The Codex Dei Omnibus is a rare manuscript written in the seventeenth century, probably by the hand of the Russian theologian
Mikola Mandelstahm. No complete copies exist. The text is currently housed in the
rare books section of the
National Library of Russia, where it was first entered shortly after Mandelstahm's death in 1681. The book was, records supposedly indicate, a gift of the tsar
Peter the Great, who confessed in secret that he could not read the book.
The text was written in the
print age, but one of its characteristic features is its forced appearance as a much older text. The text reveals what is apparently false aging of its pages, though the method is as yet undetermined. Additionally, the
form and
ductus of the
Cyryllic letters seem to indicate an authoring at least 1000 years prior to Mandelstahm's birth. Nonetheless, dating techniques developed in the 1960s (
Thermoluminescence) have revealed that all of these features are
false, and that the author went to great lengths in order to
falsify the origin of his or her text. Of course, there is a margin of accuracy in the technique of dating the physical object. Further, some apologists for
Mandelstahm and the codex have claimed that Mandelstahm's hand was divinely inspired and that God interfered as Mandelstahm made the paper on which he would later write his
ciphered symbols.
The subject of the book is as
occult as the the physical object. Many pages have been lost, perhaps stolen by occultists and eccentrics. The title of the work, from which its name derives, was probably "Dei Omnibus". This might be derived from the Latin "deus" meaning "God". The origin of "Omnibus" is more obscure, but according to the text, in which the word is often used, it was a
conceptual innovation of Mandelstahm's that meant something like "Total" and "Orbit" at once. In fact, the text obsesses with
astronomy, and
celestial divinity. The title can probably be translated as "The Complete Orbit of God". One passage reads:
Dei Omnibus is the only study worthy of a true theologian. To understand how God has left, where God is, and when God will return, recur, defer, revert, is the most pure form of contemplation, whose content (meaning) will always give rise to a divine inspiration. Even if such contemplation is a falsification of God's divine logos, it is still an inspiration, a breath into the soul that is greater than all human whispers, works, wars, and worlds.
Of the book, we know that most of the chapters were devoted to an explanation of
celestial movement, which, even by standards of the day (
Galileo,
Tycho Brahe), would not be seriously entertained by any
scientific astronomer. Of this, Mandelstahm is aware, and in the preface he writes that he is not a scientific astronomer, but "a
divine astronomer, a
celestial theologian".
The book touches on many other subjects. Mandelstahm deals, in a method that almost prefigures the work of
Friedrich Nietzsche's
eternal return, with
Heraclitus' words on the subject of rest vs. motion, the static vs. the dynamic, identity and return. The words, quoted by
Plato in his
Cratylus (402a), and again by Mandelstahm in the Codex Dei Omnibus are: "All things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the same river." On this, Mandelstahm writes the following:
That we cannot step into the same river twice is not true, because we have stepped into that same river an infinite number of times. There is a circle, and always we find ourselves somewhere along its perimeter. That God is infinite is the only proof of this I have required in my faithfulness. This faith, I have held an infinite number of times, and shall lose equally. Heraclitus is yet correct in writing what he does, for his words do not contradict my faith in Omnibus. A circle implies motion. This is all that Heraclitus insists upon, motion. His fault is that he does not explicate the centrifugal force (Dei) that lies at the center of this divine circular motion (Omnibus), conceiving it instead as linear, which is particularly un-Christian of him.
The codex, it is written, is
beautiful and its
figural adornments and accompanying
images are stunning. Many have written that they have cried upon witnessing these images, and their words. Some believe that the authorship is divine, even more divine than the
Gospels, the
Kabbalah, and the text that is
Adam and Eve. Many have been ejected from the library from too fervrent a weeping and ejaculating before this text, which they call by the name of "Holiest".
Regardless of its divine status and its uncomparable beauty, the text is also of great
historical and
theoretical value. Mandelstahm's words (if they are indeed his) reveal an awareness of authors and concepts which are altogether absent in the
literature of his
contemporaries. In seventeenth century Russia, the name
Heraclitus practically had no meaning. There are no complete copies of his text, though a retired Russian historian living in Moscow, a Viktor Ustinov, is planning an edition in Russian with an accompanying English translation. Until then, the few fragments that we possess, quoted in disparate sources, and mostly by the hands, probably inaccurate, of the codex's devotees, will have to satisfy our curiosities.