When Babel Wears a Crown: Kircher’s Theology of Empire

“The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,

against the LORD, and against his anointed.”

— Psalm 2:2, KJV

“And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.”

— Revelation 18:9, KJV

“And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies,

gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army.”

— Revelation 19:19, KJV

Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel (1679) begins as a warning against human pride but ends as an act of imperial homage. The Jesuit priest denounces the arrogance of Nimrod’s builders and their attempt to “ascend to the borders of heaven.” Yet within the same volume, he dedicates the work to Emperor Leopold I, praising him as Caesar sacratissimus; the “Most Sacred Caesar” and providential head of "Christendom".

This contradiction was not an isolated inconsistency but the logic of early modern Christian politics. The Habsburg dynasty, ruling from Vienna, presented itself as the last defender of divine order; a “Christian empire” that claimed to redeem Babel by baptizing it. History exposed the conceit. From the Counter-Reformation’s coercive absolutism to the later Germanic campaigns that turned against Europe’s Jewish roots, the same pattern persisted: unity enforced by power, justified by theology.

Christianity itself was born within Palestinian Judaism and spread through the witness of Syria. Centuries later, its imperial heirs made those same regions symbols of devastation. Kircher’s career embodied this reversal. In Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54), he dedicated an Egyptian obelisk to Emperor Ferdinand II, fusing pharaonic and Roman symbols to celebrate the Habsburg throne. His scholarship thus joined pagan and Christian empires under one imperial emblem. The gesture revealed the intellectual temptation of his age: to interpret providence as dynastic continuity and to read salvation history as imperial genealogy.

The Modern Echo of Caesar

The Habsburgs were not biological heirs of Julius Caesar, but they inherited his theology of rule. The medieval doctrine of translatio imperii ;the idea that the Roman Empire had passed intact to Christian Europe; made their emperors Caesars in everything but blood. Their crowns carried Rome’s universal claims, now clothed in ecclesiastical language. From this fiction arose centuries of “sacred monarchy,” where cross and crown reinforced each other.

The British monarchy emerged from the same Germanic dynastic web. Its modern name, Windsor, adopted in 1917, replaced the older title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to conceal its German heritage. From that same soil; Austria and Germany; came Europe’s darkest harvest. In those lands, millions of Jews, the people from whom Christianity itself descended, were exterminated in the name of racial purity. The empires that once styled themselves as Christian became instruments of Babel’s final illusion: unity achieved by force and blood rather than by spirit and truth.

Kircher’s imperial theology stands in direct conflict with the Gospel. Christ declared, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). He refused the devil’s offer of “all the kingdoms of the world” (Luke 4:5–8), rejected the sword (Matthew 26:52), and warned that Gentile rulers “lord it over” their subjects, whereas among His followers “it shall not be so” (Matthew 20:25–28). To enthrone a Caesar as Christ’s representative on earth is to reverse the meaning of discipleship. The Roman Caesars claimed descent from the gods; Julius Caesar traced his line to Venus Genetrix, the Roman form of Isis, mother of divine kings. In biblical language, such rulers belong to the lineage of the Nephilim — the “mighty men” who exalted themselves as demigods before the Flood. When this same myth of divine descent is baptized and placed in Christian vestments, tyranny appears in holy robes: mortals enthroned as mediators between God and man. This is not the kingdom Christ proclaimed; it is the restoration of pagan divinity under a Christian name.

“And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.”

— Revelation 18:23, KJV

The first Christians refused to offer incense to a demi-god: and suffered martyrdom for that refusal. Later Christendom enthroned new Caesars and demanded homage to its own sanctified power. Kircher condemned the tyranny of Babel while praising an imperial Christendom that repeated Babel’s logic through coercion, censorship, and war. The medieval and Roman Inquisitions were not metaphors of zeal but literal systems of imprisonment and torture.

The intellectual scaffolding of this system rested on counterfeit foundations. Pseudo-Dionysius’s doctrine of celestial hierarchy provided a spiritual blueprint for imperial bureaucracy, imagining an ascent to God managed by graded ranks. The forged Donation of Constantine and Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals supplied the legal fictions that expanded ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

When the documents that define your authority are forged, your theology of power is already Babel.

If Christ has no earthly kingdom, then no "Caesar" (Nephilim or demi-god), holds a divine mandate. Christ, not the crown, defines Christian authority. The task of the Church is not to enthrone a new Nimrod but to call all Nimrods to repentance. The pride Kircher condemned in Babel still appears wherever miters, tiaras or diadems claim the right to command conscience. To call a Habsburg the image of divine rule while defending coercion, idolatry, and inquisitorial cruelty is not Christianity but paganism in ecclesiastical costume. Christ requires no Caesar to be King, and He entrusts His kingdom to no impostor.

Translation of Page 18, Turris Babel (1679)

Kircher writes:

"They attest, as do all who have written of these matters, that this region was the most fertile in ancient times. Herodotus himself bears witness, saying that no land was so fruitful in every kind of produce. The testimony of Scripture also confirms it, for here the human race, after the Flood, took its first seat; here Noah and his descendants dwelt; here was the first habitation of mankind after the retreat of the waters of the Deluge. This same region was later called Babylonia, from its capital city Babylon, and also Chaldea, from the Chaldeans who inhabited it. It was watered by the great rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and by many other streams that continually irrigate and enrich the soil. The land produced date palms in abundance, as well as every kind of grain, vegetables, and fruit-bearing trees. Because of this fertility, it was thought to be the site of Paradise, whose vestiges many claim to recognize there even now. The ancient Babylonia is situated between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, toward the north bounded by Mesopotamia, on the south by Arabia Deserta, on the west by Syria, and on the east by Susiana (Elam). Later, Semiramis, queen of the Assyrians, after her husband Ninus had founded Nineveh, enlarged the boundaries of this realm and built up Babylon itself, restoring it with magnificent walls and fortifications. Hence it is that Babylonia is often taken for Chaldea, and Chaldea for Assyria, because one and the same kingdom embraced them all under various names. These regions were the first that humanity cultivated after the Flood, the first homes of men, the cradle of all arts and sciences, the origin of kingdoms, and, at the same time, the first theater of human ambition. Thus Ninus, son of Nemrod, king of Babylon and Chaldea, subdued all of Assyria, built the city of Nineveh, and transferred the seat of his empire there. His successors, following the same pattern of pride, undertook ever greater enterprises until the confusion of languages, ordained by God, dispersed the builders of Babel and broke the unity of that first monarchy".

The ancient myths that Kircher recycled were not neutral antiquarian curiosities; they were the scaffolding of a theology of empire. The line that runs from Semiramis to Isis to Venus Genetrix; the divine mother of kings; carries the same logic that underwrote the Caesars’ claim to sacred descent. Isis, the Egyptian queen who built cities and claimed divinity, became in later Christian imagination the Whore of Babylon, “the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” Her cult, renamed but never renounced, passed through Rome’s Venus until Julius Caesar traced his house to her line. The empire that crucified Christ grounded its legitimacy in a "goddess" of fertility and dominion.

By the Middle Ages Semiramis had drifted far from the Assyrian records that first named her. In Latin and vernacular encyclopedias she was no longer a queen of empire but a creature of legend; the daughter of a mortal and a spirit of the waters, a nymph or elemental who rose from the deep to rule men through beauty and cunning. The image suited medieval moralists: the sea-born queen symbolized pride rising from chaos.

In the nineteenth century the Scottish writer Alexander Hislop, in The Two Babylons (1853), revived and systematized this tradition. He declared Semiramis to be one of the Nephilim themselves; the offspring of a fallen angel and a mortal; and identified her with Ishtar and Isis, the “queen of heaven” whose worship the prophets denounced. For Hislop and his readers she became the matrix of all false religion: the mother of gods and the prototype of every imperial cult that dressed rebellion in sacred robes. However mythical its genealogy, the legend expressed a persistent truth about political religion; the tendency of power to deify itself, to trace its lineage to the heavens while dragging the world into the abyss.

The title “Queen of Heaven” long predates Christianity. In the ancient Near East it belonged to Ishtar in Mesopotamia and Astarte or Isis around the Mediterranean; the goddesses of fertility, love, and sovereignty who embodied the union of heaven and earth. The prophet Jeremiah rebuked Israel for offering cakes (Hot Cross buns today) and incense to this Queen of Heaven, a sign of religious compromise with empire and fertility cults (Jer. 7:18). Whatever one’s theology of Marian veneration, the biblical “Queen of Heaven” and the Virgin of Nazareth belong to different worlds; one is a mythic deity demanding worship, the other a woman pointing away from herself to God.

The solar and lunar imagery surrounding Christian liturgy likewise comes from symbolic inheritance, not direct pagan survival. Ancient peoples used the sun and moon to represent divine and receptive principles; in Egyptian myth they figured as Osiris and Isis, whose union was thought to renew life. Medieval and Baroque church art borrowed the same celestial vocabulary to express theological ideas: the monstrance, shaped like a radiant sun, while the lunette or luna that held the Host took its name from its crescent form; yet another of those remarkably convenient coincidences with which religious history abounds. Their resemblance to solar and lunar forms, we are assured, reflects nothing more than classical geometry and a taste for cosmic order; certainly not any conscious revival of Isis and Osiris, heaven forbid.

Later mythic theology extended the rebellion of Nimrod beyond politics into the occult. In post-biblical legend he was no longer only a tyrant who built Babel, but a man who sought the power of the fallen spirits themselves. Writers from the medieval grimoires to early Protestant polemic claimed that Nimrod, through forbidden arts, invoked the spirits of the Nephilim, the ancient giants destroyed by the Flood, and by communion with them became one of their kind in spirit. The story described him not as transformed in body but as possessed by the same intelligence that defied heaven; a king animated by what later ages would call demonic ambition.

A self-made god, then; I suppose it’s only fitting he should hang beside George Washington in the Capitol’s gallery of the semi-divine, together with all the other freemasons.

According to later legend, the dynasty of Babel did not end with Nimrod’s defiance but continued through his heir Ninus, whom many writers named as his son. In the ancient mythographers; from Ctesias to Diodorus; Ninus was the conqueror of Assyria and builder of Nineveh. Yet by the medieval period the story had darkened: Ninus is said to have taken to wife Semiramis, a woman of surpassing beauty and ambition, whose birth was itself a violation of nature. Chroniclers called her half human, half elemental, born of a mortal father and a spirit of the waters.

The union of Ninus and Semiramis thus joined the two currents of the postdiluvian world; the proud seed of Nimrod, first tyrant of the earth, and the lingering race of elemental beings that Genesis alludes to in its account of the Nephilim. Medieval theologians held that such offspring, born of human flesh and elemental spirit, lacked the divine spark, the breath of God that makes mankind a living soul. They were animated, cunning, and powerful, yet hollow; creatures of reason without spirit, capable of greatness but incapable of grace. From that union, say the old legends, arose the first imperial cults, the kingdoms that confused divinity with dominion.

Genesis 3:15

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed (offspring) and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

The Hebrew text of Genesis never describes the satan as a male being. The word śāṭān simply means “the adversary” or “the accuser”; a title, not a name or gender. In its earliest form it designates a role, a spirit of opposition, not a man. When Genesis 3:15 speaks of “enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed,” it therefore cannot mean a literal male serpent begetting offspring. The verse sets two lineages in opposition: the spiritual progeny of rebellion and the spiritual progeny of obedience.

In the oldest myths surrounding the adversary’s image, the chaos-being is often female. The Babylonian Tiamat, whose name is cognate with the Hebrew tehom—“the deep”—is the mother of monsters. Her biblical echo is Leviathan, the sea-serpent of Job and Isaiah, later reimagined as a masculine dragon but still a creature of the waters. The imagery is fluid: both stand for the primordial sea, the womb of life and the abyss of destruction. Revelation’s “great dragon, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” fuses these traditions into one symbol of chaos opposing divine order.

From the same symbolic stream came the figure of Isis, “queen of the waters,” whose command over the Nile’s inundation made her the mistress of fertility and resurrection. Later writers folded that imagery into the legend of Semiramis, whom medieval chronicles called half human, half water-spirit. Born, they said, of a mortal and an elemental water spirit, she embodied the meeting of earth and abyss; the human will joined with the spirit of the deep. Such beings, theologians warned, lacked the divine spark breathed into Adam; they were animated but soulless, clever but incapable of grace. Semiramis’ later reputation as empire-builder and seductress turned her into the human face of that watery chaos, the heir of Tiamat and the rival of the woman’s seed in Genesis.

Even Christian art preserved remnants of this aquatic theology. The vesica piscis; literally “fish bladder,” the almond-shaped frame that encloses the phallus of Osiris, was geometrically a symbol of life emerging from the waters. Its very name recalls the sea and the womb. Thus the same element that Scripture calls the deep and myth calls Tiamat survives in sacred geometry as the emblem of creation redeemed: the vessel of life drawn from the chaos that once opposed it.

And she is called the mother of every abomination that walks the earth, the whore of Babylon.

“The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,

against the LORD, and against his anointed.”

 — Psalm 2:2, KJV

“And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.”

 — Revelation 18:9, KJV

“And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their armies,

gathered together to make war against him that sat on the horse, and against his army.”

 — Revelation 19:19, KJV

In the earliest myths of chaos, the Adversary was not male but maternal; the sea-mother who both birthed and resisted creation. The Babylonian Tiamat was the first embodiment of this mystery: a vast, feminine deep whose waters held the seeds of the gods and the monsters alike. From that moment the feminine abyss; the deep, the tehom; stood for chaos restrained.

The Hebrew imagination inherited that image. Leviathan, the sea-serpent of Job and Isaiah, still bears Tiamat’s shadow. Though the grammar later turns masculine, the creature’s function remains the same: a watery womb turned adversary, the sea that must be bounded so the world can live. Even in Revelation the “great dragon” combines the two; female in form, birthing beasts and kings, yet called by a title that later theology masculinized as Satan. The dragon is both mother and destroyer, giving life to the powers that corrupt it.

When later mythographers told of Semiramis, born of a water spirit, they repeated that pattern. She is the human face of the ancient sea-mother: alluring, creative, and ruinous. Her empire rises from the floodplain of Shinar, her beauty turns cities into shrines. To call her “the mother of abominations” is to name the paradox of the feminine abyss; life that breeds rebellion. The same symbolism reappears in the Whore of Babylon, clothed in purple and scarlet, holding a cup full of filth yet seated upon many waters. She is Tiamat the deep made queen of the earth’s empires, and of heaven.

While Christ Himself is the cup of the new covenant.

In Egyptian tradition, Isis was more than a goddess of magic and motherhood; she was the mistress of the Nile and the queen of the waters. Her power was bound to the annual flooding that renewed Egypt’s soil and sustained its life. Ancient hymns called her “the one who makes the river swell, who governs the flood for the benefit of the poor.”  In temple reliefs she is shown standing upon the waves, her outstretched wings calming the turbulent sea, her tears said to cause the rise of the Nile itself.

As consort of Osiris, she embodied the waters that gathered his scattered limbs and restored him to life, making her the agent of resurrection through the element of renewal. To sailors she was a guardian of harbors; to farmers, the mother of irrigation; to priests, the symbol of divine fecundity. When her cult spread into Greece and Rome, poets hailed her as Pelagia; “She of the Sea”; and Regina Maris, “Queen of the Waters,” the one who rules both the tides and the mysteries of birth and rebirth.

Thus Isis became the archetype of the feminine deep: creative, nourishing, and perilous. The rivers were her veins, the sea her body, and every spring that welled from the earth was said to be a whisper of her presence.

When Mary is hailed in procession as “Queen of the Sea” or “Queen of Heaven,” the language unconsciously reprises far older patterns of devotion. The same epithets once belonged to the great feminine powers of the waters — Isis of Egypt, Tiamat of Babylon, Leviathan of Hebrew poetry; the ancient dragon of the deep transposed into the vocabulary of veneration.

The serpent that devours its own tail is the ancient dragon — the old serpent who rules the heavens, the earth, and the depths below. She binds humankind beneath the turning of the stars, even as she is still revered as Queen of the Sea, Mother of Nature, and Queen of Heaven — the Adversary, the one who opposes God’s creation.

 2 Thessalonians 2:3 (KJV):

"Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition"