In any case, the same thing happens with what Jung calls archetypes, which I would put under the broader category of what I term, using a metaphor, “totemic objects,” which are imperious and stimulating in their very enigmatic nature. Jung was the first to explain how as soon as these archetypal images fascinate the mind of the mystic, dragging him toward an infinite drift of sense, some religious authority immediately intervenes to gloss them, subject them to a code, make them become a parable. And at that point the totemic object becomes a symbol in the more banal sense of the term, the one that makes us call the badges of political parties symbols, on which we mark our (often automatic) X of agreement. Endowed with connotative appeals at various levels (in the sense that one can become attached to or die for a flag, a cross, a crescent moon or a hammer and sickle), they are there to tell us what we have to believe in and what we have to reject. The Sacred Heart of the Vendée was no longer the same Sacred Heart that had dazzled Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. It had changed from being the experience of something numinous to a political flag.
This idea of the symbol as an apparition that refers to a reality that cannot be expressed in words, a reality that is contradictory and ungraspable, becomes established in the West only with the spread of hermetic writings, and requires a very “strong” Neoplatonism. But as soon as the excitement caused by the flashes of the divine in Hermes Trismegistus’s obscure discourse becomes a fashion, a style, a “koine,” here too there suddenly emerges the desire, previously medieval, now Hermetic, to capture the symbol and give it a socializable sense.
It is curious how the baroque age was the most fertile in the production or, rather, invention of totemic objects, namely, its blazons, devices, and emblems; and it is curious how the baroque world spoke of them as symbols every time it could. Syntagma de Symbolis would be the title of one of the most famous commentaries on Alciati, Bocchi would write of Symbolicarum Quaestionum, Picinelli of Mundus Symbolicus, and Scarlatino of Homo Figuratus et Symbolicus. Emanuele Tesauro explains what these symbols are in his Cannocchiale aristotelico: “A symbol is a metaphor signifying a concept through some Figure which is visible.”
In this celebration of symbols there always clearly emerges a dogmatic desire to write commentaries, in other words, to decipher. Venerable volumes astonish us with their iconological baggage made up of apparently oneiric images: these are real illustrious corpses of icons, a paradise for a psychoanalyst who does not want to read the gigantic accompanying commentary. But if we do turn to the commentary, it leads us step by step, and with considerable redundance, toward the most exact (though also the most clever) deciphering of every figure, in order to draw out a single moral lesson.
In this context the enterprise of Athanasius Kircher is quite ridiculous, aiming as it does to rediscover the mysteries of ancient Egyptian writing. It has a privileged position, since it sits opposite something that resembles a device or emblem, but one for which no Alciati, Valeriano, or Ferro has supplied the interpretation. These are old and well-known images, and once they are handed down no longer by a Christian (or pagan) tradition but by Egypt’s own divinities, they acquire a sense that is different from the one they had in moralizing bestiaries. References to scripture, now absent, are replaced by allusions to a vaguer religiosity, one dense with mysterious promises. The hieroglyphics are seen as initiatic symbols.
These are for Kircher “symbols,” and therefore expressions of a hidden, unknown content, one that has many meanings and is rich in mystery. Unlike a conjecture, which allows us to move from a visible symptom to some definite cause, “a symbol is a mark signifying some more arcane mystery, which is to say that the nature of a symbol is to lead us mentally, through some similarity, to the understanding of something very different from things that are offered to our external senses; something whose nature is to be concealed or hidden beneath the veil of an obscure expression […]. It is not formed bywords, but is expressed only through marks, characters, figures” (Obeliscus Pamphilius, II, 5,).
These are “initiatic” symbols because the fascination of Egyptian culture is based on the fact that the knowledge it promises is enclosed within the unfathomable and indecipherable circle of an enigma in order to remove it from the profane curiosity of the vulgar crowd. Furthermore, Kircher reminds us that a hieroglyph is a symbol of something sacred (and in that sense all hieroglyphs are symbols, but not vice versa), and its power is due to the fact it is not accessible to the uninitiated.
If it were accessible, the baroque age would have had to invent its own writing of the unfathomable. That is what Kircher wants, and he delights in this with delirious enthusiasm in the letter to the emperor that opens his Oedipus Aegyptiacus.
I parade before your eyes, most sacred Caesar, the polymorphous reign of Hieroglyphic Morpheus: by this I mean a theater decked out with an immense variety of monsters, and these not naked monsters of nature, but so adorned with enigmatic Chimeras of a most ancient knowledge that here I am confident that sagacious minds can trace the boundless treasures of science, which is not without benefit for literature. Here the Dog of Bubastis, the Saitic Lion, the Mendesian Goat, the terrifying Crocodile with the horrendous opening of its jaws, all reveal the occult meanings of the divinity, of nature, of the spirit of Ancient Wisdom, beneath the shadowy play of images. Here the thirsty Dipsodes, the poisonous Asps, the wily Ichneumons, the cruel Hippopotami, the monstrous Dragons, the swollen-bellied toad, the snail with its spiral shell, the hairy caterpillar, and countless specters parade the miraculous, ordered chain that is revealed in the tabernacles of nature.
Here are presented a thousand exotic species of things transformed into one image and then another by metamorphosis, turned into human figures and then restored again to their former shape in a mutual intertwining, the feral with the human, the human with the craft of the divine; and finally the divinity who, as Porphyry says, flows throughout the universe, and engineers a monstrous marriage with all beings; where now, sublime in their variety of faces, raising their canine necks, are displayed the Cynocephalus, and the foul Ibis, and the Sparrowhawk covered with its beaked mask […] and where also, luring us with its virginal looks, under the covering of the Scarab, the sting of the Scorpion is concealed […all this and more in a list that goes on for four pages] we can meditate in this all-changing theater of Nature, spread out as it is before our gaze, under the allegorical veil of an occult meaning.
It is precisely because of the fascination of the secret meanings in the ancient Egyptian language that Kircher celebrates it as opposed to the bland and highly codified iconic language of the Chinese, where every ideogram corresponds to a precise idea; something that might have fascinated Bacon but not him. Egyptian symbols ” integros conceptos ideales involvebant” (enclosed complete ideal concepts), and by “involvebant” Kircher did not mean “collected,” or “offered,” but “concealed,” “enclosed”…Egyptian icons had to be like flirtatious women, constantly luring their admirers into the vortex of an unsatisfied cognitive passion but never yielding themselves up to them.
But what does Kircher do after this preamble, for thousands of pages and throughout at least three entire works? He tries to decipher it all, makes his victory as an Egyptologist consist in revealing to us the secret meaning of these signs; he translates them, convinced that he is translating them in the only correct way possible. He makes an enormous mistake, we know, but what we object to now are not his results but his intentions. Champollion would carry out the same operation as Kircher in a more secular spirit, and without making a mistake; he would tell us that those were conventional signs, endowed with phonetic values, and would try to rid every symbol of any ambiguity. Yet Kircher had already begun the process.
Those who, in a less Catholic and theological spirit than Kircher, try to preserve a charge of unresolved mystery in these hieroglyphics would turn them into party badges for down-market occultism, and in fact would be fascinated not by their unfathomable qualities but by the sense of confidence they give, these rigid emblems that they have now become. But somewhere a mystery exists, a mystery that will never be revealed, not because it is unfathomable, but because those who administer it will
