Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher was born on 2 May 1602 (some sources give 1601) near Fulda, in the Holy Roman Empire, and entered the Jesuit order as a young man, receiving the broad classical, philosophical and scientific training the Society of Jesus gave its scholars. He fled the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War across several relocations before settling permanently in Rome in 1634, where he taught mathematics and Oriental languages at the Collegio Romano for more than forty years, becoming one of the most famous scholars in Europe and earning the later epithet "Master of a Hundred Arts" for the sheer breadth of subjects he wrote on.

At the Collegio Romano he assembled the Museum Kircherianum, a celebrated cabinet of curiosities combining antiquities, natural specimens and mechanical devices that became a required stop for educated visitors to Rome. He corresponded constantly with an international network of scholars, missionaries and patrons, using Jesuit missionary contacts as far afield as China to gather material for his books. He died in Rome on 28 November 1680, having published around forty major works across an unusually wide range of fields.

Kircher's output ranged far beyond Egyptology: he published early serious studies of geology and volcanism after descending into the crater of Vesuvius, an influential treatise on music theory, an ambitious if speculative universal polygraphy for translating between languages, and some of the first published European descriptions of Chinese language and culture drawn from Jesuit missionary reports. That range, more than any single correct conclusion, is why historians of science still treat him as a central, if frequently mistaken, figure of seventeenth century learning.

Kircher's most consequential work for the study of religion was Oedipus Aegyptiacus, a massive study published in four volumes between 1652 and 1654 that attempted a complete decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Kircher approached the hieroglyphs as a symbolic and mystical language encoding Hermetic and Neoplatonic wisdom, in keeping with the Renaissance belief, later associated with the Yates thesis, that Egypt was the fountainhead of an ancient theology transmitted through Hermes Trismegistus. On this basis he produced elaborate but, as later Egyptology conclusively showed after Jean-Francois Champollion's nineteenth century decipherment using the Rosetta Stone, systematically incorrect translations, since the hieroglyphs are in fact a largely phonetic writing system recording ordinary spoken Egyptian rather than a purely symbolic code.

Despite that central error, Oedipus Aegyptiacus remained the most thorough compilation of information on ancient Egyptian religion available to European scholars for nearly two centuries, and Kircher's underlying instinct that Egyptian religious thought deserved serious systematic study, rather than passing mention, anticipated the discipline of comparative religion that later scholars would build on firmer philological ground. His work is remembered today as a monument to erudition in service of a mistaken premise rather than as a reliable source on Egyptian belief itself.