Kircher’s monomaniacal and uncommonly ambitious determination to wring a solution from the hieroglyphic monuments led him to play loose with the evidence. But he was not unique in thinking that esoteric traditions offered valuable aid to the investigator of ancient paganism and the earliest ages of history. Behind Kircher’s great failures—his incredible translations and his reliance on spurious documents—lay principles about symbolic communication and the transmission of ancient knowledge that were widely accepted. Most of Kircher’s seventeenth-century critics agreed with him about many things that, from a post-Enlightenment perspective, seem equally ridiculous. Literal biblical history, which set the ultimate parameters of Kircher’s research, went virtually unchallenged before the second half of the seventeenth century and retained favor with most scholars long afterward. That an inquiry into ancient Egyptian wisdom should focus on the transmission of antediluvian knowledge and genealogies linking all nations to Noah and his sons was fully in accord with principles shared by most of Kircher’s contemporaries, his critics included. The idea that the first human beings, such as Adam, Seth, and Enoch, had been scientists, philosophers and theologians, was the prevalent understanding of the history of knowledge throughout the Renaissance and remained popular in the seventeenth century. Proving that Hermes Trismegistus had not written the Corpus Hermeticum was not the same as proving that the Egyptian sage and his esoteric wisdom had not existed. The idea that hieroglyphs were symbols encoding sacred mysteries remained the dominant theory at least until the early eighteenth century, even if most scholars doubted that Kircher had found their key.