Would you sell your soul to Satan to avoid a horrific death? Would you do anything he asked,
even defile the faith you’ve devoted your life to and create an enduring
symbol of his dark power for future generations to see?
You probably wouldn’t expect the grinning face of the devil to be staring up at you
from the center pages of the largest bible you’ve ever seen. This depiction of evil is
only scratching the surface of the mysteries that lay buried in the titanic pages of the
Codex Gigas. The story of its creation begs an ominous question about its authorship:
was it penned by a mortal or something both greater and lesser?
To answer this question, before we even dare to open the devil’s bible,
we need to head back to the time it was created.
If there was one thing you could praise the Middle Ages for, it was
their creativity. At least creativity in terms of torture and execution.
While food shortages and poverty gripped much of Europe, there was never a shortage of new and
inventive ways to mutilate, humiliate, and murder your fellow human beings. Strapped onto the rack,
you’d have your limbs each tied with ropes or shackles. These would then be pulled further
and further apart, cranked harder by a team of executioners, as one by one all of your joints
would pop out of place before finally tearing apart under the immense strain.
Or how about the opposite of that? The Scavenger’s Daughter. You’d be forced
into a kneeling position with your chest against your thighs. A metal band would wrap around you,
tying you into this position ever tighter and tighter. Your ribs would snap,
piercing your internal organs, as your spine pops out of alignment.
One particularly dramatic example was the Brazen Bull. A hollow brass bull
would be opened up through a hatch in the side and the victim bundled inside,
behind lock and key. Without a hope of getting out, a fire would be lit underneath the bull,
steadily raising the temperature of the metal oven higher and higher. They made
it into the shape of a bull because the muted screams that would escape from the
torture chamber would sound just like a raging bull as it would buck and shake.
Then, of course, there’s the Pear of Anguish: a small device the shape of
an upside-down pear. Twisting it at the base would ‘open’ the pear up, expanding it to be
larger and larger. They’d take this pear and they’d insert it… well, you get the idea.
There was no shortage of ways to be killed in the Middle Ages. One of the more tame in
terms of physical anguish but right up there in terms of psychological torment
has to be those who were ‘walled up.’ Not all of us have claustrophobia. Many
of us like to think that we are just fine in tight, enclosed spaces. But
even the most daring and extreme cave diver would find that exact same unbearable panic
filling their chest the moment they realize they are trapped without a hope of escape.
That was the principle behind immurement. It was a very simple execution method really. A person
would be forced to stand in one spot as a stone wall was built around them. Too narrow for them
to sit down or stretch out their limbs they’d be stuck in what Guantanamo Bay guards would
now call a ‘stress position’. With the final stone laid and all daylight robbed from them,
the execution would begin. With no immediate threat other than total immobilization,
they would just have to stay in that exact spot and wait to die from dehydration several days
later trapped with their thoughts which would soon turn to waking nightmares.
This method of killing was an effective deterrent. You would hear the anguished
cries of the victims inside for a long time. You could even have a conversation with them
through the stone as they steadily lost the remaining shreds of their sanity.
Not everyone placed in immurement was to be executed,
however. Sometimes it was just used as a temporary punishment,
particularly within the church. They’d bury you underground or brick you up behind a
wall for whatever period of time they saw fit. You’d just better pray they didn’t forget you.
Some Holy Women even chose to undergo immurement voluntarily. They would be bricked up with
a slit to receive food and water for extended periods of time, sometimes as long as decades,
as a way of stripping back distractions and temptations from their life so they could
focus solely on God. Most terrifying about this voluntary immurement was that they would
often take children in with them. Kids aged around 10 years old, who had been ‘donated’
to the church by their parents would act as symbols of purity and innocence that
these Holy Women could keep for company in their walled off space for years at a time.
It’s safe to say that very few people would want to do this kind of thing though,
particularly if it was to be your method of execution.
And so begins the legend of the Gigas Codex, the Devil’s Bible and how it
came to be written. Our story starts in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic)
in the 13th Century. It was an Imperial State of the Roman Empire and as such
practiced Roman Catholicism. Monasteries dotted the land with pious men committed
to lives of poverty and religious ritual after having taken their monastic vows.
Vows which, made in the presence of God, would have three pillars: poverty,
chastity and obedience. Poverty stated they were to live their lives devoid of material
wealth. They were to own nothing themselves, but share everything communally within the monastery.
Clothes, meals, and all necessities were to be as stripped back and basic as possible. Discomfort
was encouraged at every turn. After all Matthew 20:16 tells us ‘He who is last, shall be first’.
Chastity meant a total abandonment of all sexual thought and activity. Monks
were to be totally pure in mind and body, abstaining from any kind of sexual pleasure,
and practicing total self-control at all times. Their physical urges were
temptations from the devil that would lead them away from the purity that God had called them to.
And finally obedience. They were to submit absolutely to the authority of God, the Bible, the
Roman Catholic Church, and the order of monks whom they had joined. Those who had joined the order
prior to themselves or occupied superior positions in the monastery were to be obeyed at all times.
These conditions were, at best, totally restrictive and, at their worst,
impossible to follow. Total obedience while living a life of poverty. Total chastity year after year,
without an impure thought or deed allowed, these standards were so high
that they would have taken immense levels of self-control to achieve. At any moment,
any monk was at risk of falling short of these standards and breaking their monastic vows.
Enter Herman the Recluse, our protagonist. We’d love to be able to tell you what it was that he’d
done that got him in so much trouble but sadly those details have been lost in the mists of
time. So let your imagination run wild. Perhaps he’d swiped some of the solid gold chalices
used for the Eucharist that he was going to run away with and sell to buy himself a better life.
Maybe it was something as minor as him stealing a couple of extra bread rolls at dinner. Or maybe
he punched the oldest monk at the monastery for looking at him funny. We’ll never know.
What we do know was that he was in trouble. Big trouble. Enough trouble
to get himself walled up. Dragged in front of a tribunal of senior monks, Herman the Recluse,
was desperate. He’d seen others executed in that same way for breaking their vows
plenty during his time at this monastery. He couldn’t let it happen to himself.
He begged and pleaded with the monks. There had to be something he could
do to make it right. He would commit the rest of his life to making things
better. Perhaps if he managed to perform some great feat, it would atone for his
wrongdoing. They just needed to give him some time, that’s all he needed.
The monks looked at one another and muttered. When
they looked at him again, their faces were icy cold.
He was to have one night.
Herman’s face fell. Just one night? What could he possibly do with that time to
prove his worth to the monks? He’d need nothing short of a miracle to avoid execution tomorrow.
Herman was dragged from the room and locked away in his quarters in the
monastery. With him were all of the tools and materials needed to write
a book. He got to work as soon as the door closed behind him. As much as he wanted to,
he knew that he couldn’t rush his work. He was to write something holy that would stand for
generations. It needed to be perfect. His handwriting had to be exemplary.
But after hours of work, he’d barely made a dent. He was trying to write out the text
of the Bible but he hadn’t even managed a page yet. With the ornate illustrations,
elaborate lettering and just the sheer scope of the work, he was nowhere close
to having something of value to take to the monks the following morning.
He’d been praying to God in desperation all night, but had not heard a thing back.
Daybreak was approaching. There was nothing for it, Herman prayed to Satan.
When the monks arrived and unlocked his door the following morning they were all stunned. Complete
on Herman the Recluse’s desk was an enormous book, almost as large as the man himself. It
was open to a page somewhere in the middle. The men hissed quietly at the image before
them. Emblazoned across the page was a large and beautifully realized drawing of the Devil himself.
‘Herman, what have you done?’
*
Okay, so all of that was fictional. Well, partially…
Because the book from that story, the Devil’s Bible, does exist. You can go and see it today
in the Swedish National Library, where it has sat proudly on display for centuries.
We’ll get back to the mythology in a bit, but first some of the facts.
The book is called the Codex Gigas, a Latin name that literally translates to ‘Giant Book’
and boy does it live up to that name. The Codex Gigas is 92 cm (3 ft) in length. Its 650 pages,
along with the leatherbound wood covers, make it 22 cm (8.7 in) thick. At 72kg (165lb),
it’s heavier than the average person from every continent in the world except for North America,
which narrowly beats it. This book is not meant for light reading in any sense of the word.
While initially, it’s the size of the Codex Gigas that strikes you,
as you inspect it more closely, it’s the artistry at play that really enthralls
you. The book is held together with these beautifully ornate metal guards and fittings.
Open it up and you’ll find that every page is a work of art. Adorned on each page are
what’s called illuminations. An illumination is where you don’t just have a page of plain text,
but you embellish it. You surround it with patterns, illustrations, and colors. Not only
would the artist have painstakingly handwritten every word in the book to look perfect,
they would have then spent hours or days filling out the rest of the page with these illuminations.
At the start of every chapter you’ll find the first letters have been capitalized and blown
up to take up a large proportion of the page. Golds, greens, reds, and yellows,
all intertwine to create incredibly detailed and intricate renderings
of even the most basic letters. There are pages of illustrations
filling up the book too in between the blocks of text that adorn the paper.
Except the paper itself isn’t paper at all, it’s vellum. Six hundred twenty pages,
made from 310 leaves of vellum, folded and bound together. What’s vellum,
you might be asking. Animal skin. Treated and stretched out thin and taught to be written on.
It is estimated that upwards of 160 donkeys were slaughtered to provide the vellum for this book.
Take a second to imagine just how many donkeys that is, how much of an income those donkeys
would have provided in the 13th century. All were killed in the pursuit of creating the Codex Gigas.
It would have been incredibly valuable at the time and that value has only risen in the 800
years since. Aside from all of the reasons we’ve just outlined, this book has a lot of things going
for it that make it incredibly important historically and culturally to this day.
For starters it’s the largest medieval manuscript in the world, by quite some margin. You’d struggle
to find many books this kind of size from any time period, but from the middle ages nothing
compares. So what’s inside this tome that makes it so special and why is it called the Devil’s Bible?
Well for starters there’s the Bible. Not a twisted Satanist version of it, the actual Bible. An early
version of it, known as the Vulgate Bible. The history of all the different Bible translations
and versions is long and deeply fascinating but probably not a topic to fully delve into in this
video, so we’ll give you the Sparknotes version of what the Vulgate Bible was.
The original Bible manuscripts were not all written in the same language.
Almost all of the Old Testament texts, the books written before Jesus’s life,
were in the Jewish language Hebrew. But mixed in there were the books of Daniel,
Ezra and Jeremiah, which also featured a language called Aramaic. This language blew
up in the years between the completion of the Old Testament and the time of Jesus’s birth
to the point where it is likely that Jesus spoke Aramaic during his lifetime. And yet,
the New Testament that was written about Jesus’s life and the birth of the early church after,
was all written in Ancient Greek since that was the scholarly language of the era.
This meant that anyone who wanted to read all of the Christian scriptures and learn the whole story
had to be literate in three different languages. That’s a tall order even with modern education,
let alone the inconsistent schools and universities of the Dark Ages.
Enter St Jerome, who made it his mission to translate all of these scriptures into Latin,
the language of the Roman Empire and therefore much of the Western World.
In 405 AD Jerome completed the first version of his translation and called it the Vulgate.
He continued to tweak and improve it over the course of the rest of his life but in
its various forms this became arguably the most significant translation of the Bible in history,
even more important than the King James Version, which translated the scriptures into English.
Unofficially, the Roman Catholic Church relied on this version of the Bible for centuries as it now
meant that people only needed an understanding of Latin to access the entire story of Christianity.
Over 1,000 years later, the Roman Catholic Church finally made it the official translation
of the Church, a position which the Vulgate would retain all the way up until as recently as 1979.
So the Codex Gigas has picked the right horse in terms of biblical translations. Its version
is slightly different to others. The books of the Bible are arranged in a different order to usual
and it uses a combination of different iterations of St Jerome’s translations,
but what is most interesting is that there is a lot more in those 620 pages than just the Bible.
The Codex Gigas is so important to us historically today because it acts as a kind of compendium for
the knowledge of the time. Contained between its two covers is a vast and varied account of much
of Bohemian society’s knowledge at the time. This collection tells us what people knew, or thought
they knew, about the world around them and gives us enormous insight into their lives as a result.
Take Isidore of Seville's encyclopedia Etymologiae, for example. In this book, Isidore
does his best to recount all of human knowledge on mathematics, canon law, philosophy, the human
body, geography, ship-building, weights and measures, rhetoric, and so much more. One of the
most fascinating and entertaining parts of this book comes in the zoology section, where Isidore
confidently explains that hedgehogs feed their offspring by climbing up vines and skewering the
grapes on their spines to then deliver to their waiting children, complete with illustrations.
This whole encyclopedia is included in the Codex Gigas, as is Josephus’s 20-volume history of the
Jewish people and his writings about The Jewish War. On top of these are multiple books all about
medicine, all of which would have been incredibly useful at the time, as well as a history of the
Czech lands up to that point. There are prayer books, instructions on performing the Eucharist,
a calendar containing a list of notable deaths, and a set of magic formulae.
This book is sprawling in every sense of the word,
not just the physical. The author had wanted to include everything they possibly could to
capture the knowledge of their people in one cohesive book that would stand the test of
time. It’s the equivalent today of printing out the entirety of Wikipedia to place into a
library where any future civilization can access it. Actually, it’s more incredible than that,
it’s like handwriting Wikipedia and drawing all of the illustrations for it yourself.
We’ve been talking all this time about an author, singular. Most historians coming
to a text like this would be expecting it to be the work of a whole team of writers
and illustrators. That’s invariably how books this large are able to be produced.
There is so much work to do, there’s no way just one person could do it all themselves.
But this is where we come to the most fascinating thing about the Codex Gigas,
the thing that ties all of this back into the mythology surrounding the book.
Handwriting experts analyzing the text from the very first page of the book
all the way through to the very last page of the book can’t help but conclude one
thing. It’s the same. The handwriting in the Codex Gigas is unbelievably,
almost impossibly uniform. One person wrote the whole thing.
But not only did just one person write it, but they wrote it at an incredibly
consistent quality over the course of their whole life. The text alone in the Codex Gigas,
ignoring all of the illuminations and illustrations, has been estimated to have
taken 20 years to write. That’s not 20 years of writing 8 hours a day with a good night’s sleep,
that’s 20 years of straight writing with no breaks. This was not just a job for a monk,
this was their entire life’s work and purpose.
They would have had to have started writing as a young man or even a teenager, and continued all
the way through to what was likely the end of their life given mortality rates of the time.
And yet, there’s still more to be impressed with. One of the things scholars have noted
that is most remarkable about the book is its incredible consistency.
We mentioned the handwriting being uniformly from the same person,
but the consistency also applies to the quality of the work. If you were to sit
down and write a 3000-word essay by hand, the chances are your handwriting is going to look
noticeably worse on the final sentence than it does on the first. Your hand grows tired,
your attention drifts, your brain gets fuzzy, you get lazier. That’s over the course of a day.
Now expand that out to the course of your life. Your handwriting may improve over time with
practice, it may get worse as you get older and start to lose your eyesight. Your hands
might ache from RSI, seize up from Arthritis, or shake from Parkinson’s. All of these things
impact your handwriting making it sloppier and more erratic. That doesn’t happen in the Codex
Gigas. This author, this inspired individual, somehow retains the same level of detail,
precision and creativity throughout the whole book. The level of artistry they demonstrate as
a teenager or young man, is consistent with their craftsmanship as a veteran after decades of work.
Like we said, it’s almost impossible. How could one person do all of this themselves?
Which brings us back to the legend surrounding this book
and the reason that it was given the name ‘Devil’s Bible’ in the first place.
Emblazoned in the middle of the book is the most striking and well-realized illustration
in the whole book. It’s a double page spread. On one side is an illustration
of Heaven. On the other stands the Devil himself. 50 cm (20 in) tall,
he takes up over half of the available page which has been left mostly empty around him.
He squats on the page, seemingly ready to pounce. His arms are raised high above his head,
with four clawed fingers on each hand. Across his waist is a loincloth of what
is believed to be ermine furs, a common symbol for royalty. He is Satan, king of the devils.
His expression is somewhere between a smile and a snarl. Madness fills his eyes,
sharp teeth line his mouth, and snaking its way out of his mouth are two tongues,
forked from somewhere deep in his mouth. The pages all around this one are discolored and worn. For
centuries people have been coming to this book and immediately flicking through to this exact page.
And it’s from this illustration that the legend
of Herman the Recluse came. How could one man, even across a whole lifetime,
produce a work so grand, so complete, so intricate, and so consistent? He couldn’t.
It wasn’t done by a man at all, it was done by the Devil. That’s why there is
such a large and detailed illustration of Satan in the middle of it all. The legend goes that
Herman the Recluse was scheduled for execution by immurement. Desperate to be freed from his fate,
he had one night to produce a work sufficient to earn his redemption. Out of fear,
he prayed to the Devil in the dark of the night and the Devil answered.
Satan himself finished the book for Herman. That’s why it was so
perfectly consistent but as payment he required that Herman include a large
illustration in his honor in the center. That, and that Herman gave him his soul.
Today we can look at this book and know that it’s totally harmless. There’s no dark sorcery at play,
no Satan influence. It’s just a book, an encyclopedia of 13th century Bohemia made
by one man. But staring into the eyes of Satan in the middle of the book,
you’ll notice that his gaze follows you around the room.
But it’s all totally harmless… right?
Now check out “What The Bible Actually Says About the Devil.” Or watch this instead!