Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 4	[1992 January 2]
----------------------------------------

Athanasius Kircher, SJ, is a guy I've stumbled across several
times.  He was a most inquisitive and scholarly person, whose
influence on later times has been small.

Anyway, he was born in 1601, ordained in 1628, and soon thereafter
fled Germany and its troubles.  After a brief stay in Avignon, he
settled in Rome in 1634, and died there in 1680, leaving his library
as the nucleus of a museum (but not, it seems, the Voynich MS).

There are perhaps two other things of interest.  First, he was a
secret student of alchemy.  He contributed to the scholium on the
Tractatus aureus, and I'm currently going through that work again
looking for clues.  His Latin translation of the Emerald Tablet
(Hermetis trismegisti tabula smaragdina...) is the one used by
most western alchemists; I'll gladly type in my copy but fear it
is not relevant.

What may be relevant, though, is that Kircher also tried to
decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic script.  He was the first
to conjecture (correctly) that Coptic, the liturgical language
of the Egyptian Church, was derived from ancient Egyptian. He
worked for a long time on puzzling out the script.  However,
later in life, he suddenly announced that he had discovered
the "key" to the hieroglyphs, and began to publish his own
translations, all of which, alas, were nonsense.  I still
have to check the dates, but it just might be that he thought
the Voynich MS in some way provided that key.

[Note: totally wrong, as a little actual work would have told
me.  First, the dates are wrong; Kircher had published his
Oedipus Aegyptiacus in 1652, before he saw the Voynich manuscript.
Secondly, Marci actually alludes to Kircher's decipherment
in his letter.]