This upset Peiresc, who appealed to Cardinal Barberini and Pope Urban VIII to reconsider. Their relationship was nearly cut short, however, as Kircher was soon called to Vienna to replace Johann Kepler as the court mathematician. Peiresc became Kircher's first scientific patron. Fortunately, this interest in hieroglyphics overlapped with Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a wealthy intellectual in contact with a vast international network of scientists. He began making the astronomical observations that would form the basis of his second book, Primitae gnomonicae catopricaeis (published in 1635), and continued his obsession with hieroglyphics, ignited a few years earlier in Speyer. In Avignon he continued teaching and researching. By 1631 he had left Germany for Avignon after a portentous vision of soldiers outside his dormitory window - a premonition that was fulfilled by the arrival of the fierce Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. They stripped Kircher, beat him, and were about to string him up on a tree when one of the soldiers, stirred by the Jesuit's nerve, convinced the others to let him be. Rather than travel in plainclothes, he wore his Jesuit robes, an act of defiance that caught the attention of some Protestant cavalrymen. A few years later, he was nearly killed while passing through war zones under Protestant control on his way to Heiligenstadt, where he was to study languages and "physical curiosities" as well as teach grammar. In 1621 Kircher was displaced from his lessons at Paderborn when Christian the Younger of Brunswick, a brutal Protestant military leader, brought troops into the principality. Throughout his education, the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) and its attendant violence between Protestants and Catholics created problems for the young Jesuit. Until he was ordained as a priest in 1628, he studied at various Jesuit institutions, often teaching a variety of subjects as well. He selected the Society of Jesus for their intense focus on academics and entered the Jesuit order circa 1616. Just as his five elder brothers had done, Athanasius joined a religious order. His father was a scholar of philosophy and theology who briefly took a position as a councilor and bailiff that he eventually lost due to political upheaval after this, his focus returned to scholarship and his family. Kircher was born during the feast of Saint Athanasius in either 1601 or 1602, in the town of Geisa in the center of present-day Germany. The science may be bunk, but Kircher's superhuman curiosity, sensational imagination, and eclectic range of interests make him an enduring figure of interest. Although his star fell even before his death, Kircher's peculiar theories and the bizarre and striking engravings that illustrate them have survived into the present. In his long life he published about forty books and became an intellectual celebrity. He taught and studied a wide range of topics, including numerous languages, grammar, mathematics, physics, ethics, Egyptology (a field he helped to create), geology, music, cartography, optics, and so much more. Schmidt), a spirited polymath whose outlandish claims and pursuits continue to fascinate to this day, even as most of his ideas have been discredited. These are just a handful of the more fantastic notions put forth by Jesuit priest and scholar Athanasius Kircher, "the last Renaissance man" (per Edward W. Mermaids and griffins rode in Noah's Ark alongside the other pairs of animals. Networks of fire and water course through the hollowed out spaces inside the earth. Atlantis is real and located in the North Atlantic, right in between Spain and the New World. Certain creatures, such as insects, can be spontaneously created from non-living matter. Musical harmony is but an echo of the harmony that exists out in the cosmos. Athanasius Kircher Dragons and giants have dwelled within the earth.
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