The Forbidden Universe (20 page)

Shortly after Pope Innocent X’s election in 1644, Kircher proposed that another recently unearthed obelisk, broken into four pieces, should be re-erected in his honour. The first-century emperor Domitian originally commissioned the 55 foot (16.5 m) obelisk (its height was nearly doubled by Bernini’s elaborate fountain base) for Rome’s Temple of Serapis. Innocent agreed to Kircher’s proposal and put him in charge of the project, again working with Bernini. Together they reassembled the obelisk, Kircher designing the missing pieces – complete with inscriptions – and it became the centrepiece of the elaborate statue-covered Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, which
took until 1651 to complete. The obelisk was topped not with a cross, as one would expect, but a dove, which wasn’t a reference to the Holy Spirit or dove of peace but to the emblem of Innocent’s family, the Pamphili.

Kircher’s own account of the raising of the monument,
Obeliscus Pamphilius
, begins with the mysteries of Egypt, and in particular the secrets of the hieroglyphs, but is again heavily studded with Hermeticism and even includes a lengthy discussion of John Dee’s
Monas hieroglyphica
. Incongruous to say the least for a book by a Jesuit commissioned by the Pope himself!

Obeliscus Pamphilius
can be said to conceal almost as much as it reveals, and there is a strong suggestion running throughout that Kircher is still hiding something. The frontispiece has occupied esotericists and art historians for generations. In front of a fallen obelisk the winged Mercury (i.e. Hermes) hovers holding a scroll inscribed with
hieroglyphs
in front of a woman who represents Kircher’s muse. She rests one foot on a cubic block of stone, on which Egyptian tools that are clearly the equivalent of the square and compass of the classic Masonic symbol are inscribed. This is most odd – historically and geographically Masonic symbols should not have been in Rome at that time. The frontispiece also features a cherub holding one finger to his lips. Tod Marder, professor at the State University of New Jersey and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a specialist in the works of Bernini, writes:

The symbolism of the frontispiece is obvious: through the inspiration of Hermes, Kircher is seeking to restore the great Egyptian secrets.

Kircher’s charmed life continued when Innocent X died in 1655 and Fabio Chigi was elected as Alexander VII. Alexander was responsible for commissioning Bernini to remodel St Peter’s square, with the Caligula obelisk as its centrepiece. Peter Tompkins describes the new Pope as:

The year of Alexander’s election was also remarkable for a great discovery. During the digging of a new well, a smallish, 18 foot (5.5 m), pink granite obelisk in good condition was found in the garden of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a remnant of the original temple to Isis. Having solicited the commission from Alexander, Kircher and Bernini had this set on the back of a stone elephant in the piazza in front of the basilica. With this accomplished, the statue was instantly recognisable as the outward and visible form of the woodcut from the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
. It appeared that Kircher and Bernini had finally manifested its extraordinary symbolism in hard stone.

The obelisk is topped with a small and discreet cross, as opposed to the unmissable ironmongery that Sixtus V set on the Caligula obelisk. This one, however, is devoid of smug trumpeting about the victory of Christianity. Instead it provides a perfect reflection of Hermeticism such as
Bruno’s, proclaiming as it does that Christianity is built upon and supported by the ancient Hermetic religion of Egypt.

The obelisk’s inscription is remarkable because it features a Pope honouring Isis, in what is perhaps an echo of the decorations that could be found in the Appartamento Borgia two centuries earlier: ‘Alexander VII erected this obelisk once dedicated to the Egyptians’ Pallas [Isis], to the divine wisdom and to the deipara mother.’
¹⁸
‘Deipara’ means ‘mother of God’ (so ‘deipara mother’ is either tautology or heavy emphasis), and is an official Catholic title for the Virgin Mary. But why not make a more explicit reference to Jesus’ mother, if she is being honoured here? Clearly because it is referring to Isis, not the Virgin Mary.

To Hermeticists, Santa Maria sopra Minerva was nothing less than a sacred site. Although outwardly a Dominican basilica, it was also the spot where Bruno was taken before his execution and where Galileo abjured his heliocentric beliefs. So here we have an obelisk made in honour of Isis, raised again as part of a Rosicrucian monument by an adherent of Hermeticism, outside the place where Bruno had been condemned and Galileo forced to recant. This was not your average Catholic statue.

But there is still more to this elephantine sculpture, which recalls to us at least the quite jaw-dropping symbolism Leonardo built into his
Virgin of the Rocks
, which we discuss elsewhere.
¹⁹
As Peter Tompkins notes gleefully:

Few are afforded the opportunity to make such
extravagantly
heretical gestures, and indeed this was a last hurrah for Kircher and Bernini. When Pope Alexander died in 1667, Kircher lost papal favour and patronage and resigned from the Jesuit college to concentrate on his intellectual pursuits. In particular he wanted to create a museum preserving artefacts (such as a lizard encased in amber) which he had collected and which Jesuits sent from around the world. With what seemed like destined precision, he and Bernini died on the same day, 28 November 1680.

With the huge confidence (many would say
overwhelming
arrogance) of a gifted polymath, Kircher, the self-declared Hermeticist and probably a closet Rosicrucian, worked right in the heart of Catholicism, hidden in plain sight. Had he attempted to carry out Bruno’s apparently impossible idea of celebrating the compatibility between Hermeticism and Christianity? Surely strangest of all is his success in managing to operate within the rabidly
anti-Hermetic
and Rosicrucian-hating Jesuit order.

Of course many readers will have noticed that this late flowering of Hermeticism within the Vatican is echoed in the plot of Dan Brown’s second novel
Angels and Demons
(2000), as well as in its action-packed movie adaptation. In fact it was returning to the subject of Bernini and Kircher for our roles as contributors to the truth-behind-the-fiction TV documentary tie-in to the movie that led us to unravel many of the above connections.

The fictional basis of Brown’s thriller is the supposed existence of a secret society of scientists and freethinkers called the Illuminati, created in the face of persecution by the Church and which boasted Galileo as a prominent member. Because of persecution, particularly Galileo’s, the Illuminati became rabidly anti-Catholic, eventually seeking to bring down the Church, which they had infiltrated. One of their secret grand masters was Bernini, who had encoded
certain of his Roman works with directions to guide initiates to the Society’s hidden base. The hero, Robert Langdon, has to follow the ‘Path of Illumination’ against the rapidly ticking clock in order to avert an enormous cataclysm and save the day.

As with
The Da Vinci Code
, Brown’s grasp of history in
Angels and Demons
has been roundly criticized for its inaccuracies and anachronisms. On the surface, it does seem that liberties have been taken with the facts. Although there was a real secret society called the Order of the Illuminati, whose aims were roughly similar to the organization in
Angels and Demons
– the advancement of free-thinking and the overthrow of the Catholic Church – it wasn’t formed until 1776 and was only active in the state of Bavaria. So on geographical and chronological grounds it was impossible for Galileo and Bernini to have been part of it. Critics also focused in particular on the choice of Bernini as the secret Illuminati master, on the grounds that he was a dedicated Catholic who worked for most of his life under the patronage of popes.

The essentials of Dan Brown’s story do fit with our own reconstruction, however. If you replace the Illuminati with the Giordanisti then the plot falls into place very neatly, as the latter secretly encouraged scientific thinking and aimed at either the radical reform or overthrow of the Catholic Church. And the Giordanisti was connected with Galileo and, through Kircher, to Bernini. Certain works of Bernini’s that Brown used as a framework for Robert Langdon’s apocalyptic trip to Rome, such as the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona, one of the landmarks of the Path of Illumination, are also significant in our own version of the story. So if we substitute the ‘Giordanisti’ or ‘Rosicrucian’ for the Illuminati in Brown’s novel, we see that, perhaps surprisingly, there
is
a solid historical basis for
Angels and Demons
. (And perhaps it is significant that
Bruno’s
On the Heroic Frenzies
culminates in a scene in which nine blind men receive not just sight but insight, becoming the nine ‘Illuminati’.) It seems that Dan Brown tapped into a rich vein of synchronicity and serendipity that sometimes, somehow makes life-follow-art-follow-art.

But what of the objection that Bernini was too Catholic to be involved in such shenanigans in the first place? Was he just an innocent fall guy for Kircher’s secret Hermetic agenda, as some have suggested? Neither of these objections stand up. As we have seen, even certain popes were devotees of Hermes, and strong Christian beliefs – be they Catholic or Protestant – presented no obstacle to developing an enthusiasm for the works of Thrice Great Hermes. Unless Bernini lived in a bubble and never actually read Kircher’s books, he must have understood that the symbolism of their joint works was unequivocally Hermetic.

More importantly, Kircher showed that Bruno’s
intellectual
legacy was not only still alive but also still shaping the development of science. Ingrid D. Rowland, art historian and Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, writes:

But Hermetic science still had one more giant to gift to the world whose contribution was to exceed anything that had gone before.