The Speaking Vignette: « He-who-unleashes-fire-from-the-sky »

In The Seven Crystal Balls, Hergé slips in a panel that seems ordinary at first glance, yet carries a striking visual and symbolic depth.

Professor Tarragon presents to Tintin, Captain Haddock, and Calculus the mummy of Rascar Capac, displayed in a glass case at the center of his living room. A calm scene in appearance, and yet the chill of the fantastic is already there… quietly entering the story, with a resounding touch of mythology!

Tarragon’s line, uttered in casual conversation, sounds almost like a prophecy. The very name of Rascar Capac seems to awaken the force it names. The scholar’s humor masks a deeper unease: the "one who-unleashes-the-fire from-the-sky,” as he calls him, will soon strike the house quite literally, in the form of a ball of lightning.

The composition has an almost ceremonial clarity. Tarragon stands at the center, confidently presenting the mummy; Tintin, Haddock, and Calculus stand slightly behind him, attentive, almost spellbound. Only Snowy senses the threat and becomes agitated. This contrast between human reason and animal instinct gives the scene its quiet tension. The glass case embodies science (the impulse to classify and exhibit) while the mummy, silent and withdrawn, represents the sacred reduced to an object of study.

Professor Tarragon, with his calm erudition, was no arbitrary creation. Hergé is said to have modeled him on Jean Capart, the great Belgian Egyptologist born in Brussels in 1877, who became chief curator of the Royal Museums of Art and History in 1911.

Capart, who helped popularize Egyptology in Europe, also traveled to South America in 1936, where he took an interest in Amerindian collections. His name and appearance are believed to have inspired the learned but fateful figure of Professor Tarragon. He thus becomes the embodiment of triumphant science, knowledgeable yet vulnerable, standing on the threshold of mysteries he believes he controls. And as we know, his troubles are only just beginning…

Behind them, the décor is no coïncidence, Hergé’s eye misses nothing! On the wall of the professor’s salon, the artist reproduces a scene from folio 14 of the Codex Borbonicus, a 16th-century Aztec manuscript. It depicts the god Xipe Totec, “our lord the flayed one,” a divinity of renewal, vegetation, and agriculture. In mythology, Xipe Totec flays himself to feed humankind, an image of the maize seed shedding its husk before it germinates. A god of life’s cycle, he is also the patron of goldsmiths, a symbol of transformation and rebirth.

Placed directly behind Rascar Capac’s glass case, Xipe Totec’s image becomes a visual echo of the mummy itself: two figures of shedding, two embodiments of transition, two bodies both dead and fertile.

Graphically, everything is still, no movement, only a strained calm. The glass acts as a barrier between present and past, between the real and the mythical. The mummy is no longer a mere ethnographic specimen; it is already a character awaiting resurrection. In a single image, Hergé shifts the entire narrative: scientific curiosity turns into invocation. The professor’s words become the key that opens the realm of mystery. It’s going to be a long night!

This panel, simple yet heavy with omens, encapsulates Hergé’s narrative genius, the art of suggesting the fantastic without ever naming it. Between the display case and the fresco, between science and myth, unfolds the fragile balance of the modern world. The mummy listens, silent, as its name is spoken once more, the one who unleashes the fire from the sky. And already, behind the glass, the silence tightens, and the adventure with its touch of the supernatural is about to begin.