Suspect

They say the World is controlled by groups of Illuminati. Among these more or less secret societies it exists a competition. Books. The rarer the better. Money is not a hurdle, these people are beyond material possessions. They crave knowledge. And of course…power. “I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man that controls Britain´s money supply controls the British Empire”. Ok ok. Don´t get nervous.

Three-rarely seen men control those groups. One is a dealer of rare books who moves around Bruges. The second is a Dane who operates a rare bookshop in the Nyhavn waterfront area in Copenhagen. The third is a Swede, and he too is in the rare book trade. A perfect cover. You are supposed to travel a lot and deal with very special customers.

I don´t know if you have read about these two books I want to point out today.



The first is called “Golf in the year 2000 or What we are coming to”. The author is Jack McCullogh, a Scottish golfer. He might be little remembered as a sportsmen, but his novel is causing a stir. The book was written in 1892. The book has already been compared to those of Nostradamus. It is a tale about a man who falls into a deep sleep in 1892 waking 108 years later. It depicts such things as digital watchers, televisions and women´s equality. Among his predictions, most of them golf-related, were driverless golf carts, professional players and a golf competition between Britain and the United States, much like the Ryder Cup which began in 1927. But also high-speed bullet trains and working women who dressed like men. A visionaire? A crossover? The book was auctioned and already sold.



But my favourite of all times is the so called “Voynich Manuscript”, the most mysterious of all texts. Two hundred pages written in an alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. During World War II, some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed. It contains the strangest pictures of plants, stars (crop circles style) and nude maidens bathing.

The book collector Wilfrid Voynich found it in a Jesuit College in Villa Mondragone, Italy. It is now in Yale university. It was attributed to Francis Bacon (ahh mon dieu!) It was first bought by Emperor Rudolf II, who moved to a castle in Prague (Bohemia then) and buried himself in esoteric studies. The place was a magnet for people such as John Dee, Edward Kelly, Giordano Bruno (Tristan and I talked about him in our first conversation, I will never forget it) and Kepler.

To this day the Voynich Manuscript resists all efforts of translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher. It is thought that Lovecraft might have used it as the model for his Necronomicon…another amazing Mystery.