Athanasius Kircher (1601–1689) was a German Jesuit polymath who spent much of his career at the Roman College. Peter Forshaw begins with Kircher’s biography and extraordinary range: magnetism, music, combinatorial knowledge, Noah’s Ark, Babel, Egyptian monuments and universal languages.

The central source for the lecture is Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–55), the enormous work in which Kircher attempted to recover a wisdom he believed lay behind Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Persian, Arabic and other learned traditions.

Kircher treated the “Cabala of the Hebrews” as one branch of a universal ancient theology. His frontispiece places it beside Egyptian wisdom, Chaldaean astrology, Persian magic, Pythagorean mathematics, Greek theosophy, mythology, Arabic alchemy and Latin philology.

This was Kircher’s Christian and syncretic interpretation. It should not be confused with a neutral account of Jewish Kabbalah: he read Jewish mystical material through a Jesuit theological project and repeatedly redirected it toward Christian conclusions.

Kircher’s Speculum Cabalae mysticae is the lecture’s visual centre: a circular engraving connecting divine names, angels, languages and the traditional seventy-twofold structure. Around it appear subsidiary trees that associate nations and languages, planets and body parts, tribes and zodiac signs.

Forshaw highlights the Olive Tree, with seven planets, archangels and the “entrances of the soul” in the head, and the Pomegranate Tree, which joins the twelve tribes with the zodiac and permutations of the four-letter divine Name.

Following Johannes Reuchlin, Kircher inserts the Hebrew letter Shin into the four-letter Name YHVH to form YHShVH, read by Christian Kabbalists as a Hebrew form of “Jesus.” His diagram turns this linguistic-theological claim into a five-pointed visual argument crowned by Christ.

This is the lecture’s central example of appropriation and reinterpretation: Hebrew letters and divine-name traditions are made to serve a specifically Christian proof. Presenting that historical fact does not validate the derivation as Jewish theology or modern linguistic scholarship.

Forshaw complicates the picture by including Kircher’s own warning that beneath a shining angel a dark tail may be found. Kircher believed sacred symbols could be corrupted, imitated or weaponised under the appearance of devotion.

The warning is useful for modern readers too: symbolic systems can encourage insight, but authority, historical claims and spiritual certainty still require scrutiny.

Kircher reproduces variant Trees of the ten Sephirot and arranges them across four cosmological levels: an Archetypal World associated with the Infinite and the supernal triad; an Angelic World of mercy and severity; a Sidereal or Celestial World of planets, zodiac and law; and an Elemental World associated with fire, air, water and earth.

The lecture also examines twenty-two channels, thirty-two Paths of Wisdom and fifty Gates of Understanding. These numbers belong to different textual and interpretive histories; Kircher’s diagram brings them together inside his own synthetic system.

Moving to Obeliscus Pamphilius (1650), Forshaw examines Kircher’s reading of the Egyptian crux ansata, or ankh. Kircher assigns its circles to planetary spheres and its cross to the elemental world, surrounding it with further hieroglyphic signs.

Placed beside John Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad, the image reveals a Renaissance and early-modern ambition: to compress a complete cosmology into a single generative emblem.

The lecture traces Kircher’s “Heptagonal Cabalistic Amulet” back to material associated with John Dee, including the Sigillum Dei Æmeth and manuscript traditions such as the Sworn Book of Honorius. Nested heptagons, divine names and a central letter-square are compared point by point.

Forshaw also identifies AGLA, an acronym of a Hebrew devotional phrase. The comparison demonstrates that Kircher did not simply preserve older diagrams; he edited, Christianised and repositioned them.

Kircher’s “Magia Hieroglyphica” supplies additional medallions and letter-squares, including a seven-pointed star centred on Christ. Forshaw then turns to the “Cabala Saracenica,” an Arabic/Islamic talismanic wheel used by Kircher to discuss solar and Venus talismans.

This section broadens the case: Kircher’s universalism reached across Jewish, Christian, Egyptian and Islamic materials, but always through his own seventeenth-century classificatory lens.

Forshaw closes with Kircher’s Horizon Aeternitatis: a half-light, half-dark circle associated with En Soph, the first Sephirah and the Crown. The final image returns the lecture to its opening question—how diagrams make the invisible order of creation appear knowable.

Kircher’s achievement is therefore both visually compelling and historically limited: a monumental act of synthesis whose Christian assumptions, errors and appropriations must remain visible.