Among the huge number of books and manuscripts written over the past millennium, there are several books that amaze even the most sophisticated reader. One of them is the Codex Seraphinianus, highly regarded by decadent aesthetes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Someone thinks that the book really contains illustrations that refer the reader to some “other” world, which was revealed to the genius author. Others insist that the author is an alien, describing from his point of view our world, our history and the development of mankind, while others suspect that the book is just a joke, a thing in itself, a work of pure art, completely divorced from reality.
So what is the Codex Seraphinianus?
History of appearance
The history of the book began in the last century, in 1978, when a weighty package was brought to the Milanese publisher Franco Rizzi. Inside was a whole collection of very strange illustrations. Each of them was provided with explanatory inscriptions, which could not be read, since they were all in an unknown language.
However, on one of the spreads of the book there was a hint - two identical texts, clearly written in different languages. But even this did not help decipher the book - the second language also defied identification.
The book was accompanied by a cover letter stating that its author was a graphics teacher, artist and architect Luigi Serafini, who compiled an encyclopedia of the “other” world for people. Therefore, the book was called the Codex Seraphinianus - "Seraphini's Code". However, in Great Britain this book is known under the much longer, but very correct title "Strange and Extraordinary Representations of Animals and Plants and Hellish Incarnations from the depths of consciousness of naturalist / antinaturalist Luigi Serafini" of Normal Items from the Annals of Naturalist / Unnaturalist Luigi Serafini).
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With all this, neither the strangeness of the appearance of the book in the publishing house, nor the exoticism of its content confused the cunning publishers, and in 1981 the "Encyclopedia of Another World" was published in this world as a large, luxurious, bright book on magnificent expensive paper with colorful illustrations.
It was sold out so quickly that it immediately became a rarity. Since then, Codex has been reprinted several times, but always in small print runs, so that the book does not lose value. In the West, it still costs from 250 to 400 and even up to 1000 euros, while in Russia its price starts from 119,000 rubles.
Without translation
The content of the "Encyclopedia of Another World" is built on the model of medieval treatises: each of the pages depicts a certain object, animal or phenomenon with an unreadable annotation written in a fancy and elegant font. The letters, however, vaguely resemble the Hebrew or Georgian alphabet.
Since the meaning of the text is hidden from the reader, in interpreting the illustrations, he can only rely on his imagination and his own life and spiritual experience. Thus, Codex Seraphinianus has become a unique event in typography - it turns out that the meaning of a book completely depends on the person who leafs through it. Some see it as a picture of hell and the torture of a person by demons, others - an interpretation of philosophical treatises, and still others really believe that the author has opened the curtain into another reality.
Separate chapters are devoted to the flora and fauna of the "other" world, its biology and chemistry, the life of its inhabitants in cities; here there are descriptions of people as a separate species, stories about their morals and clothes, about how they spend their time, how they have fun, what they invent and how they live.
One of the pages depicts lovers gradually turning into reptiles - and this clearly illustrates the idea of the philosopher Plato that once a man and a woman were one. In others, the horrific rituals and torture of people are revealed to readers - and this reminds of Dante's hell. Still others show outlandish trees that travel from place to place and reproduce by division.
What is it? A parody of the modern world, bizarrely refracted in the mind of the artist? Ravings of a madman? An invention of a genius who thought out his own world to the smallest detail? Or did Serafini really see some other world that has nothing to do with ours?
There is no answer to this question. Perhaps it is not worth looking for among cold facts and precise arguments of reality.
Journal: Mysteries of History No. 47. Author: Maya Novik