The Egyptian revival · Kircher's long shadow

The Order's staging — godforms, Egyptian regalia, temple names, the whole Egyptosophical apparatus — descends from a European fantasy of Egypt that Kircher did more than anyone to build. He believed the hieroglyphs were a philosophical picture-language encoding Hermetic wisdom, and he "translated" them at length. He was comprehensively wrong; Champollion cracked the actual script in 1822 and it turned out to be, in large part, an ordinary writing system recording ordinary things.

But the fantasy outlived the correction by a century and shaped the whole nineteenth-century occult revival — including the Order that was assembling itself out of Kircher's diagram at the same time.

Worth setting beside ⁂ the emerald tablet on the forebears' bench: classical Hermeticism was genuinely Alexandrian and genuinely older than the Tree's own books. This is not that. Two Hermeticisms, one word, and the annex keeps them on different benches on purpose.