Hieroglyphic Tetragrammaton; Part One.

Father Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Tetragrammaton
Shrine of the Holy Whapping: Father Kircher and the Hieroglyphic Tetragrammaton


Egypt always seems to get dragged into Old Testament archaeology, whether there's a good excuse for it, or not. Indiana Jones went hunting there for the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Racinet, the voluminous costume historian, imagined the High Priest in Egyptianizing robes, though with the pharaonic uraeus replaced with, for equally obscure reasons, a fleur-de-lys. And when we imagine the Temple, it's always either lovingly ripped off from an Assyrian ziggurat, or a massively enlarged Temple of Dendur.

The ancient Israelites were a rough-and-tumble desert people, masculine, uninterested in the niceties of art save when God forced them to be with all His talk of tassels, seraphim, and carven palm-trees, and sitting next to the vast and stereotypically mysterious land of Egypt--like Canada and the U.S.--it seems less work to simply imagine they did a bit of cultural borrowing.

I suppose, given their long sojourn (at first voluntary, then less so) in the place, it makes a certain degree of sense. Maybe. Perhaps nomads are just better with poetry like the Psalms and sagas like the Book of Kings than bricks and mortar.

The seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, the inventor of the cat piano and the last man who knew everything (really), reversed the flow of this argument in his vast and brilliantly demented encylopedia of all things Egyptian, Oedipus Ægyptiacus, where Israel's ambiguous status as Egypt's wacky next door neighbor allowed him digressions on Kabbalah, the Tetragrammaton, and a whole lot else besides. His erstwhile decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphics, colorfully and quite brilliantly imaginative (if largely wrong), also included asides on Chaldean astrology, Pythagorean mathematics, Arabian alchemy, and Latinate myth, all under the loose aegis of the whole universalizing mission of the Counter-Reformation.

It didn't help that his Rosetta stone was no such thing (the real one hadn't been found yet). It was an item called the Bembine table, a knockoff filled with nonsense hieroglyphs produced for Romans who wanted something suitably exotic for the Triclinium. (Think of it as like those Chinese tattoos that purportedly say "Strength of Tiger" and really say "Meaty Meaty Soup Boy Ketchup." The stately, Baroque, almost Borgesian grace of Kircher's fantasy-world is the sole thing that saves it from absurdity: the translation of dd Wsr, "Osiris says," is rendered instead, like something out of Racine, as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis, the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis." Even If Baroque Egypt never existed, I wish it did.