Kircher imagined his detractors whispering to each other: “Let us just see if he has experience in the knowledge of Hieroglyphics or if he can genuinely be of good use in addressing these figures.” As if to prove to these skeptics just how much “experience in the knowledge of Hieroglyphics” he had, he quickly produced five hundred pages on the subject.
It was actually Francesco Borromini, Bernini’s gloomy nemesis, who was expected to receive the commission for the obelisk’s base. Innocent wanted a big fountain; he’d already put Borromini in charge of diverting water to the site from the Acqua Vergine, a still-functioning ancient Roman aqueduct, and he’d already given tacit approval to Borromini’s concept: a fountain that would represent the four principal rivers of the four continents known at the time. Bernini was out of favor, not least because of his association with the Barberini family, but Innocent changed his mind about the commission after seeing a model of Bernini’s stunning design. Today it’s all the more stunning to consider, given that Kircher played an important role in its development. “I would even venture to say,” writes one Bernini scholar, “that it was only through Kircher that Bernini . . . managed to displace Borromini.”
Bernini stuck to the four-rivers idea, which was meant to represent the centrality of the Church and the flow of faith to all the corners of the globe, as if carried along on the waters of the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Río de la Plata. (The Americas were regarded as a single entity, and although the Portuguese had been navigating the Amazon for years, the Río de la Plata was more famous.) And for the details of animal and plant life along the rivers he’d never seen, he consulted Kircher.
Kircher had never seen them, either. (Were Bernini and others in Rome still under the impression that Kircher had actually been to the East? Maybe they were.) Nevertheless, he had an emerging reputation as an authoritative polymath. He was the figure in Rome with whom a growing number of other, some might say “actual,” authorities on a range of subjects chose to correspond, and he was the Jesuit to whom missionaries most frequently sent reports, artifacts, and natural specimens. One of those specimens was the preserved body of what’s now called a giant armadillo, a South American animal that looks even more unpleasant than its smaller cousin, with bony plating, scales, and large claws. In the well-known engraving of Kircher’s museum, it’s hanging from the ceiling. Kircher may not have been entirely clear on this animal’s bearing and habitat, however, because it seems to have inspired the carved sea creature that stands upright in the water on the American side of the fountain, referred to as the “Tatu of the Indies” by a seventeenth-century chronicler of Bernini’s life and work. (Tatú is Spanish for “armadillo.”)
The effect of Bernini’s fountain goes well beyond its fairly straightforward imagery and symbolism (there’s a dove on the very top of the obelisk, for example, that represents the pope). The rocky travertine base is made to look like a crush of tectonic forces, a mountain in the making. Water shoots from cracks and crevices all around it, and it’s carved out in such a way that you can see through it on all four sides. Each main chunk of the base supports one of four giant marble river gods, but the interior of the form on which the fifty-five-foot obelisk rests contains mostly a lot of water and empty space. As the same seventeenth-century writer put it, “One marvels not a little to see the immense mass of the obelisk erected on a rock so hollowed out and divided and observe how—speaking in artistic terms—it seems to stand upon a void.”
The concept is evidently based on conclusions that Kircher had reached since exploring the caves, underground seas, and passageways of Malta and Sicily, not to mention the deep crater of Mount Vesuvius. As he later explained, “The whole Earth is not solid but everywhere gaping, and hollowed with empty rooms and spaces, and hidden burrows.” Deep down, it held many oceans and fires, interconnected by passages that reached all the way to its core, and there were many entrances and exits in the ground and the floor of the ocean. In the case of the latter, enormous quantities of water passed back and forth through them. “The sea,” he wrote, “by the winds and pressure of the air or the motion of the estuating tides, ejaculates, and casts the waters through subterraneous or underground burrows into the highest waterhouses of the mountains.” In other words, Kircher believed that mountains were hollow and served as great reservoirs. Water pushed its way out through the sides of the mountains like the water of Bernini’s fountain, flowing down the slopes as rivers and streams, and completing the cycle by emptying into the seas.
But the fountain evokes an even larger and more primal natural process, as if capturing the moment when an animating force or a shock of the divine permeates the material world. Bernini may have known that obelisks, with their long, tapering shapes, were said to represent rays of sunlight. And Kircher would have been pleased to inform him of the magnetic manner in which he believed the rays of the sun gave life, the way in which sunlight acted as “the lodestone of heaven, drawing all to it.” Light “passes through everything,” he wrote in The Great Art of Light and Shadow, and “by so passing through, it shapes and forms everything; it supports, collects, unites, separates everything. All things which either exist or are illuminated or grow warm, or live, or are begotten, or freed, or grow greater, or are completed or are moved, it converts to itself.” Not by chance, Kircher’s reading of the hieroglyphics on the obelisk revealed that the ancient Egyptians, inscribers of sacred wisdom, basically agreed: In brief, his translation describes the emanations of a “Solar Genius” and the lower entities that are “drawn,” “fructified,” and “enriched” by the diffusion of its energy.
The important thing is that Bernini wouldn’t have been totally bemused by all this. Kircher’s animistic, Neoplatonic, and catholic views were also still somehow Catholic, and they were characteristically baroque. According to art historian Simon Schama, Bernini “was forever inventing new ways in which the unification of matter and spirit, body and soul, could be visualized and physically experienced.” While “it is difficult to trace the exact degree of closeness between the sculptor and the Egyptologist, something like this belief—the revelation of divinely ordained unities, tying together the different elements of living creation—is surely the controlling concept behind Bernini’s immense creation.”
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WORK ON THE FOUNTAIN STARTED—with some pieces of the obelisk dragged by water buffalo, and others moved with winches, canvases, and horses—as Rome began to suffer from a grain shortage. When taxes were levied to help pay for the project, people became angry. Rhymes of protest began to appear overnight on the blocks of travertine and the chunks of obelisk lying in the piazza: the people didn’t want fontane (fountains), they wanted pane (bread). Jesuits began giving out bread, soup, and wine to the poor, along with tickets that could be turned in for alms at a later date. When that day came, so many people showed up that “a terrible thing happened,” a Roman man reported. “Some of the poor died, suffocated by the crowd; a pregnant woman fell unconscious, others broke their legs, and in short many were injured.”
General hunger notwithstanding, the fountain kept going up, and the Pamphilj pope paid for the publication of Kircher’s lavish Pamphilian Obelisk, a book that serves for all intents and purposes as the first volume of his Egyptian Oedipus. Kircher used it as a kind of sales tool. As he told it, when Emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna got a look at the handsome tome that Kircher had dedicated to Pope Innocent, “he sent to me most eloquent letters by which he kindly impelled me to take up anew my work on Oedipus Aegypticus.” Through an intermediary, Kircher explained to Ferdinand that because of all the special typefaces and necessarily elaborate engravings, the book “would not be able to be produced for less than three thousand scudi,” almost $200,000 in twenty-first-century money. Ferdinand agreed to release the “altogether worthy amplitude of his munificence” on the project, and chipped in a yearly hundred-scudo stipend.
In further correspondence
with Vienna, Kircher cited a tremor in his right hand as an additional challenge to completing the work. He was approaching fifty. It’s not known if this tremor was the result of a stroke, of an old injury he suffered climbing cliffs and volcanoes, or of having scratched his obsessive script over thousands of pages of parchment. It’s also not clear how serious the problem really was, since he finished off thousands and thousands more pages in his own hand over the next twenty-eight or twenty-nine years, before the tremor became totally debilitating. But it was reason enough to request a dedicated assistant to help with the manuscript. Kircher may have hoped all along to send for his friend Kaspar Schott. In any event, Ferdinand agreed to pay, and Schott was brought to Rome from Palermo.
It’s possible to imagine that Kircher rarely thought of himself as a refugee from the war in Germany anymore. But it’s more likely that memories from those early years never left him. And they probably contributed to the conceptual all-inclusiveness, the desire to bring everything together in harmony, that so often showed in his work. The war caused “the devastation of my entire fatherland,” he wrote in his autobiography. And he was basically right, since it led to the death of about a third of the entire population. (That’s an average. In many places it was much more.) In 1648, after years of negotiations, preliminary truces, and various settlements between the Swedes and the Saxons, the French and the Bavarians, the Spanish and the Dutch, as well as bargaining by the Protestant German states and a final Swedish siege of Prague, Kircher’s patron, Ferdinand III, agreed to the Peace of Westphalia. And that’s when the series of hellish episodes that began three decades before could finally be named. Later that very year, a German pamphlet appeared with the title A Short Chronicle of the Thirty Years German War.
But when it ended, the French were still in an ongoing war with Spain and on the verge of a civil revolt called the Fronde. The Dutch were still at war with the Portuguese. The Venetians were still at war with the Turks over Crete. The English were still at war with themselves, and on the way to beheading their king. The Swedes got most of what they wanted at the negotiating table, so one person who might be called a winner was twenty-one-year-old Queen Christina of Sweden. She was crowned at age six after the battlefield death of her father, Gustavus Adolphus, whose armies forced Kircher, Schott, and other Jesuits to run from Würzburg.
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
Now 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.”
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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.”
Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Page 12
