Codex Seraphinianus: A new edition of the strangest book
dangerousminds.net
dangerousminds.net
We can understand how the Codex Seraphinianus came about. Serafini presumably looked at the Voynich Manuscript and said "that looks like fun, I want to write a modern version of that". And he did so, and he made the text look convincingly like language without being decipherable as any known language, which would seem to require applying modern knowledge of linguistics and information theory.
But we don't know how the Voynich author did the same thing, many centuries earlier.
Definitely more intriguing than this book, imho.
Clearly the writer of the article is giving equal time to bizarre theories, which I suppose is allowed for such a bizarre book. But I'd say the second [this guy], the one with the transliteration, should have at least been described as "claims to have discovered certain grammatical rules", just like the woman claims to have hallucinated herself into the Codex world.
The stuff you find on his page (http://www.paleoaliens.com/event/seraphinianus/codex/) is not linguistics. In fact, it's not really anything but batshit. He even seems to be losing track of the fact that the "world" of the Codex Seraphinianus is not real.
It's like people who read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and start seriously looking for the number 42 everywhere, forgetting that it was just a gag, in a work of fiction, written by a human. It's like that except more so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_(Jung)
I haven't bothered to try to read most of it, but it makes for a good conversation piece, at least. It's very big and, well, red. Jung's drawings are quite beautiful, his medieval-style handwriting is strangely intricate, and of course everybody knows Jung by name, so it has that aura of celebrity genius.
Jung theorized that the collective human consciousness had many archetypes that could not be explained through environmental means, and Hubbard seems to have capitalized on that idea and attempted to push it forward, which is what I understand "History of Man" and Hubbards' common Time Track theory to be all about. While I am not a Scientologist - I do believe that collective unconscious and conscious 'reality about _something_' is what Scientology really attempts to dissect. But this is based on a naive investigation of the subject beyond the tabloid 'everyone knows the subject is bullshit' collective agreement ..
The point I wish to make is that there are two versions of Scientology - and indeed, other esoteric topics - what "everyone knows about" the subject, and "what only the true practitioners know about" the subject. These two points of view are often diametrically opposed. Maybe Voynich is the result of a cargo-cult that observed some other, greater subject? Same could be true of a lot of subjects dealing with metaphysical esoterica ..
The Codex was likely inspired by the Borges story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" which involves encyclopedia articles about an imagined world: http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf
This is different. Also, can anyone tell if J.P. Harding posted his/her translation anywhere? http://www.codexseraphinianus.org/
It is so far from boring that I have agreements with myself about when and how I peruse it, to keep the pleasure and wonder of discovery going for as long as possible.
If you're not a fan of incredible, surreal, self-consistent art, then the Codex is not for you. The text is kinda hard to read. ;-)
Just me?
Yes, I thought so.