Egyptian OedipusA contemporary of Descartes and Newton, Athanasius Kircher, S. J. (1601 280), was one of Europes most inventive and versatile scholars in the baroque era. He published more than thirty works in fields as diverse as astronomy, magnetism, cryptology, numerology, geology, and music. But Kircher is most famousor infamousfor his quixotic attempt to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs and reconstruct the ancient traditions they encoded. In 1655, after more