Unpublished (or better yet artificially generated) work by athanasius kircher: LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA

Two 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.

What captivates me is how Kircher's "science" reads more like speculative fiction than fact—a kind of proto-science fiction written before the genre existed. His books are fever dreams masquerading as scholarship, imagination disguised as empiricism.

While thousands of writers spend November racing to complete a novel for NaNoWriMo, a smaller cadre dedicates the month to writing code that generates novels NaNoGenMo. The challenge: write a program that produces a 50,000-word novel. This is my NaNoGenMo entry for 2025: a computational homage to history's most imaginative pseudoscientist. This year I participated in NaNoGenMo and wrote code that generates a computational homage to history’s most imaginative pseudoscientist. The work was inspired by Kircher’s books—fever dreams masquerading as scholarship, imagination disguised as empiricism. I converted PDFs of Kircher’s original works into a knowledge base, extracted his distinctive style, and employed LLMs to generate new “lost” Kircherian treatises. The final work, LUCIS MAGNETICAE MYSTERIA, runs to 50,000 words of baroque pseudoscience for the 21st century. I’ve also created a companion visual website showcasing the work here.