Free Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) by John Glassie

from Kircher’s point of view, was that after defeat in battle and illness from the campaign, Christian of Brunswick, the Insane Bishop, had died a few years before. He was twenty-six.People said that his insides had been eaten away by a huge worm.
    The prospects across the German provinces were generally bleak. In January of that year, Kircher brazenly addressed a letter to the superior general of the Jesuits in Rome, making a vehement plea to be sent
somewhere
as a missionary. He was finally about to be ordained into the priesthood, and he was willing to go to just about any corner of the world to propagate the faith—“Arabia, Palestine, Constantinople, Persia, India, China, Japan, America.” But he expressed a clear preference for the Holy Lands and North Africa, places where in his off-hours from saving souls he might dig up ancient scrolls and texts containing early mystical wisdom. “For the love of God, and the holy Virgin Mother,” he wrote, “I resolutely implore and beseech you to grant my extremely great desire to follow the apostolic pursuit. May my prayers and supplications not be made in vain, I pray—do not permit my soul to waste away cramped among the confines of this barren Germany. Stretch forth my soul, heretofore enchained, now entirely in the service of extending the divine majesty.”
    â€œLife is short,” Kircher reminded the superior general, and he certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of his in Mainz.
    This wasn’t exactly the humility and indifference that Ignatius of Loyola had in mind for his soldiers of God, the kind that meant you “do not desire, nor even prefer” one circumstance over another as long as they served God equally. The Jesuit authorities did not grant his request. Instead, after Kircher’s ordination they reassigned him to another old city on the Rhine. This time Speyer, where he spent a customary period of spiritual probation before saying his final vows.
    â€”
    ONE DAY IN SPEYER, Kircher was asked by a superior to find a book in the library. While looking among the stacks—“Was it by chance or by the arrangement of divine providence?” he later wondered—he came across a volume depicting several ancient Egyptian obelisks. These particular obelisks, now in Rome, were thought to have been brought back from Egypt by conquering generals as many as fifteen or sixteen hundred years prior. Fallen into ruins over the centuries, they were restored and re-erected by a recent pope in the decade or two before Kircher was born.
    â€œInstantly carried away with curiosity,” Kircher assumed for a moment that the hieroglyphic markings on these structures were artistic decorations. But “when from the attached history of obelisks I learned that these figures were the chronicles of ancient Egyptian Wisdom, inscribed from time immemorial . . .” he recalled, “the desire befell me and I was goaded by the greatest hidden impulse to discover whether it was possible to attain the acquisition of knowledge of this type.”
    After all, an explanation of these markings “had been offered by no one since their meaning had been destroyed over the passage of so much time.” Many believed that Hermes Trismegistus himself had devised the hieroglyphs as a way of preserving and protecting the old wisdom, encoding it in symbolic language that was universal but also indecipherable to everyone but the truly wise. “It was the opinion of the ancient theologians,” wrote Pico della Mirandola, “that one should not rashly make public the secret mysteries of theology.” The obelisks were thought to contain some of the earliest and most sacred ideas of all: possibly this was a strain of knowledge that originated in the time of Adam, a strain that had survived the Flood and the confusion of tongues.
    â€œFrom that very moment I never turned my mind from deciphering these