Category Archives: Books

Neoreaction a Basilisk

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Three extracts from Phil Sandifer’s exploration of horror in philosophy can be found here. All quibbles aside, the core conjunction prompting the work — and advertised in the title — is hugely compelling.

For anyone interested:

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(I’m guessing this offer extends beyond the Order of Shadows.)

Codex Seraphinianus

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codex_skeletons_465

An odd book (by any reasonable estimation).

… the book is just so damned strange that it has accumulated a veritable industry of speculation about its meaning, deeper origins, and whether the language in which it is written actually has any syntax or not. Serafini has said relatively little about it himself over the years, and denies that the script has any meaning, but no one really believes that …

More here.

Underlinings (#54)

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Cryptic Dee weirdness:

In 1564, while studying at Antwerp, Dee published Monas Hieroglyphica, a series of twenty-four theorems interpreting the Hieroglyphic Monad, a symbol of Dee’s own devising which carried associations with both creation and unity. The glyph first appeared in Dee’s earlier text on astronomy, Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558), but in the Monas Hieroglyphica it became the central focus of the work. One of his most incomprehensible texts, it draws parallels between and ascribes cabbalistic meaning to the physical properties of certain minerals, their governing planets according to alchemical theories of the day, and the geometry of their alchemical and astrological symbols. The result is a complex web of meaning that is not fully understood even today. […] Some believe that the Monas Hieroglyphica was intended as a textbook to accompany lessons delivered orally by Dee but now lost; others believe that it is a hidden treatise on cryptography to be used in espionage. …

MONAD1

(Via.)