I'd say the Voynich Manuscript (which the article mentions) is still the strangest book in the world.
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.
I ll fork voynich, merge them with codex s. if cc, scramble with hegels dialectic and add a mix of brainfuck + plan 9 kernel in obscured form, and sell. is this allowed?
> For instance, [this group] discovered that the numbering system is base 21, and [this guy] discovered certain grammatical rules governing the script, and even created a sort of transliterator you can use. [This lady] claims to have hallucinated herself into the world of the Codex, even prior to having heard of it.
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.
Humor on HN is strongly moderated in an attempt to forestall the degradation of signal/noise ratio that eventually will evolve it into a sea of memes and pun threads.
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.
Yes, in this case the hidden meaning of the Red Book is the unconsiousness itself. Holding the secrets to the meaning of life. My question is, are the Voynich, Antichthon Universalis of Codex_Seraphinianus manuscripts, Valis (Philp K. Dick), Michael J. Topper's or even Castaneda's work merely artificially constructed fantasies (like Scientology or the Church of Subgenius) or also pointing to or connecting with a deeper layer of reality of archetypes rooted in our biology like in Jung's the Red Book? Is there a deeper meaning?
Since when is Scientology artificially constructed? I think "thinking about Scientology" is not the same as "the subject of Scientology" - and after all, who is to say that the Voynich manuscript itself doesn't contain some seriously intersting, deep, secrets on the nature of the universe, being overlooked by the ignorant who do not know its language. Like so many other subjects in the world, alas, of the human soul.
Hi fit2rule, a good question.... i assume Scientology's metaphysical subject was articulated by L. Ron Hubbard in
"Scientology: A History of Man" (1952)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology:_A_History_of_Man#T...
I am not sure if L. Ron Hubbard actually believed in the things he wrote as it's so far out and contradicting scientific insight, or that he wrote it to create an artifical overarching framework (a sacred canopy) to hold dianetics together by rooting it in the transcendent (as such I think Scientology is a religion). The same uncertainty I have while evaluating Castaneda's work.
The underlying question remains the same - do they (and I was explicitly including Voynich) seriously interesting, deep, secrets on the nature of the universe or do they remain a fantasy and dream meaningful only to their respective authors?
What we think about Scientology, and what Scientologists think about Scientology, are two different things - are they not?
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 ..
It's weird... a lot of the stuff around this talks about Borges' story but it's a total misinterpretation. He was talking about memetics and the need for us to bring our fictions into reality through drastic means that blend it with our history.
Probably like all books that are meant to be strange and mysterious, it's actually quite boring. The strangest books to me are those the authors meant to be understood. One example (for me) is Valis, by PK Dick.
...no. My copy of the Codex is among my most treasured tomes.
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. ;-)
The artwork is consistently wonderful: baffling, amusing, worrying, imaginative, and surprising, not to mention beautiful and incredibly skilful. And there are nearly 400 pages of it. (And that's just the PDF...)
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.