Athanasius Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Mirror
In Rome, around 1650, a Jesuit priest stood before a broken obelisk and told the pope that he could read it. Nobody alive could read the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the writing on the stone looked like a puzzle of birds, eyes, snakes and reeds.
The priest, Athanasius Kircher, said that those pictures were not simply words. They were sacred symbols in which the oldest wisdom of mankind had been locked, and he had the key. He was wrong about the key. But the story of how he got it wrong is one of the most revealing in the history of learning.
A Jesuit of Many Talents
Kircher was born in 1602 in Geisa, in the German lands, and joined the Jesuits as a youth. The Thirty Years' War drove him from place to place, and in 1633 he settled in Rome, where he taught at the Jesuit Roman College. He stayed there for the rest of his life and died in 1680.
His curiosity was enormous. He wrote on magnetism, on music, on volcanoes, on China, on languages, on the sun and moon, and on the Ark of Noah, whose dimensions he calculated. He built a famous museum of curiosities at the Roman College, which people came from all over Europe to visit.
Some of his work was careful and useful, and some was fanciful. He had a gift for making the strange seem plausible.
The Egyptian Dream
Kircher believed in what Renaissance scholars called the prisca theologia, an "ancient theology" given to the first wise men and handed down through Hermes Trismegistus, Moses, Pythagoras and Plato. In this view, Egypt held an early and pure form of the truth. The hieroglyphs, he reasoned, must have been created to hide that truth from the common people.
This belief survived a heavy blow. In 1614, the scholar Isaac Casaubon had shown that the Hermetic writings were not as old as people believed, since their Greek showed that they came from the early centuries of our era. Kircher paid little heed.
In his large works, such as the Oedipus Aegyptiacus of 1652-54, he translated Egyptian inscriptions as long speeches on cosmic mysteries. A few signs that we now know to contain a king's name became a paragraph of philosophy.
What He Got Wrong and What He Got Right
The truth was more modest and more wonderful. In 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion, helped by the Rosetta Stone, showed that hieroglyphs were largely a script for sounds, with signs for words and meanings added. They record the Egyptian language, and the writing of kings and priests is full of names, titles, prayers and offerings.
It would be unfair to stop there. Kircher was among the first European scholars to see that the Coptic language, still used in the Egyptian church, came from ancient Egyptian. He studied Coptic seriously and published a grammar and a dictionary in the 1630s and 1640s.
Champollion later relied on Coptic to read the ancient texts. So the man who misread the signs also kept alive one of the tools that would unlock them.
Mirrors and Light
Kircher's love of mirrors is real and not just a metaphor. His book on light and shadow, the Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae of 1646, discusses lenses, mirrors, sundials and projected images, and it describes devices that played tricks of light.
He also took an interest in the old story that Archimedes used mirrors to set Roman ships on fire. It is sometimes said that he invented the magic lantern. That is disputed, but he helped to spread the idea of projecting images.
For a mind like his, mirrors were more than tools. They offered an image of how the world works: one thing reflects another, and what is above is echoed below. This is the older belief in correspondences, and it was part of his vision of a universe in which every plant, stone and star carries a trace of the Creator.
A Universal Language
Kircher dreamed of a language that all peoples could understand. In his Polygraphia nova (1663), he proposed a system of codes and signs by which a message could pass from one tongue to another. In the Ars Magna Sciendi of 1669, he took up the combinatorial art of Ramon Llull, the medieval Catalan thinker who believed that truths could be found by combining basic ideas on rotating wheels.
These projects did not reach their goal, and they were not understood by his contemporaries. Yet they belong to a real line of thought: the seventeenth-century search for an ordered way to represent knowledge.
Closing
Kircher's "hieroglyphic mirror" is best taken as a cautionary tale and a gift at once. It warns us how easily a brilliant mind can find the meaning it hopes for, and how a beautiful theory can stand in the way of the facts.
It also reminds us that wonder is a good beginning for inquiry. The hieroglyphs did have a message, and it was not the one he read. It was the plain and moving voice of a people who wrote down their names and their prayers, waiting for a patient reader to turn the mirror around.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- Athanasius Kircher and the Oedipus Aegyptiacus
- The Myth of Narcissus: The Alchemy of Reflection
- Athanasius Kircher and the Turris Babel
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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