The Codex Gigas: The Devil's Bible

It takes two people to lift it. Bound in wooden boards covered with leather and metal fittings, the Codex Gigas ("giant book") is about 92 centimetres tall, 50 wide and 22 thick, and weighs around 75 kilograms. It is the largest surviving medieval manuscript. Open it towards the end and you reach a page found in no other Bible: a full-page devil, nearly a metre high, green-faced, horned, clawed, crouching in an ermine loincloth. On the facing page is a Heavenly City. The pairing gave the book its nickname, the Devil's Bible, and a legend that has never let go of it.

The object

• 310 leaves of vellum survive. The count and the collation suggest that some leaves are missing.
• Written in Bohemia in the early thirteenth century, usually dated around 1204–1230, probably at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice. A note in a calendar in the book records a "Hermann the Recluse" (Hermannus inclusus), who is often taken to be its scribe.
• One hand? Palaeographers have observed that the script is remarkably uniform throughout, and many conclude that a single scribe wrote it over many years. Estimates run to two decades or more.
• Ownership. It passed from Podlažice to other Bohemian monasteries and then to the collections of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, the same court that owned the Voynich Manuscript (V01). In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, the Swedish army took it as plunder. In 1697 a fire struck the royal castle in Stockholm, and the codex was reportedly thrown from a window to save it. It has been in the National Library of Sweden ever since, apart from loans home to Prague (2007–2008).

What is in it

The Codex is a library in one volume. Its contents include:

• The Old Testament (Vulgate).
• Josephus, Jewish Antiquities and The Jewish War, in Latin.
• Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, an encyclopaedia of the medieval world.
• Medical texts, including works of the Salernitan school.
• The New Testament.
• The Devil and the Heavenly City.
• Cosmas of Prague, Chronicle of the Bohemians.
• Confessions, penitential texts and exorcism formulae, including spells against illness and theft.
• A calendar with necrology, listing names of the dead to be remembered.

The legend, and what can be said about it

The best-known story says a monk who had broken his vows was sentenced to be walled up alive. To escape the sentence he promised to write, in one night, a book to glorify the monastery. At midnight, failing, he prayed to the devil, who finished the book and was rewarded with his portrait. The story is folklore. It is attested only long after the book was made and fits a common type of tale about pacts with the devil. The uniform script that makes the "single night" impossible is the same evidence that points to one scribe working for years.

Symbology

Devil and City, face to face. The devil page (page 290 in the library's numbering) sits directly after the penitential texts and faces the Heavenly City. The layout makes a theological statement: sin and salvation on facing pages, with confession standing between them. That is a documented reading of the book's structure. No hidden message is required to explain it.

Exorcism as text. The formulae against demons and illness show that the book was a working ritual tool as well as a display piece. Its sacred power was used, not just admired.

Connections

Scholasticism and the high-medieval Church (ch28), the Witch Trials (ch32, for the later reception of pact legends), the Voynich Manuscript (V01, through Rudolf II's Prague), and Satanism (ch39, for the modern afterlife of "Devil's Bible" imagery).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/codex-gigas.html