nine of the most bizarre but truly fantastic esoteric books

Below are nine of the most bizarre but truly fantastic esoteric books ever written…So pull up a chair, a cup of holiday cheer, and have a read …

The Puzzling But Amazing Voynich Manuscript Let’s start of with the book everyone has been talking about more recently. The Voynich manuscript! This book is an illustrated coded book that was hand-written in a mysterious writing system. It has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century and written in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, who was a Polish book dealer that purchased the book in 1912 from an Italian owner. Some of the pages are unfortunately missing, with around 240 remaining. The text is written from left to right,with occult symbolism here and there and most of the pages also have mysterious illustrations or diagrams. Some pages are creatively done foldable sheets. The Voynich manuscript has been studied by several professional and amateur codebreakers including Americas and Britains best from both World War I and World War II. However Nobody has succeeded in decoding the text at all, and it has become the most famous case in the world of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many theories proposed over the last hundred years has yet been fully verified. The Voynich manuscript was donated by Hans Kraus to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969, where it is cataloged under call number MS 408. It is one of the most intriguing and mysteries occult works in code ever! Next...Let’s travel over to Hungary, where we find…

The Hungarian Rohonc Codex The Rohonc Codex (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈrohont͡s]) is an illustrated manuscript by an unknown and mysterious author, the text is  in an unknown language and writing system, that surfaced in Hungary in the early 19th century. The book's origin and the meaning of the text and illustrations have been investigated by many scholars and amateurs, with no definitive conclusion — although many Hungarian scholars believe that it is an 18th-century hoax. The name of the codex is often spelled Rohonczi, according to the old Hungarian orthography that was reformed in the first half of the 19th century. This spelling has spread probably due to the book of V. Enăchiuc. Today the name of the codex is written in Hungarian as Rohonci-kódex.  Next up what do we find in the Netherlands? None other than...

The Frisian Oera Linda Book The Oera Linda Book is a manuscript written in Old Frisian. It covers historical, mythological, and occult themes between 2194 BCE and 803 CE. The manuscript was first revealed to the public in the 1860s.  In 1872, Jan Gerhardus Ottema published a Dutch translation and defended it as "genuine." Over the next few years there was a heated public controversy, but by 1879 it was universally recognized that the text was not that ancient but more recently written. Nevertheless, a public debate was revived in the context of 1930s as the Nazis took a deep interest in it, the rise of Nazi occultism. The book is still occasionally brought up in esotericism and "Atlantis" literature. The manuscript's author is not known with certainty, and it is hence unknown whether the intention was to produce a hoax, a parody or merely an exercise in poetic fantasy. The Dutch do have a reputation for some of the strangest or oddest books on the planet, and this one is no exception, quite intriguing! Over to where Heidi milked her cows, yes you guessed it we visit Switzerland next.

The Swiss Prodigiorum ac Ostentorum Chronicon This book was written in 1557, by Konrad Lykosthenes in Basel (A town in Switzerland). Prodigiorum AC Ostentorum Chronicon is a book that is unique and mysterious. This book contains a collection of signs and warnings that stretch from ancient Greece and Rome to contemporary Europe. It is also described and displayed various creatures, both real and fantastic. Otherwise known as the Chronicle of Warnings and Prophecies, this book was written in 1557 by the French humanist Conrad Lycosthenes. It is laid out like an encyclopedia, the book tells supernatural happenings since the time of Adam and Eve. But while the encyclopedic Codex Seraphinianus was a book of fantasy, Lycosthenes’s Chronicle was relatively factual—at least in the sense that it covered actual reports. Sandwiched in between well-documented disasters, floods, and meteor showers (including Halley’s comet) there are odd and fascinating descriptions of sea monsters, UFOs, esoteric and various biblical events. The Chronicle is incredibly detailed and contains over 1,000 original woodcut illustrations of what I described above. There are still several copies floating around, usually on rare book websites, where they sell for thousands of dollars. Would you like a copy? Lol! Back to Italy especially Northern Italy where the Occult has its ancient roots that can still be seen today…we have something more modern but a very esoterically profound and fantastic book…

The Northern Italian Codex Seraphinianus First published in 1981, this is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by the Italian artist, architect, and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978. The book is about 360 pages long (depending on edition), and written in an esoteric cipher alphabet or in an imaginary or alien language? The book is like an encyclopedia containing hundreds of hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, styles, and foods. It has been compared to the still undeciphered Voynich manuscript,which is another Italian mystery we first discussed. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into an alligator; etc.  Other pictures show very odd, apparently senseless machines, often with a delicate appearance, kept together by tiny filaments. There are also pictures readily recognizable as maps or human faces. On the other hand, especially in the "physics" chapter, many images look almost entirely abstract. All pictures are brightly colored and rich in beautiful detail.　This book is highly sought after, and the original 1981 first printing is costly and scarce. I would love a copy, wouldn’t you? Ok over to England and the John Dee connection…

The Mysterious Dee-Owned Book of Soyga This book is a 16th-century Latin work on magic, and one copy is known to have been owned by the Elizabethan scholar Magician John Dee. After Dee's death, the book was thought to be lost until very recently. In 1994 it was rediscovered when two manuscripts were located in the British Library (Sloane MS. 8) and the Bodleian Library (Bodley MS. 908), under the title Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor, by Dee scholar Deborah Harkness. The Sloane 8 version is also described as Tractatus Astrologico Magicus, though both versions differ only slightly. The Bodley 908 MS consists of 197 pages including Liber Aldaraia (95 pages), Liber Radiorum (65 pages), and Liber Decimus Septimus (2 pages), as well as some shorter and unnamed works totaling approximately ten pages. The final 18 pages of the MS contain 36 tables of letters. The Sloane 8 MS consists of 147 pages, mostly identical to the Bodley MS, with the exception that the tables of notes appear on 36 pages, and the Liber Radiorum is presented in a two-page summarized version. Amongst the chants and instructions on magic, astrology, demonology, lists of conjunctions, lunar mansions, and names and genealogies of angels, the book contains 36 large squares of letters which Dee was unable to decipher.Otherwise unknown medieval magical works are cited, including works known as liber E, liber Os, liber dignus, liber Sipal, and liber Munob. This book is quite bizarre!

The Smithfield Decretals and Pope Gregory This collection of canonical law, ordered by the 13th century Pope Gregory IX, could have been relatively typical for its time and probably rather boring. Instead, the bizarre illustrations that accompanied the decretals lifted this illuminated manuscript to a mystical status of weirdness but interest.. The book features many scenes of homicidal giant rabbits, a medieval Yoda,(and you thought Star Wars was original? Lol) bears fighting unicorns, and strange human and animals practices. Perhaps the monks drawing these had something in their water or knew there would someday exist a digital network connecting people who'd love to share such images for giggles and likes. It is quite and interesting book visually!

The Ripley Scrolls These are alchemical scrolls which are associated with George Ripley. In fact, these are rare manuscripts which illustrate the pursuit for the Philosophers' Stone. Ripley was a canon of Bridlington in Yorkshire who lived from about 1415 to 1495. When Isaac Newton began looking into the mysteries of alchemy, he read mostly the works of Sir George Ripley, a 15th-century writer who created some of the longest-lasting works on the subject. His most fascinating is without a doubt the mysterious enigma that is known as the Ripley Scrolls. These scrolls are a picture-book how-to for making the esoteric philosopher’s stone, a fabled material supposedly able to turn lead into gold. Although the original version of the Ripley Scrolls was destroyed over time, a handful of artists in the 16th century created reproductions of the alchemical work, and 23 of those remain. Each one is slightly different from all the copies were handmade. The most massive scroll is a gigantic 20 foot long, with dense illustrations covering most of it. Every occultist should own a copy! Back to the ancient world of the Aztecs where we find…

The Mendoza Codex The history of the Mendoza Codex reads like the plot in an adventure novel. Following the long and bloody conquest of the Aztec Empire, the Spaniards claimed their region of Mexico as the property of the Spanish king, and they instated Antonio de Mendoza as the new empire’s first governor. One of Mendoza’s acts as ruler was to commission a history of the Aztec people, which he sent via ship back to Spain. On the way, French pirates seized the Spanish ship, killed everyone on board, looted everything on board. Lost in the mix, the Codex Mendoza was carried to France, where it was stored and last rediscovered by one of the king’s advisers in 1553. For the next hundred years, the Mendoza Codex was sold various times and exchanged hands several times more around Europe, It appeared here and there before it vanished.  And It wasn’t until 1831 that the document was found again in a storage room at the Bodleian Library. intensely detailed, the Codex Mendoza is broken into three parts. Part one gives the lineage of the Aztec kings, Part two lists all the Mexican villages that paid taxes to the Aztec empire, and part three is a description of everyday Aztec daily life. The pictures were hand painted by Aztec slaves under the command of Spanish. Altogether, the Mendoza codex gives us the single most revealing look at the Aztec empire, which is especially crucial since the Spanish burnt nearly everything else the Aztecs had.

David and Leslie Griffin