Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory from his Childhood

Some new speculative historyby Dave Shafer

Leonardo wrote extensively about the world around him in his voluminous notebooks, but almost never about himself. In particular there is just one reference by him to his childhood and because of that Freud considered the content of this memory highly significant. His 1923 book analyzed that memory and drew conclusions about Leonardo’s personality.

In the history of the immense body of Sanskrit literature there are essentially no personal childhood memories recounted. That is a very remarkable fact and it clearly says something quite significant about Indian culture. Freud was right to seize on Leonardo’s sole mention of a childhood memory as being very significant, as well as the actual details of the memory. Unfortunately Freud was led astray by a single word mistranslated from Italian into German. Here I give a new analysis.

Freud was reading Leonardo’s writings (in Italian) in a German translation. Unfortunately the word that Freud read as “vulture” should have been translated as “kite” – a quite different bird. This set Freud off on a false trail that we will not go into here, where he attached much significance to the distinctive characteristics of vultures, like eating carrion and being associated with death. The kite is a much smaller bird, extensively studied by Leonardo.

Here is Leonardo’s childhood memory and Freud’s initial comment on it, taken from Freud’s 1923 book..

Leonardo was fascinated by flight and designed many flying machines based on his very careful studies of how birds do it. He specifically studied a lot the kite bird native to where he lived.

So Leonardo’s memory/phantasy about his experience in the cradle is of a kite, which “opened my mouth with its tail and struck me many times with its tail against my lips” -and not a vulture.

As Freud points out this is a very bizarre image and it cries out for an explanation. Here I will give a new one.

The ancient Greek Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) was the “father of history” and tried to make history a rigorous discipline. His famous writings about history were known and studied throughout the ancient world. Leonardo Da Vinci, like most well educated people of his day, knew about Herodotus and his history writings.

Leonardo made sketches and built a model of a machine described (but not shown) by Herodotus that he said Egyptians used in building the pyramids

So from Leonardo’s sketches (similar to what is shown here) -based on a description by Herodotus - we know that Leonardo had read Herodotus.

Around 450 B.C. Herodotus visited Egypt and talked with the priests there about many aspects of Egyptian culture.

Herodotus learned about various aspects of Egyptian religions and a section of his “Histories” book is devoted to discussing what he learned in Egypt. For example, he describes in some detail the Egyptian practice of mummification of the dead. Leonardo would have known about this due to reading Herodotus.

Herodotus was told about and maybe shown key aspects of the mummification process, which he then put into his history book, and which Leonardo would have known about.

Herodotus did not include any details in his book about a very important religious ceremony done at the end of the mummification of a pharaoh. He may have known about it but it is just not in his book. Today we know much about this ceremony because of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, about 2,300 years after Herodotus.If Leonardo did know about this

ceremony, about to be described, it did not come from Herodotus.

The religious rite is called “the opening of the mouth ceremony” and is shown in many tomb decorations. Because of rigor mortis the mummy’s mouth would be frozen shut. The Egyptians thought that the dead pharaoh would not be able to speak or eat in the afterlife unless his mouth was forced open. Certain ritual tools were used for this task.

Recent research has shown that this ceremony was not a simple matter of prying open the dead pharaoh’s mouth. Instead a lot of force was needed to overcome the rigor mortis and in the process it was common for several teeth to be broken off.

The asp – sacred to the pharaoh –was a shape that became one of the tools used.

The goddess Isis often appeared in the form of her sacred raptor –the falcon or Egyptian kite.

So what do we make of this? – Leonardo has a memory/phantasy of a bird – specifically a kite –striking his mouth, as a baby, and “opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips”. Sounds like the Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ceremony – in which a kitewas sometimes shown next to the mummy. Leonardo could not know about this from Herodotus, whose writings about the Egyptian mummies he would have read, because Herodotus does not mention the ceremony.

Is there any other way that Leonardo might have known about this? And what would it have meant to him, to be the one childhood memory he ever wrote about?

In ancient Egyptian mythology the goddess Isis took the form of a bird - the kite -in order to resurrect the dead. Was there any other source possible for Leonardo to learn about that sort of thing? One idea is the Corpus Hermeticum.

The Corpus Hermeticum was a collection of assorted esoteric “secret knowledge” (like alchemy) and sacred texts that was mostly written in Greek and dated to a span that may go back to 600 B.C. in Egypt up to about 200 AD. Most were lost to Europe during the Middle Ages but were rediscovered later in Byzantine copies and had a big influence during the Renaissance. Da Vinci (1452 – 1519) was 19 when this was first translated into Latin in 1471 and made available to intellectuals of Leonardo’s day in Italy.

First Latin edition, of 1471

The contents of this collection of esoteric writings made a sensation in the intellectual circles that Leonardo moved in. It generated much interest in ancient Egypt. But people could not yet read the hieroglyphics, as in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and there were few sources of information. Visitors to ancient Egypt, like Herodotus, could learn much as well as see tomb decorations that showed the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, but unless they wrote it down somewhere and it survived to Leonardo’s time it was lost forever.

It turns out there is nothing in the Corpus Hermeticum about the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. But there were other hermetic texts circulating around Leonardo and some were probably lost to us now. Some were just rediscovered in 1945. So there is no hard evidence that we have now to show that Leonardo knew about the Egyptian Opening of the Mouth ceremony. Some far fetched ideas include the Freemasons, which started around 1425, and Freemasonry has ties to Egyptian mystery schools and their initiation rites.

Freemasons make much of knowing ancient Egyptian “secrets”.

We may never know for sure if Leonardo Da Vinci was a Freemason or connected to other fringe groups, some very shadowy. And we may never know if he had some source of information about the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. But what if he did – what could this have led to this very odd memory/phantasy that he mentioned in his notebooks, so close in form to the ancient Egyptian ceremony? What could it have symbolized for him?

It may have represented him unconsciously phantasising about how his start in life as the genius he was as an adult required a sort of divine intervention – of opening his mouth as a baby and thereby opening him up to the world. The kite was his much-studied and sketched bird/mouth opener.