Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) was a German Jesuit priest, natural philosopher, and polymath whose encyclopedic ambitions encompassed Egyptology, comparative religion, geology, magnetism, optics, music theory, and the reconstruction of ancient languages. Born in Geisa in the Electorate of Mainz, Kircher entered the Society of Jesus and after extensive travels settled in Rome in 1633, where he spent the remainder of his life at the Collegio Romano with access to the resources of the Jesuit order and the patronage of successive popes. His productivity was extraordinary: he authored more than forty folio volumes on subjects ranging from the natural world to ancient civilizations, making him the most prolific learned author of the seventeenth century. For the history of Hermeticism, Kircher is a figure of peculiar importance and equally peculiar ambiguity. He was deeply committed to the belief that Egyptian civilization was the source of all ancient wisdom and that the hieroglyphic script encoded a profound Hermetic theology — a belief he elaborated in his massive comparative mythological synthesis Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652–1654) — despite the fact that Isaac Casaubon had, forty years before the publication of that work, definitively demonstrated that the Corpus Hermeticum was not genuinely ancient Egyptian. Kircher was not, in the modern sense, an Egyptologist; he was a Christian Hermetist who read Egyptian antiquity through the lens of the prisca theologia even as that lens was being dismantled by philological scholarship elsewhere in Europe.

Works and Intellectual Context

Oedipus Aegyptiacus (4 vols., Rome, 1652–1654) is Kircher's masterwork and the most ambitious attempt in the seventeenth century to decode the Egyptian hieroglyphic script and reconstruct the theology it supposedly encoded. The work is a monument of baroque erudition that draws simultaneously on ancient Greek sources, Arabic manuscripts, Coptic texts, Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah, and Chinese comparative data to argue that Egyptian religion was the common source of all ancient wisdom traditions. Kircher's approach to the hieroglyphs was fundamentally allegorical rather than phonetic: he believed that each hieroglyph expressed a philosophical or theological idea symbolically rather than representing sounds, and he therefore produced interpretations of hieroglyphic texts that were entirely imaginary from the standpoint of later Egyptology, which demonstrated after the Rosetta Stone's decipherment in the 1820s that the script was primarily phonetic. Despite this foundational error, Oedipus Aegyptiacus was enormously influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a compendium of comparative religious information and as an expression of the Hermetic Egyptomania that persisted in European learned culture. Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665) demonstrates another dimension of Kircher's intellectual interests: it is a comprehensive account of the earth's interior, combining genuine geological observation with speculative cosmology and a theory of underground fires and water systems drawn partly from Hermetic and Neoplatonic conceptions of the earth as a living organism. Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646) on light and optics, and Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650) on music theory and harmony, reveal the range of Kircher's natural philosophical interests and his consistent concern with analogical correspondences between different orders of reality.

Hermetic Significance

Kircher's place in the history of Hermeticism is, paradoxically, as much about failure as success. His spectacular misreading of the Egyptian hieroglyphs — generating elaborate "translations" that were entirely fictitious — kept alive a form of Hermetic Egyptomania in European learned culture that had no basis in actual Egyptian philology but that proved enormously generative for the subsequent history of esoteric thought. The image of Egypt as the source of occult wisdom, of hieroglyphs as repositories of a hidden theology accessible only to initiated interpreters, of Hermes Trismegistus as the founding figure of an ancient priestly wisdom — all of these ideas, which Kircher propagated with extraordinary erudition and visual splendor, entered the esoteric tradition in forms that would persist through Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, and the occult revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From a strictly historiographical standpoint, Kircher's significance is as a transmission node: he channeled and amplified a specific construction of Egyptian antiquity and Hermetic philosophy that had originated with Ficino and been elaborated by generations of Renaissance scholars, and he propagated it at a moment when its philological foundations had already been undermined by Casaubon. As Wouter J. Hanegraaff has argued, Kircher's Egypt is a thoroughgoing Analyst construction — a projection of Renaissance and Jesuit theological assumptions onto a civilization the tools did not yet exist to understand on its own terms.

Transmission and Reception

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Kircher's works were among the most widely read and frequently cited in Europe. Oedipus Aegyptiacus was received as an authoritative reference on Egyptian antiquity and exercised influence on travelers, antiquarians, Freemasons, and esoteric writers throughout the period. Leibniz corresponded with Kircher and drew on his comparative linguistic work. The architects of eighteenth-century Freemasonry drew on Kircherian Egyptomania in constructing their ritual symbolism. The Rosicrucian movements of the early seventeenth century, which emerged partly from the same Hermetic milieu Kircher inhabited, intersected with his interests in the universal language of nature and the prismatic unity of ancient wisdom traditions. After Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphics in the 1820s, Kircher's "translations" were definitively exposed as fictional, and his reputation collapsed in Egyptological circles. The twentieth and twenty-first century reassessment of Kircher has been more generous, treating him not as a failed Egyptologist but as a major figure in the history of the comparative study of religion, in the history of early modern natural philosophy, and in the history of esoteric thought. Scholars such as Joscelyn Godwin and Paula Findlen have rehabilitated Kircher as a thinker who, whatever his empirical failures, was genuinely attempting to construct a universal science of correspondences that expressed real intellectual ambitions of his era.

Scholarly Debates

The scholarly debate about Kircher turns on how to read a figure who was simultaneously a major vehicle of transmission and a spectacular producer of error. Historians of science have sometimes treated him as a cautionary example of pre-empirical natural philosophy; historians of esotericism have treated him as a crucial transmission node for Hermetic Egyptomania. Paula Findlen's edited volume Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (2004) and her earlier work in Possessing Nature (1994) offer a nuanced reassessment that situates Kircher within the specific institutional and intellectual context of the Jesuit order and the Roman learned world of the mid-seventeenth century. Anthony Grafton has emphasized the continuities between Kircher's methods and those of his humanist predecessors, arguing that his errors were systematic rather than merely idiosyncratic.

Literature

Findlen, Paula (ed.). Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Godwin, Joscelyn. Athanasius Kircher: A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Kircher, Athanasius. Oedipus Aegyptiacus. 4 vols. Rome: Mascardi, 1652–1654.
Kircher, Athanasius. Mundus Subterraneus. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Jansson-Waesberg, 1665.
Stolzenberg, Daniel (ed.). The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher. Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2001.
Walker, D. P. The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century. London: Duckworth, 1972.
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.