Athanasius Kircher & the dire transience of style
Athanasius Kircher, 1602-80, polyglot polymath monster of energy and best-selling author. He wrote Oedipus Aegypticus to explain Egyptian hieroglyphs and much more besides. His sources include astrology, kabbalah, Greeks accounts of the Egyptian gods, Pythagoras, alchemy, reports from missionaries, and fairly accurate drawings of Egyptian antiquities. I've been fascinated by Kircher since an undergrad project on deciphering Maya writing — he reinvigorated a greco-roman proto-orientalist notion that hieroglyphs directly encode mystical truths. Similarly, generations of archaeologists fancied that Maya glyphs were primarily astronomical instead of the usual things written on stone, kingly victories and genealogies and such. So after years of admiring the psychedelic and occultic splendor of the art in Kircher's books, I was pleased to find volume one (of three) of Oed. Aeg. in pdf . It begins with 68 pages of poems in honor of Holy Roman Emperor ...