The Celestial Cow of Isis

The woodcut shows a stylized cow in profile, walking toward the left. Between its horns sits a large circular solar disk cradled by a crescent moon. On the cow's back, a bird with folded, patterned wings is perched, while above the animal hovers a horizontal winged sun disk. To the left, a small plant in a pot stands upright. The image is rendered in stark black lines against a textured paper background, appearing as an illustration embedded within a block of printed text.

This illustration is from Athanasius Kircher's 'Oedipus Aegyptiacus', a massive encyclopedic work that attempted to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics through the lens of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and comparative mythology. It exemplifies 17th-century European attempts to synthesize ancient Egyptian iconography with late Renaissance occult philosophy.