The Forbidden Universe (19 page)

Is it a stretch to say that mathematical equations, the modern scientific use of formulae and even some of the basics of computer science comes from an occult idea? Clearly Leibniz himself saw his work that way, even defensively describing the
characteristica universalis
as ‘innocent magia’.
⁹
There is no denying Leibniz’s unique contribution to mathematics and computer science – but significantly it may also be fair to say that these were largely inspired by the Hermetic tradition.

In the midst of all the Hermetic reversals in fortune there seems to have been a last and perhaps desperate attempt to carry the tradition into the very heart of Rome in a way that would have made Giordano Bruno very proud.

As we saw earlier, in the 1580s Pope Sixtus V had presided over the raising of an ancient Egyptian obelisk in Saint Peter’s Square to mark the final trouncing of paganism. But there was another episode of obelisk-raising in the 1650s and 1660s that was motivated by the exact opposite. Inspiration for the second wave can be traced back
almost entirely to one man, another acknowledged genius of the age, one of those paradoxical figures who according to the usual simplistic view of the period should not really have existed: the extraordinary Hermetic Jesuit Athanasius Kircher.

Kircher was a polymath and gifted mathematician – he has been called the ‘last Renaissance man’ and ‘the last man who knew everything’ – and is regarded by many as the founder of Egyptology. He was born in either 1601 or 1602 (he didn’t know which, although happily he knew his birthday) in Hesse-Cassel in Germany. After being
educated
at the Jesuit College in his hometown of Fulda, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1618.

There is no way that Kircher could not have been aware of the furore over the Rosicrucian manifestos. Not only were they were published in Hesse-Cassel and widely debated during the 1610s and 1620s, but also the Jesuits spearheaded the opposition to them. And all the key Rosicrucian elements turn up in Kircher’s works – everything but the name, in fact.

In 1631, during the Thirty Years War, Kircher was forced to flee, swimming across the Rhine to escape Protestant forces. He made his way to Avignon where he taught mathematics in the Jesuit College, before becoming a professor of mathematics at the Society’s most prestigious establishment, the Collegio Romano in Rome. By that time he was widely thought of as a brilliant mathematician and polymath, and had gained the confidence of the Pope. As befitted the ‘last Renaissance man’, Kircher studied medicine, besides being a great inventor and a musician. He experimented with the magic lantern and the projection of images. He was a geologist and fossil-collector whose intellectual curiosity was so great he ventured into the crater of Mount Vesuvius when it was threatening to erupt. Perhaps as a result of an association of ideas, he also
designed firework displays. By any standards, Kircher’s career was extraordinary. So much so, in fact, that in 2002 a number of distinguished scholars convened at the New York Institute of the Humanities to debate ‘Was Athanasius Kircher the coolest guy ever, or what?’ They concluded that he was, no ‘whats’ about it.
¹⁰

His work with microscopes led him to argue that little ‘worms’ propagate plague, the earliest statement of the germ theory of disease based on microscopic observation. He also calculated that the height needed for the Tower of Babel to reach the Moon would knock the Earth off its path through the skies, which was particularly interesting as he shouldn’t have acknowledged that the Earth had an orbit in the first place! He argued that animals would have had to adapt to life after the Flood, one of the first recognitions of evolution. But like Leonardo before him, there was an element of the joker about Kircher. He launched little hot air balloons with ‘Flee the wrath of God’ written underneath, and dressed cats up as cherubs. He also designed – but mercifully probably never built – a katzenklavier, a musical instrument that produced a range of sounds when a
semicircle
of cats had pins stuck in their tails. It was clearly not a good idea to be a cat around Kircher.

But most of all, he was passionate about ancient Egypt. To him, deciphering hieroglyphs would reveal the language that God gave to Adam, bestowing all the secrets of the universe. Indeed, thanks to a book that Kircher encountered in the Jesuit college library during his training, his main obsession was hieroglyphs – which nobody could read then (and wouldn’t until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799). Kircher became convinced he had made the longed-for breakthrough required to crack the code, although we now know that this was wishful thinking. However, his passion is one of the reasons he was so enthusiastic about getting involved in the re-erection of
obelisks, as he lusted after the opportunity to study their inscriptions. While he was a professor in Rome, Kircher even dispatched a student to Egypt to measure the Great Pyramid, inside and out, and to copy hieroglyphs from two standing obelisks in Alexandria and Heliopolis – probably not the quickest or easiest assignment the young man had ever been given.

Like most scholars in those days, Kircher was convinced that the hieroglyphs inscribed on temples, statues and obelisks embodied the wisdom and science of ancient Egypt. Surely it would only be a matter of time before a genius such as himself would claim to be the first to
understand
it all? In Avignon he benefited from a friendship with the astronomer and antiquarian Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, who had not only travelled to Egypt, but had also brought back various relics. As a fellow astronomer, Fabri de Peiresc was one of Galileo’s correspondents who leapt to his defence. Less understandably, he also publicly defended Tomasso Campanella.

Kircher’s interest in the mysteries of Egypt naturally brought him into contact with Hermeticism, for which he made no attempt to hide his enthusiasm. But he completely ignored Casaubon’s dismissal of the antiquity of the Hermetica, arguing that the texts represented the authentic philosophy, cosmology and religion of his beloved ancient Egypt. In fact, he not only tried to decipher and translate hieroglyphs but also attempted to relate them to the teachings of the Hermetica. He regarded Hermes as the inventor of hieroglyphs, and the inscriptions on the obelisks as the keys to unveiling his wisdom. He even called the Egyptian looped cross, the
ankh
, the ‘
crux Hermetica
,’ or Hermetic cross.

Kircher was also an astronomer, and while he privately accepted Copernicanism, he was careful to state in public that he denied ‘both the idea of the mobility of the earth,
and of the inhabitants of the other heavenly globes’.
¹¹
The last part of this refutation suggests that it was Bruno, rather than Galileo, who he had in mind. In fact, Kircher’s work often displays such close parallels with Bruno’s that he
must
have read his works. It is hard to find anyone more in tune with Bruno’s thinking: Kircher, too, believed his religion of Catholicism was heir to the Egyptian tradition, and he took Bruno’s cosmology as the basis for his own. For obvious reasons, however, it would not have been a great idea to make this too obvious.

Kircher wrote voluminously, his masterwork being the four-volume
Oedipus Aegypticus
, published between 1652 and 1654, which contains a synthesis of all mystical and esoteric traditions, with Egypt squarely positioned as their foundation. And naturally, he acknowledged the
significance
of the name of the sacred city of the Egyptians, Heliopolis, City of the Sun.

Kircher greatly admired the ancient Egyptian civilization, upholding it as the ideal model for both politics and religion. This understanding is very close to Bruno’s vision of Egypt – dangerously so, one might have thought, for a Jesuit working at the very epicentre of Catholicism in Rome. After all, it does seem a perilously short step from believing that Ancient Egypt is the perfect model to advocating the reform of religion and state to match.

Kircher’s other beliefs included the idea that Moses had been schooled in the religion of Egypt, which he had then passed on to the Israelites, who subsequently corrupted it. Again, this is dangerously close to Bruno’s thinking. The suggestion here is that, given it was believed that Jesus had been sent to put the Jews back on the right track and to open their religion to the rest of the world, then he was actually restoring the Jewish religion to its
Egyptian
roots. Kircher never made this line of thinking overt – after all, he of all people was no fool.

Not only is
Oedipus Aegypticus
liberally studded with quotes from the Hermetica, but Kircher takes both Hermes Trismegistus’ authorship of those books and his antiquity for granted, believing him to be a contemporary of Abraham. He includes a hymn of Hermes from
Pimander
. To this he added, in the words of Peter Tompkins, ‘a hieroglyph enjoining silence and the secrecy concerning these sublime doctrines – the colophon employed by the Brothers of the Rosy Cross!’
¹²
More overtly (and bizarrely), Kircher placed great importance on John Dee’s
Monas hieroglyphica
, from which he frequently quotes, linking the symbol to the Egyptian
ankh
.

We can see that Kircher shared exactly the same ideals and influences as the authors of the Rosicrucian manifestos, which seems decidedly odd given that the Rosicrucian movement was a Protestant expression of the Hermetic reform agenda. However, as the Hermeticists were working behind both Protestant and Catholic lines for a common cause, even a Catholic Hermeticist like Kircher would share a similar mindset with the Rosicrucians. Kircher’s German background even suggests the possibility of a connection with the Giordanisti.

Maybe Kircher was trying to change Catholicism from within, reviving the old dream of Bruno and Campanella. This is by no means just idle speculation, as he managed to interest two popes in Egyptian ideas, and his work with the ancient obelisks points to more than a mere academic interest in those monuments. In this Kircher collaborated with his great friend, the artist, sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), who is most famous for designing St Peter’s Square with its magnificent colonnades. (Or rather, he is probably most famous now for featuring so prominently in Dan Brown’s
Angels and Demons
.)

Unsurprisingly, Kircher and Bernini’s joint projects incorporated a wealth of Egyptian symbolism and motifs,
which Bernini incorporated into his other works. George Lechner, an expert on magical and astrological symbolism in Renaissance art – a real-life version of Dan Brown’s character Robert Langdon – acknowledges that Bernini’s use of Egyptian motifs probably derives from the Hermetica.
¹³
Kircher and Bernini first worked together on a project, later abandoned, to re-erect a 40 foot (12 m) obelisk that had been discovered in a vineyard. Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of the then-Pope, Urban VIII, sought to set it up in his palace gardens.

Kircher and Bernini conceived that the base of the monument should feature a life-size sculpted elephant, which would bear the upright obelisk on its back. But what did the elephant signify? Was it simply an error – did Kircher and Bernini perhaps believe elephants came from Egypt? The answer reveals something important about the men’s otherwise concealed attitude to their religion.

In the twentieth century the Italian painter Domenico Gnoli, among others, identified the inspiration as an image in the allegorical and highly symbolic book
Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream
(
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
), published in Venice in 1499, an identification accepted by the American art historian William S. Heckscher.
¹⁴
The romance is anonymous, although the first word in each chapter spells out a sentence containing the name ‘Frater Franciscus Columna’, apparently the name of a Dominican monk in Venice. Despite this clue, other authors have been suggested, including Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leon Battista Alberti, the polymath mentor of Leonardo da Vinci.

The tale describes a dream within a dream in which Poliphilo (‘Lover of many things’ or ‘Lover of Polia’) searches for his
amorata
Polia, who has rejected him. Inevitably, throughout his adventures he encounters many strange creatures along the way, all illustrated by superb woodcuts.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
has exerted a hold over
the esoteric imagination to this day, as it seems to convey a profound, if elusive, something in symbolic form. Decoding its hidden message provides the central plot of the 2004 bestseller
The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, and it is mentioned in Roman Polanski’s powerful and unsettling movie
The Ninth Gate
(and in the novel on which the movie is based,
The Dumas
Club by Arturo Pérez-Reverte).

In the story of Poliphilo the obelisk on the back of a stone elephant is not only described but also illustrated by one of the woodcuts. Before Gnoli identified it as Bernini and Kircher’s joint inspiration,
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
was already acknowledged by researchers of the esoteric as a major influence elsewhere. An Italian writer on Rosicrucianism, Alberto C. Ambesi, considered that it ‘marks the true birth of the Rosy Cross, but in code’.
¹⁵
This was not to suggest that either the fraternity or the group that produced the manifestos existed in Venice in 1499, but that the currents of esoteric thought that came together in
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
later influenced the Rosicrucians.

Although the obelisk-on-an-elephant project was aborted, the idea resurfaced in Kircher and Bernini’s last collaboration.