Mundus Subterraneus (1665)

I read Athanasius Kircher, of the Society of Jesus, in the three-part scan of Mundus Subterraneus. The title page is file page 9 of the first part. It reads Athanasii Kircheri e Soc. Jesu, Mundus Subterraneus, in XII libros digestus, Tomus I, addressed to Alexander VII. The imprint is Amsterdam, at the house of Joannes Janssonius and Elizeus Weyerstraten, in the year 1665, with privileges. The year stands on that page as cIɔ Iɔc LXV. That is 1665, so the book is public domain for this review, and the Latin sentences under the dates and places are his own. A portrait of Alexander VII follows the title. I did not find a second title page, with another year, where the second tome begins. That tome has its own address to the reader and starts its printed numbers again at 1. When I cite a page, the number is the one printed on the leaf, and I name the tome, because both tomes use the number 232 for different books. The preface leaf I quote has no printed number. This copy is 996 file pages, 332 in each part. I am not opening his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, though he sends the reader there for the Egyptian proof. I am not matching him to later Atlantis writers. Plato’s dialogues are on this site at Timaeus and Critias, and there is already a note on his map of the world before the great flood. What follows is only what this 1665 book says.

The book at a glance

• Title: Mundus Subterraneus, in twelve books. Tomus I on the title page. The second tome follows in the same scan.
• Author: Athanasius Kircher, priest of the Society of Jesus.
• Edition I read: Amsterdam, Joannes Janssonius and Elizeus Weyerstraten, 1665, with privileges. The Jesuit licence on the next leaf is Rome, 19 April 1662, Joannes Paulus Oliva, vicar general. Three theologians of the Society had approved the twelve books.
• Length: 996 file pages across the three parts. The two tomes are numbered separately. Printed numbers of Tomus I run through the first seven books and an index of things and words. I read that tome through printed p. 327. Printed numbers of Tomus II start over at 1. The last page of the work is numbered 487 and marked FINIS. An index of things and words for the second tome follows.
• What he claims: The earth is a house built by God, with hidden workshops, canals, and stores of water, fire, air, and earthy matter. The sea is one great receptacle, and its weight drives water through canals into the mountains, which then feed the rivers. Fires inside the earth feed the volcanoes and the winds. In the second book he treats Plato’s Atlantic island as a true history, not a fable, places it in the ocean between Spain and Africa and America, prints a map, and says the island was swallowed with its people by a flood or by earthquakes. He does not date that end. He does say the face of the land today is not the face it had of old, and he refuses the opinion that the mountains first lifted their heads out of the mud after the flood. Noah’s ark, he says, rested on mountains of Armenia that were already there.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• The island. In the dialogue he calls Critias, Plato says that by the drawing of lots among the gods an island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic ocean, much larger than Africa and Asia, fell to Neptune. Solon had it from the priests of Egypt, who had written the site, the names of the people, and the series of deeds. Nine thousand years had passed from Plato’s age to the age when that land was still in being. The first heroes of Athens fought the island. Nothing is left but names and fame. The whole island, with its inhabitants, was swallowed, whether by a flood or by earthquakes. The margin of that column names the Cratylus instead of Critias. I am leaving both as printed (Tomus I, p. 80).
• Not a myth, and not a date he will own. He says this shows a true history, not a mythical one, that is, not a history subject to fables. On the next page he says the nine thousand years Plato counts down to his own time are an Egyptian comment. The Egyptians, to seem the oldest of men, pushed their origin back by an outrageous number of years. The full Egyptian demonstration, he says, is in the first tome of his Oedipus, and he sends the reader there (Tomus I, p. 81).
• Where the map puts it. The plate is captioned as the site of the island of Atlantis, once swallowed by the sea, drawn from the mind of the Egyptians and from Plato’s description. The labels I read are Africa, Hispania, Oceanus, Insula Atlantis, Atlanticus, and America. He says some people want this land joined on the west to America. He says that opinion has no credit. A continent carried on to the Strait of Hercules would run to more than about ninety degrees of longitude, and nature meant the portions of the earth to stay open to the ocean (Tomus I, p. 82).
• How it ended. It is plain, he says, that a great Atlantic island has been extinguished from the memory of all ages. How it ceased, and when, is as unknown as the times in which it flourished. He gives two kinds of ruin. One is the fires under the Atlantic sea, and the earthquakes the historians write of. The other is the violent motion of the ocean out of the north, eating out the cavernous roots of islands, or an earthquake throwing the whole mass down. He thinks it in the highest degree probable that this huge island, worn out by injuries of that kind, at last fell, and that nothing remains except the islands already named. Those islands, built of very high mountains, have a firmer consistency and are left as witnesses, like surviving bulwarks. The Chinese annals, he says, assert that the Philippine islands were once joined to the golden Chersonese as one continent, and that the tyranny of the ocean afterwards broke that one land into islands past number. He says he has already pointed this out more fully above (Tomus I, pp. 82, 83).
• A new island, not the old one. He prints a report of the fathers, dated 26 June 1638, of earthquakes of eight days in the islands of St Michael, and then of a new island born in the deepest ocean, at first about five jugera, and within fourteen days five miles long (Tomus I, pp. 82, 83).
• The flood did not make the first mountains. In the second tome he rejects the opinion that mountains first put their heads up after the flood, out of heaped mud. He says it is contrary to the sacred text. The ark rested above Ararat, on the mountains of Armenia. Noah could not have named a mountain that was not there before the flood. The waters of the flood are said, in the place of Genesis he cites, to have stood fifteen cubits over all the mountains under heaven, which argues that those mountains already existed (Tomus II, p. 5).
• Another face of the land. Islands exist that did not exist before. Land has grown where the waters used to stand. Land that was fat and fertile is now the sea’s hiding place. He says he finds that the storied ocean between the Persian gulf and the Erythraean sea was continuous sea before the flood, and that the flood heaped the sand, lifted the land, and forced the sea back into its gulfs (Tomus I, pp. 83, 84).
• The canals. He names the stores. Water receptacles are hydrophylacia, fire stores are pyrophylacia, air stores are aerophylacia, and the mixed earthy stores are geophylacia. The sea’s weight drives water through canals, which he calls hydragogi and syphones, into the hydrophylacia of the mountains. He compares those canals to the veins and arteries of the human body. The abyss of Scripture, for him, is a gulf of water in the inmost earth (Tomus I, pp. 112, 232).
• Giants, and what he will not believe. He holds that there were giants before and after the flood, greater than other men in size and strength. He throws out the Arabic story of the giant Og, enemy of Noah, and the tale that a beard Og tore out became a cedar forest from which Noah built the ark (Tomus II, p. 60).
• The art before the flood. One account he records derives the name of alchemy from Cham, first king of the Egyptians, son of Noah. That account says the art was written down, kept in the ark, carried into Egypt, and afterwards taught by Mesraim, son of Cham, and by Hermes his counsellor. Kircher also says the art was practiced by the first men before the flood, while Adam was still alive, and notably by Tubalcain, and that Noah and his sons received it from their fathers and spread it, after the flood, into all parts of the world (Tomus II, p. 232).

Preface

The preface has no printed page number on the leaves I used. He compares the book to an organ. Twelve books are twelve registers. The works of nature lie in the hidden places of the earth, and the tubes and pipes of that organ still give every thing under the moon its number, weight, and measure. He says geographers have described the outer face of the world, and that no one has reached the inner economy. He had long wanted that argument. The occasion came when his superiors sent him to Sicily and Malta in the company of Frederick, Landgrave of Hesse, later a cardinal, whose confessor he was. In Sicily he found, as in an epitome, whatever is rare in the whole earth. He climbed Etna, which he calls the source of all the prodigious effects that show themselves in Sicily. He examined the Aeolian or Hephaestian islands, especially Strongylus and the island they call Vulcanus. He spent three days on the Mamertine strait, on account of the incredible tides, as dangerous as it is infamous for shipwrecks. He worked through the motions of Scylla and Charybdis. He says he wrote what he saw on a palimpsest, weighed it when he was home, and that the reader will find it in the course of the book.

He was held at Messina longer than he wished, on the way back to Rome. He takes that delay as the reason he saw the earthquakes of 1638. The chapter heading calls them the dreadful earthquakes that arose in Calabria in 1638, during which the author was present for fourteen days at great peril of his life, and on that occasion learned great secrets of nature. He says God wanted him not only as an eyewitness of evils about to fall, but in some part a sharer in them, so that he could tell of calamities greater than any he has read of in all past ages, greater than the fall of the twelve primary cities of Asia, and greater than any Italy has known. In a short time almost the whole of nearer Calabria went to waste.

Ego itaque anno 1638. una cum duobus Religiosis tertii Ordinis S. Francisci, aliisque duobus saecularibus conducta cymba, 24 die Martii Messana solventes, eo ipso die Pelorum Siciliae promontorium attigimus, ubi triduum sustinentes, cum nullo non calamitatis genere confliximus, adeo omnes loci, aerisque injuriae in nos conspirasse videbantur.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), file p. 22

In 1638, then, with two religious of the Third Order of St Francis and two laymen, in a hired boat, he left Messina on 24 March and the same day reached the promontory of Pelorum in Sicily. They stayed three days, and every injury of the place and of the air seemed to conspire against them. They tried twice to leave and were driven back, by an unwilling sea and, as he later saw it, by the hidden hand of God. If they had gone on, he says, they would have been found at Santa Euphemia, where they were hurrying on business. On Palm Sunday, which was 27 March, they were tired of the long delay. I am not going to unfold the rest of that Calabrian narrative. It is the frame of the book, not an Atlantis story. It does fix the journey he uses whenever he says he saw a thing himself.

The licence and the privileges

The leaf after the title is the licence, not a chapter of the world. Joannes Paulus Oliva, vicar general of the Society, says that three theologians have reviewed Kircher’s twelve books on the subterranean world and judged that they can be published. He gives leave for them to be printed.

cujus rei gratia has literas manu nostra subscriptas, nostroque Sigillo munitas damus, Romae 19 Aprilis 1662.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), file p. 10

The letters were given at Rome on 19 April 1662, signed and sealed. Under that, the imprimatur of Ottavianus Patracensis, episcopal vicegerent, and of F. Raymundus Capisuccus. The same front matter prints privileges for the Amsterdam booksellers. I am not quoting those leaves. They add no claim about Atlantis, the flood, or the canals.

Book I, Centrographicus

The first book is about the center. He calls it the greatest work of God. The center is a point, the smallest thing in space, simple, without parts, and yet the point which heavy things seek and from which light things are carried up. He defines the center of the universe, the center of gravity, the center of magnitude, the center of virtue, and the line of direction. He sets paradoxes of the earth’s center, the accelerated motion of heavy bodies, motion on an inclined plane, pendulums, and the parabolic motion of projectiles, and then the uses of that doctrine for the cosmos and for geometry. The subterranean world, he says at the opening, has no mineral increase, no vegetative power, and no work of sense, without this center. The book does not discuss Atlantis, a lost land, or the flood. It is the geometry he wants in place before he opens the globe.

Book II, Technicus

The globe as a house of hidden canals

The second book is the fabric of the terrestrial globe. It begins with the end and scope of the geocosm, and with the idea of the globe as it exists in the divine mind. An architect about to build a royal palace turns the whole site in his mind, draws a plan, and only then lays foundations. God, he says, did not do less for the human race. The foundations of the orb were thrown. The earth is held immobile in the arms of the moment, and yet so confirmed by divine power that no wind and no mass of sea can move it even a little from its seat.

Est igitur Terra nihil aliud, quam Terraqueus Mundi globus, humano generi ad inhabitandum a Divina providentia destinatus, omnibus, quae desiderari possunt, rebus ad bene, commode, beateque vivendum necessariis instructus et in medio Universi constitutus.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 56

The earth, on this sentence, is nothing other than the earth-and-water globe of the world, destined by providence for men to live on, furnished with what is needed for a good and happy life, and set in the middle of the universe. In the same chapter the architect’s plan includes subterranean workshops, storerooms, and hidden canals for the apparatus of springs, then open channels by which the waters are shared to every part of the great body, as if by veins. The outer surface receives woods, mountains set like towers, fields, and metals. He says he has shown the rough ground-plan, and that what remains is to describe the whole structure part by part, as an anatomist does.

The chapters that follow, before he reaches the waters, are the nature of the starry globes and how they influence the lower world, the sun, the moon, the proportion of the earth to the sun and moon, the outermost surface of the earth and its size, and the necessity of mountains. I am not setting those astronomical chapters beside Atlantis writers. They do not add a lost land. They do keep the earth in the middle, lit and fecundated from outside, which is the frame for the canals.

The water stores of Europe, Asia, and Africa

He then builds the mountains as the water-stores of the continents. A plate on the leaf numbered 71 is titled as the type of the hydrophylacium inside the Rhaetian Alps, which pours out the most famous rivers of all Europe. I read on that plate Gallia, Germania, Helvetia, the Rhaetian Alps, the Cottian Alps, Pedemontium, Italia, Mare Gallicum, and Mare Adriaticum, and the rivers Danubius, Rhenus, Rhodanus, and Padus, with lakes and the streams that leave the Alps toward both seas. The text under the plate makes the same claim in names. Between Hispania and Gallia, the Pyrenees. Between Germania and Polonia and Hungaria, the Carpathians. From the Pyrenees he draws the Iberus, Durius, Tagus, Betis, and Guadiana, and the streams of Gallia. From Polonia the Vistula, from Hungaria the Tibiscus, from Germania the Oder, and he says these three stores water all Europe.

Asia, he says, was built on the same plan. One chain of mountains runs the whole length, from the Thracian Bosphorus to the last bound of the east, and divides northern Asia, Scythia or Tartary, from southern Asia. Some of those mountains are called Taurus and Antitaurus, some Caucasus, some Imaus and Parapanisus. Where they meet in the middle of Asia they make the principal hydrophylacium of the whole of Asia, and from it immense rivers break out.

On the next leaf the particular rivers are named. Taurus and Antitaurus beat Asia with the greatest streams. Greece is watered by the Acroceraunian mountains, Athos, Olympus, Pelion, and Ossa. Armenia, Persis, and Babylon have the Euphrates, Tigris, Derbi, and the rest, which he traces in a short course from the Gordyaean or Ararat mountains and the Caspian mountains. Those, he says, join Taurus and Caucasus from the west, and then run east into a heap of mountains, like branches planted in a trunk. In the farthest north, the Hyperborean and Riphaean mountains have their own hydrophylacia, feeding the Borysthenes, the Volga, the Tanais, and Tartary. He says he will treat their memorable deeds in their own place.

Africa is the part most exposed to the burning heats of the torrid zone, so nature placed a vast hydrophylacium in the middle of it. The mountains are called the Mountains of the Moon. From them the Nile, the most celebrated of all the rivers of the world, takes its origin, falls through long and unknown windings and through cataracts, and at last discharges into the Mediterranean. The Zaire seeks the west and mixes at last with the Atlantic ocean. The Niger, born not far from the same place, is swallowed by chasms, comes out again, and is at last poured into the ocean in a marsh. The Cuama and other rivers of the south are so large that they can be compared with the sea itself, and the southern ocean receives them all. He also names two lakes, Zambre and Zaire, as water-stores. Zambri, set as if in the center, diffuses into the widest rivers. To the north the Nile. To the east the Cuama and the Coavus, Zeila, and Manhice or Manhensen to the south. To the west the Zaire, whose waters make fertile the whole western side of southern Africa: the kingdoms of Congo and Angola, Monomotapa, Matamam, Bagamidi, Agasymba, as far as the Cape of Good Hope. The interior of the abyss, and the sea-mouths from the Erythraean sea as far as the mouth of the Cuama, he marks with Melinde, Barnagassus, Quiloa, Mombaza, Mozimba, Mombara, Membaca, and Mozambique.

He rejects the account of the Nile given by Odoardo Lopez. Lopez was never a true inspector of the Nile, and his relation does not agree with the thing. Kircher says he learned the truth from a manuscript of Fr. Pedro Pais, and then wished to consign it to Fr. Franciscus Caravaglius, procurator of India and Ethiopia, so that the truth would not be lost among the conjectures of authors.

Provincia ubi Nilus oritur, vocatur Agaos, vicina regno Goiam; Terra, in qua oritur, vocatur Sabala; in apice montis, in plano arboribus undique circumdato; Diameter fontis lata pedem unum cum dimidio, fundi inexplorabilis, margine in radice montis exitum sibi pandit.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 72

The province where the Nile rises is called Agaos, next to the kingdom of Goiam. The land is called Sabala. The spring is on the top of a mountain, on a flat place surrounded by trees. The mouth is a foot and a half across, the bottom cannot be searched, and at the root of the mountain the water opens a way out. He adds that the stream then spreads, grows by other rivers, and empties into a lake thirty leagues long and fourteen wide, and that it emerges again from that lake through long lands. I am not correcting these names against a modern map. They are his.

From Atlas, he says, nature distributed the mountains chained toward the east so that moisture would be shared from the head through all the members of the body, and so from Atlas through the rest of the viscera of the mountains. That is the Atlas range as a water-head, not yet the island.

Abysses and the great whirlpools

Later in the same book he stops to name the workshops. The water receptacles are hydrophylacia, the fire receptacles pyrophylacia, the air receptacles aerophylacia, and the stores of mixed earth geophylacia, the custodians of water, fire, air, and earth. He says he has already pursued the hydrophylacia of the highest mountains. Here he asks what an abyss is. He takes the word in the literal sense, not the mystical one. An abyss is a deepest gulf of waters, whose bottom cannot be explored, set in the inmost parts of the earth. He cites Psalm 41, “Abyssus abyssum invocat,” and the place where the Psalmist says the waters went over him. The sea, thrown down the immense precipices of internal rocks, excites great roarings. There are many such abysses inside the viscera of the earth, and from their effects he deduces the gulfs that show themselves in lakes, seas, and the deepest places of the ocean, gulfs strong enough to refuse a mass of any size.

He gives three by name. In the northern ocean, toward that part of Norway which is divided from Lapland, geographers give a whirlpool a circuit of nearly thirteen German miles. Its center is held by a rock the natives call Muske, the jaws of nature. For six hours everything near it is swallowed. Ships, whales, and boats are sucked down as if by a turning. At the seventh hour it vomits them back with a roar that is heard, not without terror, in the farthest places. He defers the cause to a later book. In the Persian gulf there is a similar vortex, at the promontory of Moffendam, where there are several rocks called Salemas. Between those rocks and the promontory the sea is so strait that a thrown stone can cross, and the sea boils even in a calm, and makes whirlpools so great that in the middle of them, especially when the sea is stirred, a great stone can be sent down and the water closes. He is quoting an eyewitness in an eastern itinerary, and he notes the folio. Sailors cross by the very force of the water when the sea is disturbed, and when it is quiet they row. He thinks this vortex communicates, by a subterranean passage, with the opposite Caspian sea. He says the same ebb appears at the same time on the southern shores of the Persian gulf and rolls great tides into the Caspian, and that vortices are frequent in the Caspian. Between Normandy and England a vortex is observed in the ocean, to which ships are drawn with a wonderful speed, and, what he finds as wonderful, they are driven off again, once they are close, by the same neighboring gulf. He breaks off there toward the Euripus of Chalcis. These are his channels between seas, not a lost continent. The Norwegian gulf returns in the index of the third book, which is where he said he would give the cause.

What the sea takes, and what it gives back

Before the Atlantic island he spends a long argument on land the sea has made and land the sea has eaten. Mount Circeius was once separate from the continent and is now joined by a heap of sand. The same thing, he says, happens wherever a narrow sea or a river piles sand: Batavia, Frisia, Zeeland, and almost the whole sandy and clay archipelago, where plains slowly end as high mountains. He lists places that have changed their estate. Antissa, once Lesbos. Zephyrium, once Halicarnassus. Ethusa, Mindo, Dromiscon, and Parren, once Miletus. Pythecusae, joined to the Parthenian promontory, for which he cites Pliny. Hybanda, once an island of Ionia, afterwards twenty stades inland from the sea. Syrite at Ephesus, and Derasides and Syphonia in Magnesia, which used to be counted among islands. Epidaurus and Oricum have ceased to be islands. Next to that he sets Ovid, in the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses: a time will come when Pyramus, with its rapid waves, will come into sacred Cyprus, the shore having been heaped up.

The section heading is that whatever the sea loses in one part of the lands, it recovers in another, and that from this comes the origin of new islands and new lands. Rivers dig one bank and fill the other. He draws the Po, the Rhine, the Danube, the Rhone, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Ganges, and the great rivers of America, all carrying sand into the low places where water used to stand, and founding new colonies of land. The Tiber, he says, has in twenty years pushed the plain of the sea back so far that the mountain almost licks the fields with its roots. He warns that not every river does this, but above all the rivers that come from the highest mountains.

On the leaf numbered 80 he gathers the cases. Lower Egypt, which they call the Delta, was heaped by the Nile, and the Nile is called the gift of the Nile by Herodotus. He says this is the common opinion of the geographers, and that he demonstrated it in the first part of his Egyptian Oedipus. The districts of Holland were heaped by the Rhine, the Meuse, and other rivers, as Goropius teaches. A great part of the fields of Ferrara grew from the floods of the Po. The maritime field of Arles, together with the island of Comargo, is part of the Rhone. The marshes of Ammonia and of Moeotis were once much deeper and suffered a greater shipwreck, since they could be crossed in mud, as Aristotle witnesses. All Teuthrania, and the land about Ilium, is flat, where once there was sea, now fields, by the benefit of the Maeander. Ravenna, once set on the Adriatic, is now six miles from it. Ostia of the Tiber, once set by the sea, is now about three thousand paces inland, and the intervening ground is cut by great heaps of sand. The same, he says, has been verified in many places of lower Germany. In Pliny’s time the sea had retreated five miles from the port of Ambracia, which had been dry land from the first. If he brought in every maritime place, there would hardly be a region left. Cities that the sea once washed are now far from it. Near Dordrecht and Dullart in Frisia, castles of no small fame have been so buried by alluvium that even the towers, once eminent, scarcely show. On the Etruscan shore, not far from Liburnum, a whole city gave way to the waves, and the dwellings of men were turned into dens of fish.

Ad littus Thuscum non procul Liburno integra urbs undis cessit, hominum habitaculis in piscium latibula conversis, quod non sine horrore anno 1634 propriis oculis observavi.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 80

He says he saw it with his own eyes in 1634, not without horror. He puts it between Centum Cellae, commonly Civita Vechia, and Santa Severa. The coast there is a rough one, with windows, other gates, and arches. In the region of Puteoli, in the very bay of the city of Baiae, a house, with the distinction of its streets, shows under a very clear sea, a famous monument of a city once swallowed, and the remains of its destruction. He says he proved these things by his own experience, and that the monuments of the historians are full of innumerable other events of the same kind. From all of them he concludes that every gathering of islands which men call an archipelago was once joined to a continent, and was torn apart by the violence of the ocean beating on both sides, the softer parts of the continent gradually eaten away, the harder parts, the mountain peaks, left standing in the sea. He has maps, he says, that show it, or else the rage of subterranean fires tore them apart by earthquakes.

The Atlantic island

That is the step into Plato. The Atlantic ocean, where the Canaries now are, and the islands they call the Terceras, was once inhabited by a huge multitude. Plato teaches it in the dialogue entitled Critias. Kircher says he will set down a short epitome of that history, supported by great reasonings, and then go on.

Plato itaque in suo Dialogo, qui Critias intitulatur, sortitione Deorum, Neptuno obtigisse refert Insulam quandam ultra Herculeas Columnas in Oceano Athlantico sitam, Africa et Asia multo majorem; atque Solonem ab Aegyptiorum Sacerdotibus, (qui istius regionis situm, hominumque in ea viventium nomina, rerumque gestarum seriem monumentis suis descripserant) edoctum, Graeci juris reddidisse.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 80

In the dialogue called Critias, by the allotment of the gods, an island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in the Atlantic ocean, much larger than Africa and Asia, fell to Neptune. Solon learned it from the priests of the Egyptians, who had written in their monuments the site of the region, the names of the men living there, and the series of deeds, and Solon put it into Greek. Between Plato’s age and the age when the Atlantic land was still surviving, nine thousand years had intervened. The first heroes of the Athenians fought very hard wars with that island, wars which the injury of an immense antiquity has worn out, so that nothing remains but the names and the fame. The whole island, with its inhabitants, was swallowed, whether by a flood or by earthquakes. He says this shows it to be a true history, not a mythical one, that is, not a history thrown under fables. He says Plato takes the proof of it from the antiquity of Greece, produces the Isthmus as the first bound, and from there the destruction of Epyrum and Cytherona, running on until it ends at the sea. The margin beside the Critias sentence names the Cratylus: Plato in the Cratylus, on the Atlantic island. The text names Critias. I am not choosing between them. The land was of such richness, pleasantness, and abundance of everything needed for human life, that for the proportion of its age, and not by any wasting disease of the body, it could be compared with the old constitution. He then quotes Plato on a region stretched out from another continent like a promontory. The quotation runs off the foot of the page. I am not supplying the rest from Plato. The Greek wording he prints in the margin is there for the reader who wants the line as Kircher cut it.

The next leaf is the Greek side of the same story, which he has from Plato, and then the Egyptian expedition, which he will not retell in full. He has Plato say that the deep bed of the sea lies open, and that the vase of the deep sea which surrounds it on every side, since many and great floods of nine thousand years came between, and that is the whole time from then to our age, left no part of the land in our time without the changes that follow when higher places flow down. Elsewhere, as in the narrow places of Attica, the land is always settling, hidden, in a circle, into the depth. The islands were settled. Attic places, if they are compared with the old ones, have shrunk like a body diminished by disease. The earth was fat and soft, so that only a thin and dry body of earth remained. When the earth was whole it had sublime mountains and hills, and the fields now called Phallei abounded in rich soil and in plentiful wood on the mountain ridges, so that the traces still show. The region, however fruitful, received rain from Jove, and did not, as in our time, flow from a steep and broken place into the sea. The earth, absorbing that rain, held it in a rich and tough substance, stored it in the upper places, and let it out into the valleys. Hence the great rivers and springs everywhere, of which some sacred monuments still appear in the old springs.

Plato, he says, brings this in to show the destruction of the Atlantic island, by an insignificant transmutation of part of the land, which the Greeks fable to have happened in Greece, over an interval of nine thousand years, by a triple flood. The cause is first the sinking of the mountains. All the land was fat and rich, like flesh, and not bare, like bone, as those who want to clothe it now would have it, but in truth bald, bare, and stripped of every ornament of woods, like a body diminished by disease. Then, by the floods of rain, and by the fat earth being scraped off together with the woods, the lowest valleys, fields, and even the sea itself were little by little filled. The earth, raised by the heaping of clods, made the peaks of the mountains not only much shorter and smaller than they were in the first times, but stripped them of all flesh, and left nothing but certain bones of the mountains. He says Plato thinks the same thing happened in the Atlantic land. Many rivers and springs are missing in Greece today, which men of a great name say once watered the whole land, and the monuments of the ancients report it. The cause assigned is that the mountains, once very rich and clothed, did not let the rain sent by Jove flow off, but now, like a sponge, they drink what they drink, send it down through the hidden meanders of the mountains, and press it out as a very abundant river and springs, which for that reason are not found today, because the meanders of the mountains are stopped with mud and clods, or shut every entrance against the rain water, or else, shaken by an earthquake, have induced the transmutation he has described.

He then says he will examine Plato’s opinion on the decrease of mountains and the drying of rivers more copiously elsewhere, and that he now returns to the Atlantic island. As he taught in his Oedipus, it is not fabulous, but truly historical. Plato tries in many ways to show it, while he curiously describes the site of the island, its quality, the customs and genius of the men, and the manner of governing it, when cities, camps, fortifications, and the apparatus of workshops had been built, not only of a wonderful extent, but furnished with gold, ivory, and precious stones, with which the temples of the gods were adorned, and with the greatest abundance of everything. At last, as it was swallowed by the sea, it has remained forgotten by the memory of men to this day. Certainly the Greeks, swollen in a strange way with glory, ascribe this expedition into the Atlantic land to the oldest and most autochthonous of the Athenians, as Plato says, and especially to the strength of their affairs and the skill of their right hands, so as to darken, by this memorable history, the oldest glory of the Egyptians. Plato himself confesses that Solon learned the history from the Egyptians, who had written it in their monuments, as a monument, more perennial than cedar, of antiquity and of Egyptian strength. He says he showed, in the Oedipus, how this series of deeds was carried on. Hercules the Egyptian, whom they also call Osiris, when the care of the kingdom had been committed to Isis his wife, traversed the whole world with a strong army, and subdued to his empire all those regions from the sunrise, on both sides of the Herculean strait, which is now named from his memory. Then, made more certain by a sure report of a huge island which stood in the immense ocean, he directed a naval expedition there, came on the island suddenly, subdued it, and, peace having been made with the inhabitants at the start, founded a colony, and set over it one of his grandsons, of the name of Neptune.

That is a second story, set beside the lot by which the island fell to Neptune. Kircher does not reconcile them on this page. He says the Egyptians remember these things of the Atlantic land. What Plato says, that nine thousand years had flowed away down to his own time, by which he proves that these things happened, is likewise a comment of the Egyptians. In order to persuade men that they were the oldest of all, it can hardly be said with how outrageous a number of years they fixed their origin back into earlier times. Because he has demonstrated all this very fully in the first tome of the Oedipus, he sends the reader there. Whatever does not belong to his present matter, he returns to the Atlantic island.

The leaf numbered 82 opens on the result, and on the map.

Athlanticam Insulam ingentem omnium seculorum memoria extinctisse ex praecedentibus patuit; quomodo autem et quando defierit, tam ignotum est, quam ignota tempora, quibus viguit.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 82

It is plain from what goes before that a great Atlantic island has been extinguished from the memory of all ages. How it ceased, and when, is as unknown as the times in which it flourished. If what the ancients say of it is true, he would say its site is no other than the one comprised by the Canaries, the Azores, the islands he calls Flandricae, and the other islands that survive in the Atlantic ocean. It is very like a recent island made of huge and very high mountains, so that the higher and harder parts of the Atlantic island remained, and the rest, the smaller mountains, valleys, and plains having been cut between, were swallowed by an earthquake, and the ocean succeeded to their place. The map is the picture of that. The cartouche reads: site of the island of Atlantis, once swallowed by the sea, from the mind of the Egyptians and from Plato’s description. Africa and Hispania stand on one side, America on the other, the island in the ocean between, with smaller islands about it. One label is Oceanus, another Atlanticus, and the great island is Insula Atlantis.

Some, he says, want this land as a part of a continent joined on the west to America. That lacks all credit. Such a continent, continued to the Strait of Hercules, would extend the space of the terrestrial circle to more than about ninety degrees of longitude, which was against nature’s intention. Nature distributed the portions of the world so that they would always be open to the surrounding ocean, both for the production of springs and rivers and for the other benefits of nature. It remains to ask how it perished, and, so far as it can be known by experience, by what double reason it could fall into ruin.

The first cause he defends is earthquakes, whose efficient causes are the subterranean fires with which the Atlantic sea abounds, so that the land is exposed to earthquakes. Historians write of them. Mount Pico in Tenerife, of the Canaries, is of such height that it hinders sailors. Set in the deepest ocean, it appears like a column at sixty miles. They testify that it emits smoke from the top, and that fires have sometimes happened. Sulphur stones are carried from there into Spain in great quantity, and the journey is made in three days. From a plain conspicuous at the summit, all the Canary islands, however far off, offer themselves to the sight. It also abounds in hot springs and bituminous springs, which are manifest signs of a hidden subterranean fire. In the Azores he picks out Pico, called by the inhabitants Pico de Fayal de San Georgio. The island has mountains about it, of which those called Tercera, and San Michael, are said to have erupted fire in many places, and to have shaken the whole island so often with frequent earthquakes that it was almost all thrown into the abyss. He then adds a report, because the thing is worthy of memory.

26 die Junii anni 1638. caperunt spatio 8 dierum adeo formidabiles terraemotus universam conquassare Insulam, ut homines civitatibus, oppidis, castellis derelictis campos apertos fuerint coacti inhabitare, maxime in inculta terra, dicta Vargen, ubi terraemotus saeviebant, quam aliis in locis, multo efficacius.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 82

On 26 June 1638, for the space of eight days, earthquakes so dreadful began to shake the whole island that men were forced to leave the cities, towns, and forts and to live in the open fields, especially in the uncultivated land called Vargen, where the earthquake raged more fiercely than in other places. The margin calls this a relation of a remarkable fire that arose in the islands of San Michael. The prodigy that followed the earthquakes was at Pico, commonly Pico delle Camerine, six miles from the place called la ferreira. Fishermen of the island, going there to fish, especially in the summer time, found the space of one natural day so filled with a multitude of fish of every kind that no boat came back that was not loaded with ten thousand fish. In that ocean, on a Saturday, in the month of July, in the year 1638, a fire broke out with so inexplicable a violence, not obstructed by the known depth of the ocean, one hundred and twenty geometrical feet, explored by the fishermen before these rocks, that it erupted to so great a height of burning that the ocean itself was not enough for it. The space the boiling of the fire occupied was as great as two measures of wheat would have been enough to sow. It broke out with such violence that, despite the known depth, it appeared in the clouds, carried into the highest region of the air, and threw out dry sand, stones, and other huge masses, which, struck by the sparks, offered the onlookers a spectacle like tufts of cotton, and the matter thrown back into the sea, once liquefied, took on the look of pap. He ascribes it to a benign divine providence that the wind was then a land wind, running out from the parts of the island against the rage of the fire. Had it been otherwise, he says, so formidable a fire would have torn the whole island away. Then the force of that raging nature threw rocks of immense size to the height of three lances, so that you would have said not rocks but whole mountains had been cast out. To the horror of it, some of those falling mountains were thrown into the sea, some were lifted into the air, and they were torn into terrible fragments by the mutual striking of the parts. The black sand received into the sea was turned into a new island.

Porro ex varia immensaque rejectamentorum multitudine, saxorumque innumerorum coacervatione Insula nova in medio, eoque profundissimo Oceano exorta, in principio quidem parva quinque jugerum, at indies augmentata in tantum excrevit, ut ab hinc, 14 diebus, spatium longitudinis quinque milliarium occuparit.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 83

From the huge quantity of what was thrown out, and from the heaping of innumerable rocks, a new island arose in the middle of that very deep ocean. At first it was small, of five jugera, but it grew from day to day until, within fourteen days, it occupied a length of five miles. So great a multitude of fish died in that fire that eight Indian cargo ships could scarcely have held them. Scattered far and wide through the island, they were collected by the natives and buried in very deep pits for eighteen miles around, so that rotting would not cause a contagion. The smell of sulphur was felt for twenty-four miles.

From this, he says, it is clear what happens in our times, and what could have happened in the first times, since the nature of the place is always the same. He supposes fires under this tract, which nature constituted, and he puts them at once in that place. Hence no age is not subject to earthquakes. Another work of nature, he says, has little by little disposed the Atlantic island to its final ruin, and it is the violent motion of the ocean from the north. By that motion, in time, the cavernous roots of islands are eaten out, or, when an earthquake rises, the whole mass falls and sinks. It is therefore very like the truth, and in the highest degree probable, that this Atlantic island, once of enormous size, worn out by similar injuries of nature, at last fell, and that nothing remains except the islands already mentioned. Those islands, built of very high mountains, have a firmer consistency, and are left as witnesses of so great a past calamity, like surviving bulwarks. The same, he says, is very like what happened to the islands of the Philippine archipelago, which the Chinese annals assert were once joined to the golden Chersonese as one continent, and were afterwards broken by the tyranny of the ocean, in times of innumerable shipwrecks, into islands past number. He says he has already pointed this out more fully above.

Another face of the earth after the flood

The corollary on the same leaf is the general claim, wider than the one island.

Existunt itaque Insulae, quae prius non erant; Terrae excrevit, ubi prius indomiti stabulabant aquarum gurgites.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 83

Islands exist, then, which did not exist before. Land has grown where the untamed whirlpools of the waters used to lodge. Against this, tracts which once enjoyed a fat and fertile land have now, under the rule of the sea, vanished into new hiding places of fish. The yokes of the mountains, swallowed here, have grown elsewhere. Great lakes, where the right of Neptune has passed over into the right of Vesta, and the contrary. Rivers, their native beds abandoned, have prepared exits for themselves through other mountain straits. The margin says that the face of the land today is other than the face it once had. Such conversions of the terrestrial globe, and they are infinite, so strike the uncertainty of human strength, and warn the mortal inhabitants of this geocosm, that since nothing is perpetual and stable, and all things are caducous, they should turn their thoughts, studies, and mind from sublime and temporal goods to God alone, in whose hand are all the rights of kingdoms and the bounds of universal nature. That is his moral. I leave it as his.

An appendix follows, on the most famous plains of the orb. He divides plains into sandy, stony, and heathy, which are also called deserts, and into fruitful plains, gardens, and woods. Sandy and heathy deserts lie open in almost every region. Stony Arabia is the example of the stony kind. The heaths are in Germany and in the other parts of the world. The woods differ by place and climate. He names the Hercynian wood in Germany, the black wood, and the German trees, then the chestnuts of Gaul and Italy, the palms of Africa, the citrus wood of the promontory of the Cape Verde, the cinnamon woods of Ceylon, and the nutmeg and cedar of Lebanon from the Banda and Molucca islands. He says the variety is so great that to list it would be endless, and he passes on.

The deserts destitute of all human cultivation are the deserts of Tartary, which they call Mongul and Lop. The sandy desert is not far from the Chinese wall, and it is still unexplored. Its length runs from the south into the north, and merchants going back and forth from Tartary into China have to cross it. It is a place equal in terror to every place. There are also vast deserts in America, northern and southern, of which the one between the kingdom of Paraguay and Chile holds the place called by travellers the Pampas. Whoever comes from the kingdom of Chile into Paraguay first meets mountains of incredible height, which they call Andes or Cordillera, surpassing a journey of forty leagues, on whose top the air is said to be so thin that, at the peril of life, the vital spirits can scarcely consist because of the mutual shutting off. Hence all sponges, cold water, and whatever is fit for condensing air into breath, have to be used. The air is so disposed to inflammation that travellers seem to belch flames, and they are burned at once by the breath of a furious fire. He gives this as a spectacle of nature unknown to the inexperienced, and he has it from Padre Alfonso d’Ovale, of the Society, procurator of the kingdom of Chile, who made the journey. Coming down from the mountain in a journey of three days, one meets the city called Mendoza. Then that desert, which they call Pampas, built in the manner of an ocean, stretched out a long way, yet with no vestige of sand. The whole is covered with herbs by nature, and inhabited by animals of every kind, and it is not destitute of rivers and lakes. They make their way in, no differently than sailors with a compass make their way on the ocean, toward the end of the desert called los buenos ayeres, and toward that first city of Paraguay, set on the river Jannarium, directing themselves by a constant law. The buildings are of wood and can hold many men. While oxen draw them, the trampling of the herbs and grasses levels a path and opens a road. They rarely spend three months on that road, and usually four. He has the relation from the same Padre Alfonso d’Ovale, and he sends the reader to that father’s history of the kingdom of Chile. There is no trace of higher land or of mountains in this place. It is open on every side, and on every side the horizon, which you would call a land-ocean.

He then asks why nature produced so many deserts in the orb, destined for no human use. He is speaking of the sandy and stony deserts, not of the wooded and heathy ones, which have their own convenience. The sandy deserts are above all worth seeing in Africa, and in Arabia within the northern bounds of Happy Arabia. From various exploration of the places, and from information given by the natives, and also from the reading of Arab authors of various antiquity, he has constituted this.

hunc fabulosum Oceanum inter sinum Persicum et Erythraeum interjectum ante diluvium continuatum mare fuisse reperio; diluvium autem ingentes sabulos arenarumque cumulos illuc congesisse, terramque elevatam, marique intra sinus suos coacto, hanc, quam experiuntur, sabulos congeriem reliquisse.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 84

He finds that the storied ocean lying between the Persian gulf and the Erythraean sea was continuous sea before the flood. The flood heaped huge sands and mounds of sand there, lifted the land, forced the sea back inside its gulfs, and left the sand-heap they now experience. What is required is a gathering of sand which it is scarcely possible to see, because the nature of the place, a low place without any mountains, unless the unstable fable of the stirring of the winds is repeated and soon refuted, founds the plain. The same is to be thought of the storied desert of Tartary. It is not badly founded on reasons that it was once the site of the ocean, that is, that the Caspian sea was continuous with it. The same of the sandy fields of Libya. Since, as he said above, the lower part of Egypt was once flooded by the sea, Libya is certainly not to be denied, when the waters withdrew from the plain of Egypt. The end he assigns is nature’s intention. I stop the quotation there. The rest of the appendix is the division of plains and the uses of woods, and it does not add another lost land.

The later chapters of this second book, as the running titles and the index carry them, are the height of mountains and the depth of the ocean, with Aristotle’s height for the Caucasus, the inequality of the world, joined to the memorable history of the Calabrian earthquakes, the magnetic constitution or the bones of the earth, the heterogeneous body of the earth, the inner constitution of the geocosm and its analogy with the members of a human body, and the caves, chasms, and innumerable passages. A leaf numbered 120 is headed as a cave in the Andes, and he points to Ramusio for American mountains whose caves exceed all human belief. I am not retelling cave stories I did not read through. They belong to the same canal-world. They do not add a second Atlantis.

Book III, Hydrographicus

The third book opens on the leaf numbered 121. The title is the nature of the ocean: origin, motions both external and internal, the perpetual circulation of the ocean, and the other remarkable effects in the nature of things. The first section is the nature of the watery element, or of the sea, the continuous motions by which it is agitated at every time, and the remarkable effects it produces in the subterranean world. He will discuss to what end nature constituted these marine motions around the terrestrial orb, the variety and change of the tides in various regions, rivers, islands, and straits, the causes of each and of all, the remarkable constitution of the floor of the ocean, the circulation of the ocean through either pole of the terrestrial orb, and the remarkable constitution and communication of all seas through the hidden meanders of the earth.

The ocean, he says, which is the common receptacle of all sublunary waters, has one natural motion, by which every part of it is driven, insensibly to us, but sensibly in the surface, into a spherical figure. Experiment shows it. If you make any lake and its ditch shake, the water goes back, of its own accord, to the equable surface of its bed. He argues that one part cannot stand higher or deeper than another, so the water must tend to equilibrium, and that this is the end and the appetite of the element. If you consider the universal ocean in its natural state, there is no doubt that it is composed, as to its surface, into a spherical figure. If its parts are equidistant from the center of the earth, it is beautifully proved, he says, by Archimedes, from the things that are carried in water. His second supposition is that if one part of the ocean is struck by a heavier impulse, the whole ocean must be moved. A body A pushes the next part E out into B, B pushes F into C, C pushes G into D, and so on in a circle, until it is restored to its own beginning. The motion is always weaker the farther it is from the start. All of this is of the motion of the sea with no blowing of the winds, which dominate everywhere. The obstacles of shores and promontories are not enough to stop the motion. They can only impede it, and they must be worn away. Hence, if any canal is of any length, it is filled with water, and the banks are stopped.

That is the channel doctrine of this book, as far as the opening page states it. The index of arguments then lists a general motion from east to west, currents that are struck back or reflected, a second general motion composed of two contrary motions, which he calls the tide, the flux and reflux, the access and recess, the swelling and the subsiding of the sea, the virtue by which the moon moves the sea, why the force is greatest at new moon and full moon, why the sea does not always flow and ebb for six hours in every part of the earth, and whence so irregular a motion comes. The index also has London on the Thames, the mouth of the Garonne, and the river Senegal, the southern sea by Panama set against the northern sea by Nombre de Dios, and the gulf of Norway as the most celebrated in the whole orb. A third section is the art of the tides, the circulation of the ocean, and the saltness of the sea, its origin and its necessity. I read that index in order to know the plan. I did not walk every tide chapter, and I am not going to invent the hour-counts. The whirlpools themselves were already described in the second book. This book does not add Atlantis, and it does not add a lost land beyond the communication of the seas through hidden meanders.

Book IV, Pyrologus

The fourth book is the subterranean fire: its nature, its site, and its operations. The necessity, as he puts it on the opening leaves, is that the internal economy of the earth required a fire. He says Plato, looking at these things more deeply, recognized in the Phaedrus the perennial flames, the incredible waters both hot and cold, and many great rivers of water and of fire. Aristotle, from the observed effects of fire, taught that the earth contains very large springs of spirit and of fire, as it contains springs of water, and he repeated it when he searched for the causes of the motion of winds in the earth. Pliny, Vitruvius, and Cicero noted the same secret. When they search the viscera of the earth, they see the workmen of heat hiding there. The greatest parts of the world are held up by heat. Fire is struck from the collision and friction of stones, and a recent digging shows the earth smoking. He then says the subterranean fire is not pure elemental fire, but a portion stained with a mixture of combustible things, and he sets that against the opinion that every kitchen fire is the element. The true element of fire, for the philosophers he names, Trismegistus, Zoroaster, and Orpheus, is not a certain place but the substance of the ether of the universe, a vivifying fire. Orpheus teaches that all things were constituted by the maker out of fire, water, earth, and the all-nourishing ether.

The index carries the book on through the Phlegraean field in the country of Puteoli, the fire-vomiting mountains on the outer surface as proof that the earth is full of fires, the perennial duration of the fire and its food, a scheme of Etna as a prototype of the subterranean fires and of their unfailing fuel, and a description of the crater of Etna. The second section is the air and the winds, on the outer face and in the cavernous regions inside, the general wind, the periodic winds the Greeks call etesian, the anniversary winds observed by Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and English sailors, and the claim that no meteor has its birth except from the subterranean world, and that every meteorological impression born on high draws its origin from the subterranean fires. The fires are the pyrophylacia he named in the second book. I did not find, in the opening or in that index, a return to the Atlantic island. The new island of 1638, which he used as the living example of how an Atlantic island can be destroyed or born, stays in the second book.

Book V, the origin of springs and the canals from the sea

The fifth book is the origin of lakes, springs, and rivers, their different nature, powers, and properties. By the time the printed numbers have reached 232 he is answering the question how the water of the sea is lifted into the highest mountains and into the other hydrophylacia. Two swellings of the sea, which he letters, occupy two quadrants of the geocosm. He has already set out the pressure of the sea in the third book, in the first section, on the motion or the flux and reflux. Those swellings walk the circuit of the whole globe of the earth in the space of twenty-four hours, by the counsel of nature, so that by the weight of the gathered waters they agitate the sea and drive it into the water-leading canals inserted by nature in the earth, and push it out into the hydrophylacia of the mountains. Because these swellings are perennial, the inflow of water into the hydrophylacia is necessary, and, as long as the world lasts, they will not cease to solicit the watery element. When the swellings grow and are violently accumulated, the waters squeezed by each portion of the swelling are plainly driven, not by one canal but by innumerable canals, whose waters they perpetually solicit, to unload themselves into all the mountains of the earth. The unloading is the easier the more oblique the water-leading syphons were. He shows it by an experiment. A vessel of lead or iron plates has an oblique canal from one point to another, and another canal perpendicular. Water pressed in the vessel, by hand or by a little piston, is pulled much more easily along the oblique canal than up the perpendicular tube, because the weight of water in an oblique site weighs less than in a normal site. He says he has demonstrated this in his hydrostatics, and that sagacious nature seems to have looked to this principle when she wanted to twist the canals, not straight down into the earth, but on an oblique lead, for an easier drive of the waters. He adds that not all the water-leading canals are inserted in the floor of the sea. Very many are inserted in the walls of the earthly mountains, which have their site at the sea, or are inserted by nature in the sides of islands. And so those canals are solicited by the pressure of the mass of water, now by the drive of the waves and of storms, now by the pressure of the swelling tide, and they easily carry the water off into whatever mountain peaks you like.

He meets the objection that the motion of the sea is not violent at all, but natural. His answer is that nature always intended to join a natural motion to something violent, which should not be called violent in a proper and simple sense, but as a necessary accompaniment of the operations of nature. The sea is not by its own natural force in a perpetual unrest and turbulence, but it is printed with violence by the agitation of the winds and by the flux and reflux. Meteorological impressions show it, when the wind throws down trees and towers, and an earthquake overturns cities, drives the sea back, and turns beeches upside down, which one would hardly have believed were natural operations without the violence. In the same way, from the impulse of the sea made into the water-leading canals, the water is violently pressed, and is thought to lift itself beyond the bounds of its own nature. The impulse follows from the operations of natural things by a necessary consequence. These operations are intended by nature, and they are perpetual. If there were something simply violent, it would at once fail in the whole, but they last, and will last, as long as the world consists, as so many ages, Etna, so many burning places, so many kinds of hot springs, witness. He confesses that this should not be called simply violent, but a natural effect of a natural cause. He cites Thomas, on a passage of Aristotle, that nothing violent is perpetual, and that nothing violent is perpetual unless the cause is perpetual. If something violent is seen in natural operations, it still cannot be called violent properly and simply, since the cause is a perpetual work of nature, and the effect is a perpetual consequence of nature. The operation is not violent in kind, but perpetual, as the other species are perpetual and intended by nature. He compares it to the circulation of human blood. The ascent of the heavy blood from the foot to the head is not called violent, but intended by nature, and therefore perpetual while the man lasts. He has already set out the mode and the reason by which water is lifted from the sea into the highest mountains and into the other hydrophylacia.

Et primo quidem suppono, hydrophylacia naturae, uti et syphones, sive inciles hydragogos non casu aut fortuito, sed magno naturae consilio imo non minori industria, quam venas et arterias in corpore humano sive Microcosmo, vasis humorum, insertos fuisse.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 232

He supposes, first, that the hydrophylacia of nature, and likewise the syphons, or the cut water-leading canals, were inserted not by chance or at random, but by a great counsel of nature, and indeed with no less industry than the veins and arteries were inserted in the human body, the microcosm, as the vessels of the humors. And as eternal wisdom constituted all things in number, weight, and measure, so she fitted the inner economy and fabric of the geocosm with those channels. That is his system of the canals. The book goes on, in the index and in the leaves that follow, into lakes on the plains, the goodness and badness of spring water, how to know where water hides under the earth, mixed and medicated waters, the heat of hot springs, the color, taste, and smell of particular springs, deadly waters, springs that ebb and flow, and waters that turn things to stone. Where the second part of this scan opens, he is still in that book, on lakes of four kinds, according to a fourfold combination, beginning with lakes that receive no river and emit none and stand in a perpetual tenor. I am not listing every spa. None of those chapters, in the passages I read, returns to the Atlantic island. The canals are the claim that belongs beside the island, because the same book of the globe used subterranean fire and earthquake to destroy it.

Book VI, earth and the salts

The sixth book is the fourth element, the earth, and the first fruits the subterranean world produces from it. He asks whether earth is truly and properly an element, and what should be understood by it. The variety of things contained in the womb of the globe is then reduced, with the help of the other elements, to salt and its differences, the way of extracting salts, nitre in its kinds, the making of nitre powder and its uses in the art of fire, alum, and vitriol, with an appendix on a fourfold kind of salts. In the prooemium to the second tome he says that from the force of these salt bodies every body in the inner and the outer globe takes a fixed, hard, and solid consistency. I found no Atlantis in this book, and no lost land. The flood appears only as he passes into the next book, in the sands heaped after it.

Book VII, sand, earths, and circulation

The seventh book is the nature, property, and use of the minerals or fossils which properly taste of the earthy element, and the perpetual circulation and revolution of the geocosm which happens by their motion. Sand, gravel, and the rest are gathered in the empty places of mountains and mines, or rolled along the banks of rivers and seas by the agitation of the waves, or brought down the burrows of the mountains by the motion of the waters, or heaped from sands after the flood. From those heaps come sandy mountains and hills. Some, in the course of time, are turned to stone by a petrifying juice. Others remain under a moving sandy substance. The sand found in sandy deserts comes from the nature of the place itself, rock worn down by a dewy moisture into a sandy matter. A later section is the great and perpetual separation of earthly matter, the resolution of clay, stone, and metallic mixtures by the motion of sand and gravel, what earth properly is, why earths differ, the use of various earths, what is required for the cultivation of fields, and the earths painters use. The preface of the book says no body in nature has an origin except from salt, and that every body at last resolves into salt. He has no Atlantic island here. One origin of sand, among others, is the heaping of sands after the flood.

aut arenis post diluvium coacervatis, unde arenaceorum montium colliumque origo, quorum nonnulli succo petrifico successu temporum in lapidem conversi, alii sub mobili arenae substantia remanserunt, uti Mons Janiculus, qui fulvi coloris arenis totus constat.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus I p. 327

Or from sands heaped after the flood, whence comes the origin of sandy mountains and hills. Some, in the course of time, are turned to stone by a petrifying juice. Others remain under a moving sandy substance, as the Janiculum, which consists entirely of yellow sand. After the seventh book the first tome closes with an index of things and words, and a short errata note, before the second tome’s dedication. I am not treating that index as a new argument about the earth.

Prooemium to the second tome

The second tome opens with a prooemium to the reader, an idea of the work, and then the index of the five books it contains. After the seven books of the first tome, on the center, the structure and fabric of the geocosm, the hidden nature of the ocean and of the watery element, the meteors both inside and outside the surface of the earth, the birth of subterranean fires and winds, the nature, property, diversity, and origin of the waters that surround the globe, and the true and genuine element of earth, that is, salt and the other earthly clods, nothing remains, he says, but to go on to the particular fruits and births which the most fertile womb of the geocosm brings forth in a rich yield, and to explore their powers and the nearest causes of so many effects. He thinks this can be done, in a fitting series, in the five books of this tome.

The eighth book is the stony substance of the geocosm. Nature has amused herself, with an admirable and ineffable industry, in the composition of common stones and of precious stones and gems, both as to ornaments worthy of all admiration and as to the incredible endowments of inner powers, and as to the apparatus of pictures by which she has tried, throughout whatever is contained in the circuit of the world, to express, in play, the capacity of a mocking genius. He asks with how artificial a work she has elaborated bones of a giant size, and horns of a prodigious length, in her hidden workshops, and with what sagacity she has drawn fossil wood under the earth, and plants of an incredible fabric, corals, out of the rocks of the sea. The eighth book lays all of that open. The ninth is the poisons. The maker mixed goods with evils, the impure with the pure, the harmful with the wholesome, as if in a box of Pandora, and the ninth book is to treat, as richly as he can, the origin, nature, and powers of the poisons, which are the deadly parts of the earthly world. The reader will know openly that nothing from God, the author of things, was so pernicious and deadly in the sublunary world that it did not contain in itself a remedy of life as well as a poison. From the salt, stony, and destructive substance he goes on to the metallic art, which he will call metallurgy. The tenth book treats the proportion, concoction, and separation of the metals drawn from the matrices of the mines, and the powers of each. The eleventh book, under the title of chemiotechnia, disputes whether true and natural gold can be made by alchemy, exhibits the errors, impostures, and frauds the alchemists have committed in every age, and examines, with the utmost rigor, the art they call transmutatory, called back to the balance of physiology, together with the boast of the philosophical stone, by various experiments. The twelfth and last book he calls, by a name he thinks not incongruous, the ape of nature. In it he means to teach and demonstrate, by innumerable rare and unusual exhibitions of experiments, that whatever of the admirable nature exhibits in the geocosm, human wit can produce, provided nature duly lends her aid. That is his own map of the second tome. I follow it.

Book VIII, stones, the flood, and giants

The eighth book, in the index, is the stony substance of the earth, bones, horns, and fossils, and also the subterranean animals, men, and demons. The second chapter asks whether stony mountains existed from the beginning of things, or grew in the course of time out of mud, or after the flood out of an immense coagulation. He says there is no difficulty in this, and that it is solved in a few words. Mountains of stone, of every kind, as he showed in the third book, huge chains of mountains, some from pole to pole, some risen from the bed of the ocean, were constituted from the beginning of things, when, by the divine will, after the division of the waters, the dry land appeared. They were constituted by the divine architect. That is the opinion of most interpreters of holy Scripture.

Qui vero putant, Montes primum post diluvium ex coacervatione limi capita sua extulisse eorum opinio, utique Sacro Textui contraria, prorsus repudianda est.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus II p. 5

Those who think the mountains first lifted their heads after the flood, out of a heaping of mud, hold an opinion contrary to the sacred text, and it is wholly to be rejected. When the sacred letters, in the cited place of Genesis, expressly say that the ark rested on the mountains of Armenia, above Ararat, the ark could not have rested above a thing which at first did not exist, nor could Noah afterwards have named a mountain which he had not known to exist before the flood.

Accedit quod diluvii aquae quindecim cubitis excessisse dicantur citato Genesis loco, omnes montes qui sunt sub coelo; quae quidem locutio aliud non arguit, quam quod montes jam ante diluvium extiterint.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus II p. 5

The waters of the flood are said, in the cited place of Genesis, to have exceeded by fifteen cubits all the mountains which are under heaven. That way of speaking argues nothing other than that the mountains already existed before the flood. He does not deny that, from various revolutions of the world and from the spreading of inundations, mud and clay, gathered into huge heaps, hardened in the course of time into a stony substance. He is not speaking of those stones, or of the marbles, which daily serve for the building of temples and of other works, but of the stony mass by which the body of the earth is sustained for its functions in the manner of mountains, a substance which is, so to speak, the bones and the substructions, intended by God for a firmer consistency of the whole geocosm. The rest of the chapter is the petrifying virtue, and it does not add a lost land.

Much later, still in the second section of this book, he comes to giants, because he has been talking of bones of a giant size. He asks, when giants are mentioned, whether they are to be understood only of strength and of manhood, or also of a mass of body. He says it is now clear, from men seen in the Strait of Magellan, that men of a good proportion can exceed the ordinary stature by half, or even by more, and that no giant of the kind he has just discussed was invented in our age. Giants of that kind, before and after the flood, that is, more eminent than other men both in size and in strength, are to be held as certain. He does not mean the exotic bulk the stories describe. If they were of a prodigious size, how did they inhabit the city of Enon, and how did they live in houses or tents incapable of so great a mass? How did they mix, in a disproportion of body, with mothers, sons, and the rest of men, as Berosus says, and as the sacred text does not refuse?

The Arabic history, or rather the fabulous description of the giant Og, surpasses, he says, every conception of the human imagination in its monstrosities. He prints a Latin version of an Arabic sermon.

Og gigas ante et post diluvium superstes, cum Noe insigni et irreconciliabili inimicitiae dissidio exercebatur, quem et continuo ad internecionem quaerebat.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus II p. 60

Og the giant, survivor both before and after the flood, was engaged in a notable and irreconcilable enmity with Noah, and continually sought him for slaughter. Noah could not resist so great a vastness, and hid himself in the caves of the mountains, which the huge mass of the giant’s body could not enter. Once, when the giant could not catch Noah as he fled, he threw after him a beard he had torn out. It at once filled the whole plain like a cedar wood, as many hairs as cedars, and from those cedars, they say, by a ridiculous fiction, Noah built the ark. They fable him of so immense a size that when he sought Noah’s ark in the flood, the waters reached only to his knees. Meanwhile, tortured by hunger, he hunted whales and devoured them, roasted in the sun, at one gulp, and similar things, which move laughter and, by their crude lies, turn the stomach. Kircher says he gives this for the mind’s sake, and that the recent history of giants is empty and ridiculous. He also throws out the Sicilian tales of giant corpses. He asks how a vaulted chapel could hold a corpse of sixty-six palms, and he says the teeth sold as giants’ teeth are the teeth of mineral fossils. Fazelus on the like giant corpses in Sicily is, he says, mere fable, or else it fails on the demonstrated facts. If they were once born and raised in Sicily, why does Sicily not produce them today? It is not enough to allege the influence, since the climate is the same today, and the aspect of the sky is the same, and the same soil should produce the same fruit and the same animals. No one will persuade him that there were never giants in the world. That would be to deny it. Far from it. Sacred literature teaches otherwise, from Genesis 6: there were giants on the earth in those days, and they were powerful from of old, famous men. What Berosus writes of the giants, and of the city of the giants, Enon, on Mount Lebanon, has, as he sees it, no credit with historians, and those fables are no more to be ascribed to history than all the other things the old gentile historians and Homer write of the Giants, the Titans, and the Cyclopes, and the births from heaven and earth. The recent histories of giants rest on nothing, he says, except to show how nature generates a substance of this kind in subterranean places. From this it will be plain that those bones were never the invention of a likeness, but only a pure work of nature.

The second disquisition on that leaf is the origin of enostos, or of subterranean bones. He asks how the earth generates, in its womb, stones of every kind, coals which they call lichantraces, wood which they call fossil, and flesh of the earth which they call marga, and bones which the metallurgists already call enostos, osteocolla in Greek, and in German, from the likeness of human members, Knochenstein. He cites Hector Boethius on stones of the earth. Under the earth, ribs or thigh-bones are dug up in the form of human bones, and they are found in various places in Germany. They are found in the Palatinate not far from Speyer, likewise near Heidelberg and Jena in Saxony, and in Silesia and the other places. They grow at the roots of sandy mountains, and are dug up underground in great number. Cianthes, bishop of Potenza, told him that in his bishopric there is an underground place from which round bones are dug, of very different sizes, some expressing the form of a human skull, some a thigh. He and Ambrosinus recite them together with figures, and call those kinds of stone cephalites, or cardites, from the figures they refer to. Some look, on the outside, like the bark of a tree. I stop before the agriculture of the next column. The point for a comparison is the one he himself draws. He accepts giants before and after the flood as greater men. He does not accept Og, and he does not accept the subterranean bones as the corpses of those giants. They are a work of the earth.

The rest of the eighth book, on the index, is the transformation of juices, salts, plants, trees, animals, and men into stone, asbestos, amber, the twelve stones in the rational of the high priest and in the foundations of the Apocalypse, subterranean animals, subterranean dragons, subterranean men, and subterranean demons. I did not find a lost Atlantic land in those headings. The subterranean men and demons are a different claim from a drowned island, and I am not unfolding chapters I did not read.

Book IX, poisons

The ninth book is the poisonous and deadly fruits of the subterranean world. The index opens on the nature, origin, and remarkable properties of poisons, the earthy veins and minerals from which every poison is said to draw its origin primordially, accidental poison in other plants and animals both living and dead, the differences of poisons, and the difference between foods, medicaments, and poisons, together with sympathy and antipathy. The prooemium says the reader will see that nothing God made was so deadly as not to carry a remedy of life in itself. I found no Atlantis, no lost land, and no flood in this book.

Book X, metals and mines

The tenth book is metallurgy. He has already said, in the prooemium, that it treats the metals drawn from the matrices of the mines, their proportion, concoction, separation, and powers. The running titles I met are the conditions of the mines, gold, silver, and the ores. One section heading, late in the book, is the subterranean earthquakes. I did not read that section through, and I am not going to supply its causes from the fire-canals of the fourth book. I found no Atlantic island, and no account of a lost land, in the mining leaves I sampled. The flood does not return here as a claim about the shape of the world.

Book XI, alchemy before and after the flood

The eleventh book is the origin and the examination of alchemy. He has spent the previous book on metals. Here he says he could not find, to his taste, in Lull, Villanova, Rupescissa, Isaac Hollandus, Trevisan, Bacon, Paracelsus, Basil Valentine, and innumerable others, the mode and reason of making the stone they boast of. Weighed in the balance of truth, and touched to the Lydian stone of a true philosophy, he saw in all of them nothing but a pronouncement worthy of every praise of wisdom, and he quotes Ecclesiastes, that he understood that man can find no reason of all the works of God which are done under the sun, and that the more he labors to seek, the less he finds. He calls the opinions an Augean stable. He wrote this book to separate the licit from the illicit, the true from the false, and what nature can do from what she cannot. The first section is the origin of alchemy. The name, he says, is a mixed barbarous word, from the Arabic article and a Greek word, and it has become the property of every people. Some want the pure Arabic name to mean a great construction, a Ptolemaic work. The Arabic books use the name more often, and it was borrowed from the Greeks, as innumerable other things were.

Qui vero ab Aegyptiaca voce Chami, illud derivant; putant, illam a Chamo primo Aegyptiorum Rege Noemi filio literis descriptam, in Arca conservatam, et in Aegyptum translatam fuisse, posteros vero illam nullo non tempore a Mesraimo Chami filio et Hermete ejus consiliario traditam coluisse.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus II p. 232

Those who derive the name from the Egyptian word of Cham think that it was written down by Cham, the first king of the Egyptians, the son of Noah, kept in the ark, and carried into Egypt, and that posterity ever afterwards cultivated it as handed on by Mesraim, son of Cham, and by Hermes his counsellor. He says he has discussed all this very fully in the hieroglyphic alchemy of the Egyptians, in the Pamphilian obelisk and in the syntactic Oedipus, and he sends the reader there. He then gives the account he thinks should be understood. No one ought to doubt that the alchemy of the Egyptians was zealously cultivated by the first men of the world before the flood, while Adam was still alive, and notably by Tubalcain, the son of Lamech by Sella, as Genesis 4 has it. He quotes the verse: Sella bore Tubalcain, who was a hammerer, and a workman in every work of bronze and iron. Bronze and iron drawn from the mines were not drawn out pure and clean, but by the metallic art. That art, divinely inspired, Adam the first-made had taught his sons as necessary for passing human life. No one should doubt that it was drawn out and worked in that way.

quam et posteri Adae Noemus, filiique avita traditione acceptam, post diluvium in universas mundi partes propagarunt.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus II p. 232

The posterity of Adam, Noah and his sons, received it by ancestral tradition and, after the flood, spread it into all the parts of the world. From that, he says, the metallic art was multiplied. He is not, on this page, describing an Atlantic people. He is putting a metal art in the world before the flood, preserving it through Noah, and carrying it into Egypt by Cham. Later in the same book he turns on a monument which someone would make the source of the first characters and letters after the flood. He asks where it was seen, in what city, in what tongue, and in what character, and he says a man is blind who can be brought to believe it. He sends that dispute to his hieroglyphic alchemy of the Egyptians, where he says the author was exposed as a trifler and a great cheat. I am not naming that author from a dirty line. The point he leaves in this book is the refusal.

The rest of the eleventh book, on the titles I met, is the examination of the stone, the canons, the vegetable stone, the experiments, and the punishments of men who used the art badly. It does not add a site for Atlantis.

Book XII, the ape of nature

The twelfth book is titled the ape of nature. Whatever in the preceding books is produced as remarkable, rare, and unusual by the sagacity of nature and by the power of the geocosm, the same, he says, can be produced in equal step, provided nature lends her aid, by human wit. A short prefatory note sits in the first section. The sections run through the generation of plants and animals, including generation in the earth, insects, and then a long last section of experiments in distillation, tincture, and the imitation of metals. Where sailors on the Atlantic are mentioned, it is the ocean they furrow, and a thing seen floating on its surface, not the island of the second book. I found no second account of that island, and no new claim about a lost land.

Conclusion

The last numbered page of the second tome is 487. After the mechanical experiments he prints a conclusion of the work. He says he has at last been drawn out of the formidable and horror-filled heat of the subterranean world, through the hidden storerooms of nature and the inner recesses of the ocean, with God as leader, into the port he had long wanted. With Herculean daring, he says, he has put in. He has shown the admirable order of the inner fabric of the geocosm, its disposition, and its end. The rest is a thanksgiving to God, to Christ, to the Virgin, and to his guardian angel. It adds no Atlantic island, no lost land, and no new claim about the flood.

Omnia ad majorem DEI gloriam Virginisque MARIAE.

Athanasius Kircher. Mundus Subterraneus (1665), Tomus II p. 487

All things to the greater glory of God and of the Virgin Mary. The page is marked FINIS. An index of things and words for the second tome follows. Its title leaf has no printed page number. It says the number is the page, and the letters a and b mark the first and second column.