The following is taken from:
Robert J. Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and
the Hebrew Name of God—From the Beginnings to the Seventeenth Century (Studies
in the History of Christian Traditions 179; Leiden: Brill, 2015), 439-40, 442-44
Athanasius
Kircher (1602–1680)
Athanasius Kircher, polymath and professor at the Jesuit Collegium Romanum, reserved a special place for Kabbalah in the huge idiosyncratic syncretic system of “hieroglyphic knowledge” he created. Kircher tended notoriously to equate the traditions of all cultures, but he found a particular affinity between Egyptian and Hebrew learning, the wisdom of Hermes Trimegistus, and the true teachings of the Kabbalah (appropriately purged of rabbinic superstition) (Illustration 34). His great work Oedipus Aegyptius (1652–1655) contains in its second volume a treatise on the Kabbalah of the Hebrews dealing with the alphabet, hermeneutics, and the Sephiroth as well the false teachings of Kabbalistic magic and astrology. As in the case of Fludd, we have a complex diagram, The Mirror of the Mystical Kabbalah, which is found as a plate after his discussion of the divine names and upon which we may concentrate (Illustration 36).
Kircher had first written on
Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1650 in Obeliscus Pamphilius, when Innocent X
had placed the obelisk in the middle of the Piazza Navona. Hieroglyphs had been
invented, he held, by Hermes Trimegistus to encode the wisdom of the
ante-diluvians (Illustration 35). Though their tradition had been corrupted by
magic, traces might be restored from the prisci theologi Orpheus,
Pythagoras, the Chaldean Oracles, et al. The purest tradition, however, though
not entirely uncorrupted, was to be found in Kabbalah.
It was apparently from the work
of a Jewish convert turned Christian Kabbalist, Philippe d’Aquin (c.1578–1650),
Interpretatio Arboris Cabbalisticae (The Interpretation of the Tree
of the Kabbalah) (Jean Laguehay, Paris, 1625), that Kircher took and then
adapted the basic pattern of his diagram in his plate. He replaced a central
Sephirotic tree with a sunflower bearing the names of God (itself probably
based upon a diagram in a manuscript of Moses Cordovero’s Pardes Rimmonim,
now in the Vatican Library). The innermost circle contains the Tetragrammaton,
supplemented with a Hebrew letter shin, YHSUH, as the origin of the
other divine names. The monogram of Jesus IHS, adopted by the Jesuits, is
topped by an image of Christ himself, reinforcing the message of the
Pentagrammaton. Below this are three yods written above the vowel sign qamets,
a form of the Tetragrammaton emphasizing the Trinity. The first circle
thereafter contains the twelve-letter name of God, usually read as “Father, Son
and Holy Spirit,” punctuated by the twelve divine attributes. Thereafter comes
the forty-two–letter name, again read usually as “God the Father, God the Son
and God the Holy Spirit, Three in One, One in Three.” But, surprisingly,
Kircher also included a real Jewish forty-two–letter name derived by letter
substitution from the first two verses of Genesis and quite devoid of
Trinitarian or Christological significance.
So far this has been very
predictable. Thereafter, Kircher presents the seventy-two–letter name, but instead
of seventy-two three-letter names, we find seventy-two four-letter names of God
associated with the seventy-two nations that make up humanity. It was
apparently Marsilio Ficino in his commentary on Plato’s Philebus who
first claimed that “everyone calls God by four letters.” The range of nations
is impressively broad (some are borrowed from Ficino), though the challenge of
the requirement of four letters means that the English worship “Good,” as the
Italians worship Idio. All nations thus possess a God-given divine name,
and Kircher replaces the usual angelic powers of the seventy-two–letter name
(and the risk of their magical use) with these. These names emanate from the
Tetragrammaton, as do the twelve-letter and forty-two–letter names. Thus, the
entire world is supported by the power and efficacy of the Tetragrammaton, and
all peoples are bound together in the cult of true religion. The universalist
ideology of early modern Catholicism could not be more apparent, as is
Kircher’s borrowing from Arcangelo da Borgonovo. The Universal Horoscope of
the Society of Jesus from the 1646 Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (p.
553) makes use of a similar tree and shows the Jesuit mission as it had
stimulated the original heritage of ancient truth so long buried under idolatry
and superstition. Like the Oedipus Aegyptius it offered a justification
for the accomodationist missionary strategy of the Society.
The Mirror of the Mystical
Kabbalah contains two further trees in the lefthand and right-hand corners
which portray Kabbalistic amulets representing superstitious “rabbinic”
astrological manipulations of the Tetragrammaton and the seventy-two–letter
name, which are to be avoided. A third tree represents the seventy-two
three-letter names, presumably also hinting at bad rabbinic practices.
Kircher’s source for such practices was a Hebrew book of popular magic called Shimmush
Tehillim (The Use of the Psalms), which he found in manuscript in
the Vatican Library.
Illustration 34 (p. 441):
Illustration 35 (p. 442):
Illustration 36 (p. 443):
