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Preamble
For many, this obscure folio-sized book is a sumptuous, hallucinogenic objet trouvés commanding a mix of curiousity and respect. Given that the text is all in cipher, this adds a second layer to the text, one that may prompt a desire to decipher its contents to gain access to its semantically locked contents. For some, this is an all consuming affair, while for others who take a different view of the book (or who are convinced that the cipher is indeed an instance of Greeking, or the fanciful creation of a language that only appears to have a meaning), the Codex Seraphinianus is simply an art book that carries a theory of asemic reading into practice. There is no doubt, as evidenced in its imagery, that the book is a product of its time, a 1980s coffee table book of conceptual art entirely conceived by an emergent Italian artist who holed up inside an apartment for two years to develop it. The world of Serafini is surreal and art-deco, at least insofar as all the objects and organisms in the book resist cold functionalism and mass reproduction, perhaps putting us more in mind of the Italian new wave in design and the undulating, semi-futuristic work of Cesare “Joe” Colombo. But it is not even precisely that, for as much as it may satisfy our desire to situate the book in a recognizable aesthetic history, reducing its otherness to a series of labels, the book resists this as well. At best, we can say that it is a pastiche resembling a few key sources in art history. This, one can say, is a key component to the book: the idea of resemblance, but it is a resemblance that draws upon the forces of the false, the spectacle, the image in this world, and mixes freely with an entirely different world of which this book is our only known contact. This resemblance is not of the order of model and copy, but that of simulacrum: the marshalling together of component symbols and themes that effectively produce the new model-copy relation. In this way, the book oozes out of the simulacrum machine, made-to-order.
Most university libraries will have a copy - that is if it has not been stolen. Generally, it will be shelved in a section dedicated to encyclopedias, fictional languages, and imaginary worlds in the oversize stacks. A first edition copy, published by Franco Maria Ricci, can command well beyond a thousand dollars, with the first “English” edition (Abbeville, New York) priced similarly. In 2006, Rizzoli reissued a deluxe edition (which also came with a separate “Decodex” chapbook in the back cover sleeve) at a more affordable $250 - still at a price point prohibitive to the average book-buyer. However, with the Internet, there have been scanned versions placed online. What was peculiar about the Rizzoli edition was the addition of nine new pages in the preface (as well as inserted throughout the original, at times duplicating or cleaving the numbering system). A careful examination of the style does more than suggest it is by Serafini’s hand, but it is likely that these were produced well before or well after the original given that it seems stylistically (d)evolved. These new pages are tantalizing, and for all that eager cryptanalysts might think this is mirabile dictu, Serafini might just be having us on once more in dangling clues that are not really clues.
Since its debut in 1981, the book has resisted all efforts at its decipherment with the exception of the numbers (but mostly those that appear as page numbers, not the separate numerical series that occurs in text). The Codex Seraphinianus occasionally returns to our attention. There are some - and I consider myself in this camp - who cannot resist the challenge of deciphering it even if the result may prove futile. In fact, it is the mystery of the book as a whole that keeps it alive and lends it its particular value as an esoteric, obscure, and mystifying object. Other connoisseurs of the text, like Peter Schwenger, tell us that deciphering is not the point of the Codex, and he devotesconsiderable ink to the final page where we have the page curling up into itself and revealing some of those “rainbow germs” prancing around the authorial hand - a skeletal reminder of futility. Those who side with Schwenger may agree that perhaps the worst possible fate this book could succumb to would be in the definitive proof that the language itself turns out to be a hoax, or even worse if it does not and the deciphered text is banal. I have attempted several methods from classical to computerized in an effort to decipher what remains indecipherable, but one wonders if we should leave well enough alone and allow the mystery and beauty of the text to remain intact without trampling upon it with analytical instruments in hand. This has already been suggested to me by Peter Schwenger, who wrote the seminal article, Codex Seraphinianus: Hallucinogenic Encyclopedia. And, among all of us who gather virtually or in-person to discuss the enigma of the Codex, this invariably conjures up our anecdotal tales of how we came across it, a kind of meta-narrative that is associated with the book, sometimes as uncanny and mysterious as the book itself.
The other problematic wrinkle in all of this would be that, as of this writing, the author of the text is still alive. He has gone on record in saying that the text is not a cipher at all, that it is asemic, and that it aims to mimic how a pre-literate child would view an encyclopedia. If we apply the principle of charity to this confession or declaration, we have little reason to doubt that attempts at deciphering the book will always end in frustration, but if we take a more suspicious view, then Luigi Serafini may be trying to dissuade us from unmasking the text and revealing its semantic information. I have no doubt that Serafini has been pestered enough on this subject, and that he has been contacted by a strange breed of persons who have made this book their most fervent obsession.
No one so far has stepped into the breach and declared the solution to puzzle save for a few isolated individuals who have coasted on the provocation of their claim without providing much in the way of evidence. There have been no charlatans on the order of Athanasius Kircher who have made bold claims to have translated Serafini’s hieroglyphics with any real demonstrative evidence. Of course, this book would have tested Kircher’s skills in much the same way the Voynich Manuscript did before he fobbed it off in frustration to others until it was occulted from view and rediscovered in a trunk of a Jesuit College by Alfred Voynich in 1913.
As previously stated, I have attempted a wide variety of deciphering or decoding techniques from the classic Caesar shift cipher to frequency analysis, Vigenere squares, and not only have I not come upon a solution (if it exists), but I have yet to exhaust the many variations of this deciphering techniques. When in the throes of such efforts, it is a far too common phenomenon to find oneself conjuring up yet another possible way into the cipher midway through an attempt already in progress. If there is a solution, it may only come about through a brute force attack. My closest lead thus far has been in viewing the chapter headings (after an assiduous collection into various matrices and tables) as being consonants, with the exception of when a diacritical mark is added to denote passage to the nearest vowel. To explain the multiple instances of these glyphs (at times in triplicate), I can only assume that he is using different alphabets, shifted by sevens, fourteens, twenty-ones, or some hidden series.
I have been remiss in leaving out many of Serafini’s other works for the sake of focus. Although there is reason to suspect that his exhibited work, the Pulcinellopedia, Storia Naturale, and his illustrations for an Italian edition of Kafka’s The Penal Colony may provide more clues, they may in fact only multiply conjecture and the tendency while frustrated to make hasty connections. [update: I am looking forward to a copy of LUNA-PAC I just ordered. Will this shed any light on the mystery of the Codex?]
Just to sound a note of peculiarity outside what is already peculiar, I was invited by the editor at Scriptjr.nl to submit my very old and quasi-satirical essay on the Codex that I had written quite a few years ago. During that time, the editor (Quimby Melton), attempted to contact Luigi Serafini but received no reply. Yet, he did start receiving mail-art shortly after by a Serse Luigetti, postmarked in Perugia, Italy. I thought, just for kicks, to compare the names of Luigi to Serse and Serafini to Luigetti. Curiously enough, using a conventional alphabet, the letters in the first three of each stood apart by a shift of exactly seven. Could this be Serafini acting out an alter ego, or is this just the jape of an artistic enthusiast? There is very little record of Serse Luigetti beyond his mail-art - no online biography or maintained website.
The purpose of this site will not be to record (all) my failures as a codebreaker, for as much as negative results can be enormously helpful in the empirical sciences to spare the time of others from footling with dead ends, my interest is to examine the book in its interdisciplinary contexts. The book itself is an imaginary compendium that is itself interdisciplinary in scope, and it simply does the book far more justice and respect to consider it on these terms. This page is dedicated to a descriptive page by page analysis of the book, examining it in detail and providing observational commentary with possible points of historical relevance and inspiration. In order to ensure said relevance, it is highly recommended that the reader pair this analysis with a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus since I will not be supplying images (because that violates copyright).
Serafini’s Codex has a double inheritance. For as much as it appears an homage to the lurid rubrications of medieval bestiaries and an increase in the natural sciences following the Arabic-inspired intellectual watershed that eventually brought the works of Aristotle into view and began the period of scholasticism, the Codex also has a debt to surrealism. Apart from the apparent dreamscapes that Serafini depicts for us, it is a cinematic reel seemingly plucked from the subconscious. It is absurd, occasionally disturbing, almost always marvellous. The Codex is surrealism without the politics, or without a politics we can access and comprehend. We could interpret the very act of cataloguing and organizing as something inherently political, but this risks throwing another interpretive blind over the work. Throughout the Codex we are privy to mutations and fusions, the unlikely mergers of the organic and synthetic, bandaged fruit, trees that uproot and migrate by swimming away, chairs grown in the wild, architects with enormous prosthetic pencils in place of hands, the reverencing of the refrigerator, the meticulous measuring of a fried egg, glyphs in nature, machines that make rainbows and tie them into bows, and all manner of oddities composed of objects and concepts that have resemblances in our own world.
Most university libraries will have a copy - that is if it has not been stolen. Generally, it will be shelved in a section dedicated to encyclopedias, fictional languages, and imaginary worlds in the oversize stacks. A first edition copy, published by Franco Maria Ricci, can command well beyond a thousand dollars, with the first “English” edition (Abbeville, New York) priced similarly. In 2006, Rizzoli reissued a deluxe edition (which also came with a separate “Decodex” chapbook in the back cover sleeve) at a more affordable $250 - still at a price point prohibitive to the average book-buyer. However, with the Internet, there have been scanned versions placed online. What was peculiar about the Rizzoli edition was the addition of nine new pages in the preface (as well as inserted throughout the original, at times duplicating or cleaving the numbering system). A careful examination of the style does more than suggest it is by Serafini’s hand, but it is likely that these were produced well before or well after the original given that it seems stylistically (d)evolved. These new pages are tantalizing, and for all that eager cryptanalysts might think this is mirabile dictu, Serafini might just be having us on once more in dangling clues that are not really clues.
Since its debut in 1981, the book has resisted all efforts at its decipherment with the exception of the numbers (but mostly those that appear as page numbers, not the separate numerical series that occurs in text). The Codex Seraphinianus occasionally returns to our attention. There are some - and I consider myself in this camp - who cannot resist the challenge of deciphering it even if the result may prove futile. In fact, it is the mystery of the book as a whole that keeps it alive and lends it its particular value as an esoteric, obscure, and mystifying object. Other connoisseurs of the text, like Peter Schwenger, tell us that deciphering is not the point of the Codex, and he devotesconsiderable ink to the final page where we have the page curling up into itself and revealing some of those “rainbow germs” prancing around the authorial hand - a skeletal reminder of futility. Those who side with Schwenger may agree that perhaps the worst possible fate this book could succumb to would be in the definitive proof that the language itself turns out to be a hoax, or even worse if it does not and the deciphered text is banal. I have attempted several methods from classical to computerized in an effort to decipher what remains indecipherable, but one wonders if we should leave well enough alone and allow the mystery and beauty of the text to remain intact without trampling upon it with analytical instruments in hand. This has already been suggested to me by Peter Schwenger, who wrote the seminal article, Codex Seraphinianus: Hallucinogenic Encyclopedia. And, among all of us who gather virtually or in-person to discuss the enigma of the Codex, this invariably conjures up our anecdotal tales of how we came across it, a kind of meta-narrative that is associated with the book, sometimes as uncanny and mysterious as the book itself.
The other problematic wrinkle in all of this would be that, as of this writing, the author of the text is still alive. He has gone on record in saying that the text is not a cipher at all, that it is asemic, and that it aims to mimic how a pre-literate child would view an encyclopedia. If we apply the principle of charity to this confession or declaration, we have little reason to doubt that attempts at deciphering the book will always end in frustration, but if we take a more suspicious view, then Luigi Serafini may be trying to dissuade us from unmasking the text and revealing its semantic information. I have no doubt that Serafini has been pestered enough on this subject, and that he has been contacted by a strange breed of persons who have made this book their most fervent obsession.
No one so far has stepped into the breach and declared the solution to puzzle save for a few isolated individuals who have coasted on the provocation of their claim without providing much in the way of evidence. There have been no charlatans on the order of Athanasius Kircher who have made bold claims to have translated Serafini’s hieroglyphics with any real demonstrative evidence. Of course, this book would have tested Kircher’s skills in much the same way the Voynich Manuscript did before he fobbed it off in frustration to others until it was occulted from view and rediscovered in a trunk of a Jesuit College by Alfred Voynich in 1913.
As previously stated, I have attempted a wide variety of deciphering or decoding techniques from the classic Caesar shift cipher to frequency analysis, Vigenere squares, and not only have I not come upon a solution (if it exists), but I have yet to exhaust the many variations of this deciphering techniques. When in the throes of such efforts, it is a far too common phenomenon to find oneself conjuring up yet another possible way into the cipher midway through an attempt already in progress. If there is a solution, it may only come about through a brute force attack. My closest lead thus far has been in viewing the chapter headings (after an assiduous collection into various matrices and tables) as being consonants, with the exception of when a diacritical mark is added to denote passage to the nearest vowel. To explain the multiple instances of these glyphs (at times in triplicate), I can only assume that he is using different alphabets, shifted by sevens, fourteens, twenty-ones, or some hidden series.
I have been remiss in leaving out many of Serafini’s other works for the sake of focus. Although there is reason to suspect that his exhibited work, the Pulcinellopedia, Storia Naturale, and his illustrations for an Italian edition of Kafka’s The Penal Colony may provide more clues, they may in fact only multiply conjecture and the tendency while frustrated to make hasty connections. [update: I am looking forward to a copy of LUNA-PAC I just ordered. Will this shed any light on the mystery of the Codex?]
Just to sound a note of peculiarity outside what is already peculiar, I was invited by the editor at Scriptjr.nl to submit my very old and quasi-satirical essay on the Codex that I had written quite a few years ago. During that time, the editor (Quimby Melton), attempted to contact Luigi Serafini but received no reply. Yet, he did start receiving mail-art shortly after by a Serse Luigetti, postmarked in Perugia, Italy. I thought, just for kicks, to compare the names of Luigi to Serse and Serafini to Luigetti. Curiously enough, using a conventional alphabet, the letters in the first three of each stood apart by a shift of exactly seven. Could this be Serafini acting out an alter ego, or is this just the jape of an artistic enthusiast? There is very little record of Serse Luigetti beyond his mail-art - no online biography or maintained website.
The purpose of this site will not be to record (all) my failures as a codebreaker, for as much as negative results can be enormously helpful in the empirical sciences to spare the time of others from footling with dead ends, my interest is to examine the book in its interdisciplinary contexts. The book itself is an imaginary compendium that is itself interdisciplinary in scope, and it simply does the book far more justice and respect to consider it on these terms. This page is dedicated to a descriptive page by page analysis of the book, examining it in detail and providing observational commentary with possible points of historical relevance and inspiration. In order to ensure said relevance, it is highly recommended that the reader pair this analysis with a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus since I will not be supplying images (because that violates copyright).
Serafini’s Codex has a double inheritance. For as much as it appears an homage to the lurid rubrications of medieval bestiaries and an increase in the natural sciences following the Arabic-inspired intellectual watershed that eventually brought the works of Aristotle into view and began the period of scholasticism, the Codex also has a debt to surrealism. Apart from the apparent dreamscapes that Serafini depicts for us, it is a cinematic reel seemingly plucked from the subconscious. It is absurd, occasionally disturbing, almost always marvellous. The Codex is surrealism without the politics, or without a politics we can access and comprehend. We could interpret the very act of cataloguing and organizing as something inherently political, but this risks throwing another interpretive blind over the work. Throughout the Codex we are privy to mutations and fusions, the unlikely mergers of the organic and synthetic, bandaged fruit, trees that uproot and migrate by swimming away, chairs grown in the wild, architects with enormous prosthetic pencils in place of hands, the reverencing of the refrigerator, the meticulous measuring of a fried egg, glyphs in nature, machines that make rainbows and tie them into bows, and all manner of oddities composed of objects and concepts that have resemblances in our own world.
Section 0: Preface [Rizzoli Edition Only]
Unless otherwise marked with [R] all pages will pertain to the FMR and Abbeville editions, expressed as either preface [P] (Rizzoli edition only) first volume [A], or second volume [B]. The second column will use the Serafini numeral with the following column expressing the number equivalent in the Latin alphabet. The next column is composed of description, notes and observations.
Section 1: Flora
This section is incomplete
Section 2: Fauna
coming soon
Section 3: Homunculus
coming soon
Section 4: Chemistry and Physics
coming soon
Section 5: Mechanics
coming soon
Section 6: Anthropology
coming soon
Section 7: Ethnology and History
Just a stub for the moment, but it may be of some interest to note the similarity between Serafini's tank in the war scene and the tank designed by Da Vinci in the Codex Arundel:
Section 8: Linguistics
coming soon
Section 9: Culture
coming soon
Section 10: Amusements
This section of the Codex contains a variety of entertainments that can be conducted in small groups such as playing cards, a version of a cribbage board, and a private viewing box. It then proceeds to detail what appear to be larger attractions like circuses.
We begin with an examination of the four card suits which are roughly based on animal totems. The “major arcana” cards appear at the top, and the suits correspond two on two akin to our playing card deck of having two red suits and two black. This can be seen in the difference between the cards that sport the strange centaur-esque creature holding a globed standard. What is also particularly interesting about these decks would be that the numerical sequence moves from one (or zero) to two, three, five, nine, fourteen, twenty, to a very cluttered and seemingly uncountable card number. These numbers do not correspond with the base-21 of the pagination. Also of note would be the specific use of animals that represent each suit: ass and rhinoceras on one set of pages, and mouse and bull on the other. Setting aside the symbolism of these animals, we know in Latin that these form rhyming pairs: asino / rino, topo / toro.
The scene of two men approaching to shake hands seems drawn from William Henry Fox Talbot’s iconic Two Men Shaking Hands. Widely credited with the invention of photography, it nearly seems that Serafini is paying homage to Talbot with this image. In Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), he writes: "when the eye was removed from the prism – in which all had looked beautiful – I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold." And later he decides to "reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature's painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus – fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away... the idea occurred to me... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper." Serafini’s device displays the principle of film animation within a presumably elaborate series of stills that fold up within a pyramid. When unfolded or perhaps viewed through an aperture, the viewer would see the sequential series of the two men approach, clasp hands, and retreat.
We begin with an examination of the four card suits which are roughly based on animal totems. The “major arcana” cards appear at the top, and the suits correspond two on two akin to our playing card deck of having two red suits and two black. This can be seen in the difference between the cards that sport the strange centaur-esque creature holding a globed standard. What is also particularly interesting about these decks would be that the numerical sequence moves from one (or zero) to two, three, five, nine, fourteen, twenty, to a very cluttered and seemingly uncountable card number. These numbers do not correspond with the base-21 of the pagination. Also of note would be the specific use of animals that represent each suit: ass and rhinoceras on one set of pages, and mouse and bull on the other. Setting aside the symbolism of these animals, we know in Latin that these form rhyming pairs: asino / rino, topo / toro.
The scene of two men approaching to shake hands seems drawn from William Henry Fox Talbot’s iconic Two Men Shaking Hands. Widely credited with the invention of photography, it nearly seems that Serafini is paying homage to Talbot with this image. In Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844), he writes: "when the eye was removed from the prism – in which all had looked beautiful – I found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold." And later he decides to "reflect on the inimitable beauty of the pictures of nature's painting which the glass lens of the Camera throws upon the paper in its focus – fairy pictures, creations of a moment, and destined as rapidly to fade away... the idea occurred to me... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper." Serafini’s device displays the principle of film animation within a presumably elaborate series of stills that fold up within a pyramid. When unfolded or perhaps viewed through an aperture, the viewer would see the sequential series of the two men approach, clasp hands, and retreat.
Section 11: Architecture
coming soon