KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS. Jesuit, scholar, and polygraph, born at Geisa (Fulda) on 2 May 1601, died at Rome on 27 November 1680. He first taught (1629) ethics and mathematics at the University of Würzburg, also giving lessons in Hebrew and Syriac; but in 1631 he was forced by the Swedish victories in Germany to take refuge in Avignon, where he devoted himself intensively to the study and decipherment of hieroglyphs. Called to the Collegio Romano in 1635, he taught for a time physics, mathematics, and Oriental languages, but was then left free to pursue his studies and researches, surrounded by the esteem and assistance of learned men.
From this emerged a copious harvest of pamphlets and works (44 printed volumes) on the most diverse subjects, so much so that his contemporaries called him “doctor centum artium”; yet while he displayed vast erudition and extraordinary versatility of mind, he did not always show solidity of judgment, admitting puerile interpretations and accepting information with a credulity well beyond the mark.
He concerned himself with philology, especially Egyptology, with the Prodromus copius (Rome 1636), Lingua Aegyptiaca restituta (ibid. 1643), and Oedipus Aegyptiacus (3 vols., ibid. 1652–54);
with machines, with every kind of object of interest to classical, Christian, and Oriental antiquity, and to South America, as well as ethnography, which gave rise to the Museum of the Collegio Romano, later called the Museo Kircheriano after the founder of the collection.
In his later years he built on the Sabine hills the Marian sanctuary of Mentorella, a destination of numerous pilgrimages, where afterward his heart was placed.
C. Celestino Testore