The Ninth Gate, revisited...

Note: this article has now moved to the-ninth-gate-revisited on Cipher Mysteries

Another day, another curiously contentful blog to set me thinking: this time it's Alterati, "The Inside Scoop on The Outside Culture", and specifically a two-part article there from October 2007 entitled "The Yellow Sign: Manuscripts, Codices, and Grimoires".

In Part 1, the discussion swoops from our old friend the Codex Seraphinianus (yet again), to Borges' Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, to Newbold's claimed microscopic writing in the VMs, and then on to a powerful idea: that "a void, the right void, will spontaneously generate a stop-gap if there’s enough market pressure", i.e. given sufficient market demand to scratch an itch, people will start selling backscratchers.

"Or perhaps ideas manifest themselves - the more real an idea is the quicker it pops into existence in library-space [...]. 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": i.e. given sufficient 'market demand' for a religion, books claiming to be the sources of those religions will spontaneously appear.

Here, I suspect the Alterati blogger is thinking about the legend surrounding the Codex Gigas (because that's what he goes on to discuss), but that seems a little dubious: just about all of the Codex Gigas is mundane, if not actually dull (there's a set of hi-res scans here, the famous devil picture is on p.290, but big deal, I say). However, it's actually far closer to the truth with The Grand Grimoire, which is supposed to date to 1522 but which seems to scratch a peculiarly 19th century itch.

In Part 2, the focus shifts to Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, a film I really enjoyed but thought no more than a piece of celluloid mythmaking, a seductive summoning-up of the taste of the Devil's sulphurous kiss to titillate and amuse. However, I had no idea at all that it was based upon a book - The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. Fascinating stuff! (And yes, I've already ordered myself a copy). There's also a set of the engravings from the film online.

After various idle speculations on the Lovecraftian mythos, our Alterati blogger friend wonders whether the mysterious roving figure of Corso (the book dealer / detective in The Ninth Gate / Club Dumas) is actually based on Wilfrid Voynich. Hmmm... Wilfrid Voynich, as played by Johnny Depp? It's fairly sublime (I get more of a David Suchet vibe): but perhaps I'm wrong...



I think you'll have to decide for yourself. :-)

Dee, Lovecraft, Voynich - An Eternal Triangle?

I've just started reading Colin Wilson's "The Philosopher's Stone", so I thought it might be a good idea to blog about an article from the Metromagick blog where he also plays a role.

The piece is called "Dr. John Dee, the Necronomicon & the Cleansing of the World", and was written by Colin Low in 1996-2000. It's basically an extended riff on H.P.Lovecraft, John Dee, the Voynich Manuscript, Aleister Crowley and the Necronomicon, and how much they do (or don't) relate to each other.

The problem with Lovecraft fans is that they often enjoy emulating what their gloomy hero liked to do: mix fantasy with history until they both blur together into one great big glob of either historicised fiction or fictionalised history (whichever you prefer, it doesn't matter much).

And so it was that in 1978, a book called "Necronomicon" appeared edited by George Hay (reprinted in 1995), containing a claim by David Langford and Robert Turner that Lovecraft's fabled Necronomicon was not only real but "had been preserved by Alkindi in his treatise The Book of the Essence of the Soul", parts of which had in turn been enciphered by John Dee in his Liber Loagaeth. With an introduction by Colin Wilson, it looked convincingly like real historical research... but (as you've probably guessed by now) it was merely faux Lovecraftian nonsense.

Colin Low's article then goes on to collect together various strands apparently connecting Dee (via Enochian and Choronzon) to Crowley and his well-documented adventures with demon summoning. It's all entertaining stuff, but the possible presence at the ball of a Lovecraftian mischief-making poltergeist tends to rather reduce its reliability for the reader. So in the end, does Low's account amount to something special or to something of nothing? Basically, I think you'll have to make your own call.

However, I do find Low's summing-up of the Necronomicon fiercely attuned to much that has been said about the Voynich Manuscript: "The Necronomicon is a hollow vessel - it booms resoundingly, but has nothing in it but the projections of our own fantasies." Which is a shame.

Voynich miscellany (again)...

The Voynich Manuscript meme continues to tap at our cultural windows, asking politely to be let in from the rain. And sometimes people do...

For example, here's a knitted squid sitting on a copy of Gawsewitch's "Le Code Voynich" (don't be put off by the LiveJournal 14+ age warning, it really is a knitting page).

Over at evilbore, Eric P is getting cross about how the VMs is sneaking in under the cultural radar: "What's caused this subconscious societal permeation of this obscure text?" he asks, before linking to Voynich News (good call!)

Or alternatively, here's someone called Malcolm starting a game of Lexicon based around a (fictional) deciphering of the VMs. Lexicon is an RPG where players take on the role of cranky scholars building a faux Wikipedia (one letter at a time, hence the name) around a fictional world, while trying not to cite themselves. Errrm... just like the real Wikipedia, then. ;-)

Norbert R. Ibanez has posted up some thoughts on the VMs in 'English' (with a PDF you can download): though his ideas may be basically OK, I don't like his automatic translator much. :-(

And finally, I've had some visitors from a posting about my VQ ("Voynich Quotient") page put up on the Yog-Sothoth forums (dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu players). One poster mentions "Keeper's Companion Vol. 1, p.63", where it presumably links the VMs to the Necronomicon: add that to the ever-growing web of Voynich references out there.

"The Spiderwick Chronicles" and the VMs...

You may not have heard of them, but the six books in The Spiderwick Chronicles - stories that follow a group of kids in their everyday struggles with elves, goblins and boggarts - have (according to a piece in this week's MCV, which seemed to have been written by Vivendi's PR folk) sold six million copies worldwide, more than a million of which were in the UK. Oh, and the US box office release of the movie grossed nearly $25m: and there's a computer game imminent, too.

LA-based blogger Martin van Velsen caught the film's opening: and was struck by the title-sequence, during which Arthur Spiderwick constructs a book, one page every day, by gluing down small objects and animal (mostly insect) parts and writing a commentary around them. Martin wonders if the Codex Seraphinianus and the Voynich Manuscript (both of which he describes as "pure works of fiction, a flight of fantasy out of control... [yet] based... on the real world") were effectively the real Spiderwick Chronicles.

"When browsing the Voynich Manuscript I tend to find myself wonder what was drawn true to life and what was made up. More importantly, did the author deliberately stay on the edge as to lure the reader into believing some of the imaginary depictions are actually real?"

All good thoughts. He ends his blog with a rather splendid quote from H. P. Lovecraft:-

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

This whole blog entry warmed my heart, simply because here we have a blogger who really gets the Voynich. OK, he's into H. P. Lovecraft and Luigi Serafini too, so it wasn't a massive jump sideways: but all credit to him regardless. :-)