The Goddess: Her Names and Symbols (Kircher’s Isis)

This engraved plate from Athanasius Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus depicts Isis as the universal mother goddess, surrounded by lettered emblems and a table of the many names under which ancient peoples were said to have worshipped her. Kircher, a German Jesuit polymath based at the Collegio Romano in Rome, built the image around a famous passage from Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Book 11), in which the goddess appears to the hero Lucius and declares that the Phrygians, Athenians, Cypriots, Cretans, Sicilians and Egyptians all honour her under different titles: Mother of the Gods, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Proserpina, Ceres, Juno, Hecate and finally, by her true name, Queen Isis. The plate turns that speech into a visual inventory. Each attribute of the figure, from her crown and lunar disc to her sistrum, ears of grain and the garments of many colours, is keyed to a Latin explanation interpreting it as a sign of nature’s powers. The image exemplifies Kircher’s conviction that Egyptian religion encoded a primordial theology, partly preserved in the Hermetic writings, which pagans had fragmented into many gods but which anticipated Christian truths. Modern historians treat his Egyptology as mistaken, since he could not read hieroglyphs, yet the plate remains a celebrated document of the Baroque fascination with Egypt and of the long afterlife of Isis as a symbol of nature and hidden wisdom in later esotericism.

What it contains

• Engraved figure of Isis as Magna Mater with lettered attributes
• Table of her names among different peoples, after Apuleius
• Latin key explaining each symbol (crown, moon, sistrum, grain and others)
• An English rendering of Apuleius’s self-revelation of the goddess