n the 17th century Athanasius Kircher was a phenomenon. In the 21st he has become a cult. He had an extraordinary imagination, comparable to the most avant-garde modern artist, even (or often especially) when he was wrong.

By profession a Jesuit priest, he made himself an authority on almost every subject under the sun. His most vaunted achievement was to translate the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and though he got them wrong his work marked the beginning of Egyptology.

Kircher was the first to map ocean currents; the first to offer a comprehensive theory of vulcanism; the first to compile an encyclopaedia on China, a dictionary of Coptic, a book dedicated solely to acoustics; the first to construct a machine for coding messages and another for composing music.