Manufacturer’s note on Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus (trans: Oedipus of Egypt; or theater of hieroglyphs, a new and hitherto untouched interpretation of obelisks and hieroglyphs, which hitherto remained in Egypt, Rome, or in more outstanding European museums — explained to their physical, figurative, mystic, historical, cabalistical, hermetical, sophistical, theosophical, understanding; demonstrated from all oriental doctrine and wisdom), Vol. 1, 1652: Hieroglyphs are everything, he might say, hieroglyphs are ideas. Hieroglyphs are ideas, he might say, ideas are everything. Hieroglyphs are everything, that is, except words — except phonetics and accents and language. Because — he might tell you — they can’t be both. So his translations weren’t translations at all: they were transformations. He didn’t just move words across languages; he changed meanings, made meanings of his own. He mocked the process of simple translation, and that is why all of his are considered incorrect. He knew exactly what he was doing, collapsing figure into figurative, transforming “dd Wsr” into “The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis, nature’s moisture is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis” without ever stopping at what it said (“Osiris says”). He must have thought the Egyptians had so few ideas, repeating birds and cats and jackals, sometimes changing the order but keeping the pictures the same. Later, Kircher was instrumental in building obelisks in European cities. Often he would carve his own hieroglyphs into the stone. To this day scholars cannot translate what his symbols mean. Perhaps because he wasn’t using words, perhaps because hieroglyphs are everything else. Everything physical, figurative, mystic, historical, cabalistical, hermetical, sophistical, theosophical — everything but understanding, that is.