Copulating Alligator or CODEX SERAPHINIANUS

The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing

 I saw a flattish doughnut, possibly made of liquid, and colored a soft, rich red. While the doughnut’s inner ring (i.e., the perimeter of the doughnut’s hole) was perfectly round, the outer ring was irregularly shaped, and appeared more like an elastic membrane. Ladybugs, the same color as the doughnut but also stippled with their standard black dots, emerged from the outer ring and crawled off in all directions. On closer inspection, it didn’t appear that the ladybugs had pushed through the membranous outer ring; no, it seemed more like they were forming from the doughnut material. Parts of the doughnut’s outer ring appeared scooped out, and these inlets seemed to correspond to the various fully formed ladybugs that had walked away. I saw a flattish doughnut, possibly made of liquid, and colored a soft, rich red. While the doughnut’s inner ring (i.e., the perimeter of the doughnut’s hole) was perfectly round, the outer ring was irregularly shaped, and appeared more like an elastic membrane. Ladybugs, the same color as the doughnut but also stippled with their standard black dots, emerged from the outer ring and crawled off in all directions. On closer inspection, it didn’t appear that the ladybugs had pushed through the membranous outer ring; no, it seemed more like they were forming from the doughnut material. Parts of the doughnut’s outer ring appeared scooped out, and these inlets seemed to correspond to the various fully formed ladybugs that had walked away.

Text accompanied these images—or what looked like text. But the text wasn’t in English, and it wasn’t anything recognizably foreign like, say, Arabic or Sanskrit, though those analogs immediately came to mind. Though impenetrable, a kind of meaning was suggested by the layout of the script on the page.

This was reinforced by the visual resonances of the two images and their apparent or implied relationship to one another. The ladybug doughnut, which dominated the whole top half of the page, seemed to be a natural process, a sort of variation on the butterfly chrysalis, though in this case a multitude of creatures was formed in (but also, importantly, of) some protean organic material (perhaps a visual pun on the idea of a “primordial soup”) that collected in shapely rings around tree limbs, at least in the environment under consideration. Toward the bottom of one “paragraph” on the page were four dollops of color, ranging from a whitish beige to the same red as that of the rings. Perhaps the text was explaining how to gauge the rings’ progress in the incubation/gestation
cycle. Since the rings on the tree were all final-stage red, and the leaves on the tree were so green, you could surmise that it was spring in the picture, and the rings were getting ready to burst forth with new ladybugs. The world, at this level, was wholly internally consistent—or at least it could be made to “read” that way.

History is littered with inscrutable texts. Some have been deciphered, others—in terms of origin, content, and purpose—remain mysterious. As a book-object, though, the Codex’s only real precursor is The Voynich Manuscript. Discovered by the Polish book collector Wilfrid M. Voynich in a wooden chest at an Italian Jesuit college in 1912, the heavily illustrated manuscript was worked on by top code-crackers during World War II. They failed. It’s never been deciphered. Theories on its origin and significance abound, including the theory that the manuscript is a fraud perpetrated by Voynich himself, but the most popular and conclusive theory attributes the work to Roger Bacon, the medieval Franciscan friar who, in his Letter Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and Nature and the Nullity of Magic, noted that “certain persons have achieved concealment by means of letters not then used by their own race or others but arbitrarily invented by themselves.”
From Believer by Justin Taylor