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EGYPTIAN OEDIPUS
Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity
By DANIEL STOLZENBERG
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-92414-4
Chapter One
Esoteric Antiquarianism
This science has its visionaries as well as all others. There are several, for example, that will find a mystery in every tooth of Neptune's trident, and are amazed at the wisdom of the ancients that represented a thunder-bolt with three forks, since, they will tell you, nothing could have better explained its triple quality of piercing, burning and melting. I have seen a long discourse on the figure and nature of horn, to shew it was impossible to have found out a fitter emblem for plenty than the Cornu-copia. These are a sort of authors who scorn to take up with appearances, and fancy an interpretation vulgar when it is natural. —Joseph Addison
KIRCHER'S HIEROGLYPHS
Egyptian Oedipus is a big book. Its dense assemblage of Latin scholarly exposition, excerpts from primary sources, images of archeological artifacts, and diagrams fills more than two thousand pages, spread over four in-folio volumes. A typographical tour de force, employing dozens of exotic fonts to display Oriental text and lavishly furnished with woodcuts and engravings, it took three years for the Roman printer, Vitale Mascardi, to see it through the press (figs. 2–5). In an age accustomed to scholarly grandiosity, its scale impressed. To the modern reader, however, it is the book's substance that most astonishes. Egyptian Oedipus promises a complete "restoration of the hieroglyphic doctrine," all the lost secrets of religion and science that ancient Egyptians supposedly encoded on their monuments. The massive final volume gathers almost every hieroglyphic inscription known to Europeans at that time, as well as other ancient artifacts, including mummies, sarcophagi, Canopic jars, sphinxes, idols, lamps, and amulets, found in Rome, other Christian cities, Istanbul, and Egypt. Kircher glosses each object with a learned explanation of its ancient significance. Without a Rosetta Stone, he translates the hieroglyphic inscriptions, character by character, into Latin prose.
But Egyptian Oedipus hardly confines itself to matters Egyptian. Kircher interprets the hieroglyphs by comparing Egyptian inscriptions with evidence from other traditions that supposedly preserve elements of the "hieroglyphic doctrine." The book contains extensive discussions of topics such as pagan religion from Mexico to Japan, ancient Greek esoteric texts like the Orphic hymns and Pythagorean verses, Jewish Kabbalah, Arabic magic, ancient alchemy, astrology, and astral medicine. Kircher calls his scholarly procedure the "combinatory method," because it juxtaposes diverse texts and artifacts meant to illuminate one another. Such a method is potentially sound; indeed, the comparative study of texts, inscriptions, and artifacts was one of early modern erudition's significant contributions to historical scholarship. But one can't help but be struck by the inappropriate heterogeneity of the fragments out of which Kircher would reconstruct the ancient Egyptian world. To harmonize the "sacred history" of the Bible with the "profane history" of pagan civilizations, Kircher relies on a hermeneutics of symbolism and allegory. Properly interpreted, the seemingly "absurd" myths of the Greeks, Egyptians, and other heathens express a monotheistic theology that prefigures many of the tenets of Christianity. Among the many levels of meaning contained in the story of Isis and Osiris, for example, Kircher detects the doctrine of the Holy Trinity (fig. 9).
To the modern reader, the historical narrative at the heart of Kircher's study—a saga of secret knowledge lost, found, and lost again, enacted by heroic wise men, devious priests, and powerful magicians—has a patently fabulous character. At the dawn of time, Kircher, explains, Adam, instructed by God and the angels, and guided by experience acquired during his centuries-spanning life, possessed perfect wisdom, which he passed on to his children. Noah and his sons preserved antediluvian knowledge from destruction by the Flood, which Kircher placed 1,656 years after the creation of the world and 2,394 years before the birth of Christ. But Noah's son Ham polluted the Adamic wisdom with magic and superstition. Eventually the great Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus purified the antediluvian wisdom from its corrupt admixture, and invented hieroglyphic writing to preserve it for posterity. But later Egyptian priests mixed the Hermetic wisdom with magic and superstition, creating, yet again, an ambiguous legacy, which was passed on to other nations.
Kircher undertook his investigation almost two centuries before Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) famously solved the enigma of hieroglyphic writing. Using the bilingual Rosetta Stone as his key, Champollion demonstrated that hieroglyphs, despite their figurative form, represented the sounds of spoken language, albeit in a more complex manner than a purely alphabetic writing system. Modern Egyptology reveals that ancient obelisks were memorials whose inscriptions record the identity of the kings who built them and the gods to whom they were dedicated. For example, the obelisk that now stands in the private garden of the Villa Celimontana in Rome was originally erected in Heliopolis in the thirteenth century BCE by Ramesses II and dedicated to the god Horus. We know this because its inscription reads, "Horus, strong bull, beloved of Maat, Usr-Maat-Ra Setepen-Ra (Ra-strong-in-truth-chosen-of-Ra), king of Upper and Lower Egypt, son of the Sun, Ramesses II" (fig. 10). Kircher, who scoffed at the idea that obelisks recorded such mundane details, interpreted the same hieroglyphs as symbols of esoteric wisdom. He arrived at a longer translation:
Supramundane Osiris, concealed in the center of eternity, flows down into the world of the Genies, which is the most near, similar, and immediately subject to him. He flows down into the divinity Osiris of the sensible World, and its soul, which is the Sun. He flows down into the Osiris of the elemental World, Apis, beneficent Agathodemon, who distributes the power imparted by Osiris to all the members of the lower world. His minister and faithful attendant, the polymorphous Spirit, shows the abundance and wealth of all necessary things by the variety that he brings about and oversees. But since the beneficent power of the polymorphous Spirit may be impeded in various ways by adverse powers, the sacred Mophto-Mendesian table, which acquires the moist strength and fertility of the Nile, in order for the flow of good things to be performed without impediment, must be worn for protection. But since the polymorphous Spirit is not capable of thoroughly completing this task, the cooperation of Isis, whose dryness tempers the moisture of Mendes, is needed. To obtain it, the following sacred table of Osiris is composed, on which are taught the things to be done in sacrifices and the way to perform the Komasian rites. Through this table and the sight of it supra-mundane Osiris shows the desired abundance of necessary things.
Faced with Kircher's relentless mobilization of erudition in the name of such nugatory results, one may be tempted to dismiss him as a learned charlatan or a crank. More than a few readers have done so, from the seventeenth century to the present, usually emphasizing his unwavering faith in texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus despite Isaac Casaubon's demolition of their authenticity decades earlier. And yet, despite widespread recognition of his flaws, Kircher was one of the most famous scholars of his time and his hieroglyphic studies were at the center of his reputation, both ill and good. Egyptian Oedipus was taken seriously by seventeenth-century scholars. Indeed, as chapter documents, it informed scholarship well into the eighteenth century. If we want to understand how early modern Europeans thought about the past, we should take it seriously too.
RENAISSANCE EGYPTOLOGY
Egyptian Oedipus was the culmination of two centuries of European fascination with ancient Egypt and hieroglyphic writing. The kingdom of the Pharaohs had enthralled the Greeks since Herodotus, in the fifth century BCE, described an ancient land of marvels and sacred mysteries which had passed its science and religion on to younger civilizations such as Greece. As Renaissance scholars immersed themselves in Greek and Roman literature, they reactivated the classical image of Egypt, which merged with and at times submerged the biblical view of Egypt as the land of exile and idolatry. In the early fifteenth century, Italian humanists rediscovered important works about Egypt by Pliny, Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, and Plutarch, among others. Especially decisive in shaping the Renaissance image of Egypt was the revival of Neoplatonism, spearheaded by Marsilio Ficino. The Florentine philosopher translated and disseminated works by Plotinus and other Neoplatonists of late antiquity, who described the hieroglyphs as a symbolic language encoding the profound mysteries of ancient Egyptian sages. Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris and Macrobius's Saturnalia provided detailed allegorical interpretations of Egyptian religion that harmonized with Platonic theology and metaphysics, while Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Proclus venerated Egypt and the Orient as the homeland of true philosophy and pious magic.
Most influential were two Greek texts that found their way to Italy from the disintegrating Byzantine Empire and were purported to be translations from ancient Egyptian. In the 1420s, a manuscript of the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo was discovered on the island of Andros and brought to Florence. Attributed to an Egyptian priest—but most likely composed in the fourth century CE by a Greek author with little knowledge of the Egyptian language—the Hieroglyphica was a guidebook to interpreting hieroglyphic symbolism. Translated into Latin and various vernaculars, Horapollo saw many editions, exerting a profound influence on the European understanding of the hieroglyphs. In 1460, at the command of Cosimo de' Medici, Ficino interrupted his translation of Plato to undertake a Latin version of another recently discovered manuscript, which promised to reveal the ultimate source of Platonic wisdom. The Corpus Hermeticum was a collection of treatises on philosophical and theological themes, believed to have been written in remote antiquity by the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. In reality, these texts were composed in Greek in the first centuries of the modern era, which is why their views so uncannily "anticipate" Platonist and Christian teachings from the same milieu. The Hermetic Corpus became the locus classicus for the Renaissance conception of Egyptian wisdom, establishing Hermes Trismegistus as a key figure in the pious pagan tradition anticipating Christianity, known as the prisca theologia, or ancient theology.
Simultaneously with the literary encounter, humanist scholars, especially in Rome, began systematically to investigate the physical remains of the ancient world, which included a significant quantity of Egyptian material. Most spectacular were the obelisks that Augustus and subsequent emperors had carried across the Mediterranean to display as symbols of imperial majesty, eventually adorning the ancient city with close to fifty monuments. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, only the Vatican obelisk still stood, but the remains of others lay scattered about the town. Statues of sphinxes, lions, and smaller artifacts were also to be found both above and below ground, legacies of imperial Rome's infatuation with Egyptian culture which gave rise to the Temple of Isis in the Campus Martius. Over time, the provenance of these objects was forgotten. Most famously, the Vatican obelisk was long mistaken for a funerary monument bearing the ashes of Julius Caesar. It was not until the 1420s that Italian antiquaries identified these monuments as Egyptian and their inscriptions as the famous "sacred letters" described by Pliny and Ammianus Marcellinus, and explained by Horapollo.
These literary and material encounters inspired a Renaissance tradition of Egyptology focused on hieroglyphs, with two chief dimensions: one philosophical, centered on Hermetic wisdom and hieroglyphic symbolism, and one archeological, involving the study of Egyptian antiquities. The influence of Horapollo and the Neoplatonists was profound but paradoxical. Their accounts of hieroglyphic symbolism were widely taken as authoritative, yet they failed miserably as a key to decipher actual inscriptions. None of the ancient works explained how individual symbols worked together to convey complex ideas, and hardly any of Horapollo's hieroglyphs corresponded to those on Rome's monuments. Instead, inspired by the compelling but erroneous notion of hieroglyphs as a philosophical language, universally intelligible to the learned elite, humanists like Leon Battista Alberti devised new, modern "hieroglyphs." The result was a tension between the symbolic and archeological approaches: the philosophical theory that hieroglyphs were universally intelligible was irresistible, but it was awkwardly belied by experience of actual Egyptian inscriptions, which remained inscrutable. Cognitive dissonance was contained not by revising the theory but by avoiding confrontation. For the most part, writers on "hieroglyphic" symbolism, although often avid investigators of other antiquities, declined to study genuine Egyptian inscriptions, while students of Egyptian epigraphy refrained from interpretation, contenting themselves with collection and description.
The philosophical approach generated the extraordinarily popular early modern emblem tradition, encompassing several codified genres of symbolic devices including emblems, imprese, heraldry, and "hieroglyphs." Among the most influential works in this field was Pierio Valeriano's Hieroglyphica (1556), a work of sixty chapters, each explaining a different "hieroglyphic" symbol. Valeriano thought of hieroglyphs not as specifically Egyptian, but rather as a "divine language of symbols" common to many ancient cultures. Despite being a serious student of ancient material culture, when it came to authentic Egyptian hieroglyphs, Valeriano adopted what Brian Curran calls a "hands-off" attitude. Frequently reprinted and translated, Valeriano's work soon rivaled Horapollo's treatise, with which it was often bound, as the standard guide to hieroglyphic symbolism. Enthusiasm for hieroglyphs and emblems—the two terms were practically synonyms—spread quickly from its Italian epicenter to the rest of Europe, producing an astounding number of publications during the early modern period. Although in practice, modern hieroglyphs and emblems often communicated pedestrian didactic messages, their authority was rooted in the idea that the ancients had communicated profound wisdom by means of symbols. There was considerable overlap between emblem literature and the mythographic manuals that appeared around the same time, which explained the symbolic meaning of ancient pagan gods, paying considerable attention to Egyptian deities.
Typical of the sixteenth century's expansive conception of the hieroglyph was Jan van Gorp's Hieroglyphica, posthumously published in Antwerp in 1580. Gorp's work (which argued that of all surviving languages, Flemish was closest to the primordial language of Adam) treated symbolism in general and focused more on Hebrew than on Egyptian material. The most successful seventeenth-century addition to the genre of the hieroglyphic dictionary was On the Symbolic Wisdom of the Egyptians by the Jesuit Nicolas Caussin. True to the genre, and despite its title, Caussin's work was not about specifically Egyptian material. Like Valeriano, Kircher respectfully observed, it treated "not so much the hieroglyphic doctrine of the ancients, as the emblematic doctrine assembled from the histories of all ages."
Parallel to the proliferating literature on hieroglyphic symbolism, the study of Egyptian antiquities carried on, primarily in Rome, as part of the humanists' ongoing investigation of the ancient world's material remains. Already in the first half of the fifteenth century the pioneering Roman antiquary Flavio Biondo had called attention to the city's ruined obelisks and their inscriptions. Later in the century, the historian and forger Annius of Viterbo pursued the archeological study of supposedly hieroglyphic inscriptions, although the chief objects of his investigation were not of genuine Egyptian provenance. By the 1480s, however, other scholars, less famous but more rigorous, took to the field and made copies of authentic hieroglyphic inscriptions. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the sketchbooks of antiquaries like Pirro Ligorio were filled with images of Egyptian objects, including accurate renderings of hieroglyphs. These labors, however, seem to have had more influence on visual artists, notably Raphael, than scholars.
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Excerpted from EGYPTIAN OEDIPUS by DANIEL STOLZENBERG Copyright © 2013 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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