Codex Seraphinianus: Some Observations

They say that the text of the Codex Seraphinianus was never meant to mean anything; all the same, I mean to treat it here as if it was. Sounds crazy? I tried being sane once, and it nearly drove me mad. Anyway, don't blame me; it was Luigi Serafini who started it.

I don't own a copy of the Codex; I'm working from some notes I took in Michael Everson's library.

The Structure of the Text

The Codex consists of eleven chapters, each of which contains the following pages:

• A title page (right-hand), blank except for an illustration and the chapter_title.
• A summary page (left-hand). The header is C_1a0F₀F₀H₀ A₁₀F₁ chapter_title A₁₀F₁A₁₀. (Note that I have not devised a complete notation for the script of the Codex, and what I'm using here is subject to change without notice, so don't rely on it.)
• A table-of-contents page (right-hand). Apart from the header A₁₀E₁C_0a0, it contains a list of section_titles (on the left), one or more subsection_titles (on the right) and the page number for the first subsection (on the extreme right); paragraphs are not listed here. One chapter (the ninth) contains two subchapters with separate titles (one on food and one on clothing).
• Any number of body pages, each of which has a header of one of the following types:
• A₁₀F₁ section_title F₁L₀J_1a0 (or, in the first several sections in the Codex, F₂L₀J_1a0);
• L₀L₁L₀ section_title G₁C_1a0C_1a0;
• a unique character followed by a dash and a subsection_title;
• L₁L₀ paragraph_title F₁L₀J_1a0;
• L₁L₀ paragraph_title G₀C_1a0;
• L₀L₁L₀ paragraph_title G₁C_1a0C_1a0;
• If the body ends on a right-hand page, a blank last page precedes the title page of the next chapter.

The whole book ends with the word A₁₁P₀C_1a0F₃F₃ (presumably `The End').

Page Numbers

Page numbering is reset to 1 at the beginning of the sixth chapter; the codex is thus divided into two volumes of approximately equal size, without distinctive titles, but with lines to the effect of `End of A<sub>10</sub> volume' and `End of B₁ volume' at the end of each. There is some sort of index (under the header L₀L₀C_4a0F₁L₀) to the second volume only.

The number system in which page numbers are written is, on the whole, base-21. This implies that a number is expressed as a sum of what I'll call scorones (i.e., twenty-ones) and ones. (You may think of scorone as an Italian-style augmentative of score or a contraction of score+one.) Suitable for counting on one's fingers, toes and nose or something. Telefol uses a base-27 system, and its speakers have the same anatomy as the rest of us, which is more than can be said of many kindreds in Serafini's world.

Now there are 21 digits (from 0 to 20), by means of which the quantity of ones is expressed. Not much is remarkable about them, except that 7 consists of 5 followed by a dot on the line; 5 itself looks like a wedge (on the relevance of which anon); the digit 16 is something (but not another digit) followed by a dot on the line and the digit 17 is something else followed by a raised dot.

The quantity of scorones is expressed in an opaque way (by which I mean that the number of pages in each of the two volumes runs to less than 9*21, and it does not appear possible to guess what happens afterwards). This involves the use of a vertical bar, a vee (that is, an upside-down 5), a dot on the line, a raised dot (here written as i, v, . and ', respectively, except when the dots form part of a digit), the digit 5 (the wedge) itself and, mirabile dictu, iteration of the digit that expresses the quantity of ones. To make it even more complicated, a quantity of scorones between 3 and 6 is expressed in one way with a quantity of ones up to 14 and in another with ones from 15 onwards. Further deviations occur if the quantity of ones is 5 or 7. (Some of those -- but not all -- can be attributed to the apparently regular substitution, probably for æsthetic reasons, of 5v for 55 as well as vv.)

In the table below a tilde indicates the digit corresponding to the quantity of ones.
 

It gets totally out of hand in the ninth scorone:

• 81₂₁ is written iix03i (where x is the digit 10);
• 82₂₁, 83₂₁ and 84₂₁ are written ii111i, ii222i and ii333i, respectively;
• page number ii999i is absent in both volumes, though there is no knowing whether the number 89₂₁ is regularly written as iixxxi (and 8X₂₁ as iieeei, etc., possibly returning to the normal routine at some later point), or the number 177=89₂₁ is not used as a page number due to some taboo (think of 13 and the numbering of floors and rooms in hotels in some countries).

There are larger numbers here and there in the book (each of the portraits in the chapter on history is accompanied by two numbers, which presumably stand for the years between which the person lived, ruled the country, or something), but those are written in a system of their own. And in many places in the text there are sequences of number symbols that don't form a legitimate number according to the rules stated above (a very common sequence is 22).

The use of iteration in the notation may be able to teach us a lesson. In the systems used for writing numbers in our world (Arabic, Roman etc.) the repetition of a symbol indicates that its numeric value somehow participates two or more times in the number. For example, in the number 33 the value of the symbol 3 appears twice (3*10¹+3*10⁰=33); in the number XX the value of the symbol X (i.e., 10) also appears twice (10+10=20). But in a Serafinian number such as 5vii66 (56₂₁=111) the repetition of 6 does not indicate two sixes; it merely signals that the six ones are added to five rather than four scorones (cf. 5vii6=46₂₁=90). By analogy, one may suppose that the very frequent iteration of characters in titles and other words in majuscules also indicates something other than repetition of the corresponding phonetic value -- if indeed they have a phonetic value.

Back to Words

Which brings us back to the writing system. (I'm only discussing words written in majuscules here -- titles of chapters, sections, subsections and paragraphs, for the most part.) Several dozen different characters appear in them, far too many for the writing system to be an alphabet, and there are too many long words for it to be a syllabary. Some characters occur very many times, others only once or twice.

What is even more striking, however, is the tendency of the characters, even the less frequent ones, to reoccur within the same word or group of words (e.g., within the titles of the various subsections and paragraphs in a section). If a character occurs in a word at all, there's a good chance that it occurs there at least twice -- perhaps thrice in a row (which is next to unseen in any sort of phonetic writing system), up to six times altogether. It is as if the headers of most pages in an English book were such words as bookkeeper, googol, grammar, Ouagadougou and Wassamassaw.

On many occasions the titles of a section and its first subsection are cognate, though not derived from a common base in uniform ways. The titles of several other sections are derived from the sequences of the first characters of the titles of some or all of the corresponding subsections (usually, but not always, in the same order). (This is quite common in the first two chapters, but occurs only occasionally in the rest of the first volume, and not at all in the second.)

A meaning-oriented writing system? Or a philosophical language?

And to make it worse, otherwise distinct characters which share certain components or are mirror reflexions of one another seem to form similar patterns. But I'll say no more now.

Notes

Telefol counting starts with the fingers of the left hand (1 being the pinky), progresses from the thumb (5) to the wrist, lower arm, elbow, upper arm and shoulder (6--10), the side of the neck, ear and eye (11--13) and thence through the nose (14) and right eye (15) to the right pinky finger (27). The Telefol idea of a very large number is kakkat=14*27=378.

Last modified: 29 September 2004.