Zoroaster’s Egg

The ‘Ovum Zoroastraeum’ is a diagram and short commentary from Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus, appearing within his discussion of the Barberini obelisk in Rome. Kircher took his starting point from Plutarch’s account, in On Isis and Osiris, of the Persian dualist myth: Oromazes, the good principle, created twenty-four gods and placed them in an egg, while Areimanios, the evil principle, made an equal number who pierced the egg, so that good and evil became mixed in the world. Kircher reads the egg as an image of the cosmos and links its forty-eight divinities to forty-eight genii he believed were represented, twelve to a side, on the four faces of the Egyptian obelisk, and to the stations of the gods in his reconstruction of Egyptian astrology. In his interpretation, the obelisk’s hieroglyphs described a many-formed deity with its ministering spirits, and implied the sacrifices, amulets and invocations by which ancient priests sought to attract their influence. Kircher repeatedly warns that such material belongs to demonic magic and that he explains it only so that it cannot mislead. The plate is a good example of his method of comparative mythology, which fused Greek reports about Persia and Egypt, astrology and Christian apologetics into a single ‘hieroglyphic’ system. Its image of a world-egg containing opposed spiritual powers was later reused in occult and theosophical literature on cosmic dualism.

What it contains

• Engraving of the cosmic egg with the gods of the two principles
• Plutarch’s account of Oromazes and Areimanios
• Kircher’s link between the egg’s forty-eight gods and the Barberini obelisk
• Interpretation of the obelisk as a record of genii and talismanic rites
• Cautionary remarks on demonic magic