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

by Lynn Picknett

  Maybe Kircher was trying to change Catholicism from within, reviving the old dream of Bruno and Campanella. This is by no means just idle speculation, as he managed to interest two popes in Egyptian ideas, and his work with the ancient obelisks points to more than a mere academic interest in those monuments. In this Kircher collaborated with his great friend, the artist, sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), who is most famous for designing St Peter’s Square with its magnificent colonnades. (Or rather, he is probably most famous now for featuring so prominently in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons.)

  Unsurprisingly, Kircher and Bernini’s joint projects incorporated a wealth of Egyptian symbolism and motifs, which Bernini incorporated into his other works. George Lechner, an expert on magical and astrological symbolism in Renaissance art – a real-life version of Dan Brown’s character Robert Langdon – acknowledges that Bernini’s use of Egyptian motifs probably derives from the Hermetica.13 Kircher and Bernini first worked together on a project, later abandoned, to reerect a 40 foot (12 m) obelisk that had been discovered in a vineyard. Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of the then-Pope, Urban VIII, sought to set it up in his palace gardens.

  Kircher and Bernini conceived that the base of the monument should feature a life-size sculpted elephant, which would bear the upright obelisk on its back. But what did the elephant signify? Was it simply an error – did Kircher and Bernini perhaps believe elephants came from Egypt? The answer reveals something important about the men’s otherwise concealed attitude to their religion.

  In the twentieth century the Italian painter Domenico Gnoli, among others, identified the inspiration as an image in the allegorical and highly symbolic book Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), published in Venice in 1499, an identification accepted by the American art historian William S. Heckscher.14 The romance is anonymous, although the first word in each chapter spells out a sentence containing the name ‘Frater Franciscus Columna’, apparently the name of a Dominican monk in Venice. Despite this clue, other authors have been suggested, including Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leon Battista Alberti, the polymath mentor of Leonardo da Vinci.

  The tale describes a dream within a dream in which Poliphilo (‘Lover of many things’ or ‘Lover of Polia’) searches for his amorata Polia, who has rejected him. Inevitably, throughout his adventures he encounters many strange creatures along the way, all illustrated by superb woodcuts. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has exerted a hold over the esoteric imagination to this day, as it seems to convey a profound, if elusive, something in symbolic form. Decoding its hidden message provides the central plot of the 2004 bestseller The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, and it is mentioned in Roman Polanski’s powerful and unsettling movie The Ninth Gate (and in the novel on which the movie is based, The Dumas Club by Arturo Pérez-Reverte).

  In the story of Poliphilo the obelisk on the back of a stone elephant is not only described but also illustrated by one of the woodcuts. Before Gnoli identified it as Bernini and Kircher’s joint inspiration, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was already acknowledged by researchers of the esoteric as a major influence elsewhere. An Italian writer on Rosicrucianism, Alberto C. Ambesi, considered that it ‘marks the true birth of the Rosy Cross, but in code’.15 This was not to suggest that either the fraternity or the group that produced the manifestos existed in Venice in 1499, but that the currents of esoteric thought that came together in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili later influenced the Rosicrucians.

  Although the obelisk-on-an-elephant project was aborted, the idea resurfaced in Kircher and Bernini’s last collaboration.

  Shortly after Pope Innocent X’s election in 1644, Kircher proposed that another recently unearthed obelisk, broken into four pieces, should be reerected in his honour. The first-century emperor Domitian originally commissioned the 55 foot (16.5 m) obelisk (its height was nearly doubled by Bernini’s elaborate fountain base) for Rome’s Temple of Serapis. Innocent agreed to Kircher’s proposal and put him in charge of the project, again working with Bernini. Together they reassembled the obelisk, Kircher designing the missing pieces – complete with inscriptions – and it became the centrepiece of the elaborate statue-covered Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, which took until 1651 to complete. The obelisk was topped not with a cross, as one would expect, but a dove, which wasn’t a reference to the Holy Spirit or dove of peace but to the emblem of Innocent’s family, the Pamphili.

  Kircher’s own account of the raising of the monument, Obeliscus Pamphilius, begins with the mysteries of Egypt, and in particular the secrets of the hieroglyphs, but is again heavily studded with Hermeticism and even includes a lengthy discussion of John Dee’s Monas hieroglyphica. Incongruous to say the least for a book by a Jesuit commissioned by the Pope himself!

  Obeliscus Pamphilius can be said to conceal almost as much as it reveals, and there is a strong suggestion running throughout that Kircher is still hiding something. The frontispiece has occupied esotericists and art historians for generations. In front of a fallen obelisk the winged Mercury (i.e. Hermes) hovers holding a scroll inscribed with hieroglyphs in front of a woman who represents Kircher’s muse. She rests one foot on a cubic block of stone, on which Egyptian tools that are clearly the equivalent of the square and compass of the classic Masonic symbol are inscribed. This is most odd – historically and geographically Masonic symbols should not have been in Rome at that time. The frontispiece also features a cherub holding one finger to his lips. Tod Marder, professor at the State University of New Jersey and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a specialist in the works of Bernini, writes:

  Cabalistic in the extreme, Kircher claimed to be purposefully obscuring the real meaning of the obelisk, lest he deprive some other erudite soul of the enlightenment that comes from personal decipherment. Kircher wrote a book about the Pamphili Obelisk, as it was called. On the title page appears a little cherub with his forefinger raised to his lips to signal silence – if you know the secrets herein, it seems to say, keep them to yourself.16

  The symbolism of the frontispiece is obvious: through the inspiration of Hermes, Kircher is seeking to restore the great Egyptian secrets.

  Kircher’s charmed life continued when Innocent X died in 1655 and Fabio Chigi was elected as Alexander VII. Alexander was responsible for commissioning Bernini to remodel St Peter’s square, with the Caligula obelisk as its centrepiece. Peter Tompkins describes the new Pope as:

  an Hermetic scholar who took a personal interest in Kircher’s hieroglyphical studies, contributing generously to the publication of Kircher’s many more works, and so, indirectly, to keeping alive the wisdom of Ficino, Pico, and their Thrice Great Master.17

  The year of Alexander’s election was also remarkable for a great discovery. During the digging of a new well, a smallish, 18 foot (5.5 m), pink granite obelisk in good condition was found in the garden of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a remnant of the original temple to Isis. Having solicited the commission from Alexander, Kircher and Bernini had this set on the back of a stone elephant in the piazza in front of the basilica. With this accomplished, the statue was instantly recognisable as the outward and visible form of the woodcut from the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. It appeared that Kircher and Bernini had finally manifested its extraordinary symbolism in hard stone.

  The obelisk is topped with a small and discreet cross, as opposed to the unmissable ironmongery that Sixtus V set on the Caligula obelisk. This one, however, is devoid of smug trumpeting about the victory of Christianity. Instead it provides a perfect reflection of Hermeticism such as Bruno’s, proclaiming as it does that Christianity is built upon and supported by the ancient Hermetic religion of Egypt.

  The obelisk’s inscription is remarkable because it features a Pope honouring Isis, in what is perhaps an echo of the decorations that could be found in the Appartamento Borgia two centuries earlier: ‘Alexander VII erected this obelisk once dedicated to the Egyptians’ Pallas [Isis],
to the divine wisdom and to the deipara mother.’18 ‘Deipara’ means ‘mother of God’ (so ‘deipara mother’ is either tautology or heavy emphasis), and is an official Catholic title for the Virgin Mary. But why not make a more explicit reference to Jesus’ mother, if she is being honoured here? Clearly because it is referring to Isis, not the Virgin Mary.

  To Hermeticists, Santa Maria sopra Minerva was nothing less than a sacred site. Although outwardly a Dominican basilica, it was also the spot where Bruno was taken before his execution and where Galileo abjured his heliocentric beliefs. So here we have an obelisk made in honour of Isis, raised again as part of a Rosicrucian monument by an adherent of Hermeticism, outside the place where Bruno had been condemned and Galileo forced to recant. This was not your average Catholic statue.

  But there is still more to this elephantine sculpture, which recalls to us at least the quite jaw-dropping symbolism Leonardo built into his Virgin of the Rocks, which we discuss elsewhere.19 As Peter Tompkins notes gleefully:

  … the satirist Segardi, taking the symbolism one step further, used the fact that the elephant’s rear end is turned towards the monastery of the Dominicans to compose the epigram, ‘Vertit terga elephas vertague proboscide clamat Kyriaci Frates Heid Vos Habeo’ or, in short, ‘Dominicans, you may kiss my arse!’20

  Few are afforded the opportunity to make such extravagantly heretical gestures, and indeed this was a last hurrah for Kircher and Bernini. When Pope Alexander died in 1667, Kircher lost papal favour and patronage and resigned from the Jesuit college to concentrate on his intellectual pursuits. In particular he wanted to create a museum preserving artefacts (such as a lizard encased in amber) which he had collected and which Jesuits sent from around the world. With what seemed like destined precision, he and Bernini died on the same day, 28 November 1680.

  With the huge confidence (many would say overwhelming arrogance) of a gifted polymath, Kircher, the self-declared Hermeticist and probably a closet Rosicrucian, worked right in the heart of Catholicism, hidden in plain sight. Had he attempted to carry out Bruno’s apparently impossible idea of celebrating the compatibility between Hermeticism and Christianity? Surely strangest of all is his success in managing to operate within the rabidly anti-Hermetic and Rosicrucian-hating Jesuit order.

  Of course many readers will have noticed that this late flowering of Hermeticism within the Vatican is echoed in the plot of Dan Brown’s second novel Angels and Demons (2000), as well as in its action-packed movie adaptation. In fact it was returning to the subject of Bernini and Kircher for our roles as contributors to the truth-behind-the-fiction TV documentary tie-in to the movie that led us to unravel many of the above connections.

  The fictional basis of Brown’s thriller is the supposed existence of a secret society of scientists and freethinkers called the Illuminati, created in the face of persecution by the Church and which boasted Galileo as a prominent member. Because of persecution, particularly Galileo’s, the Illuminati became rabidly anti-Catholic, eventually seeking to bring down the Church, which they had infiltrated. One of their secret grand masters was Bernini, who had encoded certain of his Roman works with directions to guide initiates to the Society’s hidden base. The hero, Robert Langdon, has to follow the ‘Path of Illumination’ against the rapidly ticking clock in order to avert an enormous cataclysm and save the day.

  As with The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s grasp of history in Angels and Demons has been roundly criticized for its inaccuracies and anachronisms. On the surface, it does seem that liberties have been taken with the facts. Although there was a real secret society called the Order of the Illuminati, whose aims were roughly similar to the organization in Angels and Demons – the advancement of freethinking and the overthrow of the Catholic Church – it wasn’t formed until 1776 and was only active in the state of Bavaria. So on geographical and chronological grounds it was impossible for Galileo and Bernini to have been part of it. Critics also focused in particular on the choice of Bernini as the secret Illuminati master, on the grounds that he was a dedicated Catholic who worked for most of his life under the patronage of popes.

  The essentials of Dan Brown’s story do fit with our own reconstruction, however. If you replace the Illuminati with the Giordanisti then the plot falls into place very neatly, as the latter secretly encouraged scientific thinking and aimed at either the radical reform or overthrow of the Catholic Church. And the Giordanisti was connected with Galileo and, through Kircher, to Bernini. Certain works of Bernini’s that Brown used as a framework for Robert Langdon’s apocalyptic trip to Rome, such as the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, one of the landmarks of the Path of Illumination, are also significant in our own version of the story. So if we substitute the ‘Giordanisti’ or ‘Rosicrucian’ for the Illuminati in Brown’s novel, we see that, perhaps surprisingly, there is a solid historical basis for Angels and Demons. (And perhaps it is significant that Bruno’s On the Heroic Frenzies culminates in a scene in which nine blind men receive not just sight but insight, becoming the nine ‘Illuminati’.) It seems that Dan Brown tapped into a rich vein of synchronicity and serendipity that sometimes, somehow makes life-follow-art-follow-art.

  But what of the objection that Bernini was too Catholic to be involved in such shenanigans in the first place? Was he just an innocent fall guy for Kircher’s secret Hermetic agenda, as some have suggested? Neither of these objections stand up. As we have seen, even certain popes were devotees of Hermes, and strong Christian beliefs – be they Catholic or Protestant – presented no obstacle to developing an enthusiasm for the works of Thrice Great Hermes. Unless Bernini lived in a bubble and never actually read Kircher’s books, he must have understood that the symbolism of their joint works was unequivocally Hermetic.

  More importantly, Kircher showed that Bruno’s intellectual legacy was not only still alive but also still shaping the development of science. Ingrid D. Rowland, art historian and Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, writes:

  Kircher’s cosmology and its attendant concept of a universal panspermia … show that however dramatically the eight-year trial and gruesome public execution of Giordano Bruno had been designed to prove that the heretic philosopher was a lone and terrible fanatic, the performance had failed. Bruno’s books had been read by Kepler, Galileo and Athanasius Kircher, and they were enough to change the course of natural philosophy. For both Bruno and Kircher argued with passionate eloquence that nothing but an infinite universe did justice to an omnipotent God, and once the idea of that vastness immeasurable had been conceived, it really did burst the crystalline spheres of Aristotelian physics.21

  But Hermetic science still had one more giant to gift to the world whose contribution was to exceed anything that had gone before.

  Chapter Five

  1 Couturat, p. 131.

  2 Yates, The Art of Memory, pp. 387–8.

  3 Ibid., p. 382.

  4 Quoted in the online Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz.

  5 Standford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy website: plato.stanford.edu/entries/cambridge-platonists.

  6 See Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 388, and Atanasijevic, p. xviii.

  7 Yates, The Art of Memory, p. 388.

  8 Quoted in ibid., p. 385.

  9 Quoted in ibid.

  10 Strange Science website: www.strangescience.net/kircher.htm.

  11 Quoted in Tompkins, p. 90.

  12 Ibid., p. 97.

  13 Interviewed in Burstein and de Keijzer, pp. 239–40.

  14 See ‘Bernini’s Elephant and Obelisk’ in Hecksher. This is a reproduction of an article that appeared in The Art Bulletin in 1947.

  15 Quoted in Tompkins, p. 88.

  16 Tod Marder, ‘A Bernini Expert Reflects on Dan Brown’s Use of the Baroque Master’, in Burstein and de Keijzer, p. 255.

  17 Tompkins, p. 97.

  18 Quoted in Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, and the Panspermia of the Infinite Universe’,
in Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher, p. 56.

  19 See Picknett, Mary Magdalene, pp. 27–9.

  20 Tompkins, p. 100.

  21 Ingrid D. Rowland, ‘Athanasius Kircher, Giordano Bruno, and the Panspermia of the Infinite Universe’, in Findlen (ed.), Athanasius Kircher, pp. 201–2.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ISAAC NEWTON AND

  THE INVISIBLE BROTHERHOOD

  After the collapse of Rosicrucian dreams in Bohemia and Germany and the eruption of the Thirty Years’ War that engulfed Europe for a generation, Hermetic hopes for the great reform of society focused on England, which had remained largely uninvolved with the war, if only because Charles I’s expedition of the late 1620s had been ignominiously defeated. And when he ran out of funds for another such venture, it was the issue of how to raise money for the army that deeply divided the English.

  The ensuing Civil War between the king and Parliament convulsed the country from 1641 until 1649, and ended with the public beheading of Charles I in London and the foundation of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The years of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate under Cromwell’s personal rule, although largely miserable (Christmas was cancelled, for example), were relatively stable.

  But before England endured its own upheavals, a number of scholarly refugees who cherished the Rosicrucian dream arrived. England quickly became the repository of the Hermetic reform movement.

  The Hermetic tradition had by no means died out in the country. In 1654 John Webster – a Puritan Parliamentary chaplain, astonishingly – wrote a tract proposing that the universities should base their teaching on ‘the philosophy of Hermes revived by the Paracelsian school’1 – in other words, Rosicrucianism. He mentioned the Fraternity of the Rose Cross and strongly recommended John Dee’s mathematical works, as well as those of Robert Fludd.