Imag­ine you could talk to Hierony­mus Bosch, the authors of the Book of Rev­e­la­tion, or of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script—a bizarre 15th cen­tu­ry text writ­ten in an uncrack­able code; that you could solve cen­turies-old mys­ter­ies by ask­ing them, “what were you think­ing?” You might be dis­ap­point­ed to hear them say, as does Lui­gi Ser­afi­ni, author and illus­tra­tor of the Codex Seraphini­anus, “At the end of the day [it’s] sim­i­lar to the Rorschach inkblot test. You see what you want to see. You might think it’s speak­ing to you, but it’s just your imag­i­na­tion.”

If you were a long­time devo­tee of an intense­ly sym­bol­ic, myth­ic text, you might refuse to believe this. It must mean some­thing, fans of the Codex have insist­ed since the book’s appear­ance in 1981.

It shares many sim­i­lar­i­ties with the Voyn­ich Man­u­script, save its rel­a­tive­ly recent vin­tage and liv­ing author: both the Seraphini­anus and the Voyn­ich seem to be com­pendi­ums of an oth­er­world­ly nat­ur­al sci­ence and art, and both are writ­ten in a whol­ly invent­ed lan­guage.

Ser­afi­ni tells Wired he thinks Voyn­ich is a fake. “The Holy Roman Emper­or Rudolf II loved ancient man­u­scripts; some­body swin­dled him and spread the rumor that it was orig­i­nal. The idea of made-up lan­guages is not new at all.” As for his own made-up lan­guage in the Codex, he avers, “I always said that there is no mean­ing behind the script; it’s just a game.” But it is not a hoax. Though he hasn’t mind­ed the mon­ey from the book’s cult pop­u­lar­i­ty, he cre­at­ed the book, he says, “try­ing to reach out to my fel­low peo­ple, just like blog­gers do.” It is, he says, “the prod­uct of a gen­er­a­tion that chose to con­nect and cre­ate a net­work, rather than kill each oth­er in wars like their fathers did.”

The Codex, writes Abe Books, who made the short video review above, is “essen­tial­ly an ency­clo­pe­dia about an alien world that clear­ly reflects our own, each chap­ter appears to deal with key facets of this sur­re­al place, includ­ing flo­ra, fau­na, sci­ence, machines, games and archi­tec­ture.” That’s only a guess giv­en the unin­tel­li­gi­ble lan­guage.

The illus­tra­tions seem to draw from Bosch, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, and the medieval trav­el­ogue as much as from the sur­re­al­ism of con­tem­po­rary Euro­pean artists like Fan­tas­tic Plan­et ani­ma­tor René Laloux.

Ser­afi­ni has been delight­ed to see an exten­sive inter­net com­mu­ni­ty coa­lesce around the book, and has had his fun with it. He “now states,” writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “that a stray white cat that joined him while he cre­at­ed the Codex in Rome in the 1970s was actu­al­ly the real author, tele­path­i­cal­ly guid­ing Ser­afi­ni as he drew and ‘wrote.’” You can now, thanks to a recent, rel­a­tive­ly afford­able edi­tion pub­lished by Riz­zoli, pur­chase your copy of the Codex. Buy now, I’d say. First edi­tions of the book now fetch upwards of $6000, and its pop­u­lar­i­ty shows no sign of slow­ing.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

A Dig­i­tal Archive of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Com­plete Works: Zoom In & Explore His Sur­re­al Art

Explore a Dig­i­tized Edi­tion of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script, “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book”

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Man­u­script The Red Book

The Foot-Lick­ing Demons & Oth­er Strange Things in a 1921 Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script from Iran

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

The expres­sion “Don’t quit your day job” is often used as an insult, imply­ing that the recip­i­en­t’s cre­ative skills aren’t up to attract­ing a career-sup­port­ing audi­ence. But it can also be prac­ti­cal advice in cer­tain cas­es, espe­cial­ly those of artists pos­sessed of a sen­si­bil­i­ty too par­tic­u­lar and strange to bear direct expo­sure to the mar­ket­place. So it was with Hen­ry Darg­er, who delib­er­ate­ly passed his 81 years in near-absolute obscu­ri­ty, work­ing increas­ing­ly menial jan­i­to­r­i­al jobs by day and, when not attend­ing one of his five dai­ly mass­es, obsess­ing over his art the rest of the time. That art took var­i­ous forms, most notably The Sto­ry of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unre­al, of the Glandeco–Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebel­lion, which has been described as the longest work of fic­tion ever writ­ten — and the strangest.

As described in the video above from Fredrik Knud­sen (and in the 2004 fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary In the Realms of the Unre­al), its 15,145 pages relate the adven­tures of a set of immac­u­late­ly vir­tu­ous lit­tle girls against the back­drop of an apoc­a­lyp­tic, ultra-vio­lent reli­gious war. When Darg­er’s land­lords dis­cov­ered the work after his death, they also turned up a vari­ety of draw­ings, paint­ings, and col­lages, many of them at least oblique­ly relat­ed to the sto­ry.

Against back­drops alter­nate­ly idyl­lic and har­row­ing, the Vivian girls often appear naked, some­times bewil­der­ing­ly out­fit­ted with male gen­i­talia. Though clear­ly com­posed with­out for­mal train­ing of any kind, Darg­er’s visu­al com­po­si­tions demon­strate an askew kind of pro­fi­cien­cy, or at least a kind of stag­ger­ing evo­lu­tion over the course of decades. What­ev­er the appeal of his work, there’s nev­er been an artist like him. Nor could there be, giv­en the high­ly spe­cif­ic stretch of his­to­ry occu­pied by his long yet rigid­ly bound­ed life.

Not long after Darg­er’s birth in the Chica­go of 1892, the death of his moth­er fol­lowed by the inca­pac­i­ta­tion of his father plunged him into a child­hood of Dick­en­sian-sound­ing hard­ship, spent in insti­tu­tions with names like the Illi­nois Asy­lum for Fee­ble-Mind­ed Chil­dren. An aggriev­ed lon­er seem­ing­ly afflict­ed by what we would now call men­tal health dif­fi­cul­ties from the start, he took a kind of refuge in the fan­ta­sy coher­ing in his head, one shaped equal­ly by mass print media phe­nom­e­na like Win­nie Win­kle and Lit­tle Annie Rooney, Civ­il War pho­tographs, and ultra-devout Catholi­cism. Since his posthu­mous dis­cov­ery and ele­va­tion to the sta­tus of the ulti­mate “out­sider artist,” there’s been no end of spec­u­la­tion about his per­son­al habits, sex­u­al pro­cliv­i­ties, and state of mind. But with all such ques­tions beyond res­o­lu­tion, we can, for the moment, leave the last word to the artist him­self: “It’s bet­ter to be a suck­er who makes some­thing than a wise guy who is too cau­tious to make any­thing at all.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet Hen­ry Darg­er, the Most Famous of Out­sider Artists, Who Died in Obscu­ri­ty, Leav­ing Behind Hun­dreds of Unseen Fan­ta­sy Illus­tra­tions and a 15,000-Page Nov­el

The Artistry of the Men­tal­ly Ill: The 1922 Book That Pub­lished the Fas­ci­nat­ing Work of Schiz­o­phrenic Patients, and Influ­enced Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky & Oth­er Avant Garde Artists

Japan­ese Artist Has Drawn Every Meal He’s Eat­en for 32 Years: Behold the Deli­cious Illus­tra­tions of Itsuo Kobayashi

Explore a Dig­i­tized Edi­tion of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script, “the World’s Most Mys­te­ri­ous Book”

A Short Video Intro­duc­tion to Hilma af Klint, the Mys­ti­cal Female Painter Who Helped Invent Abstract Art

Lewis Carroll’s Pho­tographs of Alice Lid­dell, the Inspi­ra­tion for Alice in Won­der­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.