ABSTRACT
Athanasius Kircher’s life, world, and work belong, without a doubt, to a universe to which we have lost the key. His is a spectacular and extraordinary world, in which one gets easily lost like his fictional protagonists of the Itinerarium exstaticum (1656), wandering throughout the celestial universe or lost in the depths of universal time. His world is conspicuously luxurious-consider, for example, the rich illustrations that signpost his many books. In Kircher’s world, the boundaries between entertainment and science, between religion and other means of understanding the supernatural, and between legend and history are often blurred. This exuberance awakens not only our fascination but our scholarly interest as well. One needs only read or re-read the pages that the famous Italian ethnologist Ernesto De Martino devoted to the tarantella-the dance of healing and exorcism that Apulian people who have been bitten by a tarantula still perform today-to discover that Kircher’s musical treatise, Musurgia universalis (1650), was, in the middle of the twentieth century, one of his major sources.1 In the middle of the 17th century already, Alejandro Favián, a priest living in the province of Michoacán in central Mexico and who imagined himself the local Kircher, requested this very same work from its author.2
