The Man Who Translated Everything Wrong

Athanasius Kircher published forty books. He described the mechanics of volcanoes, proposed that disease was caused by invisible living organisms two centuries before Pasteur, and built one of Europe's first public museums. He enjoyed the patronage of four popes and two emperors. He was, by the mid-seventeenth century, the most famous scholar in Europe.

He was also wrong about nearly everything.

Kircher believed the Earth's interior was laced with rivers of fire. He believed in dragons, particularly when a pope vouched for them. He published recipes for creating living creatures from scratch. He translated the simple Egyptian phrase "Osiris says" as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis." He was convinced he had cracked hieroglyphics — a feat no one would actually achieve for another 170 years.

None of this dimmed his confidence. In the preface to one book, he described his critics as "stupid or obtuse."

In 1651, Pope Innocent X commissioned Kircher to oversee the hieroglyphic inscriptions on the obelisk at the center of Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona. Kircher obliged, carefully restoring the ancient text with his translations.

They are complete nonsense.

The fountain is still there. Tourists photograph it every day, admiring Kircher's confident gibberish, chiseled in stone.