The Ecstatic Journey Through the Heavens

About this book

One evening in Rome, after a concert, Theodidactus falls asleep and the angel Cosmiel appears to him. Together they walk on the mountains of the Moon, see the Earth from space, brighter than the Moon and covered with shifting clouds, visit Venus and Mercury, and cross the Sun's ocean of fire in a little asbestos boat. They pass the sulphur volcanoes of Mars, the crystal seas of Jupiter and the gloomy globe of Saturn with its two "companions", and at last reach the stars, where our Sun looks like one small star among other suns.

Kircher wrote with a telescope in one hand and caution in the other. The Earth still stands motionless at the centre, as a Jesuit in Rome had to say; yet the solid crystal spheres of Aristotle are mocked, the heavens are fluid and changeable, and the stars are suns with their own dark moons circling them. In the Second Dialogue the angel speaks of the creation, size and order of the world, the waters above the heavens, the Empyrean and the end of the world.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the Latin edition of 1656. Sentence by sentence, not a summary or a retelling. This is the first, heavenly part of Kircher's journey, complete.

What is inside

• the dedication to Queen Christina, the preface to the reader and the hortatory prelude; the First Dialogue (nine chapters, from the Moon to the fixed stars) and the Second Dialogue (twelve chapters); the epilogue, the conclusion of the work and the list of authors cited
• a contents page with every chapter
• the 1656 title page, the dedication page and the first page of the First Dialogue from the same edition
• colour illustrations: the angel Cosmiel, the Moon, the asbestos boat on the Sun, Saturn and its companions, the order of the globes, the region of the stars (created with AI tools)
• 616 short footnotes on the same page: people, places, Bible verses, old astronomy in plain words and what we know today
• a foreword on Kircher's life, Queen Christina and the shadow of Galileo's trial; commentary at the end: in plain words, Kircher and his time, and what science says

Who it is for

Readers curious about the history of astronomy and science; lovers of old travels to other worlds and early science fiction; anyone who has wondered how the sky looked to people who had just begun to use the telescope. A thoughtful gift for a reader of strange old books.

A historical source: Kircher writes as a seventeenth-century Jesuit; his theology, his astronomy and his errors are kept as in the original. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.