Soon after his arrival in Rome in 1635, Jesuit teacher, inventor, and researcher Athanasius Kircher commissioned this slate engraved with scales and charts that his students could use to plot the courses of stars and perform other astronomical calculations.

Nobody was talking internet in the 1650s. No one worried about multinationals and globalization. Telephone, television, and telemarketing were all centuries away.

The telescope was around, though, and while it did not do anything or make anything, it allowed something: it allowed one to see things that before had been beyond sight, to know what had been beyond knowing. And it began stirring up questions, especially after Galileo observed Jupiter's satellites and in 1610 published his findings in a book he called The Starry Messenger. The concept of Nicholas Copernicus -- that the earth and other planets orbit the sun -- was 60 years old by then. Galileo's observations added a lot of weight to this theory, but controversy flared because he seemed to contradict the Bible. Church authority reacted and condemned, but scientific thinking would not retreat.

The new science was one part of a knowledge explosion. Europeans had reached just about every populated part of the world and, along with trade goods, were shipping home reports and drawings, artifacts and specimens of the useful or exotic or simply curious things they found.

One center of new knowledge was the Jesuit Roman College, a century old in 1651. Among its many academic pursuits, the Roman College trained young Jesuits in mathematics and astronomy; and many of these students, voyaging later to Asia and America as missionaries, made accurate observations of lunar and solar eclipses, of Jupiter's satellites, and of other heavenly phenomena. They also made accurate maps of the lands they visited and drew images of the people and animals and plants that filled these lands. And they faithfully reported their findings back to the Roman College, "as to a clearinghouse of scientific information," according to Jesuit historian Philip Caraman.

This traditional portrait of Athanasius Kircher gives his age as 76. The engraver has emphasized the energy in Kircher's inquiring eyes. A professor of eloquence in Rome added the flowery inscription: "The painter or poet would declare only in error: 'This is the man.' But the farthest Antipodes know his name and face."

And in the center of the new knowledge at the Roman College was Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit transplanted to Rome, a man devoted to collecting, observing, analyzing, synthesizing, displaying, and publishing what he knew. Kircher taught young Jesuits, published books, and ran a museum -- always gathering more information and making it available to the studious and the curious.

Kircher, born in Germany in 1601, studied as a young man at the Jesuit college in Fulda, near his birthplace. In 1618 he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Paderborn, but when the Thirty Years War brought violence to that area, he escaped to Cologne with two fellow novices. Though the war punctuated his years of early Jesuit training, he was ordained in 1628. He then taught at the Jesuit college in Avignon, France, where he developed wide interests such as Egyptology, art, the measurement of time, and he also started building exotic devices like a sundial that used mirrors to work indoors.

While in Avignon in 1631, Kircher published his first book; it was on magnetism, a field that fascinated him throughout life. Publishing books filled the rest of his life: over the next half century he published some 40 more.

In 1635 Kircher washed up on shore near Rome -- he had suffered a shipwreck en route to Vienna. He was to take up the post of mathematician to the Hapsburg court there, replacing the astronomer Johannes Keppler, who had died in 1633. But Jesuit officials decided to change Kircher's assignment and keep him in Rome, where he remained for the next 45 years.

Giorgio de Sepibus's catalog of The Most Famous Museum of the Roman College appeared in 1678. The frontispiece shows Athanasius Kircher leading visitors around his museum with its starry vaults, artifacts and specimens, artwork and machines. The model obelisks confirm Kircher's enduring interest in Egypt.

In 1651 Kircher was awaiting publication of The Egyptian Oedipus, a major treatment of Egyptian studies in four volumes replete with engravings; it appeared the next year. He had already published three books on Egyptian themes. One celebrated Pope Innocent X's installing an ancient obelisk in the Piazza Navonna to celebrate the jubilee year in 1650. The two others were on Egyptian languages; Kircher postulated that the Coptic language used in the liturgy could provide the key to translating hieroglyphics. This eventually proved correct, but his own attempts at translation were totally wrong.

Kircher's interest in Egyptian was part of a wider interest in discovering or inventing a universal language to facilitate missionary work. Many Jesuits at the Roman College would become missionaries, and Jesuit missionary strategy insisted on their learning the languages of the local peoples.

But beyond the pragmatic, some of Kircher's interest was simply the unstoppable working of a very curious mind. He loved to learn new languages, and he filled the illustrations in his books with tag lines or scriptural quotes in many languages. He also did pioneering work in encryption, in which diplomatic circles were becoming increasingly interested. Among those he worked with in encryption were the young sons of the Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand. He also published a design for a magnetic encryption machine.

In 1651 Kircher also became a museum curator. That year, one of the city's leading citizens, Alfonso Donnino, gave a collection of antiquities to the Roman College. Kircher already had a collection there that included both ancient artifacts and his own inventions. Signore Donnino's bequest became the impetus for a public display of the whole collection. A tour of the museum soon became a must-see for visitors to Rome. According to historian Paula Findlen it was Kircher's contribution to the collection that visitors most remembered, along with "the experience of meeting the fabled Kircher and seeing him surrounded by the objects he had made and collected."

By the flickering light of an oil lamp, Athanasius Kircher projected a series of images engraved on glass onto a wall. He could use his projector to illustrate lectures or simply to amuse his visitors.

The objects Kircher made were another sign of his ever-active curiosity and imagination; he never tired of figuring out how things worked or of designing some practical application of what he learned. One of his designs was for a projector that used candlepower to cast images from glass plates onto a wall.

He was interested in sound and music. Statues in his museum seemed to talk as he devised horns and tubing to bring street noise through the walls and out of the statues' mouths. The porter who kept the front door to the Roman College was able to speak to Kircher through tubes to let him know when visitors were waiting to see his museum. He also devised instruments that used water or wind power to create music. In one fanciful design, a keyboard extended back to a series of boxes. The keys had pins at their tips, under which were tails of cats arranged according to the pitch of their meows. Hitting a key would produce harmonized howling. There is no evidence that Kircher ever actually made such an instrument.

The scientific method relied heavily on observation and experiment, and Kircher was a tireless observer. In 1637--38, soon after he arrived in Rome, Kircher accompanied a German prince to Malta. During the trip two famous volcanoes in the area, Mount Etna and Stromboli, erupted. As the party made its way home, Mount Vesuvius near Naples threatened to erupt. Kircher had himself lowered into the crater to observe first-hand its fire and smoke. This led to a study of the underground systems of fire and water that appeared as Mundus Subterraneus (Underground World) in 1664--65.

Kircher devised a number of boxes that housed distinct elements for combining into larger units. One of them allowed budding composers to produce four-part harmonies. This mathematical box, built to Kircher's design, demonstrated a number of mathematical functions in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, timekeeping, and music.

Kircher was able to be part of the scientific world of his day and to publish his findings without, for the most part, getting into trouble. Authors often used aliases or wrote findings as simply theory rather than an assertion of belief.

This obelisk is typical of those that Kircher had made in wood and installed in his museum to show visitors the art of Egypt.

Kircher never used an alias, but he was careful in what he asserted. In one book, The Ecstatic Heavenly Journey (1656), he described his understanding of the universe as a dream trip guided by the angel Cosmiel. The heavenly guide escorts the Jesuit on a trip through the stars and spheres and brings them, as Prof. Ingrid Rowland describes it, "one step away from a Copernican world, as close as they could come without admitting to one explicitly." This "one step away" was not far enough, and censors were quick to react. But a student of Kircher's, Gaspar Schott, published a new edition that with a few changes met the critics' demands.

Kircher's illustrations could also say things that his words did not. The frontispiece to The Ecstatic Heavenly Journey shows Cosmiel leading Kircher to a universe that is clearly not that of the tradition. And already in 1651, when he was preparing Oedipus Aegypticus for publication, he had the mythological figure of Harpocrates appear in the book. This boy god holds a finger over his mouth, but the words appear over his head, "Only by this do I reveal secrets." He was the Egyptian god of silence.

Appreciation of Kircher has varied through the years. His students kept his work alive through their editing of his work and their own scholarship. But not all who knew him admired his work. Fellow Jesuit Melchior Inchofer, who as censor had praised Kircher's Coptic Forerunner (1636), a decade later attacked him -- among many others -- in his Monarchy of Solipsists, a satirical commentary on the professors of the Roman College. Inchofer was on the papal commission that had examined Galileo in 1633 and contributed to its final report.

The museum suffered neglect even before Kircher died in 1680. In 1698 another Jesuit scientist, Felipe Banana, restored it; but the restoration followed Banana's interests and had little of Kircher's original materials. The first of several catalogues of the museum appeared in 1678; the last, from the 1760s, bore little resemblance to the first. Dr. Paula Findlen remarks that the only item connecting the last catalogue with the first is "the tiny image on the front ... the face of Father Athanasius, still presiding over the museum in all its permutations."

	Kircher's museum also had an art gallery, which included this Lorenzo Lotto painting of "Madonna with Child and Saints."   The canopic vase in marble and terracotta, another museum acquisition, attests to Kircher's lifelong fascination with Egypt.

Through the years, Kircher came to be seen often as a curiosity. Some of his research did not bear up under later scrutiny -- his proposed translations of hieroglyphics, for example. Some of his quests, like that for a universal language, came to nothing. Did anything permanent come of all his writings, or weren't they really just curiosities of a long-lost age, critics wondered.

Symbols fill an illustration in Kircher's The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Angels form an arc under the central light, which is YHWH, the Hebrew letters for God. Daylight is the source of direct light, refracted light, and light reflected by night (on right). Divine authority, a hand writing a book that absorbs light directly from the source of all light, oversees the daylight, and it is a little higher than Reason, the hand writing a book above the night, which receives a more modest eye's light. Below daylight is Profane Authority, which receives only a lantern's light; below Reason is Sense, which points to an image produced by a telescope. Emperor Ferdinand enters the picture as one of Kircher's patrons.

Recent exhibits and publications, though, have brought Athanasius Kircher back to public notice. The University of Chicago and Stanford have had careful and respectful exhibitions of his books, and last year an exhibit of his artifacts, inventions, and books took place in Rome. And scholars tend to agree that Kircher was an important figure at the end of an age that thought one could know everything worth knowing, a renaissance man at the end of the Renaissance, one who linked all fields of interest as the age of specialization was beginning.

And two years ago, another eclectic collection of curiosities -- the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles -- honored Kircher by opening a permanent exhibit that displays some of his inventions and publications. Amid its fossils and Napoleona, perfume bottles, sculptures in the eyes of needles, and other artifacts that demonstrate human imagination, Athanasius Kircher rests comfortably at home.

Fr. Edward W. Schmidt, SJ is Company magazine's business manager.

Globalization was not a concept in 1651, but global enterprises were coming into being, the Jesuit order one of them. There was no television or telephones then, but Kircher's projector shows up in histories of the movies and his speaking tubes served a real purpose. Telemarketing? Not really, but Athanasius Kircher was quite a promoter.