Hepburn’s Alphabets

A post at metafilter a few weeks back about the 17th-Century Jesuit savant Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) prompted me to order the book about him published last year: Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything; a collection of essays touching on various aspects of the prolific scholar’s life and work. One of the pieces therein, by Daniel Stolzenberg, describes Kircher’s presentation of the Kabbalah, the subject of an 150-page section in Oedipus Aegypticus, his 3-part treatise on the mysteries of Egyptian hieroglyphs (1652-5). Kircher’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the Kabbalah is summarised, writes Stolzenberg, in an elaborate diagram displaying the seventy-two names of God.

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Among the influences behind this diagram, Stolzenberg suggests, was a curious engraving published by a Scottish scholar named James Bonaventure Hepburn, in Rome, in 1616, ‘This broadside […] contains an engraving of the Virgin Mary inside a stylized, radiating sun, beneath which are displayed seventy-two alphabets, many of a fanciful or magical nature.’ The engraving was entitled Schema Septuaginta Duorum Idiomatum, sive Virga Aurea—quia Beata Virgo dicitur tot annis in vivis fuisse; et ille numerus discipulorum est Christi, et Romanae Ecclesiae cardinalium, et tot mysteria in nominee Dei (‘The Heavenly Golden Rod of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Seventy-two Praises’), or Virga Aurea for short.

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Besides Latin, and several varieties each of Greek, Hebrew and Arabic, Hepburn includes such alphabets as Etruscan, Assyrian, Armenian, Gothic, Scythian, Scottish, Hibernian, Coptic and Chaldaic, although with what degree of verisimilitude, I couldn’t say. There are also some impressively unconventional character-sets such as the Mystical, the Noachic, the Adamean, the Solomonic, the Mosaic, the Seraphic, the Angelical, and the Supercelestial… The present images show a selection of these alphabets, as cut from these images of the Virga Aurea I found at this French site.