The Italian artist Luigi Serafini produced a richly illustrated book called the Codex Seraphinianus in the late 1970's.
The book is an encyclopedia containing bizarre pictures of a parallel universe of alien origin, and its 364 pages are filled
with obscure writings in an unknown language.
Don Luigi chose to express alien ideas inside surreal artistic images that were his deciphering of the thoughts and ideas
pressed upon him by the aliens; whether in dreams or a dreamlike state of consciousness only he can choose to say.
That the paintings are often parodies of things found in our world is proof of the difficulty he faced in expressing thoughts so
different from what he was accustomed to.
The writing system used in his book appears to be modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems, but with letters that curve into each other in patterns that cryptologists and linguists have been unable to break. They most probably were not meant to be much more than a display table for his excellent drawings, and a showcase for his imagination.
However, the number system used for numbering the pages has been cracked by a Bulgarian linguist, Ivan Derzhanski of Sofia, Bulgaria ( his web page may be seen at http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html ).
Regarding the writings found in the pages of the book, Mr. Derzhanski states "Several dozen different characters appear in them, far too many for the writing system to be an alphabet, and there are too many long words for it to be a syllabary. Some characters occur very many times, others only once or twice. A meaning-oriented writing system ? Or a philosophical language?".
While some progress has been made in translating the book, researchers have complained that the book contains a "Rosetta Stone" that "only translates Codex script into another alien language" while "on another page there is a picture of a scholar standing by what is apparently a Rosetta Stone but unfortunately, the only language on it, besides Serafinian itself, is an unknown kind of hieroglyphics". I now agree that the rest of the researchers were probably correct in their assumptions. The writings express only a vivid imaginary story.
My research into the mystery of the Codex began with two questions that I posed myself:
(1) Why would Serafini show several Rosetta Stones in his book, if they were not meant to be used by completely different life forms - depending on the state of awareness and development that each had attained up to that point in time ?
(2) Why should we assume that the level of empathy apparent in those aliens was not strong enough to comprehend our problems in holding their entire alphabet in our minds - and thus understanding the thoughts they were trying to convey ?
I then discovered another Rosetta Stone, the one meant for a race at our particular stage of development, contained inside an example of Codex Script referred to as the 'Matrix'.
( The image is © 1983 by Luigi Serafini )
In the next few pages I will prove that an alphabetical language bridge, found inside the Matrix, furnished for our particular use,
and modeled on earthly language systems, is what the aliens provided for us to communicate with them.
Using this Rosetta Stone, and the alphabet it contains, both humans and aliens can express their ideas using characters that
can be mutually understood.
Perhaps only by specially trained 'dumbed-down' linguists on their part, but for us it can be an easily utilized tool to promote our thoughts.
During the course of my explanation, I will be using a copy of the artwork created by Don Luigi, with Alphabetical characters
added to each of the rows for reference.
The following are the Rules that I have discovered in regard to the alphabetical system that I choose to call '" La Matrixa "® (la mah-Trix-ah) in honor of Don Luigi.
(1) La Matrixa contains only miniscules. I feel that the stress markings and/or paragraph seperator punctuation serves also
as a beginning of sentence indicator, and thus uppercase letters were neither needed nor provided. On this particular Rosetta Stone there are no numerals shown either. I think this has to do with the base 27 math system they used, but possibly there are other
numerals existant but they are provided on another Stone, along with examples of their useage. In any case, my translator
program will transform all input to lowercase, and delete any numbers or other untranslatable input.
(2) La Matrixa is read from the matrix image starting from RIGHT TO LEFT
( like Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, AND LEONARDO DAVINCI ), and contained in 6 rows that I have lettered A,B,C,D,E,F, as shown in Image one below. I feel strongly that the output of La Matrixa should be printed from right to left, like the example in the matrix chart, and therefore I give the option to view your input text in easily readable left to right or in the probably more correct form of
right to left. Using my translator program found here, you may choose to have your output shown in right to left format ( which is the purest way ) by checking the indicated button to the left of the input form.
(3) It contains ligatures (LIH-guh-choors), or characters that resemble two letters joined together, as in AE, fl, or OE. Ligatures, also called digraphs, are presently used in English, French, and Norwegian. Examples are: Æ æ .
The ligatures used in La Matrixa are determined by the placement of letters in the matrix itself.
These ligatures have been outlined in blue in Image two below.
(4) The ligatures are additional characters of the alphabet, created using alternative positioning of the location of certain
characters, by row, and possibly are of more use to the aliens, as markers for pronunciation, word stress, or to help
bridge the alphabetical difference between our culters, and are determined as follows:
Row A uses the first character plus the next to last character to form
an additional ligature character of AE ( and it resembles an AE ).
Row A also contains the ligature character CI.
Row B uses the first character plus the next to last character
to form the ligature character of GI.
Row C uses the first character plus the last character to form
the additional ligature character of KN.
Row D contains a extra ligature ( like row A ) of OE.
Row D uses the first character plus the next to last character
to form the ligature character of OQ. ( resembles O & some of Q ).
Row E uses the first character plus the last character to
to form the ligature character of SU.
Row F uses the first character plus the next to last character to
form the ligature character of VZ. ( resembles V & some of Z ).
(5) These ligatures, plus the included A through Z characters, bring
the total alphabetical characters of La Matrixa to 34. ( Recall
that the American alphabet contains 26 characters but the Italian
alphabet, for example, only 21 characters plus some borrowed
foreign characters, and the concept of an alphabet with extra
or less characters may not seem so strange. )
Image three shows the alphabetical
letters and punctuation translations, in each matrix block, above the character
used to represent it.
(6) Row A contains alphabetical characters plus a dash character that acts as a seperator, or
9 characters in total.
Row B contains characters of the alphabet plus punctuation characters, for a total of 6.
Row C contains 5 characters of the alphabet plus the symbol for
a dot punctuation, or sentence ending ( period ) for a Total of 6, and an
image of Space ( or Omega, the ending or ultimate step => space ) which I have chosen to use as the spacer.gif to seperate spaces in the text input.
Row D contains 6 characters of the alphabet ( 2 ligatures ) and
the Square or Alpha sign to signify emptiness and a beginning.
Row E contains characters of the alphabet plus two symbols
for ends of paragraphs or themes for a total of 6.
Row F contains characters of the alphabet plus something
resembling a soccer ball ( and I have interpreted as a
question mark for cultural reasons ) and something that
I feel is a comma character, for a total of 9, and a Null
symbol, ( a zero or value that is neither positive nor
negative seems to be a universal necessity )
[Alpha, Omega and Zero - concepts we have expressed since
the beginnings of written language, and 6 or 9 Characters
per row - aren't these further proof that this is indeed our
own Rosetta Stone and not just a random depiction ?]
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As a side note, below are my reasons for
the assignment of the various characters to the various
letters of the La Matrixa alphabet:
Character for A - top part resembles an 'a' in english.
Character for Dash - used as a seperator between characters or words, and may be meaningful to the aliens as a
marker for emphasizing or accenting words - much like the accent marks used in Czech, French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese,
Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, and Latinized Macedonian languages. Examples of our accents: Í Á á É é í Ý ý.
Character for B - right part contains a 'B' in english.
Character for C - resembles a 'c' in english but with top accent.
Character for Ligature Ci - an obviously modified 'c' character.
Character for D - like the 'c' but unaccented.
( maybe thats how you tell them apart)
Character for E - right part contains the 'e' in english.
Character for F - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for Ligature AE - resembles 'a' top and 'e' bottom.
Character for G - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for H - look at 'b'. Ever notice that a b and an h
in english are alike except for the closure at the
bottom ? So are these except for a top curl and
a bottom loop on the h.
Character for I - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for J - right part contains a 'j' in english.
Character for Ligature GH - modified 'g' character.
Character for K - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for L - right part contains 'L' in english.
Character for Dot - pretty clear.
Character for M - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for N - turn it 90 degrees to the right.
Character for O - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for Ligature OE - contains 'e' at the bottom and accent marks to the right.
Character for P - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for Q - somehow it reminds me of a Q.
Character for R - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for Ligature OQ - contains 'o' and follows the rules.
Character for S - contains an 's' on the bottom.
Character for T - not sure. ( alien input ? )
Character for U - contains 'u' on top and 's' on the bottom.
Character for Ligature SU - contains both 's & u'.
Character for V - contains a slanted 'V' on the left side.
Character for ? - 'cause I went hunh ?? when I saw the soccer ball.
Character for W - turn it 90 degrees to the left this time.
Character for X - x is a borrowed foreign character in Italian,
this may be Luigi's interpretation of it.
Character for Y - looks like a twisted 'y' on it's side.
Character for Comma - like the dot but emphasis to the left (,)
Character for Z - resembles the 'z' in our alphabet.
Character for Ligature VZ - contains 'v' and follows the rules.
[ Your mileage may vary. Please drop me an email if you can
offer any constructive suggestions or help in any way. ]
I was a cryptographer for the US Navy, eons ago, and I have written some Perl Scripts to translate Mayan,
Late Babylonian and Egyptian Hieroglyphs into other languages, but I have no formal training as a linguist and I do not put myself
forth as any type of expert in languages.
I simply saw a pattern in the Matrix image and felt I should share my findings about the alphabet now known as
" La Matrixa ®" with the general public.
I have written a Perl script that allows you to type up to 240 characters ( 30 words ) in your own English, Spanish, Italian,
German or other 'Latin1' type language and see it printed in La Matrixa. You can Click here to translate now. If anyone has the time or desire to create a font based on La Matrixa, I can furnish some images of the characters. I only ask that a written credit be included for my work.
Please forgive any grammatical errors and/or acts of omission or commission on my part.
And a special thanks to Luigi Serafini for the wonderful gift he has given the world.
© 2008 by James M. Duyer
San Jose, Costa Rica, Central America