Athanasius Kircher SJ (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680)[1] was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works of comparative religion, geology, and medicine.

Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his vast range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts".

Kircher claimed to have deciphered the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptian language, but most of his assumptions and translations in the field turned out to be wrong.

One of the first researchers to observe microbes through a microscope, Kircher was ahead of his time in proposing that the plague was caused by an infectious microorganism and in suggesting effective measures to prevent its spread.

The invention of the magic lantern has been misattributed to Kircher,[3] although he conducted a study of the principles involved in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae.

[citation needed] On the journey, he narrowly escaped death after falling through the ice crossing the frozen Rhine — one of several occasions on which his life was endangered.

On the intervention of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the order was rescinded, and he was sent instead to Rome to continue with his scholarly work, but he had already embarked for Vienna.

He based himself in the city for the rest of his life, and from 1634[9] he taught mathematics, physics and Oriental languages at the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University) for several years before being released to devote himself to 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 a crucifix in a stag's horns.

His syncretic approach disregarded conventional boundaries between disciplines: his Magnes, for example, ostensibly discussed magnetism, but also explored other modes of attraction such as gravity and love.

[14] In his Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (1643), Kircher called hieroglyphics "this language hitherto unknown in Europe, in which there are as many pictures as letters, as many riddles as sounds, in short as many mazes to be escaped from as mountains to be climbed".

[14] While some of his notions are long discredited, portions of his work have been valuable to later scholars, and Kircher helped pioneer Egyptology as a field of serious study.

[14][15] For this Kircher has been considered the true "founder of Egyptology", because his work was conducted "before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone rendered Egyptian hieroglyphics comprehensible to scholars".

[14] In Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Kircher argued under the impression of the Hieroglyphica that ancient Egyptian was the language spoken by Adam and Eve, that Hermes Trismegistus was Moses, and that hieroglyphs were occult symbols which "cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters and figures."

This led him to translate the simple hieroglyphic text ḏd Wsr ("Osiris says") as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis"[16] Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge mentioned Kircher as the foremost of writers who "pretended to have found the key to the hieroglyphics" and called his translations in Oedipus Aegyptiacus "utter nonsense, but as they were put forth in a learned tongue many people at the time believed they were correct.

[18] Another scholar of ancient Egypt, Erik Iversen, concluded: It is, therefore, Kircher's incontestable merit that he was the first to have discovered the phonetic value of an Egyptian hieroglyph.

It was a work of encyclopedic breadth, combining material of unequal quality, from accurate cartography to mythical elements, such as a study of dragons.

Umberto Eco comments that this idea reflected and supported the ethnocentric European attitude toward Chinese and native American civilizations: "China was presented not as an unknown barbarian to be defeated but as a prodigal son who should return to the home of the common father".

(p. 69) In 1675, he published Arca Noë, the results of his research on the biblical Ark of Noah — following the Counter-Reformation, allegorical interpretation was giving way to the study of the Old Testament as literal truth among Scriptural scholars.

Kircher analyzed the dimensions of the Ark; based on the number of species known to him (excluding insects and other forms thought to arise spontaneously), he calculated that overcrowding would not have been a problem.

His geological and geographical investigations culminated in his Mundus Subterraneus of 1664, in which he suggested that the tides were caused by water moving to and from a subterranean ocean.

[26] Mundus Subterraneus includes several pages about the legendary island of Atlantis including a map with the Latin caption "Situs Insulae Atlantidis, a Mari olim absorpte ex mente Egyptiorum et Platonis Description," translating as "Site of the island of Atlantis, in the sea, from Egyptian sources and Plato's description.

In 1646, Kircher published Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, concerning the display of images on a screen using an apparatus similar to the magic lantern developed by Christiaan Huygens and others.

The clock has been reconstructed by Caroline Bouguereau in collaboration with Michael John Gorman and is on display at the Green Library at Stanford University.

For most of his professional life, Kircher was one of the scientific stars of his world: according to historian Paula Findlen, he was "the first scholar with a global reputation".

His importance was twofold: to the results of his own experiments and research he added information gleaned from his correspondence with over 760 scientists, physicians and above all his fellow Jesuits in all parts of the globe.

As few of Kircher's works have been translated, the contemporary emphasis has been on their aesthetic qualities rather than their actual content, and a succession of exhibitions have highlighted the beauty of their illustrations.

In Where Tigers Are At Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, the protagonist works on a translation of a bogus 17th-century biography of Kircher.

John Glassie's book, A Man of Misconceptions, traces connections between Kircher and figures such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton.

In the end, Glassie writes, Kircher should be acknowledged “for his effort to know everything and to share everything he knew, for asking a thousand questions about the world around him, and for getting so many others to ask questions about his answers; for stimulating, as well as confounding and inadvertently amusing, so many minds; for having been a source of so many ideas—right, wrong, half-right, half-baked, ridiculous, beautiful, and all-encompassing.”[34] Kircher's life and research are central to the plot of James Rollin's 2015 novel The Bone Labyrinth.