Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity

An examination of the unique, baroque-era, German Jesuit scholar, Egyptologist, polymath, and prolific author and his studies.

A contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601/2–80), was one of Europe's most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. He published more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology, numerology, geology, and music. But Kircher is most famous—or infamous—for his quixotic attempt to decipher the Eg...