Secret Knowledge Research Articles

Samuel Zimmermann’s Gehaimnussen: The earliest cryptological book in German

ABSTRACTThis article presents the very first cryptological manual written in German in 1579. Samuel Zimmermann’s Gehaimnussen (Secrets) has gone virtually unnoticed as it was not printed separately but was included in a manual on letter writing, New Titularbüech, more specifically a compilation of hundreds of forms of address to be used in the correspondence with nobility. In Gehaimnussen, the author (a master gunner in the employ of the city of Augsburg) shows detailed but spotty knowledge of cryptological secrets that are frequently interwoven with descriptive passages ranging from the proper use of writing utensils to the production of paper all the way to a listing of alchemical symbols. There was no second edition of either part of this dual publication.

DOCUMENTING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE ABOUT AFRICA’S COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE: A CAUSE FOR CONCERN?

This article explores the global debates concerning documenting indigenous knowledge (IK) about Africa’s complementary and alternative medicine (e-ACAM). The article further explores whether it is possible to document both the common and uncommon knowledge about e-ACAM given that the uncommon knowledge of e-ACAM is practised secretly as it is a source of livelihood for traditional medicine practices. The framework presented in the article stems from the notion that the ethnopharmacological information of medicinal plants is fast disappearing and in view of the rapid loss of such knowledge, its documentation as well as a better understanding of its botanico-historical roots has become an essential task. With further theoretical research it is revealed that the uncommon aspect of e-ACAM may be difficult or impossible to document as it encompasses secret knowledge. The article proposes measures within intellectual property rights (IPR) in the form of patents that could be implemented in order to document those types of e-ACAM that embrace secrecy and are a source of livelihood for traditional medicine practices.

Crossing Through the Present

Crossing Through the Present Ellen Hinsey and Marie Luise Knott (bio) It is difficult to situate poems in time and space. Some seem resolutely “of the moment,” presenting us with a reflective mirror of our present. Other poems situate themselves in an indeterminate space, simultaneously present and past. And others—as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once wrote—are always our future, always voyaging out ahead of us, whenever they were written. For this German poetry selection—which is not meant to be a definitive presentation of the vast contemporary scene, but only a small selection of its voices—the chosen poems partake of all of these categories. Above all, the dynamic and vibrant German poetry scene attempts to situate itself in the fragile present. The postwar period has passed, even though—as words and images in these poems attest—National Socialism continues, and will continue, to cast its long shadow. In the poem “Bee-Folk or the Good State,” as in many of Daniela Danz’s verses, the weight of history and myth is lifted by an almost physical feeling for rhythm and meter. Within her work—as well as that of others—we observe a merging of poetic and public spaces, and an attempt to discover a language that might decode the sources of power. In this selection the phenomenological present is also reflected in poems by Durs Grünbein and Jan Wagner, though they too are not devoid of warnings. Durs Grünbein’s “Artichokes,” whose descriptive accuracy Elizabeth Bishop would have appreciated, is nevertheless a catalogue of our potential savagery. In Jan Wagner’s at times disorienting space of the present, we are always at risk of sudden accidents and stalled trains. The effect of such poems is to heighten our awareness of what is directly before us, even if it remains difficult to interpret and full of encoded mystery. In other contributions, such as Lutz Seiler’s “homeward,” high stylistic intensity enacts a flight from dictatorship into the world of childhood—that unspoiled realm with its assumption of individual choices in life. Andreas Altmann’s language is simple and direct, yet the images hover like a profile briefly glimpsed in a dream. One of poetry’s most fundamental encounters is that with elemental nature, a force we will never fully master—neither its threat nor its creative beauty. Nature knows things that we do not. Against the backdrop of our repressed civilized world—in the poems of Sarah Kirsch or Esther Kinsky—this secret knowledge is magically evoked. The verses of Austrian poet Peter Waterhouse, however, translated by Iain Galbraith, revel in language’s materiality and possibilities, creating poetic works that defy gravity and directional orientation. Two poets of older generations, Christine Lavant—from the pre-war period—and Günter Kunert—a well-known poet of the postwar period— provide two types of codas for this selection. Kunert reflects on the vanity, follies, and terrors of the human condition, whereas Christine Lavant belongs perhaps to that group of poets who— while having existed before us in chronological time—are still somehow out ahead of us, in a future where a bit of the transcendent still breaks into our humanly realm. [End Page 38] Marie Luise Knott Marie Luise Knott has authored, edited, and translated over twenty books. She is a former editor-in-chief of the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Knott has translated and edited volumes into German, including the work of poets Anne Carson and John Cage. Her recent books include Unlearning with Hannah Arendt (Other Press, 2014) and, as editor in both German and English, the Hannah Arendt–Gershom Scholem Correspondence (Suhrkamp, 2010; University of Chicago Press, 2017). She lives and works in Berlin. Copyright © 2016 Middlebury College Publications

Secrets from Whom?

Clandestine financial dealings are at the core of new forms of philanthropic venture capitalism in global health. Worldwide, organizing principles of state-centric pastoral and clinical health care have given way to speculative, market-driven approaches to health. Because global finance is a normatively secretized social space, the increasing use of private financial instruments in health spaces previously publicly funded raises important questions about the remaking of global welfare processes, global public health incentives, and abandonments. Anthropological research shows that market value does not always link up with improved health outcomes. This article explores a related point: what are the relationships between financial secrecy and care? When the stakes are life and death, how much secret knowledge and private action is tolerable? Increasingly in global health finance, new forms of exclusion are emerging; disenfranchised people and nation-states participate in world systems but as compromised fi...

Providing Authentication by Using Biometric Multimodal Framework for Cloud Computing

Secret knowledge, like remembering password or token based authentication systems are deemed inconvenience and difficult to use for users such as password may be forgotten or token may be lost. So burdens like remembering password and stolen or forged token based authentication have raised a current trend of biometric authentication system. Now in this current tech world, everyone needs security everywhere to protect our personal gadgets. So to keep it secured, biometric based approach can be applied for better convenience and ease of use for the user. In this paper, a novel hybrid multimodal approach for ear recognition and finger print recognition has been presented for better robustness and efficiency which can be applied in various fields of applications like authentication in banking transactions. Biometric based human recognition is rapidly gaining popularity due to breached of traditional security systems and the lowering cost of sensors. This paper comprehensively reviews multimodal recognition using ear pattern and finger print data, it is concluded that further research should investigate fast and fully automatic ear-finger print multimodal systems robust to occlusions and deformations.

Providing Authentication by Using Biometric Multimodal Framework for Cloud Computing

Secret knowledge, like remembering password or token based authentication systems are deemed inconvenience and difficult to use for users such as password may be forgotten or token may be lost. So burdens like remembering password and stolen or forged token based authentication have raised a current trend of biometric authentication system. Now in this current tech world, everyone needs security everywhere to protect our personal gadgets. So to keep it secured, biometric based approach can be applied for better convenience and ease of use for the user. In this paper, a novel hybrid multimodal approach for ear recognition and finger print recognition has been presented for better robustness and efficiency which can be applied in various fields of applications like authentication in banking transactions. Biometric based human recognition is rapidly gaining popularity due to breached of traditional security systems and the lowering cost of sensors. This paper comprehensively reviews multimodal recognition using ear pattern and finger print data, it is concluded that further research should investigate fast and fully automatic ear-finger print multimodal systems robust to occlusions and deformations.

The Double Vision of ‘Natural Man’

Walter Ong, George Ewart Evans, Walter Benjamin, and others have said words to the effect that the modern mind now only sees things literally and materially, and has lost the metaphoric vision of old. Although metaphor continues to enjoy some currency, for literal-minded thinkers it is usually relegated to occasional use. A secondary form of orality persists to some degree in everyday conversation in literate culture. However, in the prior oral culture, the metaphoric vision encompassed everything seen, heard, felt, smelt, tasted, thought, and spoken of. It was not just constantly taking measurement from experiences stored in parallel understandings in the back brain, but part of its demand for certainty and truth was by the projected use of imagination. Such metaphoric extensions into imagination produce visions of understanding, for example, of the intangible — a grasp upon those things for which we have no visible image. Despite slowly evolving physical changes, the dominance of oral modes of expressive culture in the Middle Ages continued for what we might call ‘natural man’ 1 as exemplified in language, inherited wisdom, and secret knowledge with comparatively little change in extremely remote parts of the UK until probably the 1950s, 2 and there is still a small residue. Drawing upon a lifetime’s personal study of one orally oriented culture from this period, and from an insider’s perspective, the paper will show that vernacular indigenous orally oriented people whom I encountered had an inherited second sight. I argue that such highly imaginative thought patterns from ‘natural’ man leads to esoteric belief. Northrop Frye, through studying the metaphoric nature of the Bible, recognized in the early nineteenth-century English poet William Blake a completely metaphoric mind which he called ‘The Double Vision’. Blake said, ‘I can see the past, the present and the future at the same time’. It is this idea that I primarily discuss in this paper.

Forbidden Words: Taboo Texts in Popular Literature and Cinema

In his essay “Forbidden Words: Taboo Texts in Popular Literature and Film,” Whitty investigates the occult in popular fiction beginning in the nineteenth century and in film since the twentieth century. He discovers a recurring theme in these works: the discovery of an esoteric text containing “forbidden words,”that reveal knowledge of secrets that unleash powerful evil. His broad survey of forbidden words ranges from the Garden of Eden, the Kabala, to the Victorian penny dreadful, to the “Weird Tales” magazine, and the vampire novels of Anne Rice, to name a few.He takes us through myriad films including Nosferatu(1920), The Mummy (1932), The Seventh Victim(1943), Rosemary’s Baby (1968),TheExorcist(1973), and Ruby Sparks (2012) to demonstrate thissame phenomenon.

Jung's ‘secret knowledge’: commentary on works by contemporary Irish artist Gavin Hogg

Jung's ‘secret knowledge’ is identified as including three interrelated threads: precessional astrology, alchemy and anopus divinum. This is interpreted, broadly, in terms of an astro-alchemical myth. An extrapolation of this myth is then used as a basis from which to interpret a sample of works by contemporary Irish artist Gavin Hogg. The argument developed is that such an astro-alchemical myth finds visionary expression in such artworks, and that it offers a valuable perspective from which to critique a religious problematic such as a Catholic Ireland in crisis. The related notion of integrating a ‘missing fragment’ as an Eastern and also a Celtic holistic spirituality into the Western world picture is also briefly developed.

The Hermeneutics of Omens: The Bankruptcy of Moral Cosmology in Western Han China (206bce–8ce)

AbstractStudents of Chinese intellectual history are familiar with moral cosmology developed in the Han era, a theory that alleges thatruuse omens to admonish the emperor, and thereby to constrain and compete with his absolute political power. This thesis, in theory, is convincing; in actuality it is not. This article questions the autonomous power of omen discourse. Focusing on the socio-political conditions in which this discourse functioned, it demonstrates that, in real politics, the enactment of omen interpretation had nothing to do with restraining the power of the throne, but evolved with bloody factional struggles. Replacing the secret knowledge of diviners and astrologers with the common cultural heritage—the classics—and transforming the mysterious otherworldly spirits into a moral agent,rusuccessfully defeated the technical specialists and became the primary operators of the omen interpretation enterprise. The theoretical innovation that contributed toru'ssuccess, however, undermined their chance of building a social closure both to close off competition and to secure their interpretative authority. As numerous historical cases show, neither theruclassics nor the moral competence of the speaker add to the social efficacy of omen explanation: without monopolised knowledge, standardised hermeneutic rules, or institutionalised positions, omen discourse, rather than contesting political power, became its servant.

O conhecimento secreto de David Hockney e as múltiplas janelas de tempo nos desenhos de Jandira Lorenz

Pensando na relação “leitura visual: arte, mídia e cotidiano”, entre ciência e imagem e nos processos de produção de imagens com problemas estéticos e de representação, alguns artistas nos chamam a atenção, pois utilizam a própria arte como fonte de aprendizagem, em procedimento científico, de forma mais explícita. Um deles é David Hockney, que com o livro "O Conhecimento Secreto", nos explica como tenta redescobrir as técnicas perdidas dos grandes mestres, mostrando seu fascínio pela pintura, pelo mágico universo surgido da capacidade e necessidade que tem o homem de representar a realidade e de inventá-la. O outro é a artista plástica Jandira Lorenz, professora de história da arte, que em sua produção revela sobrevivências, sintomas de sua experiência com os estudos em arte. Este artigo visa construir um pensamento em relação à montagem de tempos históricos diversos nas obras da artista Jandira Lorenz com o livro de David Hockney que contribuiu com a possibilidade de estabelecer um ponto de convergência quanto às características de multiplicidades e particularidades na compreensão das imagens vistas por janelas múltiplas na recente pesquisa do acervo completo de desenhos de Jandira Lorenz. Ao enfocar a ligação desses dois artistas com a arte e a ciência, sobretudo, enfatizamos o valor da pesquisa artística.

Adhyāropa-apavāda Tarka: The Nature and Structure of the Soteriological Argument in Śaṅkarācārya’s and Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati’s Advaita Vedānta

Abstract The article highlights some of the basic features of contemporary Vedāntin writer Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati’s Advaita Vedānta as presented in his magum opus Vedānta Prakriyā Pratyabhijñā (The Method of the Vedānta). Elaborating on Śaṅkarācārya’s postulation of the Upaniṣads as ‘secret knowledge’ or ‘secret instruction’ (rahasya-upadeśa), Saraswati posits a sort of apophatic mystagogy that seeks to reinstate Upaniṣadic thinking (vicāra) as a rigorous rational discipline understood as a ‘device of imagination’ (kalpita-upāya) acceptable only on account of its results, viz., self-realisation (anubhava). Described as a systematic process of deliberate superimposition of attributes followed by their retraction (adhyāropa-apavāda), Upaniṣadic thinking aims at eliminating the various manifestations of the fundamental and recurrent error of objectifying the ultimate Reality (ātman/brahman).

“Can I Make Any Difference?” Gang Affiliation, the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and Implications for Teachers

After one of my students correctly answered a question that everyone else was struggling with, I eagerly approached him to give him a high five or fist bump, which was apparently not hip enough for him. Instead, he suggested we do a different kind of handshake involving a lot of different twists, finger combinations, and intricate patterns. By being included in this handshake, I felt like after two short weeks my students were beginning to accept me and were welcoming me into their personal lives. Little did I know that I had just participated in a gang affiliated handshake; the class erupted in laughter and I was told I was gangbangin' and officially a part of the clique, aware of their secret knowledge (Researcher Journal, 2 October).In this situation, what should a teacher do? Clearly the students found this moment funny and interactive, an invitation into their lives through a display of extra-curricular language and action. However, a teacher might be concerned that handshakes and signs representing gang affiliation might be used by others to criminalize students within a school setting (Butler et al., 2012; Gregory, Skiba, & Noguera, 2010; Noguera, 2003; Skiba, Rausch, & Ritter, 2004). The question, What should a teacher do?, when gang issues and identities enter the classroom only scratches the surface: Are my students involved in gangs? How might that involvement (real or perceived) affect their education? How might that involvement (real or perceived) affect the way disciplinary policies push them into the school-to-prison pipeline? How might I disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline? Can I make any difference?Over the course of a year, the researcher wrestled with these questions, engaging action research to explore how to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline through a curriculum purposively designed to generate dialogue around gangs and gang affiliations. This report of research opens with a review of literature defining the school-to-prison pipeline and its connections to gang affiliation. The study engaged methods of qualitative action research to record and analyze the researcher's experiences as a high school English teacher in dialogue around gang affiliation with adolescent male students experiencing criminalized schools. Findings provided some hope that teachers might play a role in disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline but that strong student-teacher relationships are necessary. Implications describe how other teachers wanting to disrupt the schoolto-prison pipeline might use curricula that spark discussions around gangs.DEFINING GANGThere is no internationally accepted definition of the word gang (Howell & Griffiths, 2016), but even in this article it has already been used it as if a reader will intuit its meaning. Current federal law defines a criminal street gang as anongoing group, club, organization, or association of five or more persons that has as one of its primary purposes the commission of... a federal felony involving a controlled substance...; a federal felony crime of violence that has as an element the use or attempted use of physical force against the person of another; and a conspiracy to commit an offense. (18 USC § 521 [a, c])While researchers are not always specific about drug crime or violence in using the word gang, the historical development of gangs from the 1980s to the present must recognize the effect of the international drug trade on local gangs (Toldson, 2012). Other labels used in the research include adolescent gangs (Mallett, 2015), street gangs (Toldson, 2012), and delinquent peer groups (Barnert et al., 2015). In this article, the word gang connotes all of these possibilities because the participants in this study used the word gang to describe such groups. When referring to students with gang affiliations, the students claimed those affiliations; there were no assumptions that the participants were involved in delinquent or criminal activity. …

The Invention of Viking America

The Invention of Viking AmericaThis essay is an extended review of Annette Kolodny's In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). The 448-page paperback includes ten illustrations and is priced at $27.95.IN SEARCH OF FIRST CONTACT: THE VIKINGS OF VINLAND, THE PEOPLES OF THE DAWNLAND, AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ANXIETY OF DISCOVERY. By Annette Kolodny. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xiv + 448 pp. $27.95, paperback.Since the publication of her seminal books and articles in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Annette Kolodny has been a true pioneer in literary historiography. Indeed, if the field of Literature as understood today has come to include multiple approaches and perspectives- including multicultural, multilingual, trans- and circum-Atlantic, as well as hemispheric perspectives-thereby utterly transforming what we mean by both American and Literature, it is in great part owing to Kolodny's tireless efforts in opening up new archives beyond the New Critical canons to include texts written in English as well as other languages by white men as well as nonwhite men and women, many of whom originated from outside the traditional Anglo-American elites. Her most recent book, In Search of First Contact, continues her quest to transform literary and to open up new archives by considering the literary record of the contact between the Americas and Europe in the eleventh century resulting from the voyages of Leif Eiriksson and other Norsemen, in particular the so-called Vinland Sagas first preserved among the Norse as oral traditions and then written down in the fourteenth century, as well as various Native artifacts and oral traditions possibly bearing testimony to this first contact. In addition, the book considers the cultural of the idea of a contact resulting from the Norse in Anglo-American letters from colonial times to the twentieth century. On the one hand, then, Kolodny writes, [T]his book is overwhelmingly about stories: about who told them, when, and where (10). On the other hand, however, it also means to take full advantage of much recent scholarship in archaeology, anthropology, ethnology, and history (10) in order to raise new historical questions about the nature and location of the Vinland colony, as well as about the Native Vinlanders (called Skraelings in the Sagas). The result is a book that impresses in the innovativeness of its thoroughly inter- or multi-disciplinary methodology, drawing as it does on a number of literary and nonliterary archives.As the author is doubtlessly aware, the of the notion of a contact or discovery predating Christopher Columbus's voyages reaches back in Europe to Columbus's own time, when such Spanish imperial historians as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, writing on behalf of the Spanish crown in the context of its legal fight against the Columbus family, spread tales about some anonymous pilot who had supposedly imparted the secret knowledge of the existence of a fourth to Columbus before the latter embarked on his first transatlantic voyage. The implications of this tale, if true, were clear: the rights and privileges that the crown had previously bestowed on Columbus and his descendants in the Capitulations of Santa Fe in April of 1492 regarding any lands and islands he might on his Westerly way to Asia were null and void, since he would not have been the first to discover those lands. During the seventeenth century, English imperialists such as Samuel Purchas added their own versions to the old story of a prediscovery by arguing that the so-called Rights of Discovery of the North continent belonged to England because of John Cabot's voyages on behalf of the English crown, rather than to Spain or Portugal (given that Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci had only touched the Caribbean islands and South America), and that, in any case, America had already been discovered by some medieval Welsh prince named Madoc in 1170. …

IJARCCE - Computer and Communication Engineering

Wireless medium is open prone to interference attacks. Jamming is a mode for denial of service attacks on wireless networks. Jamming is an external threat model. Adversaries with internal knowledge of protocol specifications and network secrets initiate low-effort jamming attacks tough to detect and counter. Existing work handle the issue of selective jamming attack in wireless network. Swarm intelligence algorithm is proficient enough to adapt change in network topology and traffic. Using the swarm intelligence technique, the forward ants either unicast or broadcast at each node depending on the availability of the channel information for end of the channel. If the channel information is available, the ants randomly choose the next hop. As the backward ants reaches the source, the data collected is verified which channel there is prevalence of attacker long time, and those are omitted. By simulation results, it is clear that this swarm based defense technique for jamming attack is more effective than the existing

Development of Multimodal Biometric Framework for Smartphone Authentication System

Secret knowledge, like remembering password or token based authentication systems are deemed inconvenience and difficult to use for users such as password may be forgotten or token may be lost. So burdens like remembering password and stolen or forged token based authentication have raised a current trend of biometric authentication system. Now in this current tech world, everyone needs security everywhere to protect our personal gadgets. Now-a-days smartphone gradually becoming a vital tool to manipulate enormous applications which were being done in a computer before. So to keep it secured, biometric based approach can be applied for better convenience and ease of use for the user. In this paper, a novel hybrid multimodal approach for ear recognition and speech recognition has been presented for better robustness and efficiency which can be applied in various fields of applications like authentication in banking transactions. Here two techniques DWT (using haar wavelet) and GLCM have hybridized to extract both shape and texture information from ear images. Again MFCC technique has applied to extract features from speech signals. Afterwards fusion is applied to mix both of those ear and speech features. Those features can be easily and efficiently manipulated by applying Euclidean distance and Bhattacharya distance as the similarity or dissimilarity measures. This proposed approach is very convenient and simple to use, thereby its ease of use allows very fast feature extraction. General Terms Image Processing, Biometrics, Security, Authentication

Shamanism, Tourism, and Secrecy: Revelation and Concealment in Siberut, Western Indonesia

ABSTRACTThis essay attempts to explain why international backpacker tourists in Indonesia are so interested in indigenous religion and especially in shamanism. It articulates the indigenous mode of analysis or reverse anthropology of the people whom the tourists visit: in this case, the Sakaliou clan on the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra. According to Sakaliou, tourists seem to be looking for something they have lost, a kind of secret knowledge that is possessed by the shaman. Unlike other people, who keep their secrets in isolation, the shaman must skilfully reveal some of his secret knowledge as part of a public performance. It is this secret knowledge, indicated by the skilled revelation of skilled concealment, for which tourists seem to be searching among the members of the Sakaliou clan and their shamans.

Orientalism in Iamblichus' The Mysteries

Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians is part of a larger Neoplatonic debate over the soundness of theurgical practices and Eastern ritual. The discussion of Egyptian practices in The Mysteries reveals the legitimating structures which underlie Iamblichus' argument, specifically, an Orientalizing discourse which contributes to a larger esoteric market of knowledge. This is figured both through stereotypes of Egypt as a site of ancient mysteries, but also from a very real inaccessibility of Egyptian religion to the Greeks. This emphasis on timeless, secret knowledge converts Iamblichan theurgy, a disputed new system of Platonic thought, into a unit of social currency which confers worth, prestige and power upon its creator and sets it apart from the dominant mode of philosophical rationalism.

Hvem er forfatteren til Joachim Arentsehes “Krigsbog”?

One of the prized possessions of the Royal Library in Copenhagen, an expensively bound composite volume of seven different German-language writings on the art and legality of war printed in Copenhagen in 1578 by Lorentz Benedicht for Frederik II, is usually called Joachim Arentsehe’s “War Book”. However, the title pages assign only parts 2 and 4-7 to Arentsehe, while for parts 1 and 3 no author is named. The very extensive part 1, opening with woodcuts of the King’s portrait and the National Arms and containing numerous hand-coloured illustrations, is evidently the main work of the volume. Its author came to light in 2001 when German historian Rainer Leng, as part of a systematic investigation into the late medieval German “Büchsenmeisterbücher”, published Franz Helm’s “Buch von den probierten Künsten”, one of the most thorough and richly transmitted works on the art of war of the whole of the sixteenth century, which he wrote in around 1530. It is Helm’s book which comprises the main section of Frederik II’s “War Book”. Leng was unaware of Benedicht’s anonymous printed edition, and in Denmark the assumption of Arentsehe’s authorship continued to hold a veil over the true origins of the work, until a detailed comparison showed the two to be identical. While, in Germany, Helm’s work was transmitted only in manuscript for some 100 years, and was first printed in 1625, Benedicht’s Copenhagen printing dates from some 50 years earlier. The reason why transmittance was dominated by manuscripts is presumably both the desire to make the book’s content seem secret knowledge and the desire to give it an aura of exclusivity, such as more properly belongs to an illustrated manuscript than to a printed version. However, the same exclusivity was achieved by Benedicht’s printed work through the perfection of its craftsmanship, its illustrations and by the fact that it was produced in one copy only, for the use of the King.

The Missing Books of Magic from Sandvik: In search for hidden books and secret knowledge

This article aims at defining a privately-owned manuscript from the end of the eighteenth century; a notebook of charms, recipes and ritual prescriptions, presumed to be connected with known manuscripts of magic, that were kept secret and hidden away. The study attempts to reconstruct the context of ‘The Sandvik Notebook’, in order to find out who penned it, when, and why. What kind of knowledge was sought: was it collected for antiquarian reasons, for esoteric interest, or for practical use – such as curing livestock and human beings? Was it copied from books or collected from peasant informants, and could it be related to the extant manuscripts ‘The Black Book’ and ‘The Red Book’, objects of the same line of enquiry? The three manuscripts are from Sandvik Manor, of the joint parish Burseryd-Sandvik, Sweden.