The universal scholar Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) joined the Jesuit order in 1618. After several study and teaching sojourns to Paderborn, Koblenz, Heiligenstadt, Mainz and Speyer, he became a professor of mathematics and philosophy, Hebrew and the Syrian language in Würzburg in 1629. Due to the troubles of the Thirty Years War, he went to Avignon in 1631. When he was called to Rome by the Pope, Kirchner initially taught mathematics and Hebrew at the Collegium Romanum, later he focused exclusively on the studies of hieroglyphs and other objects. Proof of his far-reaching erudition are his numerous treatise, which deal with all fields of animate and inanimate nature in the sense of the baroque ideal of science. Kirchner wrote works on Coptic manuscripts, an old Egyptian dictionary and dealt with natural scientific issues like magnetism, optics, geology and mineralogy. He also wrote about medicine (including the origins of the plague) and the theory of music. The origins of 'Laterna magica', one of the oldest calculating machines, the first printed cartographic records of the most important sea currents and one of the oldest lunar maps can also be traced back to Kircher. Furthermore, he was the first to conduct examinations of blood with a microscope.