MUNDUS SUBTERRANEUS
Athanasius Kircher.
Mundus subterraneus
(“Subterranean Worlds”)
Amsterdam: ex officina Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678.
Mundus Subterraneus (“The Subterranean World”) was first published in 1664 and expanded in 1678. Athanasius Kircher was an eccentric scholar of the seventeenth century. A German Jesuit priest, he attempted to understand virtually everything: languages, geology, magnetism, Egyptology, music, optics, medicine, and cosmology.
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One of Kircher's central ideas was that the Earth was animated by hidden forces and networks. Rather than seeing the planet as inert matter, he imagined it as dynamic and interconnected. In this sense, Mundus Subterraneus can feel surprisingly contemporary, despite its scientific inaccuracies. Its vision of invisible systems linking distant places resonates with later ideas about ecology, geology, and planetary interconnectedness.
The book is an ambitious attempt to explain the hidden workings of the Earth. Kircher sought to reveal what lay beneath mountains, oceans, volcanoes, and caves. From a modern scientific perspective, much of Mundus Subterraneus is factually wrong. Yet it represents a transitional moment between medieval natural philosophy and modern science.
Photographed onsite between 2015 and 2021 by Dianna Frid.
The book is in the collection of the Burgoa Library and was photographed with permission.