Real Spiderwick Chronicles

During the opening credits of the movie 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' a man is seen assembling a mysterious book. He writes the book a leaf per day perhaps and bounds it manually into a manuscript. Onto the pages he places various objects and animal parts, mostly insects. Around these small objects he writes descriptions and draws elaborate drawings of his interpretations.

A page from the Codex Seraphinianus

Something in the scene struck me as curious and formed the reason why I believe the makers of the movie used old and very real manuscripts as an example for the movie. In the film many fantastical elements occur and most are clearly not of this world. However, anything placed in the book by Arthur Spiderwick, as displayed in the opening credits is very real. Parts of a beetle are glued down in a way that makes them appear unusual, but put together they form a very real, yet large beetle nonetheless.

When I saw opening of the film I wondered if the makers of the Codex Seraphinianus and The Voynich Manuscript did exactly the same. The Codex and Voynich Manuscript as the real Spiderwick Chronicles have always fascinated me. On one hand they are pure works of fiction, a flight of fantasy out of control. Then again, the authors based everything on the real world, and in the case of Spiderwick incorporated that into the work itself. To give a description of both the Codex and the Voynich would take a bit of time, unless I tell you to picture The Spiderwick Chronicles. Both books can be thought of as just that, with the difference that we know there are no such things as trolls and fairies and you can't find dried fairy wings stuck between the pages. Other than that I would say they are identical. We can't be certain for sure because both books have been encrypted and encoded and we don't actually know what the images depict and the text says.

Personally, the Codex Seraphinianus is a bit too much on the imaginitive side. It spins a complete fictional world around the reader and is mostly designed as a picture book. When browsing the Voynich Manuscript I tend to find myself wonder what was drawn true to life and what was made up. More importantly, did the author deliberately stay on the edge as to lure the reader into believing some of the imaginary depictions are actually real?

A page from the Voynich Manuscript

We will never know. The author of the Voynich manuscript passed away centuries ago and took the key to deciphering the manuscript's contents with him to the grave. Even now, experts are trying to decode what has been written on these pages. As for the images, it is anyone's guess as to what they show. There are pages clearly showing plants, but none that exist. Perhaps the author had a different goal in mind. Perhaps it was his (or her) intention to see what constitutes nature's form? Can we artificially create new shapes in nature and figure out how the result would function (is this maybe the accompanying texts around the images?). This approach is very much in line with the obsession of medieval times, the period in which the book was written. You could be put to death instantly for showing the slightest signs of meddling in witchcraft, but on the other hand Alchemy was the thing to do.

Personally I hope that the book will never be decoded. In it's current mysterious form it is much more interesting than if it were to be discovered that it was written by a mad monk. On the one hand we want to learn the mystery, I think mainly in the hopes that it will point to something bigger, something larger than what we know nature to be. On the other hand we want the book to stay undecoded because we either might learn there is nothing larger out there or worse yet, what is out there is larger than we can comprehend. I think H.P. Lovecraft described it best:


The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.