93-6 Subterranean Crossings: Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus and the Borders of Early Modern Geology

Session: Crossing Borders in the History and Philosophy of the Geosciences

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Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) is a landmark of early modern science that defies modern disciplinary and national boundaries. As a polymath, Kircher worked at the crossroads of history, theology, natural philosophy, alchemy, geology, and ethnography. His richly illustrated cosmography of the Earth’s interior crossed disciplinary, geographical, institutional, and philosophical borders, shaping European conceptions of the subterranean world. The work blends geology, zoology, botany, mythology, and theology, moving fluidly between what we now regard as distinct fields. Mundus Subterraneus includes some of the earliest visualizations of the Earth’s interior: cutaways, cross-sections, and conceptual maps of underground fire and water systems. These images served both scientific and ideological purposes, reinforcing a Jesuit worldview that merged physical order with divine design. Kircher saw no strict divide between empirical observation and speculative cosmology. Drawing on Jesuit missionary reports, classical texts, and his own ideas and experiments, he pursued a Renaissance encyclopedism rooted in Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions. His vision of scientia affectiva—knowledge that leads to understanding and awareness of the divine—positioned the observer as both embodied and spiritually engaged with the subject matter.

Kircher’s sources spanned continents. He incorporated accounts from Jesuits in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, along with ancient and contemporary European authors. This global scope reflects the reach of the Jesuit network and the early globalization of scientific knowledge. Though born in Germany, Kircher worked in Rome at the Collegio Romano, a central hub for transnational Jesuit scholarship. Like much early modern science, Mundus Subterraneus reflects patterns of exclusion: women are confined mainly to allegorical roles. At the same time, non-European peoples are depicted as sources of marvels, their knowledge appropriated and reinterpreted as exotic curiosities.

Mundus Subterraneus stands as a monument of baroque science—expansive, integrative, and profoundly shaped by Jesuit thought. It traverses boundaries of discipline, geography, and institutional authority, while also participating in structures of appropriation, and epistemic control. Its depictions of the Earth helped shape the emergence of geology as a holistic vision of nature—an early form of “Earth System Science” that wove together physical processes with spiritual and metaphysical meaning.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-7673

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