Renaissance magic
Athanasius Kircher
A Jesuit polymath who was wrong about almost everything he was famous for, and who engraved the diagram this entire site draws. The Tree of Life as modern occultism knows it is his plate from Oedipus Aegyptiacus.
- Dates
- 1602 – 1680
- Dating
- documented dates
- Born
- Geisa, Thuringia
- Died
- Rome
The life
He wrote on magnetism, geology, China, music, plague and the Egyptian language, and claimed to have deciphered hieroglyphs, which he had not.
Place in the tradition
The arrangement this application calls the Kircher tree — ten circles, twenty-two connecting paths, three pillars — reaches the Golden Dawn and everything after it through that engraving.
a note on the record
History and later legend
His Egyptology was fantasy, and the tree is not a Jewish diagram reproduced but a Christian Cabalist's rendering. The twenty-two channels it draws are Cordovero's; the lettering later put on them is not.
the written record
Principal works
-
Rome, 1652–1654
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
Three volumes claiming to decipher the hieroglyphs, which it does not. It carries the engraved Sephirothic Tree that became the standard diagram of Western occultism — the arrangement this application draws and calls the Kircher tree.