The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  14 Quoted in Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, pp. 101–2.

  15 Ibid., p. 136.

  16 Purver, p. 223.

  17 Quoted in Tompkins, p. 86.

  18 Quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 445. (Our translation from the French.)

  19 Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 113.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SIGNS, SYMBOLS AND SILENCE

  One might be forgiven for thinking that as the Age of Enlightenment moved inexorably towards the Age of Science, Hermeticism was, if not actually dead then pretty much moribund. But in fact, for the most part, it just continued in disguise. For obvious reasons of self-preservation after the polarization of the Thirty Years War, most thinkers who were inspired by the Renaissance occult tradition downplayed that fact, while quietly continuing on their path. Others, meanwhile, took little care to be circumspect, and astonishingly, got away with it. These two approaches – covert and overt – were respectively adopted by two of the seventeenth century’s most remarkable minds: Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz and Athanasius Kircher.

  TRUE CABALA

  Leibniz (1646–1716) vies with his exact contemporary, Isaac Newton, for the title of the century’s greatest intellect. His output covered every conceivable field of his day, from linguistics through engineering to biology, his mind leaping chaotically from subject to subject. In his lifetime he published about a dozen works, but most of his thoughts, ideas and discoveries were scattered in a vast number of papers, letters and half-completed books, the majority of which have yet to be published. Yet we do know something particularly significant about Leibniz: he was heavily rumoured to be at the very least a Rosicrucian sympathizer.

  Leibniz’s major contributions were in the increasingly important fields of mathematics, logic and metaphysical philosophy. As he devised infinitesimal calculus in the late 1670s, at the same time as Newton, a protracted row between the two men erupted, with Newton accusing Leibniz of stealing his invention. In the end it was Leibniz’s notation that became the standard. He also invented the binary system on which our digital world depends and without which, in fact, most of the modern world could not exist.

  Like many intellectual giants of the time, Leibniz’s career was an odd mix of science, philosophy and diplomacy. While working for Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick, he even got involved in negotiations over the English Act of Settlement of 1701. This Act bestowed the crown on the descendants of the Duke’s mother Sophia, establishing the run of over-stuffed and not always totally sane Hanoverian Georges on the British throne. Sophia, to whom Leibniz was mentor and adviser, was the Electress of Hanover and daughter of the Winter King and Queen, Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart. And so we find a rumoured Rosicrucian working for the family of the alchemical bride and groom – suspiciously neat.

  Born in Leipzig, Leibniz’s first job after receiving his doctorate in law was as an alchemist in Nuremberg, where he was rumoured to have joined a Rosicrucian society. There is probably some substance to the story, which was accepted, for example, by the French mathematician Louis Couturat, author of a 1901 study of Liebniz.1 There are potential Rosicrucian connections with Nuremberg: in 1630 Johann Valentin Andreae tried to revive his Societas Christiana in that city, so there may still have been a coterie of fellow travellers there three decades later.

  Not only did Leibniz practise as an alchemist, but his later works reveal a deep familiarity with the Rosicrucian manifestos and with Andreae’s writings. He proposed the formation of an Order of Charity and drew up its constitution – part of which is lifted directly from the Fama Fraternitatis.2 So at a conservative estimate, Leibniz certainly had Rosicrucian leanings.

  Leibniz’s first major work, Dissertation on the Art of Combination (Dissertatio de arte combinatoria), published in 1666 when he was just twenty, is about the art of memory – although the non-occult version, simply as an aid for remembering. In the introduction, he acknowledges his debt to previous practitioners such as Bruno, and goes so far as to lift the term combinatoria from him.3

  But did Leibniz, as many historians assume, completely abandon these interests when he realized mathematics and logic were the way forward? Certainly Leibniz’s career did seem to be set to embrace all things mechanistic. He devoted himself to absorbing the latest thinking – including certain of Descartes’ then-unpublished writings – during a four-year sojourn in Paris on a diplomatic mission for the Elector of Mainz. During that time, in 1673, he took a trip to London, where he wowed the Royal Society with his innovative calculating machine and was duly made a Fellow.

  But later Leibniz realized that the mechanistic approach was limited, writing to a correspondent two years before his death:

  But when I looked for the ultimate reasons for mechanism, and even for the laws of motion, I was greatly surprised to see that they could not be found in mathematics but that I should have to return to metaphysics.4

  Any search for the source of Leibniz’s metaphysical inspiration begins with his devotion to Marsilio Ficino’s ‘perennial philosophy’5 – Hermeticism. Bruno’s influence, too, filters directly through to Leibniz, possibly through the conduit of the Giordanisti.

  Leibniz’s search for a metaphysical explanation for ‘ultimate reasons’ led him to formulate his theory of monads, which, to put it politely, is a somewhat abstruse idea. His monads are a kind of metaphysical or spiritual equivalent of atoms, the indivisible building blocks from which everything in creation is comprised and which are attached to physical atoms. Monads all originated at the beginning of the universe and, since they can neither be created nor destroyed, all change consists merely of their transformation.

  Monad is the Greek word for unity, and since the time of the Greek philosophers it has been used to describe basic units and first causes in many different philosophies – it is an important concept in Neoplatonism, for example. Leibniz’s concept of monad, however, was directly influenced by Bruno.6 As Frances Yates pointed out:

  Though Leibniz as a philosopher of the seventeenth century has moved into another new atmosphere and a new world, the Leibnizian monadology bears upon it the obvious marks of the Hermetic tradition.7

  In the interests of self-preservation, Leibniz himself was reluctant to acknowledge the influence of the Hermetic tradition. On the one hand, in the volatile new climate after the Thirty Years War Hermeticism was tainted with the whiff of heresy and diabolism, almost entirely because of Bruno. On the other hand – and partly as a consequence of being tainted – the reputation of Hermes’ system in scientific and intellectual circles had suffered, and it was beginning to look old-fashioned and misguided.

  But even if Leibniz was wary of shouting it from the rooftops, his works quite clearly owe a major debt to the Renaissance occult philosophy. Even Leibniz’s system of calculus evolved from this tradition. It developed from his quest to reduce everything, not just scientific principles and laws but also religious and ethical questions, to a common symbolic language: a universal calculus. Building on the art of memory, both the classical and ‘occult’ versions, in order to establish a language of symbols or characteristica universalis, Leibniz envisaged a set of images to which all the fundamentals of knowledge could be reduced. This naturally necessitated the cataloguing and codification of all that was known, a growing eighteenth-century preoccupation. By manipulating and setting the symbols in different relationships, he believed that new discoveries could be made.

  He specifically likened such a system to Egyptian hieroglyphs, which along with Bruno, he believed were used in a similar way. Leibniz also considered, but eventually rejected, Dee’s innovative monas hieroglyphica symbol. The Cabala, too, was an influence, since it is based on the idea that certain principles are present in all things. Leibniz even described his characteristica universalis as ‘true Cabala’8 – hardly the words of a modern-style rationalist.

  Eventually Leibniz came to realize that the best tools for the job were mathematical symbols.
This realization then led to the development of his version of infinitesimal calculus, which he intended to be a first step towards the universal calculus. Although Liebniz developed his concepts in a mathematical and mechanical direction, in focusing on a universal calculus he was closely following Bruno, who had extended the esoteric art of memory to include complex techniques for combining the images held in the mind in different ways.

  In addition to his formulation of the binary system, in this mode of thinking Leibniz was anticipating modern computer modelling, which is based on the idea that any system can be defined in mathematical terms, reduced to values, variables and relationships that can be manipulated in the computer to predict how the system will behave under varying conditions. Leibniz laid the foundation for contemporary information theory, and also saw the potential for creating machines to do the hard work of combining his characteristica universalis. Not only did he invent mechanical calculating machines that could do basic arithmetical operations, but he also tried to design one for more complex algebraic calculations. He even conceived a device that used binary mathematics.

  Is it a stretch to say that mathematical equations, the modern scientific use of formulae and even some of the basics of computer science comes from an occult idea? Clearly Leibniz himself saw his work that way, even defensively describing the characteristica universalis as ‘innocent magia’.9 There is no denying Leibniz’s unique contribution to mathematics and computer science – but significantly it may also be fair to say that these were largely inspired by the Hermetic tradition.

  EGYPT’S LAST STAND

  In the midst of all the Hermetic reversals in fortune there seems to have been a last and perhaps desperate attempt to carry the tradition into the very heart of Rome in a way that would have made Giordano Bruno very proud.

  As we saw earlier, in the 1580s Pope Sixtus V had presided over the raising of an ancient Egyptian obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square to mark the final trouncing of paganism. But there was another episode of obelisk-raising in the 1650s and 1660s that was motivated by the exact opposite. Inspiration for the second wave can be traced back almost entirely to one man, another acknowledged genius of the age, one of those paradoxical figures who according to the usual simplistic view of the period should not really have existed: the extraordinary Hermetic Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.

  Kircher was a polymath and gifted mathematician – he has been called the ‘last Renaissance man’ and ‘the last man who knew everything’ – and is regarded by many as the founder of Egyptology. He was born in either 1601 or 1602 (he didn’t know which, although happily he knew his birthday) in Hesse-Cassel in Germany. After being educated at the Jesuit College in his hometown of Fulda, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1618.

  There is no way that Kircher could not have been aware of the furore over the Rosicrucian manifestos. Not only were they were published in Hesse-Cassel and widely debated during the 1610s and 1620s, but also the Jesuits spearheaded the opposition to them. And all the key Rosicrucian elements turn up in Kircher’s works – everything but the name, in fact.

  In 1631, during the Thirty Years War, Kircher was forced to flee, swimming across the Rhine to escape Protestant forces. He made his way to Avignon where he taught mathematics in the Jesuit College, before becoming a professor of mathematics at the Society’s most prestigious establishment, the Collegio Romano in Rome. By that time he was widely thought of as a brilliant mathematician and polymath, and had gained the confidence of the Pope. As befitted the ‘last Renaissance man’, Kircher studied medicine, besides being a great inventor and a musician. He experimented with the magic lantern and the projection of images. He was a geologist and fossil-collector whose intellectual curiosity was so great he ventured into the crater of Mount Vesuvius when it was threatening to erupt. Perhaps as a result of an association of ideas, he also designed firework displays. By any standards, Kircher’s career was extraordinary. So much so, in fact, that in 2002 a number of distinguished scholars convened at the New York Institute of the Humanities to debate ‘Was Athanasius Kircher the coolest guy ever, or what?’ They concluded that he was, no ‘whats’ about it.10

  His work with microscopes led him to argue that little ‘worms’ propagate plague, the earliest statement of the germ theory of disease based on microscopic observation. He also calculated that the height needed for the Tower of Babel to reach the Moon would knock the Earth off its path through the skies, which was particularly interesting as he shouldn’t have acknowledged that the Earth had an orbit in the first place! He argued that animals would have had to adapt to life after the Flood, one of the first recognitions of evolution. But like Leonardo before him, there was an element of the joker about Kircher. He launched little hot air balloons with ‘Flee the wrath of God’ written underneath, and dressed cats up as cherubs. He also designed – but mercifully probably never built – a katzenklavier, a musical instrument that produced a range of sounds when a semicircle of cats had pins stuck in their tails. It was clearly not a good idea to be a cat around Kircher.

  But most of all, he was passionate about ancient Egypt. To him, deciphering hieroglyphs would reveal the language that God gave to Adam, bestowing all the secrets of the universe. Indeed, thanks to a book that Kircher encountered in the Jesuit college library during his training, his main obsession was hieroglyphs – which nobody could read then (and wouldn’t until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799). Kircher became convinced he had made the longed-for breakthrough required to crack the code, although we now know that this was wishful thinking. However, his passion is one of the reasons he was so enthusiastic about getting involved in the re-erection of obelisks, as he lusted after the opportunity to study their inscriptions. While he was a professor in Rome, Kircher even dispatched a student to Egypt to measure the Great Pyramid, inside and out, and to copy hieroglyphs from two standing obelisks in Alexandria and Heliopolis – probably not the quickest or easiest assignment the young man had ever been given.

  Like most scholars in those days, Kircher was convinced that the hieroglyphs inscribed on temples, statues and obelisks embodied the wisdom and science of ancient Egypt. Surely it would only be a matter of time before a genius such as himself would claim to be the first to understand it all? In Avignon he benefited from a friendship with the astronomer and antiquarian Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, who had not only travelled to Egypt, but had also brought back various relics. As a fellow astronomer, Fabri de Peiresc was one of Galileo’s correspondents who leapt to his defence. Less understandably, he also publicly defended Tomasso Campanella.

  Kircher’s interest in the mysteries of Egypt naturally brought him into contact with Hermeticism, for which he made no attempt to hide his enthusiasm. But he completely ignored Casaubon’s dismissal of the antiquity of the Hermetica, arguing that the texts represented the authentic philosophy, cosmology and religion of his beloved ancient Egypt. In fact, he not only tried to decipher and translate hieroglyphs but also attempted to relate them to the teachings of the Hermetica. He regarded Hermes as the inventor of hieroglyphs, and the inscriptions on the obelisks as the keys to unveiling his wisdom. He even called the Egyptian looped cross, the ankh, the ‘crux Hermetica,’ or Hermetic cross.

  Kircher was also an astronomer, and while he privately accepted Copernicanism, he was careful to state in public that he denied ‘both the idea of the mobility of the earth, and of the inhabitants of the other heavenly globes’.11 The last part of this refutation suggests that it was Bruno, rather than Galileo, who he had in mind. In fact, Kircher’s work often displays such close parallels with Bruno’s that he must have read his works. It is hard to find anyone more in tune with Bruno’s thinking: Kircher, too, believed his religion of Catholicism was heir to the Egyptian tradition, and he took Bruno’s cosmology as the basis for his own. For obvious reasons, however, it would not have been a great idea to make this too obvious.

  Kircher wrote voluminously, his masterwork being the four-volume Oedipus Aegy
pticus, published between 1652 and 1654, which contains a synthesis of all mystical and esoteric traditions, with Egypt squarely positioned as their foundation. And naturally, he acknowledged the significance of the name of the sacred city of the Egyptians, Heliopolis, City of the Sun.

  Kircher greatly admired the ancient Egyptian civilization, upholding it as the ideal model for both politics and religion. This understanding is very close to Bruno’s vision of Egypt – dangerously so, one might have thought, for a Jesuit working at the very epicentre of Catholicism in Rome. After all, it does seem a perilously short step from believing that Ancient Egypt is the perfect model to advocating the reform of religion and state to match.

  Kircher’s other beliefs included the idea that Moses had been schooled in the religion of Egypt, which he had then passed on to the Israelites, who subsequently corrupted it. Again, this is dangerously close to Bruno’s thinking. The suggestion here is that, given it was believed that Jesus had been sent to put the Jews back on the right track and to open their religion to the rest of the world, then he was actually restoring the Jewish religion to its Egyptian roots. Kircher never made this line of thinking overt – after all, he of all people was no fool.

  Not only is Oedipus Aegypticus liberally studded with quotes from the Hermetica, but Kircher takes both Hermes Trismegistus’ authorship of those books and his antiquity for granted, believing him to be a contemporary of Abraham. He includes a hymn of Hermes from Pimander. To this he added, in the words of Peter Tompkins, ‘a hieroglyph enjoining silence and the secrecy concerning these sublime doctrines – the colophon employed by the Brothers of the Rosy Cross!’12 More overtly (and bizarrely), Kircher placed great importance on John Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica, from which he frequently quotes, linking the symbol to the Egyptian ankh.

  We can see that Kircher shared exactly the same ideals and influences as the authors of the Rosicrucian manifestos, which seems decidedly odd given that the Rosicrucian movement was a Protestant expression of the Hermetic reform agenda. However, as the Hermeticists were working behind both Protestant and Catholic lines for a common cause, even a Catholic Hermeticist like Kircher would share a similar mindset with the Rosicrucians. Kircher’s German background even suggests the possibility of a connection with the Giordanisti.