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 Ferdinand III and humblebragging about Kircher's amazing linguistic and interpretive powers. In Latin, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, English, German, Hungarian, Czech, "Ilyrian" (Bulgarian), Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, "Latinski" (Romanian), Turkish,  Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic, Samaritan, Coptic, an Ethiopic language (probably classical Ge'ez, "Brachman hieroglyphics" copied third hand from Brahmi, and actual Chinese courtesy of a fellow Jesuit. It's... it's a lot. 
    I absolutely bounced of the English poem at first, then girded my loins, remembered how to read the long s (ſ ) and u for v and v for u, generally remembered the way I once ploughed through shoddily printed Arabic books, and felt compelled to transcribe this artifact.

One of my hobbyhorses is the weakness of the notion that there is any proper way to spell English, the breezy way people will describe English as 'crazy' and 'nonsensical' at the same time they react with institutionalized trauma to 'spelling mistakes', and the way drilled-in notions of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and dialect all somehow fall under the heading of 'grammar', mostly when it is 'bad grammar' that would've gotten you marked down in school.
    I used to spend hours cruising the Oxford English Dictionary online, noting period fads, 'nonce-words' and coinages, regional variants and the changes from Middle into Modern English reflecting diachronic and synchronic changes, enormous differences in dialect around the British Isles and markedly fewer in the colonial world, &c. The great value of the OED is that it quotes words as they appeared in published or archival documents, cheerfully recording everything up to the present. 
    If you have ever confused ible and able, ence and ance and ense — is there one consonant or two? — is it e or ee or ea? —  then know, my comrade in composition, that thousands of writers have been there before you and established every precedent and more than you ever imagined. 

    That cheerful jungle did not die off on its own, it was hunted to extinction by the rise of the bourgeoisie and the middle classes, for whom education and codified standards were talismans of status: status acquired through hard work, wealth, and the character literally beaten into them in school. The scriptures of this ethos were dictionaries reflecting the prejudices and erudition of middle class pedants like Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster, and the mark of orthodoxy was sales success. 

    The dictionary was, among other things, a consumer item, produced and sold not as neutral scholarship nor even ideologically motivated polemic (though that certainly entered into the lexicographers' intentions), but as books their publishers expected to sell to monied masses striving for distinction.

So, Kircher's English. The following text is not even four hundred years old, perfectly modern English syntactically if not stylistically. Kircher was the most educated man in Europe, and had no reason not to spell it pitty instead of pity (why don't we still spell it that way? it's a short vowel!) or tyme instead of time (a variation to which I am fairly indifferent). 
    The book's printing and layout largely follow standards we still hold to, but remarkably foreign, even off-putting, in its use of printers' marks, commonly called punctuation, aids to reading comprehension derived from classical and monastic scribal habits (the hyphen and semicolon) or innovated in the Renaissance (the apostrophe). This was early days: a space tends to go before as well as after the comma and period, and final e + period has an elegant ligature. They are an entirely invented and haphazard set of marks, useful, perfectly arbitrary, modern, and not language. The same goes for vv instead of w, 'd instead of ed, and that initial and medial ſ for s. 

    'The great thing about standards', said an old school hardware geek I knew, 'there are so many of them'.

The first page of Kircher's English elegy to the rightful Caesar, Ferdinand 

ELOGIVM VIII. ANGLIA. 

IN FERDINANDI III. 

AVGVSTISSIMI

Iuxtà & Sapientiſsimi Imperatoris muniſicentiam, qua obſtetricante Kircherianus Oedipus poſt viginti annorum nixum feliciter editur in lucem. 

E N C O M I V M  A N G L I C V M

Iacoi albani Gibbeſij , Med. Doct.

Io no more , turn'd milky cow , doth ſtray , 

Nor Apis , the black oxe , Canopian hay

Chews into oracles : Anubis now

Barkes North, and Ibis heares no Coptick vow.

Nor Pyramids , nor Hieroglyphicks haue,

Or place, or prieſt in Memphis ; Belu's graue,

It ſelſe lyes digg'd vp , without Obeliske ,

To open ayre, wherein ſome Baſiliske ,

Or fowler ſerpent lurkes; which was in your,

Preſt ( wondrous to behold ) by many' a ſcore,

Of lofty towring ſpires . So nothing ſtands

Touch to fell tyme ,or ſcapes its greedy hands.

Cambyſes could doe this ! Auguſtus yet,

Inclin'd by pitty fau'd what he might get.

Rome shews in whole and parcels all the rubble,

Of waſted Ægypt , giuing pleaſant trouble ,

And moſt ſweet rack to witts, to know ,and ſee,

The mangled parent of Antiquitie.

Ægypt, mother of arts, where better might

Then here, ith' lapp of ſcience , take delight ,

Gather'd in Rome , diſmember'd ? perhaps too

Appeare farr brighter , then did euer doe.

A Capitol, a Cirque, a Vatican ,

Mar's field , a Pallace, markett Vlpian, 

The ſacred street with the triumphall gate , 

The court, the porche, the pulpit, ſett a ſtate,

Farre other, then brick-Walls of Babylone ,

Or Niles dry-shoare bepau'd with pibbleſstone:

To Negro's miracles, who knew no better ,

As vnto vs their beaſt or fowle a letter.

    No longer shall it be ſo. For their Sphinx

W'haue found an OEDIPVS, doth ſolue the links

Of chayn'd myſterious emblemes , holy rites ,

Cloſe riddles,obſcure ſymbols ; Ægypts nightes;

Scarce hauing other darkeneſſe. KIRCHER's he,

That whylome gaue a proofe of maſterie,

O're ſuch concealed wiſedome , when the Pile

He did expound of Sothis ; held a vile , 

And lumpish maſſe before ; not vnderſtood,

Till great PAMPHILIO's order made it good .

Yea chang'd its name,and call'd it from his ovvne,

With golden gentle Doue reſplendent shovvne.

   Thankes then to high and mighty FERDINAND

For this hidd treaſure,from whoſe noble hand

The vvworlds inricht, and eu'ry ſingle vvight

Grovvth more then Sophi , put ſo forth to light.

What marueyle ? ſince he animateth ſtones

T'inſruct our ignorance, inueſts the bones

Of dumbe Harpocrates vvith flesh againe,

TO play the truchman in a human ſtraine .

O efficacious mouer ! apes ,and ovvles

Speake cathedratick language: by thee, fovvles

Pythagoræan proue: transform'd an Aſs is

So reu'rend, I'de ſvveare it vvere Amaſſis.

To thee belongs the fame of Triſmegist ,

A righter Hermes ; th'haft outgon lift

Of's triple grandure :or if that not pleaſe,

Ioyne Ptolemies , and ſtout Muſagetes .

   This is the united ſenſe of th'Vniuerſe ,

   Though differing tongues it many vvays reherſe.