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  • Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity by Daniel Stolzenberg
  • Joscelyn Godwin
Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity. By Daniel Stolzenberg. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Pp. xi, 307. $50.00. ISBN 978-0-226-92414-4 [clothbound], 978-0-226-92415-1 [ebook].)

After long neglect, Athanasius Kircher (1602–81) is now firmly on the map of intellectual history. Since 2000, more books exclusively about him have appeared than in the whole preceding era. Perhaps it comes of a less progress-oriented attitude, which can see the virtues of what John Glassie calls “a man of misconceptions.” There is also no denying that studying Kircher is fun. His prose may be turgid—no one enjoys translating it—but his universal curiosity is infectious, and his books bear out the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

There are probably enough general treatments of Kircher by now (one of them, The Great Art of Knowing. The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher [End Page 363] [Stanford, 2001], is edited by Stolzenberg) so that the need is for topical studies of more than an article’s scope. This “microhistory of the making and meaning of Kircher’s hieroglyphic studies” (p. 32) sets a high standard. Most obviously, it is about how Kircher came to his mistaken translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it ramifies into many other areas. These include the “Republic of Letters,” the international network of scholars and antiquarians of the 1630s that Kircher first entered under dubious pretenses, claiming to own an Arabic-hieroglyphic manuscript that no one was allowed to see. As the book proceeds, the perspective on Kircher changes from that of the Republic of Letters, avid for his erudition, to that of the scientific academies, which reluctantly gave up on him as a reliable source.

One important argument concerns the occult philosophy that Kircher read into the hieroglyphic inscriptions and the question of his own commitment to it, especially since Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652–54) contains whole treatises on magic and Kabbalah. Stolzenberg writes:

Egyptian Oedipus may seem like an encyclopedia of occult philosophy, comparable to the sixteenth-century projects of Cornelius Agrippa or Francesco Patrizi. But Kircher used those building blocks to construct something different . . . [he] repurposed occult philosophy into a historical and theoretical framework for explaining antiquities.

(p. 132)

A most interesting chapter tells of the Jesuit censors’ opposition to publishing the magical material. With his international status and his papal and imperial patronage, Kircher could afford to evade and finally ignore it.

As regards Kircher’s character, Stolzenberg argues that the quest for fame drove all his studies and that deciphering the hieroglyphs was his first and best chance. Since Kircher was already certain that they contained metaphysical and cosmological statements of a Hermetic-Neoplatonic cast, it just remained to prove it, by fair means or foul. Even judged by the looser standards of his time, Kircher was a plagiarist, his great work “to a large extent cobbled together from the texts of unacknowledged early modern authors” (p. 153). His fall from grace was not due to the rejection of occult philosophy but to “his attempt to practice state-of-the-art antiquarian research without a critical approach to his sources” (p. 176).

On the positive side, Stolzenberg sees Kircher as part of a movement of scholarship away from the Greco-Roman world, both in time (Egypt being more ancient) and in space (for example, with Kircher’s China Illustrata [Amsterdam, 1667]). For all that his conclusions were wrong, his encyclopedic works were full of information found nowhere else and as such were ransacked by other scholars well into the Enlightenment era. This much any Kircherian already knows. What distinguishes Stolzenberg’s work is the author’s discontent with such assumptions unless he has tested them from the foundations. For instance, he looks at the authenticity of Kircher’s claimed Kabbalistic and Arabic sources (the latter with the help of Arabic scholars). He reconstructs Kircher’s troubles with censorship from the Roman archives. At the same time he writes a text that is a pleasure to read, [End Page 364] especially for its...

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