LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA
A Computational Homage to Athanasius Kircher
LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA: Being a Most Particular & Methodical Treatise upon the Sympathetick Correspondences betwixt the Celestial Luminaries and the Hidden Architectures of Divine Wisdom, as Manifested through Divers Optical Experiments and Contemplations
The PDF of the novel
Statistics
- Word Count: 50,707 words
- Character Count: 376,881 characters
- Verified via wordcounter.net
Project Background
A couple of years ago, I fell under the spell of Athanasius Kircher—a 17th-century Jesuit polymath who wrote with scientific authority about nearly everything, and was magnificently wrong about almost all of it. His encyclopedic works teetered between the fantastic and the real, baroque monuments to misguided genius. He decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs incorrectly. He mapped Atlantis with conviction. He designed impossible machines and documented creatures that never existed. I'm not alone in this obsession. Jules Verne mined his works for inspiration. Borges collected him. Umberto Eco devoted essays to his peculiar vision.
This is my NaNoGenMo entry for 2025: a computational homage to history's most imaginative pseudoscientist. The work was generated by being inspired by the books of Athanasiu Kircker that are are fever dreams masquerading as scholarship, imagination disguised as empiricism. The code generated the final work LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA.
Technical Approach
The project uses a style extraction and generation approach:
- Extract & Translate - PDFs of Kircher's works are processed and Latin text is translated to English
- Clean - Remove OCR artifacts and normalize formatting
- Extract Style - Analyze translated texts to create a comprehensive style guide capturing Kircher's voice, themes, and patterns
- Generate - Use the style guide with Claude API to generate new prose in Kircher's distinctive style
The complete pipeline processes original source texts through extraction, translation, cleaning, and finally generation—producing a new "undiscovered" Kircherian treatise on light and divine geometry.
Repository
GitHub Repository
Acknowledgement
This project would not be possible without the incredible work of Internet Archive, which makes vast collections of books freely accessible in digital formats. Their commitment to preserving and democratizing knowledge allowed me to obtain all the necessary materials, enabling this computational resurrection of Kircher's voice.
LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA
A Computational Homage to Athanasius Kircher
LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA: Being a Most Particular & Methodical Treatise upon the Sympathetick Correspondences betwixt the Celestial Luminaries and the Hidden Architectures of Divine Wisdom, as Manifested through Divers Optical Experiments and Contemplations
The PDF of the novel
Statistics
Project Background
A couple of years ago, I fell under the spell of Athanasius Kircher—a 17th-century Jesuit polymath who wrote with scientific authority about nearly everything, and was magnificently wrong about almost all of it. His encyclopedic works teetered between the fantastic and the real, baroque monuments to misguided genius. He decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs incorrectly. He mapped Atlantis with conviction. He designed impossible machines and documented creatures that never existed. I'm not alone in this obsession. Jules Verne mined his works for inspiration. Borges collected him. Umberto Eco devoted essays to his peculiar vision.
This is my NaNoGenMo entry for 2025: a computational homage to history's most imaginative pseudoscientist. The work was generated by being inspired by the books of Athanasiu Kircker that are are fever dreams masquerading as scholarship, imagination disguised as empiricism. The code generated the final work LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA.
Technical Approach
The project uses a style extraction and generation approach:
The complete pipeline processes original source texts through extraction, translation, cleaning, and finally generation—producing a new "undiscovered" Kircherian treatise on light and divine geometry.
Repository
GitHub Repository
Acknowledgement
This project would not be possible without the incredible work of Internet Archive, which makes vast collections of books freely accessible in digital formats. Their commitment to preserving and democratizing knowledge allowed me to obtain all the necessary materials, enabling this computational resurrection of Kircher's voice.