Ross King - Ex Libris

That, in my brief experience, was how auctions worked. But the one at the Golden Horn promised to be different. For one thing, it had not been advertised in the papers. I had been unable to find any mention of it in the gazettes, despite searching through the issues for the previous two weeks. Nor had I seen any more handbills like the one posted in the Golden Horn, even though I scanned the dead walls, cornerposts, pillories and all the various other spots favoured by the city's fly-posters, including the insides of a couple of taverns and coffee-houses. Nor, finally, had those few customers that I dared to ask-my best-known and most discreet clients-admitted to having heard of either Dr. Pickvance or the Golden Horn coffee-house, much less of the proposed auction. Their looks had grown more dubious when I explained that the Golden Horn was in Alsatia, beside the Fleet River. I might as well have told them I would be travelling among the Patagonians or the Ottawas.

I was anxious for anything I might learn-about the parchment, about the verse, even about the Golden Horn itself-because over the previous days I had not discovered very much at all. I had spent several hours searching through my shelves for information about the Corpus hermeticum . I had no idea where to begin but started by looking at the editions by Lefèvre and Turnebus, which led me backwards to a handful of Greek and Roman writers, who in turn led me forwards along unexpected paths that wove strange and mesmerising patterns. I began to discover how the Hermetic texts were a sort of underground current slithering half-seen through almost two millennia of history. They would bubble up somewhere on the surface-in Alexandria or Constantinople-only to slip away again into invisible channels beneath deserts and mountain ranges and war-ravaged cities… and then suddenly debouch somewhere else, hundreds of years later and thousands of miles away.

It was believed by most early commentators that the books originated in Egypt, at Hermoupolis Magna, which the ancients regarded as the oldest place on earth. The books were said to be the revelations of a priest known to the Egyptians as 'Thoth' and to the Greeks, who followed them, as 'Hermes Trismegistus', or 'Hermes the Thrice-Greatest', whom Boccaccio calls the ' interpres secretorum ', or the 'interpreter of secrets'. Thoth was the Egyptian god of writing and wisdom, who, according to Socrates in the Phaedrus , gave the world arithmetic, geometry and letters, and who in his spare time invented games of amusement such as draughts and dice. The wisdom of Thoth was said to have been first carved on to stone tablets before being copied on to papyrus scrolls and, in the third century BC, during the reign of Ptolemy II, brought to the newly founded Library of Alexandria, in which the Ptolemies had hoped to hold a copy of every book-roll ever written. It was here in Alexandria, among the thousands of scrolls and scholars in the great Library, that the revelations of Thoth were translated from hieroglyphics into Greek by a priest named Manetho, the famous historian of Egypt.

And it is at this point, in Alexandria, that the stream widens to Nilotic dimensions. From the great Library the texts spread outward to every corner of the ancient world, and for the next seven hundred years no respectable treatise-no matter whether its subject was astrology, history, anatomy or medicine-would be complete without a few choice references to the Egyptian priest whose revelations everyone agreed were the wellsprings of all learning. But then, after so much expansion, the river suddenly contracts. The stream slows, thins, divides and-after the rule of the Emperor Justinian, who closed the Academy in Athens and burned the Greek scrolls in Constantinople-disappears. The Hermetic texts are not heard of again until several hundred years later. At this point, early in the ninth century, copies turn up in the new city of Baghdad, among the Sabians, a sect of non-Muslims who had migrated from northern Mesopotamia. They proclaimed the revelations of Hermes as their Holy Scripture, and their greatest writer and teacher, Thabit ibn Qurra, refers to the Sabian texts as a 'hidden wisdom'. But some of this wisdom must not have been hidden all that well, because it soon made its way into the hands of the Muhammadans. Mention of Hermes Trismegistus can be found shortly after Thabit's time in the Kitab al-uluf by the Muslim astrologer Abu Ma'shar, and a Hermetic text, The Emerald Table , part of a larger work known as The Book of the Secret of Creation , is studied by the alchemist ar-Razi.

But soon after the time of these Arab writers the stream had thinned and disappeared from Baghdad, again for political and religious reasons. After the eleventh century a strict Muhammadan orthodoxy was imposed throughout the Empire and no more is heard of the Sabians of Baghdad. However, the Hermetic works reappear almost immediately in Constantinople-the city alluded to in the cipher-where in the year 1050 the scholar and monk Michael Psellos receives a damaged manuscript written in Syriac, the language of the Sabians. And it is one of these manuscripts, copied by a scribe on to parchment, then removed from Constantinople after its capture by the Turks, that is brought to Florence, to the library of Cosimo de' Medici, some four hundred years later.

But where did The Labyrinth of the World fit into this long and complex history? I could find mention of the book neither among the editions nor in the commentaries on them-and not even in the Stromateis of Clement of Alexandria, who lists the names of several dozen sacred works written by Hermes Trismegistus. It seemed that The Labyrinth of the World was even more mysterious and shrouded in secrecy than all of the other books.

Discouraged, I therefore chose a different tack, catching a sculler to Shadwell in order to visit the paper-mill of John Thimbleby. I had done business with Thimbleby for many years, and he proved to be, as I suspected, the 'JT' of the watermark on the interfoliated leaf. But he was unable to tell me either when precisely the mysterious piece of paper was made or where it might have been purchased.

The specimen was, Thimbleby admitted, an inferior effort. Did I see how flimsy the paper was? How it was already yellowing and curling? How it was almost transparent when held against the light? This meant it might have come from a batch made in the 1640s, probably between 1641 and 1647. During those years Thimbleby was mainly but not exclusively supplying Royalist printing-presses, including the King's Printer, who had been trailing the thinning and beleaguered Royalist armies round the country and cranking out their propaganda as soon as it could be written. The paper was of poor quality in those days, he explained, because demand had drastically outstripped supply.

Thimbleby took me into his workroom, where two men were dipping frames into a giant vat of what looked like porridge. Paper was usually made in this way, he explained as he gestured at the porridge, which a third man was endeavouring to stir: from linen rags, scraps of old books and pamphlets, various other oddments collected by the rag-and-bone men. These were cut into strips, shredded, boiled in a vat, marinated in sour milk, fermented for a few days, then strained, like so, through a wire mould-mesh. But with the shortage of linen scraps came improvisation. Seaweed, straw, old fishing nets, banana skins, hanks of rope, even cow dung and rotted burial shrouds from the skeletons exhumed for burning in the charnel-houses-Thimbleby had been forced to make use of almost anything. The result was paper of a dubious quality, which he nevertheless sent to the Royalist armies. Checking his records, he was able to tell me that large consignments had been shipped to Shrewsbury in 1642, to Worcester and Bristol in 1645, and to Exeter in 1646. But he had manufactured hundreds of reams every year, from any one of which, he told me, the mysterious page might have been taken.