A conversation I had with Arturo Gil of XNOGRAFIKZ while at
Esozone initiated several emails, during the course of which he relayed that he was somewhat obsessed with the Codex
Seraphinianus. I recalled vaguely the text’s description from
Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter’s collection
of Scientific American articles, but hadn’t actually seen a full copy of it until Arturo’s email sent me off on my
own book hunt. The
Codex Seraphinianus: Strange and Extraordinary Representations of Animals and Plants and Hellish
Incarnations of Normal Items from the Annals of Naturalist/Unnaturalist Luigi Serafini
it is a mirror, a huge Rorschach inkblot across hundreds of pages. The book exists on the fragile edge of meaning
and nonsense. There is internal consistency, the book describes in images and with accompanying text a world where
iterations over time produce astoundingly different forms, everything mutates and the line between animals and plants,
insects and minerals, photons of light and protozoa simply doesn’t seem to exist.
I found the book available for download on the torrents, then shortly thereafter discovered that
Brainsturbator
had covered the book and had the full book, scanned, available for download from his page.
Two years before I had discovered, in a volume of a certain pirated encyclopedia, a superficial description of a nonexistent country; now chance afforded me something more precious and arduous. Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet’s entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody.
(Source: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by J.L. Borges)
In fact, the story of the language of Tlön as put forth by Borges is illustrated obliquely in part of the Codex Seraphinianus – or perhaps I am projecting my own ideas into the codex and not seeing it for what it is. It has all the elements one would expect from a book that was inspired in part by several earlier texts, specifically the Voynich Manuscript and Jorge Borges’ short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. While I certainly can’t verify with Luigi Serafini that he created this Codex with these works in mind, there are similarities that I was immediately struck by when I studied the work in depth.
One of the early interpretations of the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher, according to Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill’s book on the subject, was put forth by William R. Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania in April of 1921. Professor Newbold made the startling declaration that each character of the Voynichese of the manuscript was itself constructed of dozens of microscopic shorthand, which itself had to be deciphered. Admittedly, there’s a great deal more to the Voynich Manuscript than this little aside, the pages of herbal depictions that seem to show impossible grafts, plants unknown to Europe, weird plumbing, several pages of star maps all accompanied by columns of unreadable (and apparently even now unbreakable) cipher text. But this specific theory, that the letters themselves are made up of microscopic forms that must also need to be deciphered to make sense of the whole is directly referenced in the Codex Seraphinianus, as we see in the illustration to the right (click on it for an up-close view). But here, rather than letters made of even smaller letters, we see the ink made of roadways, or fish, or even human souls.
The idea that there exists an alchemical text from the universe next door, or a book that drives men mad who study it, the idea that there is some primal source for mystical knowledge is in some sense a metaphor for language itself. In many ways,
Language itself is this grand game we can follow all the way back to
before meaning, chasing meaning backwards to some endpoint, some
underlying metaphor. that first moment could be filled with meaning or it could be a point
of no meaning, onto which conjecture, projection, and inter-connective
reasoning has generated by consensus a thing – the heart of the
strange attractor could be a cypher, zero, a nothing. A void, the
right void, will spontaneously generate a stop-gap if there’s enough
market pressure.
Or perhaps ideas manifest themselves – the more real an idea is the
quicker it pops into existence in library-space (aka
L-space
), much like the Hrönir that Borges describes.
I still
think of grimoires as notes from a journey rather than road maps but I’m now also starting to think of these books as emergent properties of a weird market pressure which
demands sources for belief systems. Codex
Seraphinianus, in particular, seems like a book that came about as an
artist’s rendition of what the Voynich Manuscript was described to be, and is informed by the struggles to decrypt the information believed hidden within its pages. It also appears to be an attempt to create a work that was the fulfillment of Jorge Luis Borges own intertextual fantasy.
In any event, I’ve been fascinated with these books that fill a hole created on a shelf by the books that surround it. They are manifested after the fact from a hole described in other texts, the most glaring example being the various Necronomicons produced to buttress the constantly evolving Lovecraft mythos. The
truth is our culture is constructed from secondary sources,
and where there is no longer a primary source, we confront books that
kind of get created to fill in gaps. Just the idea of a magical text generates a demand for such grimoires that lay on
those lines providing glimpses of the schizophrenic edges of historical hegemonic institutions structured around superstition and theurgy.
One of my favorite examples of a work that sits squarely on this border is the Devil’s Bible, or 
Codex Gigas. The largest of the ancient codices, its legend seems to have created a demand for the kind of black book that would enable pacts with the Devil himself. Bringing up the Devil while discussing weird and rare books that bridge the line between fiction and non-fiction opens a whole other topic, one I plan to address in part two of this series. Certainly the idea of such a book went on to influence not only books like The Grand Grimoire
and legends of Faust, but were taken as fact by the Catholic Church and countless ceremonial magicians over the years.
In the next Yellow Sign I’ll be addressing Pérez-Reverte’s novel Et Club Dumas (as well as Roman Polanski’s film The Ninth Gate), hopefully showing along the way how the Picatrix and the Voynich Manuscript helped generate all those Necronomicons out there. Until then, pour over Codex Seraphinianus yourself, as I suspect you’ll find it as inspiring as I have. (And a special thanks to Arturo Gil, for reminding me it existed!)
Download: Codex Seraphinianus (torrent)
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