Hieroglyphic Tetragrammaton; Part One.

Diagram: Holy Name




Kircher's digressions on things Hebrew include two quite wonderful items, a mandala-like sunflower diagram which encapsulates his much-Catholicized take on Jewish mysticism, and a very unique take on the Divine Name. At the time, as now, Kabbalah was very much in vogue, and often taken up by dippily enthusiastic Christians, whose faith started to shift in odd and unexpected directions as a result. (The rather undiscriminating humanist Pico della Mirandola, who consumed heterodox mystical texts like a goat does tin cans, and never found a guru he didn't like, comes to mind. Or perhaps Guillame Postel, who, Umberto Eco once joked in Foucault's Pendulum, read Kabbalistic texts like kids do Superman comics--without a dictionary.)

A few more orthodox Christian apologists, writing under assumed rabbinical names, attempted to prove the mystical school in fact foretold the Trinity and Christ's divinity, by simply cutting a few etymological corners. The results, if perhaps historically dodgy are aesthetically interesting: the Tetragrammaton (YHVH), it was found, could be converted into a Pentagrammaton which sounded curiously like the divine name of Jesus by the insertion of the letter shin (YHSUH). Christ's coming revealed God the Father, and rendered the Tetragrammaton pronounceable. (This doesn't seem to be born out in the liturgy, where we are piously and prudently bidden to not sing out God's proper name, I don't care what Dan Schutte, another Jesuit, said) but, given the whole Logos-Word incarnation thing, it has a certain poetry to it. Actually, the person I know who freaks out the most when the Divine Name is pronounced is a Catholic, and I have picked up myself his discomfort with it.)


Kircher placed this pronounceable Pentagrammaton in the center of his sunflower, nestled in the crossbar of the Jesuit IHS. Around it radiated, in Hebrew, rings containing mostly conventional names for the Godhead; Kircher, as always the only man who could bring orthodoxy out of the most offbeat sources, safely steered clear of heresy by the fact his "purified Kabbalah" contained very little of its numerological, consonant-counting roots and was based mostly on secondary spurious works and his own fertile, highly-associative imagination. He piously denounced any superstitious or magical use of such practices, of course, unlike some of his Christian renaissance predecessors who were rather more impecunious in their magical dabblings.