At times, Kircher seemed close to the intuition that certain hieroglyphs had a phonetic value. He even constructed a rather imaginative alphabet of twenty-one hieroglyphs from whose forms he derived, through progressive abstractions, the letters of the Greek alphabet. But it was his conviction that, finally, hieroglyphs all showed something about the natural world that prevented him from ever finding the right track.
Thus in his Obeliscus Pamphilius Kircher reproduced the images of a cartouche to which he gave the following reading: “The originator of all fecundity and vegetation is Osiris, whose generative power bears from heaven to his kingdom the Sacred Mophtha.” This same image was deciphered by Champollion (who in his Lettre à Dacier used Kircher’s own reproduction) as AOTKPTA (autocrat or emperor), son of the sun and sovereign of the crown, KHZPZ TMHTENZ ZBZTZ (Caesar Domitian Augustus).”4 The difference is, to say the least, notable, especially as regards the mysterious Mophtha, seen as a lion, on which Kircher expended pages and pages of mystic exegesis listing its numerous properties, while for Champollion the lion stands for the Greek letter lambda.
Similarly, in the third volume of the Oedypus there is long analysis of a cartouche that appears on the Lateran obelisk, where Kircher read a long argument concerning the necessity of attracting the benefits of the divine Osiris and the Nile by means of sacred ceremonies activating the Chain of Genies, tied to the signs of the zodiac. Egyptologists today read it as simply the name of the pharaoh Apries.
Kircher was then wildly wrong. Still, notwithstanding his eventual failure, he is the father of Egyptology, though in the same way that Ptolemy is the father of astronomy: in spite of the fact that his main hypothesis was mistaken. By following a false hypothesis he collected real archeological material, and Champollion (more than one hundred fifty years later), lacking an opportunity for direct observation, used Kircher’s reconstructions for his study of the obelisk standing in Rome’s Piazza Navona.
Since we began by speaking of China, let us see what Kircher, insatiable in his lunatic curiosity, did with China. Egyptian was an original language, certainly more perfect than Hebrew and certainly more ancient, too. Why not look for other, more venerable linguistic ancestors?
Toward the end of the sixteenth century the Western world began to learn more about China, now visited not only by merchants and explorers, as in the days of Marco Polo. In 1569 the Dominican Gaspar da Cruz published a first description of Chinese writing (in his Tractado en quem se contan muito por extenso as cousas de la China), revealing that the ideograms did not represent sounds but things, or ideas of those things, to such an extent that they were understood by different peoples, including the Chinese, the Cochincinese, and the Japanese, even though these various peoples pronounced them in different ways.
These revelations reappeared in a book by Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza (Historia del gran reyno de la China, 1585), who repeated that even though different oriental peoples were speaking different languages they could understand one another by writing ideograms that represented the same ideas for all of them. When in 1615 the diaries of Father Matteo Ricci were published, those ideas became a matter of common knowledge, and one of the authors of the most important project for a universal philosophical language, John Wilkins, wrote in his Mercury (1641) that “though [peoples] of China and Japan doe as much differ in their language, as the Hebrew and the Dutch, yet either of them can, by this help of a common character as well understood the books and letters of the others, as if they were only their own.”5
The first European scholar to speak of a “universal character” was Francis Bacon (De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, 1623, vi, 1), and, in order to prove its possibility, he cited Chinese writing. Curiously enough, neither Bacon nor Wilkins understood the iconic origin of ideograms, and both took them as purely conventional devices. In any case, the ideograms seemed to be endowed with the double property of being universal and also capable of establishing a direct contact between the character and the idea. The discovery of Chinese ideograms had an enormous influence on the development of the search for a universal philosophical language in Europe.
Fascinated as they were by reports of China, some thinkers discovered that Chinese imperial genealogies went further back in time than biblical ones. Thus Isaac de la Peyrère in 1655 (Systema Theologicum exprae-Adamitarum hypothesis) ventured the provocative hypothesis of a mankind prior to Adam. The whole of Hebrew and Christian sacred history (comprehending original sin and the mission of Jesus Christ) thus concerned only the Hebrew people but not the peoples of more ancient lands such as China. Needless to say, this hypothesis was considered heretical and did not enjoy great success, but it is worth recalling because it shows to what an extent China was increasingly seen as the land of an unknown wisdom.
The problem was to bring China into the framework of familiar wisdom. Thus in 1699 we see John Webb (in his Historical essay endeavouring the probability that the language of the empire of China is the primitive language) making a different hypothesis: after the Flood, Noah and his Ark did not land on top of Mount Ararat in Armenia but instead in China. Thus the Chinese language is the purest version of Adamic Hebrew, and only the Chinese, having lived for millennia without suffering foreign invasions, preserved it in its original purity.
Peyrère was a Protestant, Webb an Anglican. Dealing with the fascination of the Chinese enigma, the Catholic Church reacted in a different way. As early as 1540 Jesuit missionaries had sailed toward the Portuguese domain in Asia. Saint Francis Xavier tried to evangelize China. In 1583 Matteo Ricci arrived at Macao and at the beginning of the seventeenth century began a new approach to Chinese culture, deciding to become “a Chinese among Chinese.”
But let us return to Kircher. He was fascinated by Chinese civilization and for years collected all the information brought back to Europe by his fellow Jesuits. This led to his publication in 1667 of an enormous, beautiful book on Chinese marvels and secrets: China Illustrata (China illustrated through its monuments, both sacred and prophane etc …).
This book represented a sort of encyclopedia of China, covering landscape, customs, dress, daily life, religion, animals, flowers, plants and minerals, architecture and mechanical arts, and language, starting from the analysis of a Nestorian inscription found in China in 1625, which, according to Kircher, proved an early penetration of Christianity into this country.
The information Kircher collected was probably precise. While in the 1561 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography China was still fabulously and imprecisely represented, in Kircher’s book the map of the country is extraordinarily accurate and detailed, at least by the cartographic standards of that time.
But if the information was precise, Kircher’s interpretation of it was dominated by the baroque taste for wonders. Some of the pictures in the book are artistically curious and fascinating and demonstrate that Kircher, giving instruction to the artists on the basis of information received, acted as Marco Polo and other precious travelers had, interpreting verbal reports according to his own background books. Among them were certainly many nonscientific and fabulous descriptions of exotic countries, and there is a trace of this influence in the illustrations. Some unheard-of animals and plants evoke things that Kircher’s informants had actually met, even though, in reporting them, they added fantastic details; others, such as a dragon fighting a leopard (allegedly an account from the province of Kiamsi), showed that Kircher or his informant did not distinguish clearly between direct experience and local legends.
Since he was convinced that the Chinese were influenced very early by Christian ideas, Kircher did his best to describe the Chinese gods as reflecting Christian mysteries like the Holy Trinity. And, further, influenced as he was by one of his own previous books, Oedypus Aegyptiacus, he wanted to demonstrate that Chinese culture originated with Egypt, and he interpreted any piece of information as evidence supporting his thesis.
Kircher starts with his adamant belief that every aspect of Chinese wisdom was brought to the country by the third son of Noah, Ham, who became an Egyptian pharaoh, inventor of idolatry and magic (and hence to be identified with Zoroaster), whose adviser was Hermes Trismegistus himself. Ham led his people through Persia to Bactria and beyond the kingdom of Mogor, and from there the Egyptian knowledge passed to China. Thus Kircher interpreted Confucius as the Chinese version of Hermes Trismegistus, and when he was told about certain Buddhist sculptures, he concocted from their description the image of curious divinities, one of which he unhesitantly identified with the Egyptian Isis. And though he understood from his informers’ sketches what real pagodas were like, he was particularly struck by the description of a zigguratlike tower in the province of Fukien and immediately found an analogy with pyramids.
According to this line of thought Kircher carefully studied Chinese ideograms (following precise information from his informers) and understood what his predecessors, such as Bacon, had not, namely, that they must originally have portrayed the shapes of the things they represented. His method of tracing ideograms back to figures of ants or fish is rather whimsical, but his
