ABSTRACT
It is tempting to think that Gershom Scholem might have read the work of Athanasius Kircher. For a powerful elective affinity links the two men. Like Scholem in the years around 1920, so Kircher in the years after 1620 found himself committed, to his own surprise, to a scholarly work of redemption. He would spend his life collecting and repairing the broken fragments of a lost ists rejected history and talmudists scorned mysticism. Kircher made himself tradition. Scholem dedicated himself to the Kabbalah at a time when kabbal-the master of Egyptian studies after decades in which CounterReforming popes and Calvinist professors had competed to exorcise Egypt and its hieroglyphs from the Western tradition. Like Scholem, Kircher succeeded marvelously at his task. In his later years in Rome, he became the acknowledged expert on Egyptian hieroglyphs and other ancient scripts and languages, the creator of a renowned research center and collection, the author of a series of weighty and respected, if unsalable, books, and the scholarly adviser on dizzyingly theatrical urban projects dominated by obelisks.1
