ABSTRACT
The Kabbalah occupied a privileged position in the reconstruction of ancient wisdom underlying Athanasius Kircher’s interpretation of the “hieroglyphic doctrine.” Although his syncretic method tended to equate the traditions of all cultures, he believed in an especially close relationship between Egyptian and Hebrew wisdom. “The Hebrews have such an affinity to the rites, sacrifices, ceremonies and sacred disciplines of the Egyptians,” he wrote, “that I am fully persuaded that either the Egyptians were Hebraicizing or the Hebrews were Egypticizing.”2 According to Kircher, the true Kabbalah preserved the same Adamic wisdom that Hermes Trismegistus encoded in the hieroglyphs, while the “Rabbinic superstitions” found in many kabbalistic treatises were closely related to Egyptian idolatry. On this ground he believed that he could use the Kabbalah to interpret hieroglyphic inscriptions, and his works frequently drew on kabbalistic sources. The second volume of his magnum opus, Egyptian Oedipus (Oedipus Aegyptiacus) (1652-55), contains a 150-page treatise on the Kabbalah of the Hebrews, a systematic treatment of the Kabbalah that deals in turn with the mystical nature of the Hebrew alphabet and various hermeneutic methods based on its manipulation; the kabbalistic names of God and their use in mystical prayer; the doctrine of the ten sefirot or divine numerations; and what Kircher calls the “natural Kabbalah,” which, as with the other divisions, contains both a true doctrine and a false one, the latter corresponding to what Kircher calls kabbalistic magic and kabbalistic astrology.
