Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus

The fantastical world of Italian artist Luigi Serafini, born in 1949 and still living in Rome. 

A forest somewhere, in some place,
maybe over the rainbow

I discovered a whole new world recently when visiting my granddaughter Julia and her oldest son Philip, my great-grandson, now 15 years old. He talked about something called the Codex, an encyclopedia of some kind, and he especially liked the drawings. They are weird, these odd scribbles and things, made-up things. Like weird plants, weird animals and birds, weird machines. Hmm, really?  I had no idea what Philip was talking about.

When I got home I messaged his mom to send me more information. What is this book? She said it was called The Codex Seraphinianus. Strange name. I did some research and reading. It didn't take long to realize I had gotten lost in a very unusual, to say the least, fantasy world that was incomprehensible and fascinating at the same time. 

The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia of people, places and things that exist only in the mind of its creator, Luigi Serafini. It's nothing like the other Codex we know, the one by Renaissance artist and genius Leonardo Da Vinci, which is a collection of his scientific writings and illustrates the link between art and science.  No, this is different. Maybe its title contains some hints. It's peculiar. It's  graphic. It's a combination of the author's name and, ahem, something else. It was created to sound like Latin so it would be taken seriously, which is so amusing in itself, this parody, this play on words. 

Serafini's Codex, as it's called for short, was first published in 1981. That's a longer time ago than I thought. I learned that it became a "cult classic," has been republished several times since then, and that it continues to feed a vast underground of admirers and followers right up to Philip's generation.  

Serafini, who lives in Rome, is an artist, designer, and architect. He spent years creating a make-believe language for his encyclopedia, a sort of flowing script with lots of curly ques and flourishes that looks like a free-floating form of Sanscrit to me. Some reviewers have called it asemic: it looks like writing, but you can't read it.

So the first thing to know about Serafini's Codex is that you cannot read this book. You just look at it and enter into a fantastical place you've never been before. I went to the Library to look through it.  It was strange. It  felt like being embedded in a Salvador Dali painting, actually many Dali paintings, getting into his dripping watches out on a limb in a strange dreamscape. 

What in the world? Whose world?

The second thing is that the people, places and things described in this encyclopedia are also invented. The Codex is wildly imaginative. The made-up language describes made-up people, places and things. Yes, I see what Philip was saying. The illustrations are amazing and weird, drawn in colored pencils, detailed, amusing and sometimes even scary. These fantastical visuals resemble nothing that we would want to look up in any real encyclopedia, but you can't help but be drawn into a surreal enchantment.  Serafini credits the decorative gothic painter Carlo Crivelli and the Surrealists with informing his style. "I have many masters. I really believe in masters. Really, it's very difficult to say what master gave me more than others," he says.  The surrealist masters stand out for me. 

Taken together, the visuals you don't recognize and the language you can't read, add up to a powerful imaginative experience that transports you to another realm. Readers, especially younger readers, are inexplicably mesmerized by this encyclopedia of arcane knowledge you don't need to consult for any reason, except that it's a fun+++ art experience. 

Serafina, now 72, began creating his Codex in the mid-1970s, and I would hazard to guess, maybe under the influence of something!  According to a 2020  Insider article, Serafini spent "two and a half years drawing like a hermit" while wearing out the grooves of a vinyl copy of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."  That was "the soundtrack of the Codex," Serafini said. "I almost broke it."  

His publisher finally forced him to put his pencil down. The Codex was published in 1981, and republished several times after that.

One critic calls Serafini's work  "a cross between a field guide to alien flora and fauna and an assembly manual for bizarre biomechanical devices, like something you'd find on a shelf in Dr. Strange's library – an arcane artifact that's recognizably a book, just not one from our reality."

A panel from a French exhibit of Serafini's work in October 2020

Why has this fanciful encyclopedia of Serafini's world that exists only in his mind, as creative and wonderful as it is, become a cult classic?  Maybe this psychotherapist, Douglas Hofstadter, has an answer. 

At Serafini's house in Rome. He is still writing,
still drawing, so there's no end to his Codex either. 

"On top of dreaming up a magnificently mysterious curly script in which all the articles were written (readable only by inhabitants of that world, sad to say, yet beautiful to behold by outsiders like us earthlings), he painted hundreds of fantastic, surreal scenes that would have sent chills up and down the spines of such madly possessed magicians as Hieronymus Bosch, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and M. C. Escher. Without any doubt, Luigi Serafini belongs in the ranks of those immortal geniuses, each of whom was gifted with a unique brand of deliciously demonic inventivity. Serafini matches them all at every level and in every dimension. I tip my hat with boundless admiration to this marvelous thinker, miraculous creator, and magistral artist."  Douglas Hofstadter

So, Philip.  Why do YOU like this book you can't read and that you find strange and weird?  "I don't know. It has do with the mystery of it, and the drawings." 

"Lots of people think the made-up language could be an actual language," he says. "There's lots of discussion online about it." 

Why would they think that? "Well, it might have grammatical rules or something. Also, the drawings are the coolest things ever and the art is unique. Where else can you find this information, Nana?"

Some Sources:  

1.  https://birdinflight.com/media/luigi-serafini-on-how-and-why-he-created-an-encyclopedia-of-an-imaginary-world.html

2.  https://contentcatnip.com/2018/09/21/book-review-codex-seraphinianus-by-luigi-serafini/

3.  https://newsrnd.com/life/2020-09-29-france-pays-homage-to-the--codex-seraphinianus-.rJeUvLYgUP.html   A 2020 exhibition in Southern France. 

4.  https://www.insider.com/codex-seraphinianus-luigi-serafini-interview-40th-anniversary-edition-2021-11

5.  https://www.wired.com/2013/10/codex-seraphinianus-interview/

6.  https://www.openculture.com/2017/09/an-introduction-to-the-codex-seraphinianus-the-strangest-book-ever-published.html  two pages from this weird Encyclopedia of a fantasy world

7.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Leicester

8.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus  "The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods....The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit and a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair....Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces; while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly coloured and highly detailed."  

Wikipedia also describes the structure of the book. "The book is in eleven chapters, in two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world of flora, fauna and physics. The second deals with various aspects of human life, including garments, history, cuisine and architecture. Each chapter seems to address a general encyclopedic topic, as follows:

1. Types of flora: strange flowers, trees that uproot themselves and migrate, etc.
2. Fauna (animals), including surreal variations of the horse, hippopotamus, rhinoceros and birds
3. An apparently separate kingdom of odd bipedal creatures
4. Physics and chemistry (generally considered the most abstract, enigmatic chapter)
5. Bizarre machines and vehicles
6. The humanities: biology, sexuality, aboriginal peoples, including some examples with plant life and tools (e.g. pens, wrenches) grafted onto the human body
7. History: people (some only vaguely human) of unknown significance, with their times of birth and death; scenes of historical and possibly religious significance; burial and funereal customs
8. The Codex's writing system (which is to say, the – or probably, a – writing system of the world (if a world it is) from which the codex originates, or which it documents), including punctuation marks, the text being written, and experiments performed upon the text
9. Food, dining practices, garments
10. Bizarre games, including cards, board games and athletic sports
11. Architecture." 

Russia v. Ukraine: David v. Goliath

Biden says latest intel indicates Russia will invade on Wednesday
16 February 2022.  Pray for Ukraine.

Russia has one of the most powerful militaries in the world. It ranks in the top five nations that spend the most on their military. In 2020, 

A map of Russia and Eastern and Western Europe. The
sheer size of Russia is daunting, and its military budget
even more so. 

Russian military spending amounted to $61.7bn. Ukraine’s was less than a 10th of that at $5.9bn, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.  The Ukrainian military is bigger than it was in 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea and then invaded eastern Ukraine in the Donbas region where I served with the Peace Corps.  But it's still David v. Goliath when it comes to war and geopolitics.

It wasn't always the case. In fact, Ukraine used to be the third largest nuclear power in the world. It gave up nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security guarantees from the US, UK and Russia.  These were promises to respect Ukraine's borders. Russia violated these agreements by invading Ukraine in 2014.  Only then did NATO station multinational forces to protect eastern Europe,  and the U.S. and allies imposed sanctions on Russian and pro-Russian oligarchs. These were the sanctions that Republicans sought to end in 2016, and in most cases did, Oleg Derispaka being the prime example.  

Although the NATO nations agreed to increase support for Ukraine, there is still no international accountability for Putin's invasion of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine's borders, or for that matter for Russia's shooting down of MH-17 over the killing fields of Ukraine, which killed 298 innocent people, or the blatant breaking of international treaties. 

Crimean Tatars, a peaceful and long-suffering people,

mourn the 2014 Russian takeover of their homeland. 

After heroic efforts to return to Crimea & rebuild their

homes and communities, they find themselves once again

under the genocidal thumb of Russia. 

Few shed tears for the loss of Crimea, the indigenous home of the Crimean Tatars, now militarized, stalinized, and victimized by untold human rights abuses. I weep for Crimea, and for the loss of parts of Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts, where I lived for two years and where the warm and wonderful Ukrainian people took in a stranger and made me feel at home. . .

Putin, unchecked, will continue to grab Ukraine into his orbit. It touches the core of his revanchism. He is set on destroying Ukraine and with it NATO in one fell swope. He says this is non-negotiable. Not Ukraine, not any eastern European country, must be accepted into NATO membership. It cannot happen.  

Yesterday's protest in Kyiv. +

Shouldn't these countries be able to make their own decisions, free from the threat of war? It's not what Putin wants.  Nigel Gould-Davis, of the International Strategy Institute in the UK, argues that Putin's immediate fear is not NATO per se, "but its own currently declining influence over Ukraine, whose Western ties are growing deeper, resistance to local pro-Russian figures like Viktor Medvedchuk sterner, and national identity stronger.... Since time is not on Putin’s side, he is seeking to assert dominance over Kyiv while this is still possible.” (reported in Aljazeera, which is on top of this story). 

No one wants war with Russia. I think President Biden is making every effort to work with our allies in Europe to negotiate peace. Putin's aggression has strengthened our alliances, which as we know were severely damaged during the former administration. The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelinsky, was elected by a large majority and is holding fast. He has made progress against corruption and is focusing on Ukraine's economy. I asked historian Timothy Snyder, author of The Bloodlands, if there were Nazis in the Ukrainian government. "There are no Nazis in the government," he said. Zelinsky, who is Jewish, is working on self-determination for Ukraine, and that's across the board.  That's what the vast majority of the Ukrainian people yearn for. 

In spite of the massive amounts of intel the US has, no one knows for certain what Putin will do. He's already achieved his goals of creating chaos and fear in the West. His military build up will make a decision to invade easy to carry out. And it will be devastating.

Biden warns that the latest intel suggests that Russia will attack on Wednesday. This Wednesday, February the 16th. 

Ukraine will resist, but it will not be able to hold back the mighty Russian military. I fear for arial bombings of Kyiv, an ancient and  beautiful capital city filled with extraordinary cathedrals. monuments, and neighborhoods. I fear for the destruction of the beauty of Ukraine across the country, from my town of Starobelsk in the far east to Lyiv in the far west of Ukraine; from Chernigov down to Odessa and around the Black Sea. I fear for my friends who have been in harm's way since Putin's 2014 invasion. 

If Ukraine falls, many Russia experts predict that so will other former Soviet Socialist Republics of eastern Europe. Belarus is already in alliance with Russia. Hopes for self-determination and autonomy will be gone. Western Europe will be on the Russian border, facing Putin's Ukraine strategy. The world will be a sadder place wherever Peace Corps volunteers have served in eastern Europe in their efforts to build fellowship across boundaries. 

Putin's map would look something like this, adding eastern Europe and more
territory to what is already the largest country on earth. Putin does not fear for his borders, he's hungry for war and revenge and international dominance over eastern Europe that will bring Russia to the boarders of the West.  

The drums of war are getting louder. The echoes of death and destruction are hovering. The saber rattling is morphing into boots on the ground and bombs from the air. President Biden says if Russia continues to advance into Ukraine, retaliation will be swift and forceful. What does that mean? I pray for my friends.  

Here is a powerful take by Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, "The Reason Putin Would Risk War," February 3, 2022: "Putin is preparing to invade Ukraine again—or pretending he will invade Ukraine again—for the same reason. He wants to destabilize Ukraine, frighten Ukraine. He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too. Farther abroad, he wants to put so much strain on Western and democratic institutions, especially the European Union and NATO, that they break up. He wants to keep dictators in power wherever he can, in Syria, Venezuela, and Iran. He wants to undermine America, to shrink American influence, to remove the power of the democracy rhetoric that so many people in his part of the world still associate with America. He wants America itself to fail."

Sources/Notes:

1.   https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/how-ukraines-armed-forces-shape-up-against-russias-2022-02-01/

2.  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/25/infographic-military-capabilities-of-russia-and-ukraine-interactive,  Good on options for economic sanctions, which sound severe. 

3.  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/27/ukraine-faces-enormous-military-odds-against-russia

“Ukrainian politics is quite a fractious sport because it’s undergoing a period of protracted reform from an oligarchical system. Russia is ruled under the iron grip of the regime and there wouldn’t be any vacillation on the Russian side,” he said, calling any Russian-Ukrainian war “an unfair fight”.

4.. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_111767.htm

5. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/02/04/an-open-letter-to-the-russian-leadership/

6,  https://francurrocaryblog.blogs+pot.com/2016/02/de-occupy-crimea-end-russian-occupation.html

7.  https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/how-russia-is-slowly-encircling-europe-32596