Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) (13 page)

There was some confusion about Christina's gender at the time of her birth. (Questions lingered after her death, so much so that her remains were exhumed in 1966, but experts say the female skeleton they found doesn't rule out the possibility of an intersex condition.) Rumors about her sexuality were fed by her preference for men's coats and shoes, and by her appreciation for beautiful girls. It was reported that she “
could shoot a hare with a single shot better than any man in Sweden.” She thought of herself as an intellectual; she corresponded with Gassendi, read Tacitus, and enjoyed judging the quality of canvases, sculptures, and antiquities that came in crates as war booty from German lands.

The year after the Peace of Westphalia was signed, Christina decided that she wanted René Descartes to come to Stockholm and serve as her personal tutor. He was wary about doing it, and by the time he arrived from the Netherlands in late 1649, she'd become less interested in new philosophy than in ancient occult wisdom. Descartes had his hair curled for their first meeting, but she was disappointed in his looks, and didn't show much interest in him other than insisting he write a libretto for a court ballet. He barely got out of performing in it. She finally scheduled time for him: three meetings a week at five o'clock in the morning in her freezing-cold library. (Even his thoughts froze in Sweden, he said.) Descartes caught the flu, which he treated by drinking hot brewed tobacco, and then developed pneumonia. Christina's physicians bled him, but naturally his condition grew worse, and after ten days of illness, Descartes died in Stockholm at age fifty-three.

But Descartes, who held on to his Catholicism while dismantling almost everything else, did have some influence on Christina, who was straining against Sweden's state-sponsored Lutheranism.
Sometime after he died, Christina accepted visits from two Jesuits with long beards, disguised as Italian gentlemen. In secret meetings with these two, she laughed at literal belief in the Scriptures and at the possible apocalyptic import of a much-discussed comet. While she was less pious than she might have been for someone who was thinking about converting to their religion, her interest in Catholicism was at least partly genuine. In her view, the Jesuits encouraged, or permitted, the kind of intellectual curiosity she herself felt. She asked about astronomy, occult sciences, atomism, and, to one degree or another, about Athanasius Kircher.

Kircher lost no time contacting her, sending her a number of unctuous letters and his book on music. The queen answered: “
I hope that we shall henceforth have the opportunity of greater freedom and sincerity to correspond with each other and to communicate with each other in greater safety.”

12

Egyptian Oedipus

N
ow that he'd secured the emperor's funds and Schott's help, the onus was on Kircher to complete the monumental project he'd promised for so long. As Schott described it, Kircher's cubiculum during this period was piled high with manuscripts and books so old that many were “
half-consumed by rot” or “besieged by dust and cockroaches” and “etched over in nearly illegible characters.” Also lying around as they worked: “
a vast quantity of hieroglyphs, idols, images, gems, amulets, periapts, talismans, stones, and similar things.” Because
Egyptian Oedipus
was too ambitious and too long to be printed in one volume at any one time, the handwritten sheets had to be sent to the typesetter in several stages between 1652 and 1654. The book, all two thousand pages of it, was finally published in four volumes in 1655.

In his introductory treatise, Kircher likened his breakthrough with hieroglyphics to the discovery of America, the development of the printing press, and the sighting of “
new heavenly bodies.” Interest in Kircher's solution to the puzzle was already such that
one Dutch bookseller alone bought five hundred copies (half the print run) of
Pamphilian Obelisk
, its 1650 precursor. But needless to say, it was not the kind of book that could be digested in a few sittings. As with most publications of the era, the assessments of readers emerged over a period of years and even decades, rather than weeks or months. Initially, especially among those who already thought of Kircher
as “an oracle,” it inspired awe. Much more recently it has been called “
one of the most learned monstrosities of all times.”

Egyptian Oedipus
was full of esoteric-looking languages in exotic typefaces; long tables of obscure letters, markings, and symbols; occult diagrams; and engravings of mummies and pagan gods. The physical scale and the elaborate beauty of this book made it suitable for courtly display, consistent with the realization of a decades-long ambition on Kircher's part, and appropriate to what it was supposed to contain.
Egyptian Oedipus
wasn't just supposed to supply a method for retrieving the secret wisdom that was encoded in hieroglyphic inscriptions—it was supposed to provide the secret wisdom itself.

Egyptian pyramids, as envisioned by Kircher and his engraver

In Kircher's version of events, this wisdom had been handed down from God to Adam and passed along all the way to Noah. Over those centuries, impure versions of the sacred doctrines emerged in the form of dark magic, idolatry, and superstition, thanks in great part to Adam's bad son, Cain. After the flood, as Noah's descendants repopulated the earth—all the cultures of the world had to come from this same single source, after all—Noah's own bad son, Ham, made the great mistake of confusing the strains before going on to father the civilization of the Egyptians, who absorbed these idolatrous admixtures. It was Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great Egyptian priest, philosopher, and king, who was supposed to have decontaminated the sacred doctrines, at least to the degree that his pagan mind-set allowed, devising the obelisks and the system of hieroglyphics as a way to preserve them.

Superstitious practices crept back into Egyptian culture over time, Kircher argued, recombining with some true wisdom and forming the basis for various religions and societies. He thought he recognized ancestral Egyptian influence in the cultures of the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians, and even the Aztecs, whose inscriptions and monuments he'd learned about through Jesuits in Mexico. Even Kircher had to admit it was all fairly complex. Putting together a scholarly chronology of human civilization that was consistent with the short time frame of the Bible, for example, presented challenges, though he betrayed little doubt of overcoming them. And there were many unknowns. On the question of influence between the Egyptians and their longtime captives the Jews (the descendants of Noah's son Shem), especially with respect to the mystical practices of Kabbalah, he had this to say: “
I am fully persuaded that either the Egyptians were Hebraicizing or the Hebrews were Egypticizing.”

And yet Kircher and many others believed that a strain of true (or truer) wisdom had survived, in the form of the written texts attributed to Hermes and in teachings believed to connect Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Plato, among others. Kircher argued that vestiges of the hieroglyphic doctrine and symbolism must still lie hidden “
scattered among the chronicles of ancient authors.” So in order to decode the system, it wasn't just the “
mysteries of the Egyptians” that he needed to apprehend, but also the “secrets of the Greeks, the amulets of the gnostics, the arcana of the Cabbalists, the phylacteries of the Arabs, the antidotes of the Saracen,” and also the “characters, signs, frivolities, superstitions, and deceptions of all the imposters.”

—

BEYOND THE CITATIONS
of praise to Ferdinand in twenty-seven different languages, most of the beginning of
Egyptian Oedipus
was devoted to assuring readers how singularly suited Kircher was to be its author. Pages and pages of prose testifying to his erudition were preceded by lines and lines of poetry testifying to it. (Just who was this new Oedipus again? “
Kircher's he.”) In a foreword to readers, Schott described Kircher's superhuman diligence as a researcher and his uncanny ease with language: “
He has been exceedingly educated in Arabic, Chaldaean, Syrian, Armenian, Samarian, Coptic . . . and for many years now he has spoken not only with Greeks in Greek, with learned Hebrew rabbis in Hebrew, but with Arabs in Arabic and with foreigners from other provinces of Asia and Africa, of which the number here in Rome at any time is enormous, in each one's mother tongue.”

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.

—

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.”