In a sense the entire first fifteen hundred pages of the book served as a kind of preface to Kircher’s long-awaited translations. His stated strategy for deciphering them, a search for clues and shared symbols across antique texts and cultures, gave him an excuse to delve into the full spectrum of ancient Egyptian history, culture, and belief, and into every mystical tradition of the ancients that might contain some fragment of the original faith. There are extremely lengthy considerations of, for example, the metaphysical significance of numbers, mathematical harmonies, astrology, talismans, the musical magic inherent in the hymns of Orpheus, and the universal schemes of the Chaldean Oracles.
In many of these ideas he found commonality with the Hermetic texts he believed to be of Egyptian origin. In others he claimed to find fault. It wasn’t that Kircher didn’t believe in the mystical meaning of numbers or characters, or in cosmic sympathies and influences—in the radiation of divine forces from above and in invisible chains or “secret knots” linking intellectual, celestial, and earthly realms. These were the kinds of forces described in the texts supposedly written by Hermes Trismegistus, and that Kircher believed to be at work in magnetic attraction and repulsion. Generally, it was their corruption and use for divinatory, idolatrous, and superstitious practices that he objected to. Astral influence might be real enough, for example, but the practice of astrology for the purposes of telling the future amounted to black magic.
But while he claimed to disapprove of these pursuits, he frequently gave his readers what they needed to engage in them. “Long sections of the Oedipus described illicit magical practices with the detail of an instruction manual,” writes the historian Stolzenberg. This thoroughness, for lack of a better word, made Egyptian Oedipus one of the biggest compendia of the occult ever produced, one that, in serving as a source for would-be mystics, had more influence on readers, and the culture at large, than Kircher’s dubious translations of hieroglyphics ever would.
It also got him into trouble with the censors. Conservative members of the Jesuit College of Revisors, who were charged with upholding long-standing Church doctrines, were concerned by Kircher’s manuscript. They ordered him to “explain doubtful things clearly, condemn blameworthy things,” and “not assert magical or superstitious matters in detail.” In the case of his extensive section on Kabbalah, where he cited “too respectfully the Talmud and other Jews,” he was instructed to cut his discussion of the Sefirot way down, and the chapter on “practical Kabbalah” (including the use of numerical and alphabetical permutations for incantatory purposes) completely.
The censors could be forgiven for failing to understand exactly what Kircher was doing, and what he really believed. People have been wondering about that for centuries. But, among other desires, he wanted to reveal the way in which all people and all religious traditions were connected by (what he thought was) their common origin. Perhaps if you could trace the paths by which all the pagan and heretical peoples and cultures had gone astray, you could show the way back home, to the one true church. The Renaissance Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola had decided long before that Kabbalah was a kind of Jewish version of the Hermetic doctrine and an ancient antecedent of Christian truth, as well as a perfectly decent vehicle for natural magic. The censors apparently didn’t realize that Kircher’s text on Kabbalah continued the revisionist Christianizing trend. He argued, for example, that the sefirotic tree of life, contemplated by Jewish scholars for ages, actually contained a notion of God as trinity. He’d adjusted the diagram of the tree a bit to reflect this.
In the end, with the approval of the superior general, the censors’ requests were largely ignored. The reasons no doubt have to do with the power and prestige of Kircher’s patrons, if not with a greater appreciation for his ideas. To comply with some of the concerns, Kircher did insert more of his perfunctory disclaimers into the text. The way in which these disavowals were mixed into otherwise sympathetic discussions was, in modern terms, “Jesuitical,” and Kircher’s contortions, in this book and others, surely contributed to that meaning of the word.
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KIRCHER RELIED ON a daunting range of sources, and cited hundreds and hundreds of authors in a variety of languages. Prominent among them, Hermes Trismegistus, Neoplatonists such as Pico and Ficino, and one especially authoritative source, the Babylonian Barachias Nephi—the alleged, obscure author of the Arabic text that Peiresc and Barberini had been so keen for Kircher to translate all those years before. He had never quite gotten around to completing that project. This Nephi was nevertheless particularly loquacious on Egyptian notions of the divine mind and the power of the sun as a provider of “life, motion, and fecundity,” as well as the idea that the Egyptians, too, worshipped a holy trinity. His statements often support Kircher’s arguments so perfectly that it’s believed Kircher wrote many of them himself.
Does it need to be said? Athanasius Kircher was an incredibly erudite man, but Egyptian Oedipus was not quite the work of erudition and scholarship that he made it out to be. Although standards of scholarship were much different than they are today, he frequently relied on the works of others when he claimed to have penetrated some obscure and exotic text himself, and he often entered into “full plagiarist mode,” as one historian called it, for pages and pages at a time.
Readers who made it to the final tome of Egyptian Oedipus were at last provided with his interpretations of the (non-ancient) Bembine Tablet, a number of obelisks, and other inscriptions. Despite the years of work Kircher put into investigating the connection between Coptic and the language of the ancient Egyptians, he didn’t spend a lot of time on a phonetic approach—what would turn out to be the correct approach—to interpreting the hieroglyphs. He had always been inclined to see them, as he had previously written, “not so much as writing but rather as symbolic representations of sublime theosophy expressed through signs that are universally intelligible.” Universally intelligible, that is, to a select few with rare intellect and a divine calling.
Because he believed that Hermes Trismegistus had himself embedded the old doctrines in the hieroglyphs, Kircher’s interpretations were bound to read like the other writings attributed to him—with perhaps an extra dash of pagan exoticism thrown in. Kircher’s translation of a very small section of the Pamphilian obelisk, now at the center of Piazza Navona, is enough to get a sense of his work:
The beneficent Being who presides over reproduction, who enjoys heavenly dominion . . . commits the atmosphere by means of Mophtha, the beneficent principle of atmospheric humidity unto Ammon most powerful over the lower parts of the world, who, by means of an image and appropriate ceremonies, is drawn to the exercising of his power.
That section is now known to contain merely the name and title of the Roman emperor Domitian—and to show that the obelisk was a first-century Roman commission and not, as Kircher claimed, a structure dating back to the fourteenth century before Christ. It was this sort of “flight of the imagination and learning run mad” that convinced one nineteenth-century Englishman that he could “safely consign” the “folio volumes of Father Kircher to the old book-stalls in Holborn.”
When Kircher began his hieroglyphic studies so many years before, he had no idea that they were based on an incorrect assumption. This was now what he refused to believe. By the time Kircher began writing Egyptian Oedipus, he was well aware of scholarly research published in 1614 by the Swiss-born Calvinist Isaac Casaubon. Casaubon had dated the Hermetic texts to the second or third century, not to the time of Moses. There was no such person as Hermes Trismegistus, or, if there was, he was not the author of the writings and the hieroglyphic texts ascribed to him.
It’s not really a surprise that Kircher wasn’t willing to dismantle his sense of the sanctity of the Hermetic texts. That would have been like dismantling his sense of self, or at any rate, his life’s work. On the contrary, he argued in Egyptian Oedipus that the kind of challenge to ancient a
uthority that this Protestant Casaubon had made was a very dangerous thing: “Since they have been accepted by everyone, from so many centuries ago until these times,” certain historical and sacred texts “are worthy of necessary trust.”
“Without this the acts of all human affairs . . . would dissolve,” he continued, and “nothing certain could be written or said, and all would be murky and obscured by doubt.”
From a later perspective, Kircher employed some unscrupulous scholarly tactics in Egyptian Oedipus, but he was more concerned with what he saw as a noble intent. As a historian of the baroque period has put it, the goal was to show the “fundamental unity of human culture and its origins” as well as the fundamental truth of Christianity. For Kircher, larger truths took precedence over smaller ones. In the hands of someone like Casaubon, Kircher seemed to suggest, even the sanctity of biblical scripture might be called into question.
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The Admiration of the Ignorant
Meanwhile—that is, while he was busy capping off two decades of work by producing what would later turn out to be wildly inaccurate translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions—Kircher also put together his famous museum.
During the last half of the sixteenth century, cabinets of curiosity, or wonder cabinets, had become popular all over Europe. Galileo had mocked the “curious little men” who displayed, say, “a petrified crab, a desiccated chameleon, a fly or spider in gelatin or amber, those small clay figurines, supposedly found in ancient Egyptian burial chambers.” But his was the minority opinion. In 1651, when a wealthy Roman gentleman donated his trove of art and antiquities to the Collegio Romano, the Jesuits saw an opportunity to build a collection of prominence, and they put Kircher in charge of it.
The bequest included Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Etruscan items—coins, statues, tablets, manuscripts, and more everyday artifacts from ancient or at least former Rome (household utensils, weights and measures). This gave Kircher a foundation on which to add all the curiosities he’d kept on view in his cubiculum. “It happened,” he later recalled, “that I was compelled to transfer my private Museum to a more appropriate and accessible location in the Roman College, which they call the Gallery.” This gallery, a long corridor adjacent to the formal library on the third floor, where paintings and portraits had already been hung, was well lit with three window bays.
Fairly soon Kircher and his assistants had filled it with swords, clothes, ornaments, preserved animal specimens, and other things brought or sent back by Jesuit missionaries. The collection included the “tail and bones” of a mermaid, which Kircher told visitors he obtained on Malta, and a brick from the Tower of Babel donated by Pietro della Valle. One Jesuit priest even contributed his own ten-ounce gallstone.
According to a catalog published years later, there were “armillary spheres, and celestial and terrestrial globes, equipped with their meridians and pivots.” There were Archimedean screws, a number of mechanical clocks, and devices “bearing a resemblance to perpetual motion.” There was “an organ, driven by an automatic drum, playing a concert of every kind of birdsong, and sustaining in mid-air a spherical globe, continually buffeted by the force of the wind.”
Together, Kircher and Schott built a number of magnetic and hydraulic machines for the space. Some taught moral lessons, and some underscored traditional Aristotelian laws (for example, that nature abhorred a vacuum, despite recent experimental evidence to the contrary on the part of Evangelista Torricelli). Others were meant to reveal the wonders of natural magic, and a number of them “vomited” fluid, apparently to provide amusement that now seems inscrutably baroque. These included “a two-headed Imperial Eagle vomiting water copiously from the depths of its gullets”; “a hydraulic machine, which supports a crystal goblet, from one side of which a thirsty bird drinks up water that a snake re-vomits from the other side while opening its mouth”; “a water-vomiting hydraulic machine, at the top of which stands a figure vomiting up various liquids for guests to drink.”
The Delphic Oracle
Kircher’s playful nature was never more in evidence than in his museum. He entertained visitors with the catoptric theater that John Evelyn had seen, the one in which cats were fascinated to observe “an innumerable multitude” of other cats, and with his projection device, which showed “ghosts in the air.” He also delighted them with what he called the Delphic Oracle. To make it, Kircher removed the acoustical tube from the wall of his cubiculum and installed it in a similar recess between the college courtyard and the museum; it was then connected by progressively smaller hidden tubes to a hollow statue.
Let a “statue be situated in a sure and calculated spot in such a way that the end of the tube meets precisely with the opening of the mouth and you will have a statue perfect and consummate in articulately producing whatever you will,” he instructed. “Because the orifice of the shell meets with a public place, all the words of men coming from outside into the spiral tube produce themselves drawn within the mouth of the statue.” As a result, the tube could be “employed in playful oracles and fictitious consultations with such artifice that not one of its witnesses was able to discern anything concerning its secret construction.” The Delphic Oracle is “shown to visitors not without some suspicion of a latent demon by those who do not understand its mechanism, for the statue opens and closes its mouth in the manner of one speaking, it even moves its eyes.”
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THE MUSEUM WASN’T just a place for the “investigation of the learned,” “the admiration of the ignorant and uncultured,” and “the relaxation of Princes and Magnates,” as Kircher liked to say. It was a venue in which Kircher could put himself on display. And in general, given his increasing status and celebrity, the Jesuit authorities were happy for him to do so. Schott’s recollections suggest that Kircher was in his element when giving tours of the museum. Sometimes he was in such a buoyant mood that he would pull a sword down from the wall to demonstrate his thrust and parry.
Kircher began to exhibit his own books in the museum and, at some point—ostensibly to show how integral he was to the functioning of the Republic of Letters and the degree to which he was in contact with the best and most holy minds—he also began to exhibit his personal correspondence. Before he died in 1680, Kircher exchanged letters with more than seven hundred fifty people, many of them quite prominent. The letter writing was never done: there were dispatches from Jesuits to acknowledge and forward to other learned men; sycophantic letters to send to patrons; sycophantic letters requiring response; and never-ending requests for translations. “It can hardly be said,” Schott wrote, “how many inscriptions, sacred, profane, superstitious, magical and even diabolical . . . have been brought to him from all the parts of the world, in order to be interpreted.”
It wasn’t always easy being a “master of one hundred arts,” as Kircher had begun to call himself. But indications are that Kircher felt a certain satisfaction during this period of his life (his early fifties). At least some of it had to do with the presence of his friend Schott, who worked tirelessly on Kircher’s behalf.
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MANY OF THE LETTERS sent to Kircher around this time concern astronomy. A Jesuit named Hermann Crumbach, for example, sent observations he’d received from Malabar, in southern India. A linguist, Amatus de Chezaud, reported on the “most minute asteroids” he’d observed from Aleppo. Former student Nicolò Mascardi wrote to him about the comets he’d seen while sailing through the Strait of Magellan. Although not a great astronomer himself (he lacked the attention span, for one thing, and the mathematical rigor), Kircher forwarded a steady stream of data from his correspondents to astronomers such as Giovanni Battista Riccioli, a Jesuit in Bologna, and Johannes Hevelius, the young astronomer from Danzig he’d hosted in Avignon many years earlier. Hevelius had used the proceeds from his family’s brewing business to set up an observatory on the roof of his home. In an attempt to clear away the distor
tions and halos produced by the refracting telescopes of the time, Hevelius kept pushing their focal lengths, using a sixty-foot telescope to make unprecedented observations of the surface of the moon. They were published in one volume in 1647, in the form of one hundred fifty steel engravings. (Years later, he built a telescope with a focal range more than twice as long.)
The astronomical evidence kept mounting in favor of a sun-centered system. Kircher had come out against the magnetic arguments for the Copernican configuration in The Magnet, but that was more than twenty years before. Since then, because the Church subscribed to it, he’d perfunctorily endorsed the so-called geoheliocentric arrangement of Tycho Brahe. Supporters of this cosmology essentially said: It appears to be true that the planets revolve around the sun—but the sun and the stars still revolve around the Earth.
Schott had been encouraging Kircher to write on the subject. But an insufficiently critical discussion of the new astronomy could get you in trouble with the Inquisition, if not burned at the stake, and Kircher had always made a point of steering clear of it. He wasn’t the type to take on the topic without a change in political circumstances, the kind that might have transpired, for example, if one of his friends were elected pope. In April of 1655, after the death of Innocent X, one of them was.
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