"The Box of Crazy": amazing codex "found by the trash"

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Wanted to correct that it’s “Codex Seraphianus” – turned out, it’s “Seraphinianus”.

Some of that made sense to someone, at some time. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Sometimes, I wish people could just enjoy a good yarn rather than focusing entirely on finding details that permit the shouting of “Hoax! Hoax!”—but such are our times.

Indeed. If one expert debunks something weird and interesting you can just tune them out and enjoy weird for its own sake but when everyone is an “expert” its much less fun.

Wouldn’t the correct analogy be to outsider art epics like Darger’s “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion”? rather than to to the “Codex Seraphinianus”? After all, the Codex, while fascinating, was deliberately created by an artist for publication and would be unlikely to found in the trash, whereas outsider art is often only found when going through the creator’s possessions.

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I’ve known artists in all mediums to leave their art in random public places. Outsider artists are bloody creative in their distribution methods, and don;t give a crap about a transaction in my experience - they are quite willing to simply put their tape/cd/poster/book/whatever in a phone booth or on a random cafe table and walk away.

Roller bearings really are pretty cool; and if the owner of the Box of Crazy drew those schematics, I’d say he has reason to be proud of them and carry them around. As for the “Incident in 1977”, Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods came out in 1968, but didn’t really reach America unto the documentary in 1970.

Take another look at those illustrations; They’re a late 70’s meme of conflating Ezekiel’s Wheel with space ships. The entity is right out of Ezekiel, too. So, yeah, maybe the author/illustrator was trying to say that the roller bearing was invented by space aliens and recorded in the book of Ezekiel? I’ve known some engineers who were pretty weird; they might as well have had heads of animals!

Also, too; If it was found “by the trash”–not in it, you’ll note–it could have been meant to be found. My guess is someone cleaning out old stuff opened it, thought “weird, too cool to trash, can’t keep, too much crap, gotta go, can’t trash, put to one side maybe someone will adopt it”.

Hoax? Who the fuck cares? It’s just plain awesome. Even if it was staged, the staging itself is pretty cool. Mixing Roller bearings with Ezekiel’s Wheel is a fucking stroke of genius!

It’s interesting the immediate impulse is to call, ‘hoax’. I do a lot buying, around yard sales, clearing sales, deceased estates and while this sort of thing isn’t common it does pop up. Right now I have an old 1920s folio full of strange artwork, letters and notes about angels, ufos, spiritualism, witchcraft and astrology amongst other interesting things. As it happens I know exactly who compiled the folio and where it comes from (which makes it even more mysterious), but if I left it on a street corner and someone else found it, with no provenance, I guess it would be called a hoax.

It’s an artifact of the internet… no one wants to be branded as gullible and there have been a LOT of hoaxes spread around online. So the safe option is to view everything with a heaping spoonful of skepticism.

Plus there’s also the opportunity to be the hero… the person who unveils the truth gets to assert dominance over whatever community they’re dealing with.

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I was about to say the same, that this is pretty much a sci-fi interpretation of Ezekiel. I saw some quotes from Ezekiel in the handwriting, too.

Anybody know anything about that font in the first few pages? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, but I can’t remember where. It’s nice.

The draftsmanship is pretty sweet. The bearings look very similar to some of the images in Wikipedia’s article on rolling-element bearings: Rolling-Element Bearing

Has anyone seen my box of documents? I seem to have dropped it … oh, never mind. I’ll just be moving along.
Thanks anyway.

That was my take as well. This is very “Chariots of the Gods” stuff.

Why cant we have more winged-puma trains? So RAD!

the other day i tripped over a joseph kossuth whilst going downstairs

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There is a lot of stuff like this, and I suspect most of it gets burned or put into the landfill. Occasionally it gets rescued. At a convention I went to, someone showed off their late uncle’s huge, complex diagrams of how he thought the universe worked. An architectural draftsman in San Francisco did amazing drawings of imaginary buildings inspired by people he knew, and diagrams of strange world fair like festivals, which only got discovered and published by happenstance. And I’ve run across lots more, not as spectacular, examples. This “crazy” is pretty typical in style, and not as weird in content as some.

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More interestingly (IMO), doesn’t it seem like Business Insider has less to do with business and much more to do with BuzzFeedesque, click-baity stuff?

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Looks like one of my exes tossed her collection of my “love” letters…

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