How The Book of Mormon Came to Pass: The Second Greatest Show on Earth

By Lars Nielsen

Several explanations for the seemingly sudden appearance of The Book of Mormon in 1829 (first published in 1830) have been put forth by both historians and apologists alike. Each holds some value to its advocates

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lars Pauling Nielsen
• Release date: Apr 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798990232143

Lars Nielsen

Lars Pauling Nielsen is an independent researcher of Mormon history and a first-time author. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2007 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2009. He currently resides in Minnetonka, MN with his three daughters. He resigned from the Mormon church in 2010.

Book preview

e-book_IngramSparkLars NielsenLars Nielsen40572024-03-18T20:12:00Z2024-04-22T20:42:00Z2024-04-22T23:29:00Z263134587767151Aspose6392179989993916.0000

How The Book of Mormon Came to Pass

Copyright © 2024 by Lars Pauling Nielsen

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of Lars Nielsen.

The engraving of Athanasius Kircher on the title page (left)

is taken from his China Illustrata, 1667.

The photographic print of a drawing of Joseph Smith

on the title page (right) is taken from the Library of Congress

Prints and Photographs Division (item# 2009632233).

ISBN 979–8–9902321–0-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 979–8–9902321–1-2 (paperback)

ISBN 979–8–9902321–2-9 (ebook)

ISBN 979–8–9902321–3-6 (mass-market paperback)

ISBN 979–8–9902321–4-3 (mass-market ebook)

Support this book (and future endeavors) by donating at the following website:

www.HowTheBookOfMormonCameToPass.com/

Comments, corrections, and constructive feedback are always welcome via

[e-mail]

e-book_IngramSparkLars NielsenLars Nielsen40572024-03-18T20:12:00Z2024-04-22T20:42:00Z2024-04-22T23:29:00Z263134587767151Aspose6392179989993916.0000

For Chris, who chose to stay with us.

For Susan, who tried to do likewise.

Trigger Warning: This book is not written for true-believing Mormons (TBMs). If you are a TBM and you do not yet have a robust support system outside of the Mormon church, do not read this book. If you continue to read it, you accept the responsibility of managing your immediate or eventual faith crisis in a way that will not result in harm to yourself or others.

e-book_IngramSparkLars NielsenLars Nielsen40572024-03-18T20:12:00Z2024-04-22T20:42:00Z2024-04-22T23:29:00Z263134587767151Aspose6392179989993916.0000

Table of Contents

Chapter 1     The Hierophant’s Tale

Chapter 2     Prolegomenon

Chapter 3     The Trunkless Legs of Ozymandias

Chapter 4     Parallelomania

Chapter 5     Put Away for a Season, Now Restored

Chapter 6     John the Linguist

Chapter 7     The Maze of Thorns

Chapter 8     The Ancient-Authorship Theory (AK0)

Chapter 9     The One-Man Show (AK1 and K1)

Chapter 10   All in the Family (K2 and K3)

Chapter 11    Old Come to Pass

Chapter 12    Homer erectus

Chapter 13    The Case for K4 (and K5)

Chapter 14    The First Chiasm & the Second Republic of Letters

Chapter 15    A Prophet for All Seasons

Chapter 16    The Straight Path (K5Pv1.0)

Chapter 17    A Crisis of Magic

Chapter 18    Religiopithecus rigdonensis

Chapter 19    Wherefore is therefore wherefore?

Chapter 20   The Quantification of Faith

Chapter 21    Magic and Misdirection

Epilegomenon

Afterword

Acknowledgments (The Book of Thoth)

e-book_IngramSparkLars NielsenLars Nielsen40572024-03-18T20:12:00Z2024-04-22T20:42:00Z2024-04-22T23:29:00Z263134587767151Aspose6392179989993916.0000

Table of Figures

(go to)        (view now)

Figure 1     Athanasius Kircher

Figure 2     Collegio Romano

Figure 3     The Lateran Obelisk

Figure 4     A Reformed Alphabet

Figure 5     Oedipus and the Sphinx

Figure 6     Translation or Translation?

Figure 7     Tabusa Combinatoria

Figure 8     Museo Kircheriano

Figure 9     Machina Magnetica

Figure 10   The Magnetic Oracle

Figure 11    A Magician’s Stage

Figure 12    A Magnetic Epicyclic Disk

Figure 13    The Magnetic Horoscope

Figure 14    The Archimedes Sphere

Figure 15    An Allegorical Compass

Figure 16    Fabius Chisius

Figure 17    Prints and Plates

Figure 18    Patrons and Benefactors

Figure 19   The Bembine Table of Isis

Figure 20   The Cat Piano

Figure 21   The Sunflower Clock

Figure 22   A Favorite Seer Stone

Figure 23   La Fénix de México

Figure 24   Lehi and the Liahona

Figure 25   The Nephi Obelisk

Figure 26   The Kinderhook Plates

Figure 27   The GAEL and the KEP

Figure 28   A Page from Peiresc

Figure 29   Caractors and Characters

Figure 30   What Museum Walls Say

Figure 31   What’s in the Vault?

Figure 32   One Eternal Round?

Figure 33   The Island of Atlantis

Figure 34   An Engraving and a Poem

Figure 35   Into the Maze of Thorns

Figure 36   A Catalogue of Books

Figure 37   Fieldnotes of Arlene Hess

Figure 38   Cooking the Cook

Figure 39   The Conneaut Creek Cave

Figure 40   Mormon Mandrills

(inset 1)     The First Chiasm

(inset 2)     The Chiasm Marks the Spot

Figure 41   A History of Histograms

Figure 42   The Timeline for Dictation

Figure 43   A Farewell to Arms

Figure 44   In the Library of Congress

Figure 45   Sources and Influences

Figure 46   A Lucky Lamen

Figure 47   Dance of the Tarantella

All figures are viewable at

www.HowTheBookOfMormonCameToPass.com/#figures

All figures are downloadable (into one PDF) at

www.HowTheBookOfMormonCameToPass.com/s/Figures-all-compressed.pdf

Most of the endnotes in this book contain active hyperlinks. Should you desire to view the original sources (from another device) while reading from this device, just go to the following page at this book’s website:

www.HowTheBookOfMormonCameToPass.com/s/endnotes-index.pdf

There, you can click on the links directly or download the PDF.

e-book_IngramSparkLars NielsenLars Nielsen40572024-03-18T20:12:00Z2024-04-22T20:42:00Z2024-04-22T23:29:00Z263134587767151Aspose6392179989993916.0000

Now, gentle reader, the author who wishes well to thy present and thy future existence entreats thee to peruse this volume with a clear head, a pure heart, and a candid mind. If thou shalt then find that thy head and thy heart are both improved, it will afford him more satisfaction than the approbation of ten thousand who have received no such benefit.

e-book_IngramSparkLars NielsenLars Nielsen40572024-03-18T20:12:00Z2024-04-22T20:42:00Z2024-04-22T23:29:00Z263134587767151Aspose6392179989993916.0000

Chapter 1

The Hierophant’s Tale

Athanasius Kircher, the last man who knew everything,[1] was born in 1601 near Fulda, Germany. As the youngest of nine children, he spent his formative years in relative bliss, fully content with his parents’ expectation that he would one day become a priest. He was, after all, the namesake of St. Athanasius, the same who was exiled to Germany from the Holy See of Alexandria in the fourth century by Constantine. Between 1624 and 1628, Kircher studied theology in Mainz, where he was ordained to the Jesuit order in the Catholic Church (Figure 1). For much of his life, he was employed by the Vatican as a linguist, serving as its Professor of Oriental Languages at Collegio Romano (Figure 2). He was quite famous in his day, publishing more than forty books between 1630 and 1680, largely due to his position as a spanner node at the intersection of the world’s two largest social networks: the Society of Jesus and the more secular Republic of Letters.[2] Most historians today conclude that at the center of his meteoric rise to fame, there was, disappointingly, a categorical lie. At best, he told this lie to get himself out of a serious predicament. At worst, he did not.

Early in his career, Kircher claimed to have found a key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs: the lost manuscripts of Rabbi Barachias Nephi, a source he fabricated. Kircher presented Nephi as if he were a Jewish rabbi, an Egyptian Arab, and a bygone linguist, speaking both Hebrew and Arabic but writing in the language of the Coptic Egyptians. Kircher would sometimes refer to him as Rabbi Nephi, Abba Nephi, Abbe Nephi, Abbenephi (a contraction), Abenephi (a contraction with fewer b’s), and the Latinized Abenephius. For context, Abbe is the Hebrew word for father, and Abbe is to rabbi as father is to priest. Incidentally, all English-speaking Mormons today pronounce Nephi, the first character of The Book of Mormon, as 'NĒ‑fī (rhyming with knee-high). In all likelihood, Kircher probably pronounced it 'NEF‑ē (rhyming with hefty but without the /t/ sound), which is how it is pronounced by Mormons when speaking in a Romance language.

The Vatican quickly promoted Kircher, making him the chair of his department, and charged him with publishing translations of the many obelisks that it had pillaged throughout the centuries, one of which is depicted in Figure 3. Hundreds of such monoliths had been transported to Italy by its emperors and popes, which were subsequently cleansed by exorcism, crowned with crosses or statues of saints, and ornamented with pious descriptions.[3] And they were in desperate need of translation. Were the engraved symbols pagan? Or did they have ancient wisdom waiting to be deciphered? If the latter, then the Jesuits of Rome simply had to be the first to know.

Having put his own feet to the fire, Kircher announced after a short span of four years that he was ready to publish the first of three keys that together would unlock the ancient wisdom that had been preserved in the pyramids of Egypt. Several of his colleagues had posited that Coptic was somehow descended from hieroglyphics, but none could discover precisely how the modern language might have evolved from its predecessor. In Prodromus Coptus, Kircher claimed to have reverse-engineered a forerunner of the Coptic language—with reformed characters somewhere between modern Coptic and ancient hieroglyphs, which he wholly invented (Figure 4). A good example of one of his many reformed characters involves the Coptic letter phi, Φ:

Kircher calls it a symbol of the world, with its two poles. In his subsequent charts of the Coptic alphabet, he always shows this letter, not with a simple vertical line through it but with two intersecting pyramids, implying thereby to have ‘corrected’ the simplified Coptic form of the letter and to have restored the intention of its inventor, [which] is retrospectively attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. … The readers of Prodromus Coptus may not all have grasped the distinction between authentic hieroglyphs and ones invented by Kircher.[4]

To properly understand Kircher’s obsession with the restoration of hieroglyphs, we must go back to one of the founding narratives of Egyptian mythology. Thoth was one of the first deities; he came to life from the lips of Ra and was therefore birthed without a proper mother.[5] He was credited with the invention of hieroglyphic writing, which was thought to be a vehicle for the storage and transmission of not only knowledge and ancient wisdom but also sacred magic. With the head of an ibis, he was also a messenger of Ra, thereby becoming associated with the Greek god Hermes. And because he was sometimes worshipped as Thoth the great, the great, the great, in time, he evolved into the syncretic deity Hermes Trismegistus, whose final appellation means thrice great in Greek. For context, during the Renaissance, Hermeticism pervasively grew into a complex, philosophical, and religious system that purportedly was based upon the pseudepigraphic, sacred, and sealed scripture that was The Book of Thoth. In classic Hermetic tradition, the gift of wisdom (prisca theologia) was the greatest of all the gifts of Thoth, which he would only reveal to the worthiest of sages. Some Jesuits in the 1600s, like Kircher, aspired to become such men through the reconciliation of Hermeticism with Catholicism and by mapping syncretic gods onto biblical patriarchs. Kircher, like many others before him, believed that Thoth should be mapped onto Enoch, whose prophetic book was conspicuously missing from the Bible.

One decade after publishing Prodromus Coptus, Kircher laid down another linguistic stepping stone—just as the general confidence in his ability to translate was starting to wane. In 1643 he produced his second key to unlocking the sacred wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus: Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta. Kircher upheld the publication as a complete translation of his Coptic-Arabic manuscript,[6] which Nephi had supposedly written. As the title declares, it was dedicated to finishing the restoration of the Egyptian language based on his forerunner of Coptic. Much more than a mere revision of his reformed characters, however, it was also the world’s first pretended Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL), which one might call the Kircher Egyptian Papers (KEP). The word hieroglyphs, incidentally, is a Greek compound word that means sacred carvings. One decade after publishing his GAEL, Kircher produced his three-volume magnum opus, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, in which he boasted that he had finally solved the riddle of the Sphinx—an analogy he used to describe his accomplishments in the field of linguistics (Figure 5). This third key together with the other two promised to be a complete ‘restoration of the hieroglyphic doctrine,’ [and of] all the lost secrets of religion.[7] It was Kircher’s greatest desire to discover the untold religious history of the world, to translate the forgotten stories from lost manuscripts found, and to reveal the prisca theologia of the true Hermes Trismegistus. But Kircher could not claim The Book of Thoth so easily. Unfortunately, he never realized that ancient Egyptian was almost purely phonetic, not ideographic, rendering all his translations—if that’s what we want to call them—semantically and syntactically useless. Among the most entertaining, flowery, and fanciful translations were the ones that he gave for certain obelisks, in which he sometimes generated long sentences (and even entire paragraphs) from a single character. Compare and contrast, for example, the accurate, seventeen-word translation of the Celian obelisk with the 203 words that Kircher provided (Figure 6). Most modern historians agree with Frank Manuel that Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus was "one of the most learned monstrosities of all time" (italics added).[8]

But Kircher’s ambition as a linguist did not stop with ancient Egyptian. According to many sources, he was proficient (but not fluent) in many languages beyond his native German: Arabic, Chaldean (biblical Aramaic), Coptic, French, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Samaritan, Spanish, and Syriac. The loftiest goal of his career, however, was to reconstruct the Adamic language, which God himself supposedly spoke to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. Taking the biblical story of the Tower of Babel literally rather than etiologically, Kircher, like most of the Jesuits in his day, believed that God had disguised and confused[9] the primordial mother tongue by scattering pieces of it into a plethora of new, mutually incompatible languages—and this as punishment for Nimrod’s pride in thinking that he could build his way to heaven. In his final book, Turris Babel, which was published in 1679 (the year before he died), Kircher claimed to trace all tongues to the Tower of Babel, generating humanity’s first complete linguistic family tree and depicting characters from which all the alphabets of languages are clearly drawn[10] (Figure 7). According to Kircher, the true but untold religious history of the Aztecs was fundamentally Christian but with Egyptian roots. After devot[ing] himself to the study of Mexican gods and codices kept in the Jesuit collections at the Collegio Romano,[11] Kircher boasted that Catholic missionaries in Asia and America had "rediscovered the message of Christianity in the ‘hieroglyphic’ writings of the Chinese and the Aztecs" (italics added).[12] The following excerpt explains how, according to Kircher, all hieroglyphic writings connected back to the Garden of Eden:

Ancient wisdom, revealed to Adam and the other patriarchs, had inspired the rulers of Egypt before the Flood [to form] a lineage of erudite and powerful natural magicians. The original Hermes, who lived in their time, built the first pyramids, which were leveled by the Flood. But a cult of black magic and idolatry, created by Cain, had superseded the true Adamic tradition. After the Flood, Ham, Noah’s evil son, combined the two traditions into a corrupt form of the ancient philosophy, which he taught to his children. They took it with them into the nations they founded. Centuries later, in the age of Abraham, a second Hermes recovered the fragments of the true ancient religion. He invented a new form of writing, the hieroglyphs, with which he hoped to preserve the ancient wisdom while keeping ordinary, ignorant people from profaning it further. And he devised the obelisk as a durable, practical medium on which he inscribed them (italics added).[13]

It is now abundantly clear that the actual function of obelisks was to mark temple and burial sites with proper names and titles. They were not durable, practical vehicles for hiding in plain sight ancient wisdom and Adamic magic. It is true that in Egyptian mythology, obelisks did have a spiritual significance as petrified rays from the Sun Disk of Ra, which is why some were capped with a gilded pyramidion and were sometimes called the needles of Pharaoh.[14] Kircher once quoted Nephi saying: The king of Egypt in those days erected many needles of Pharaoh, that is, obelisks. The religious king followed suit and fell into these divine mysteries, ordering the priests to note down whatever they found in the sacred books.[15] Notwithstanding, the earliest natural (and even spiritual) history of humankind is nothing like the Hermetic, Kabbalistic, and occult lore that Kircher had preserved in his writings. But that didn’t stop him—or the French Jesuits especially—from trying to trace the secret combinations of Royal Arch Masonry to both the Temple of Solomon and the pyramids of Egypt. Such attempts to reconcile Hermeticism with Christianity and the Kabbalah (a movement that today is called Western esotericism) permeated much of 17th-century Europe. Vestiges of such thinking persist to some extent today—even on the one-dollar bill.

It may not be all that surprising then to discover that Kircher was a staunch believer in magic; in his day, the concept of magic significantly overlapped with Jesuit beliefs without being too heretical. Magician was a title that he embraced and never repudiated. That said, his relationship with magic was quite distinct from how it is cinematically portrayed today and is summed up well by someone that Kircher had looked up to, Giambattista della Porta, who in 1558 wrote Magia Naturalis. Therein, he defined the term as follows:

Magick is nothing else but the survey of the whole course of Nature. For, whilst we consider the heavens, the stars, the elements, how they are moved, and how they are changed, by this means we find out the hidden secrecies of living creatures, of plants, of metals, and of their generation and corruption. … This art, I say, is full of much virtue, of many secret mysteries; it openeth unto us the properties and qualities of hidden things … and it teacheth us by the agreement and disagreement of things, either so to sunder them, or else to lay them so together. … Thereby we do strange works, [which] the vulgar sort call miracles. The works of Magick are nothing else but the works of Nature, whose dutiful handmaid Magick is.[16]

This semi-apologetic definition of magic allowed Kircher to function in both academic and religion-adjacent spaces. That is not to say that Kircher wasn’t a serious researcher in several disciplines—in some fields, he was even a mildly scientific one. Though the Scientific Revolution was well underway by most definitions, the Age of Enlightenment was still several decades away from earning its sister sobriquet: the Age of Reason. Acknowledging the problems with presentism, some have argued that we should resist the temptation to judge Kircher too harshly using today’s standards of naturalism, ethics, and scholarship.[17] Stolzenberg, for example, manages to hold the difficult balance of reading Kircher [as] neither a vainglorious charlatan nor a pioneering scholar.[18] He does concede, however, that the mysterious manuscript by Barachias Nephi was little more than Kircher’s ticket into the Republic of Letters and a repository of quotes too good to be true (or, alternatively, in Arabic, too poor to be real).[19] Citing Marracci, Veyssiere, and Glasson, he posits that the many orthographic blunders in Nephi’s quotations are further evidence that Kircher invented them: "Several readers of Egyptian Oedipus have observed that the Arabic in many of the Abenephius quotations is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, leading them to suspect that they were forged by someone lacking full command of the language."[20]

We certainly can admire the relentless zeal, ebullient energy, and magical quality that Kircher put into all of his projects, despite how misapplied they might have been. But there is no reasonable doubt about whether he actually translated ancient or reformed Egyptian using the writings of Nephi. "Where Kircher lacked hard facts, as with his highly fanciful ‘translations’ of hieroglyphics, he simply made them up. Sometimes he invented whole sources. The mysterious manuscript of Barachias Nephi, a supposed ancient Babylonian rabbi, [which] Kircher drew on for his mammoth occult compendium, Egyptian Oedipus, was full of statements that ‘support his own arguments so perfectly [that] it is believed [that] Kircher wrote many of them himself.’"[21] It is not an exaggeration to say that Barachias Nephi, though possibly imaginary, made Kircher’s career.[22]

Though ultimately destined to fail, Kircher’s categorical lie would garner him almost three decades of unchecked fame and notoriety. But all the shine of a thousand spotlights, so to speak, would never be enough for him. Desperate to be the Leonardo da Vinci of his day, he was also a prolific inventor. In his doctoral thesis, Ars Magnesia, Kircher concluded that spiritual forces, electric forces, and magnetic forces were three manifestations of the same phenomenon, for which he earned the title Sacrae Theologiae Doctor—with the memorable postnominal S.T.D. It would seem that he even coined the term electromagnetism, which is ubiquitously used today. For Kircher, magnetism was both an indication and a radiation of spiritual energy, which could vary from day to day as a function of personal righteousness. He even concluded that spiritual electromagnetism was the mechanism by which the apostle Peter repelled Earth’s magnetic field and thus was able to walk on water—that is, until his faith wavered. To further demonstrate his (rather forced) pseudoscientific principle, he produced hundreds of balls of curious workmanship, which he displayed in his Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Wonders, and later on the colossal shelves of his Museo Kircheriano (Figure 8).

Many of these spiritually magnetic inventions were round balls made of glass and brass, having pointers, spindles, and writing on their sides. According to Joscelyn Godwin:

Glass globes contain Kircher’s favourite device of magnetized pointing figures, which rotate, as though by magic, but actually because a magnet is turning the column beneath them. … Once he had found that a figure suspended inside a glass globe could be turned by an unseen magnet, the stage magician in him took over."[23]

In the following figures, various exhibits from Kircher’s museum are discussed in minute detail (Figures 9–15). All of them showcase his favorite devices, sometimes presenting them as if they were spiritually magnetic compasses. Because Nephi’s use of a spiritually magnetic compass in The Book of Mormon is a major plot-driving element, the features communicated in Figures 9–15 are most salient; such elements should be kept in mind when evaluating various authorship theories for how The Book of Mormon came to pass. Refer to Godwin’s Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World for more detailed information.[24] Here are the links for Figure 9 (Machina Magnetica), Figure 10 (The Magnetic Oracle), Figure 11 (A Magician’s Stage), Figure 12 (A Magnetic Epicyclic Disk), Figure 13 (The Magnetic Horoscope), Figure 14 (The Archimedes Sphere), and Figure 15 (An Allegorical Compass).

For three decades, thousands of dignitaries, high-net-worth individuals, top-flight military leaders, and influential politicians would pay handsomely to be entertained by Kircher’s exhibits. Consequently, his museum was sometimes more suitably called a theatre:

It was a place where his collection was shown and demonstrated to the courtly visitors; it was a ‘tourist attraction’ for those visiting Rome, and many prominent figures from all over the world were lured into paying Kircher a visit. Even the instruments with a practical utility were now embedded in a context of Baroque spectacle, in which natural objects, artifacts, texts, and images were employed for the divertissement of the public. Kircher even staged real shows, which were so amazing that he was sometimes accused of sorcery. … Kircher characterized his magical instruments as serving both entertainment and utilitarian purposes.[25]

And Kircher loved to playfully interact with those who splurged for his VIP tours. And at this next exhibit, Kircher would say, we have a round ball made of fine brass that can forecast the weather. Looks like rain. Did anyone bring an umbrella? No? See for yourself. And then while his special guests were all huddled around an orb with spindles spinning among various weather forecasts that were etched into the surface of the globe, Kircher would go behind a curtain and turn a hidden lever that would, as if from fire sprinklers, drizzle them all with water. Like all magicians at heart, Kircher was willing to suffer the sin of a little misdirection because it was more than offset by a positive teaching moment and because it thrilled him to see strangers pour their attention into his objects, which admiration, of course, would then flow through to the man in front of the cape—or ferraiolo, as it were. In many ways, Kircher was the first and archetypal Wizard of Oz. He even displayed what he claimed was an actual brick from the Tower of Babel, which was situated not far from the tailbone of a mermaid.[26] His brick was not yellow-gold, but as long as his exhibits were lining the pockets of enough cardinals, the pressure was off revealing the lost manuscript of Nephi that he said he had found.

Fabius Chisius, who later changed his name to Pope Alexander VII, was Kircher’s chief supporter and could not have been more pleased (Figure 16). Historians have criticized Fabius for pandering to the Jesuits during his papacy and for fixating on the renovation of Vatican City rather than focusing on its mandate to feed the poor and clothe the naked. On his deathbed, Fabius defended his appropriation of Peter’s Pence by saying: We have employed the moneys of the apostolic chamber solely in the service of the Catholic religion, and the embellishment of [Vatican City], and the building of churches.[27] By way of background, Fabius had met Kircher for the first time on a trip to Malta in 1637, long before either of them came into serious power. It was on this expedition that Kircher famously lowered himself (with nothing but a rope around his waist) into Mount Vesuvius, which only six years earlier had erupted and buried an entire village. Whether such acts were indicative of a dormant daredevil personality or desperate attempts to get people to subscribe to his books is hard to say. Regardless, in social media terms, he was the quintessential influencer of his century. One might say that he totes understood the assignment, got the W, and became the main character; all glown up, his followers smashed the like button and busted his DMs no cap. In other words, Kircher proved to the world that he would do anything, including putting his own life at risk, to get to the truth for his subscribers, which rapidly inflated his popularity and dramatically increased his international correspondence.

The great René Descartes, however, refused to read Kircher’s (sus) collection of books on principle, calling him more charlatan than scholar and more quacksalver than savant.[28] In the modern era, some scholars have gone so far as to call him a dilettante and a wondermonger.[29] Though many of Kircher’s publications, inventions, and exhibits were genuinely interesting (and much revered early in his career), by the end of his life, his pseudoscientific theories on several topics were viciously mocked by his scientific betters. [H]is beliefs, at least about spontaneous generation, were rather humiliatingly debunked in 1668 by a physician in the Medici court named Francesco Redi, who referred to Kircher somewhat patronizingly as ‘a man of worthy esteem,’ but to whom it had never occurred to regulate himself by putting a lid, as it were, on his [own] container.[30] C. Clifford Dobell, a leading biologist, later reflected on Kircher’s rationalization for the bubonic plague and his mildly misogynistic theory of universal sperm, calling them "a farrago of nonsensical speculation [coming from] a man possessed of neither scientific acumen nor medical instinct."[31] John E. Fletcher’s characterization of the quixotic Jesuit sums him up nicely:

In the year 1652, Marcaurelio Severini, professor of anatomy in Naples … found in [Kircher] "a resuscitated Pythagoras, an immortal encyclopaedist," his scholarly effulgence comparable to that of a newly discovered moon … a man who on occasion deserved, more than most, extravagant praise … "easily the Phoenix amongst the learned men of this century." …

He became the black-robed oracle of Rome, confidant of popes and emperors, correspondent of the leading scholars and minds of Europe and the world. … Visitors to the Emerald Eternal City seldom left without attempting to see Father Kircher. …

In him, we can find an intellect of width and depth, given to flashes of lucid perception of scientific truth. In contrast to this, we note, too, a deep-rooted and childlike belief in the arcane and the miraculous, an uncomplicated acceptance of the written word, [and] an often-unswerving adherence to the tradition of orthodox scholasticism (italics added).[32]

Inside and outside of the museum, Kircher was a faith-promoting storyteller, committing some acts of academic dishonesty and public deception for his own ambitious and religious reasons. He did have something impressive (sounding) to say on nearly every topic, ranging from magnetism to volcanology to ethnomusicology. He mostly wrote in Latin—the preferred international language of both his social networks; however, selective publications were abridged and translated into several languages, including Dutch, English, and French. He immortalized his conjectures through thousands of manuscripts and letters, corresponding with at least 686 individuals during his lifetime,[33] 457 of whom were Jesuits, bishops, cardinals, popes, and nuns. He also produced dozens of beautifully illustrated pamphlets as well as forty-four very expensive books.[34] One of his largest published works was a second treatise on electromagnetism (also called The Art of Magnetics), which came in at a whopping 916 pages, replete with highly detailed engravings.

A short digression on Kircher’s printing process will be helpful context for later. First, he would sketch out his ideas, drawings, maps, inventions, grammars, tables, specimens, narratives, and visions with his own hand upon parchment. These were soon handed over to artists, who would then embellish them with ornate Catholic symbology. Kircher would then ship that work product to Amsterdam, where woodcutters would carve the illustrations into blocks, which would finally get handed off to the engravers, who, using various techniques, would produce mirror images of the carved wood on the surface of metallic plates (Figure 17). Pure copper printing plates were brown, like a penny, but would oxidize when repeatedly exposed to both air and iron-gall ink, forming a greenish patina—think of the Statue of Liberty—just quickly enough to become a nuisance for the printers. In contrast, alloying molten copper with 10–15% zinc significantly slowed this oxidation process and bestowed the plates with a reddish hue, which is sometimes called red brass (but more often, just brass). Some of the plates were alloyed with enough zinc (between twenty and thirty percent) that they had a lustrous yellow color. Golden plates were a higher-cost line item in the printing process compared to rudimentary brass plates because zinc ores were harder to find, mine, and smelt in those days; consequently, they were reserved for more precious, larger-volume productions.

Kircher used donations and sponsorships from the elite of the world to finance his publications, which routinely incorporated flattering dedications and engraved images of his wealthy patrons. Next to Fabius Chisius, six of his most notable and generous supporters included Charles II of Spain, Emperor Leopold I of Hungary, Pope Clement X, Pope Innocent X, Emperor Ferdinand III of Croatia, and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm von Habsburg of Austria—each of whom was carefully etched onto his own golden plate (Figure 18). During his lifetime, Kircher commissioned over four hundred golden plates, more than any other author in history. He often went through foreign engravers and publishers, with whom the quality was higher, throughput was faster, and the papal red tape was not so long. Kircher was still required, however, to submit all his publications to the Vatican’s vast and centralized system of ecclesiastical censorship[35] before they could be printed, which correlation department, so to speak, sometimes gave him trouble enough. His favorite publisher was the Dutch merchant Johann Jansson, to whom he gave the moniker Janssonius. On many topics, Kircher was a one-man intellectual clearinghouse for the Catholic church. Missionaries would feed him interesting information and answer his questions through letters, the findings of which Kircher would consolidate, embellish, and publish as quickly as he could. He then used Jansson and his connections to merchant fleets to distribute his compilations back into both of his social networks, thereby fueling the demand for more publications while simultaneously tapping his suppliers for more information. As a result, for about two decades the Earth was flooded with Kircher’s translations, abridgments, and fact-like speculations.

Of course, no brass or golden plates date anywhere near as far back as 600 BCE (an important date in the context of The Book of Mormon). However, during Kircher’s lifetime, he and his fellow Jesuits believed that some metallic tablets—which are different (but not so different) from plates—went all the way back to the Tower of Babel and even to just after the global flood of Noah, which many scientific disciplines conclude never happened. In fact, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew to Pope Urban VIII, once asked Kircher to translate a tablet that Cardinal Pietro Bembo had acquired, which is now called the Bembine Tablet, or the Bembine Table of Isis (Figure 19). Both Barberini and Kircher presumed that the tablet was antediluvian, made of brass, and written by the world’s first hieromancers. Modern analysis, however, has deduced that the Bembine Tablet is not of Egyptian origin, nor was it made of brass. Rather, it was cast in bronze and is nothing more than a Roman grotesque from the first century CE. The characters thereon are not faithful engravings at all; the whole assembly was probably nothing more than an ignorant knock-off commissioned by some wealthy socialite, who just had to have it as part of his estate. Its designer had evidently chosen to fill up the space with pseudo-hieroglyphs to make it appear more ornate and complete.[36] Tellingly to us, Kircher could not glean whether he was looking at anciently carved hieroglyphs, faithful reproductions of originals, or opportunistic forgeries.

Although Kircher’s translation and explanation of the Bembine Tablet were woefully inaccurate, they do provide valuable insights into his beliefs about Egyptian priests, occult symbols, theurgic magic, and the philosophy of sacrifice, according to Manly P. Hall.[37] From Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Kircher writes:

The early priests believed that a great spiritual power was invoked by correct and unabridged sacrificial ceremonies. If one feature were lacking, the whole was vitiated, says Iamblichus. Hence, they were most careful in all details, for they considered it absolutely essential for the entire chain of logical connections to be exactly according to ritual. Certainly, for no other reason did they prepare and prescribe for future use the manuals, as it were, for conducting the rites. They learned, too, what the first hieromancers [had] devised as a system of symbolism for exhibiting their mysteries. These they placed in this Tablet of Isis, before the eyes of those admitted to the sanctum sanctorum, in order to teach the nature of the Gods and the prescribed forms of sacrifice. Since each of the orders of Gods had its own peculiar symbols, gestures, costumes, and ornaments, they thought it necessary to observe these in the whole apparatus of worship, as nothing was more efficacious in drawing the benign attention of the deities and genii.[38]

In 2013 Stanford professor and renowned Kircher expert Paula Findlen posed the following question: How did a man who got so many things wrong become an intellectual celebrity in his own lifetime?[39] At the age of ten, Kircher’s father sent him to the Papal Seminary in Fulda where he learned Hebrew outside of his normal coursework and mostly on his own, supplementing his learning with the tutelage of a rabbi. At seventeen, he decided to join the Jesuits in Paderborn. Unfortunately, the Thirty Years’ War had just begun, and in Kircher’s generation, Jesuits, ‘die Gottlos Sect’ [the godless sect], were universally hated, feared, and despised.[40] When Kircher was nineteen years old, one particularly boisterous German-Protestant military leader, Bishop Christian the Younger of Brunswick, pillaged a great treasure from the dioceses of Münster and Paderborn,[41] which he then used to seek out and systematically torture Jesuit priests and nuns. In a matter of weeks, this same bishop invaded the city and Jesuit College, ravaging two monasteries of nuns and friars; he caused diverse feather beds to be ripped, and all the feathers thrown into a great hall, whither the nuns and friars were thrust naked with their bodies oiled and pitched and to tumble among these feathers.[42] The surviving Jesuits rather hurriedly "fled to Hildesheim, Münster, and Cologne. Five of the older priests decided to remain in Paderborn and were never heard of again. Thus, Kircher found himself in a serious predicament" (emphasis added).[43]

He eventually managed to relocate to a Jesuit College in Mainz where he was ordained in 1628. However, persecutions continued to rage, mobs continued to combine, and armies continued to assemble, so Kircher sought refuge in Speier, Würzburg, Speier again, and Mainz again before fleeing Germany forever. During this period of intense turmoil and dislocation, Kircher submitted his mission papers, hoping to be sent somewhere safer (and more exotic) in the mission field—perhaps to China or Egypt. Whether Kircher really could see himself preaching in the diaspora we cannot know; regardless, his request was denied on account of not knowing how to speak the relevant languages, which rejection may have planted an idea in his mind. At about the same time or perhaps months earlier (historians disagree on the exact timing of these things), Kircher might have come across both an unnamed treatise on Egyptian obelisks and maybe a lost manuscript written by a mysterious Arabian rabbi who had never been mentioned, referenced, nor seen by anyone else—not in any culture, nor any history. This chance discovery, if we are to believe Kircher’s own account, became a turning point in the young priest’s life, and gave the impetus for the dedicated years of toil that Kircher was to devote to the exposition and deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs.[44]

Recall that by 1632, Kircher claimed to have discovered the first key to restoring reformed Egyptian based on clues within the manuscript of Rabbi Barachias Nephi. Precisely how his precious manuscript—if indeed it ever truly existed—could have ended up in Mainz Kircher never explained, and no one ever asked. To be fair, his contemporaries probably believed him on account of the original 42-line Gutenberg Bible having been published there some 175 years before. In addition, some ancient documents were rumored to have been stored in the stacks of its underground library before it was ransacked and damaged by fire. When Claude Fabri de Peiresc, an influential linguist and scholar from Aix, heard through the grapevine that Kircher had come to possess such an interesting manuscript and had acquired such unprecedented skill in such a short amount of time, he pulled several strings and made the necessary donations so that Kircher would be transferred to Rome. And that is how both the Vatican and Kircher got what they each had desperately wanted: to fill the position of chief obelisk consultant. From that point on, however, Kircher had no choice but to make both Nephi and his manuscript real. It is apparent that most of his credulous comrades just believed him when he asserted that God had put the manuscript legitimately into his hands. After all, he was a self-effacing, poverty-embracing, stereotypically-Jesuit priest—in Rome of all places. Why would he lie about something like that? Notwithstanding, throughout his life, it became increasingly difficult for him to contain and maintain his prevarication. He may have even gone so far as to fabricate his own Nephi manuscript—in the event that he might someday be called on the cardinals’ carpet.

Though Nephi started out as a convenient figment of Kircher’s imagination, in time, Kircher transformed him, consciously or perhaps subconsciously, into something like unto a benefic polymorphous Agathodaemon, a noble Osirian spirit sent to accompany him on his life’s mission. Kircher frequently used the term daemon in his writings—not with any dastardly denotation but with the same connotation that appears in Hellenistic philosophies, where a daemon is akin to an angel or, even better, a guardian spirit. Alas, Nephi never actually existed as a physical person, but the idea of an Egyptian Jew having records that no one else had was the only card in Kircher’s hand; rather than die in the perilous war zone where Jesuits like him were being tarred, feathered, and killed, he decided to play what he had been dealt. At the beginning, it was about maintaining his livelihood and position in Rome, where all the intellectual action was. But somewhere down the road, rather than maintain the cognitive dissonance, his capacious brain decided to oblige his crowded mind—selectively replacing facts with fiction. When it came time to write his autobiography, one could reasonably conclude that he intentionally resolved to whitewash his questionable past; however, it might be more accurate to say that he ultimately suffered from dream-reality confusion. His vision-containing, authority-granting, revisionist history might have done something to redeem his reputation in some circles, but in the end, it did nothing to cushion the case he was making for his own beatification. When it came to the myriad of miracle stories of his youth (surviving a life-threatening leg infection, living through a shipwreck, being washed down a river, escaping the plague, not being trampled by horses, and passing through the grinding wheel of a mill unharmed), Kircher might have made a lot of that up. Some of his biographers have speculated that he secretly hoped for eventual sainthood, and pointed out that a life littered with miracles was an important prerequisite.[45]

According to John Glassie, Kircher was a noble seeker stranded on the wrong side of the Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton may be hailed a founder of modern science, while Kircher is now ‘something of a joke.’[46] During the last few years of his life, Kircher lived as an academic recluse, still associated with (but marginalized by) the institution that for more than half a lifetime had provided him with his bread and keep. As the multitudes slowly apprehended the scope of his prolific misconceptions and profuse mistranslations, they neither cried out with outrage nor executed mob justice. They mostly just left him alone and to his own devices—including the dusty ones that tourists had stopped coming to see. His museum was a delicate exotic fruit touched by too many hands, and the bloom was gone. Its once colossal shelves fell into decay—bald and bare. Over the last three or four months of his life, his body, too, wasted away. His ears gave out first, then his eyes, and then his memories. He let out his last breath, mumbling more gibberish about who knows what. But one imagines it had something to do with the long-lost manuscript of Nephi that he never actually found.

His passing was, in some ways, the last step to completing the Scientific Revolution, the end of which some prefer to mark with the 1632 publication of Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo [Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems]. Others put it in 1687 when Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica [Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy]. Kircher was just starting to blossom in 1632 and was intimately connected to the Inquisition, which relegated Galileo to house arrest in Florence for the rest of his life. And Kircher died in 1680, just as Newton started writing his masterpiece. Given his meteoric rise and precipitous descent at precisely these goalposts, it would be more fitting (and poetic) for historians to peg the last day of the Scientific Revolution to the day that Kircher permanently quit the Republic of Letters, which was November 7, 1680.

The celebrated Roman sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini happened to die within twenty-four hours of Kircher’s passing. The Eternal City of Rome had to choose between two funerals. Hardly anyone went to one of them.[47] In the following weeks, the Jesuits of Kircher’s order searched high and low through his personal effects and all the places where his manuscripts might have been kept, but they never found anything that resembled the lost manuscript of Nephi—at least, not that we know of. Or if they did, they probably recognized it for the forgery and fraud it would have been, and so, did what many a religion would do under the circumstances: tuck it safely away into the Apostolic Archives—presumably somewhere near the documents about Galileo’s trial, which only recently, under intense pressure, have finally come to light. In the years after his death, Kircher’s most senior disciple, Kaspar Schott, whose new name was Gaspar Schottus, managed to maintain a small cult following for a little while, though hardly any of Kircher’s earliest supporters stood by him through to the end of his life. That said, none of them ever denied that he was inspired to bring about the marvelous works and wonders that have made him one of history’s most celebrated and then forgotten linguists. Next to his once-gargantuan, statuesque figure, where his fervid fans once stood, now lone and level sands stretch far away.

Kircher certainly started out with a big bang, expanding his fame with a four-decade period of steady inflation. He knew that what he did was wrong, but because he drank from his own holy water, in time he forgot about the poisonous lie with which he had laced it—the one that simultaneously launched his captivating career and punched his ticket into the Republic of Letters. He dismissed his naysayers as jealous persecutors and protectively surrounded himself with the few adoring acolytes who did his bidding best. And so, the process by which Kircher grew his power and gave way to corruption was as gradual and predictable as it was absolute. The unforgiving tests of time caught up with him at last, ending not in another bang, but in a whimper. Most of what he claimed or implied was his original contribution, has been stripped by objective historians, who have shifted the credit back to where it belongs. Kircher is not now considered to have made any significant original contributions … [though some of the] discoveries and inventions (e.g., the magic lantern) have sometimes been mistakenly attributed to him.[48] Even his doctoral thesis, his very first publication on spiritual electromagnetism, appears to have been, at best, an opportunistic rewriting; at worst, it was outright plagiarism.[49] Over the years, Kircher’s name was consigned to the ignominious status of a footnote in the history of science. As interest in the reconciliation of scientific and spiritual models of the universe has revived in [the postmodern era], however, Kircher’s name has regained currency and his contributions have begun to be reassessed.[50] As the year 2002 approached, which was to be the four hundredth anniversary of Kircher’s birth, professors throughout academia started dusting off his books, artifacts, and queer inventions, including the cat piano (Figure 20)[51] and the sunflower clock (Figure 21). Kircher’s curiosities were subsequently showcased in a smattering of conferences and exhibitions.[52] Then, in 2002 itself, the general interest in Kircher’s life and works surged for a news cycle or two—maybe for the last time. Love him or hate him, there is something surreal to celebrate about the daemon-hounded man who lived in a demon-haunted world.

Perhaps Kircher’s greatest contribution to society was the cautionary tale that his life would become. Honest-in-heart professors, for almost a hundred years, would start admonishing their budding students to stop Kircherizing their conclusions. Extraordinary claims would start requiring extraordinary evidence. Appeals to authority, like sacred manuscripts—seen or unseen—would no longer be acceptable premises in deductive arguments or in scientific journals. Anecdotes and faith-promoting stories were out; well-controlled experiments were in. Reproducibility and full peer review—before publication—slowly became the new minimum standard. Gone were the days when a