The Pipes of Pan
from Athanasias Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-4)
The seven pipe reeds held by the god Pan each inscribe a planetary orbit, symbolizing the ancient Pythagorean belief in a musical Harmony of the Spheres. The planets are arranged in the old Ptolemaic order, orbiting the earth. As a Jesuit, Kircher was forbidden by the Catholic hierarchy to represent the sun-centred system of Copernican astronomers; like many others in this situation, he privately favoured Tycho Brahe’s modified scheme, in which the sun and moon still orbited the earth, but the planets were allowed to circle the sun. While Isaac Newton went even further than Copernicus, in reinventing the rules of the cosmos, he shared Kircher’s taste for a musical metaphor:
“And to what Agent did the Ancients attribute the gravity of their atoms and what did they mean by calling God an harmony and comparing him & matter (the corporeal part of the Universe) to the God Pan and his Pipe.”
