(Don't try any of this at home. Please.)


Hieroglyphic Tetragrammaton; Part Three.

Indeed, he opens it up, like the new dispensation, to the whole world--rather than the seventy-two names of God derived by permutational rabbinic letter-crunching, as in more traditional forms of this school of thought, the rays of his sunflower are composed of seventy-two four-letter names of God derived from the Biblical seventy-two peoples of the world. And rather than conventional Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and the like, this being an age of science and expansion, we have exotic typefaces and the names of God of far-flung tribes like the Mexicani (BOSA), the Scoti (GOOT), and Tatari (ANOT). Kircher being Kircher, the big picture and moralizing missionary message trumps details, and occasionally he fudges things a little. For example, we discover in his table that the English call the Divine Creator GOOD and not God, in order to keep up the four-letter Tetragrammaton parallel.

This encoding leads us to a second, less complex but more intriguing diagram. Kircher imagined Hebrew wisdom had trickled-down unknowlingly into the paganism of the Jewish people's surrounding neighbors: the four letters of the Tetragrammaton were encoded by allegory by Orpheus into the figures of Muse, Dionysius, Apollo, and Venus. And the Egyptian sages, from their encounters with the Hebrews, encoded it directly into a hieroglyph (below).

I am no expert, but given Kircher's track record, the form the Hieroglyphic Tetragrammaton takes must be considered with a grain of salt. Oddly enough, his idea was not too far off. At the Amun-temple in Soleb, Sudan, we find a stretch of hieroglyphics accompanying a series of reliefs of captive prisoners; one prisoner, called of the people of Shasou, thought by some to be the ancestral Hebrews, are described as “those of Yehoua," perhaps a toponym, or, more excitingly, a garbled version of YHWH, or possibly both. Far from being preserved by recondite Egyptian sages, it's part of a list of slaves. Kircher is a bit off the mark, but the thrill of seeing Israel pop up in the historical record makes it all worth the effort. Kircher has the virtue of making interesting mistakes, in an age which straddled Aristotle and the newer sciences, and, in Kircher's case, contained large analytical chunks of both.

Kircher's main point, despite all these klutzy linguistic shenanighans, is a wholesome one--the whole world is open to the message of Christ. God has placed in the hearts of his various peoples across the world little, unconscious splinters of the truth, those pagan echoes that gave us the Sybil of the Dies Irae and the pale-faced, human-sacrifice-forbidding Aztec Quetzalcoatl. In the end of course, this can only be taken so far, a fact he no doubt realized, even if occasionally revelling a bit too much in his own funhouse-mirror erudition. The Jewish revelation was unique in all the ancient world, and quite different from the table-scraps that fell into their neighbor's hands. Nor is it the hidden knowledge that does so well on the sales tables at Barnes and Noble, but a covenant open to all. However close the pagans got to the truth (and whether it came from an accidental brush with Moses on Sinai, or some common heritage from Adam--and the latter idea steers closer to occult heterodoxy than the former), it was not sufficient. The world cries out for Christ, whether it knows it or not. He was a Jesuit after all, the champion of the Holy Name, and his mission was to show the peoples of the world that these mythic pagan and Judaic echoes had been fulfilled in a real place, by a real Man, on a dusty hill outside Jerusalem under the reign of Augustus Caesar.