Athansius Kircher was a Jesuit scholar who lived between 1602 and 1680. He was born in Germany and lived there and in France, until in 1633 the Austrian Emperor called him to Vienna to succeed Kepler as mathematician of the Habsburg court. On the way there Kircher’s ship was blown off course and he ended up in Rome, where he spent the rest of his life. He published 40 books on various subjects in the fields of Egyptology, geology and medicine. Although he was a contemporary of Rene Descartes, whose rationalism was beginning to  change the world for ever, Kircher’s thinking was still rooted in the Renaissance and particularly in Ficinian Neoplatonism. In his works he extensively quotes from Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Pimander and the Asclepius. He even gives his own version of Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica in his Obe eliscus Pamphilius, published in 1650. Although a Jesuit, Kircher was involved in natural magic; he rejected daemonic magic, but was a Cabalist, trying to establish a synthesis between Hermetism and Cabalism in the sense of Pico della Mirandola.