Joseph (Smith) in Egypt: Babel, Hieroglyphs, and the Pure Language of Eden

Thanks for this, Clark.

Looks like the link was temporary, because it is not bringing up anything on my computer.

Thanks, Justin; the link worked fine when I got on my work computer–I think my mac just had issues with it.

Some relevant quotes from Eco. The first is from his chapter on Kircher’s Egyptology (from before Egyptian could be read) which has many echoes of how the texts were viewed in Nauvoo by the Mormons. I should note in advance that Hrapollo’s Hieroglyphica was a mysterious document acquired in 1419 that influenced many Renaissance philosophers like Ficino. It’s now thought to be a fairly late Hellenistic text from around the 5th century AD after hieroglyphs had largely ceased to be used in Egypt. The Renaissance figures were fascinated by the text though and attributed it to Hermes Trismegistus. So it was a large part of what we now describe as hermetic speculation in the Renaissance.

We are speaking of the ‘re-reading’ of a text (or of a network of texts) which had not been changed during the centuries. So what has changed? We are here witnessing a semiotic incident which, as paradoxical as some of its effects may have been, was, in terms of its own dynamic, quite easy to explain. Horopollo’s text (qua text) differs but little from other similar writings, which were previously known. None the less, the humanists read it as a series of unprecedented statements. The reason is simply that the readers of the fifteenth century saw it as coming from a different author. The text had not changed, but the ‘voice’ supposed to utter it was endowed with a different charisma. This changed the way in which the text was received and the way in which it was consequently interpreted.

Thus, as old and familiar as these images were, the moment they appeared as transmitted not by the familiar Christian and pagan sources, but by the ancient Egyptian divinities themselves, they took on a fresh, and radically different meaning. For the missing scriptural commentaries there were substituted allusions to vague religious mysteries. The success of the book was due to its polysemy. Hieroglyphs were regarded as initiatory symbols.

They were symbols, that is, expressions that referred to an occult, unknown and ambivalent content. In contradistinction to conjecture, in which we take a visible symptom and infer from it its cause, Kircher defined a symbol as:

“a nota significativa of mysteries, that is to say, that it is the nature of a symbol to lead our minds, by means of certain similarities, to the understanding of things vastly different from the things that are offered to our external senses, and whose property it is to appear hidden under the veil of an obscure expression [. . .] Symbols cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters, and figures.” (Obeliscus Pamphilius, II, 5, 114-20)

These symbols were initiatory, because the allure of Egyptian culture was given by the promise of a knowledge that was wrapped in an impenetrable and indecipherable enigma so as to protect it from the idle curiosity of the vulgar multitudes. The hieroglyph, Kircher reminds us, was the symbol of a sacred truth (thus, though all hieroglyphs are symbols, it does not follow that all symbols are hieroglyphs) whose force derived from its impenetrability to the eyes of the profane. (Eco, 154-5)

Kircher, while technically the father of Egyptology, had a view of hieroglyphics that was completely and utterly wrong. He treated them as ideograms with the mystic character Eco describes above. (Although at times he nearly made the discovery they were phonetic signs) For Kircher the heiroglyphics were tied to hermeticism, despite the fact that by then the hermetic texts had already been proved to have been written in the period of late antiquity.

There is an important difference from Joseph Smith though.

In fact, hungry for mystery and fascinated by exotic languages though he was, Kircher felt no real need to discover a perfect language to reunite the world in harmony; his own Latin, spoken with the clear accents of the Counter-Reformation, seemed a vehicle perfectly adequate to transport as much gospel truth as was required in order to bring the various peoples together. Kircher never entertained the thought that any of the languages he considered, not even the sacred languages of hieroglyphics and kabbalistic permutations, should ever again be spoken. He found in the ruins of these antique and venerated languages a garden of private delight; but he never conceived of them as living anew. (Eco, 165)

The book is well worth reading and describes the many different trajectories of finding the perfect language. My favorite section is actually on Leibniz who felt that Calculus was the only example of the Adamaic language.

I look forward to reading the article. Thank you for the heads-up.