than creating hundreds of languages at one stroke, God preserved Hebrew, which continued to be spoken by the descendants of Noah’s son Shem, and then created four new languages, which he assigned to the descendants of Noah’s other sons. These languages subsequently split apart even further over time, resulting in all the languages that are spoken today. Kircher singled out a few languages for special attention in the second half of his book. Considered the father of Egyptology, he was especially interested in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he expands on one of his earlier works on this subject here.
lib.lsu.edu | Tower of Babel

I found the discovery that Kircher had illustrated the Tower of Babel as well, interesting in light of my recent posting also about the X-Seed 4000 Ultima Tower being designed right now, at two miles high, the largest human-built structure the world has ever seen.

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