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A Giant Among Books

Codex Gigas, which means “giant book” in Latin, definitely fulfils its name. It is 36 inches tall, 20 inches wide, and 8.7 inches thick. It weighs about 75 kilograms. In its time, people believed it to have all the knowledge of the world. It is made of vellum, a writing material that is made from processed animal skin.

The book is so big that it must have taken the skin of 160 donkeys to complete it. It consisted of 320 leaves of vellum, that is 640 pages. But 10 leaves were lost in history.

The Sinister Legend of The Devil’s Bible

Codex Gigas was the original name of the book. But, due to the legend that follows this artefact, in due time, it became known as another, more sinister name – The Devil’s Bible.

The story goes such:
A monk named Herman the Recluse, was about to be punished for his crimes by being walled up and starved to death. In a frantic attempt, he asked what he would have to do to avoid the punishment, and the answer was that he would have to write a book that contains all knowledge of the world.

And he would have to do so in one night. He agreed desperately. The materials were passed through a gap in the wall, and the monk started to scribble as fast as he could.

As the clock struck midnight, Herman realized that he would never be able to finish the task. So he prayed, not to God, but the Fallen Angel, Lucifer, also known as Satan, or the Devil. He struck a deal with the Devil and said that if Satan finished the book in one night, he could have his soul when he died.

Lucifer agreed. And the next morning, the monk presented the book to the king, earning his freedom.

The Intriguing Contents of the Devil’s Bible Codex Gigas

The book comprises the full Latin Bible; St. Isidore’s encyclopedia, Etymologiae; The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities, both by Flavius Josephus; The Chronicle Of Bohemia by Cosmas; and some magic spells of exorcism.

The book has got its second name from a particular illustration on page 290 – a frightful, full-page picture of the Devil himself. In the design, Satan has been shown wearing an ermine loincloth. Since wearing ermine represents royalty, experts have deduced that the ermine is to symbolize Satan being The Prince of Darkness.

Specialists have analyzed the text and concluded that it was indeed written by one person, but it was also deduced that the book would have taken at least 30 years to complete. So, basically, the writer spent his whole life writing this book. But that raises another question.

The book’s handwriting is perfect. It has the same size, style, and symmetry throughout the whole book. The human body ages a lot in 30 years. And with age, our hands get shaky. So it wouldn’t be humanly possible to achieve that sort of perfection. This evidence suggests that the book was written in a short time! And due to these contradicting facts, experts have never been able to determine exactly how long it took to write Codex Gigas.

Mysteries and Curses Surrounding The Devil’s Bible

The book is also said to be cursed. And this is the evidence for the accusation:

In the year 1477, the Benedictine Monastery in Bohemia was facing some major, financial woes. So they decided to sell their most precious treasure, the Codex Gigas. It was sold to a monastery in Brevnov. Soon after, the monastery in Bohemia was destroyed in the Hussite Revolution.

The book was in Brevnov until 1593. Then they lent it to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the II in Prague. The king suddenly started to have an obsession with the occult. He started losing his mind. His rule became paranoid and unpredictable. His family, noticing his madness, overthrew him.

But the Codex Gigas still remained in his library. Six years later, the Thirty Years War began. It ended with the Swedish army capturing Prague and seizing late Rudoph’s library. That was when they found the strange and mysterious Codex Gigas. It was moved to the Royal Library in Stockholm. In 1697, another incident happened. The Royal Palace caught fire.

To save the precious books, the soldiers started throwing them out the window. Among these was the Codex Gigas, which fell on an innocent bystander and injured him with its weight. Today, the notorious book is lying in the National Library of Sweden.

It is said that the book had lost the pages it did because of being thrown out of a window. But experts have analyzed the document and said the pages were cut. Nobody knows the reason behind those pages being cut, or what was on those pages.

How was the handwriting perfect? What was on those pages? Why were they cut? Nobody knows. It is these questions that give this book its ominous aura. It is what makes this artefact a mystery of history.

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