In the mid-17th century, Athanasius Kircher tried to create a unified theory that explained how the world fundamentally worked. After years of trying to figure out what made the world work, Kircher believed he found the answer—magnetism. He believed it was magnetism that literally held the world together.

But magnetism did more than hold the physical world together, according to Kircher’s theory. It was also the connective thread that tied together all the disparate strands of human knowledge. That’s what this page at the front of Kircher’s book represents. Each circle represents what would have been considered at the time the main forms of knowledge, from music to mathematics, from astronomy to poetry, and so on. Each of these forms of knowledge is connected to the others by chains, except the individual links are held together with magnetism rather than by being physically interlinked.

Author: Athanasius Kircher
Date of Creation: 1654