Gigas. If, by accident or design. tbe book falls open at a certain place. the ruo facing pages will show a pair of unerll compelling, full-page illustrations. On the left-hand page is a _crezf, walled city-the New Jerusalem-rhe Heavenly City that will descend frcm God at the end of time, according lo the Revelation of St. John. On the riehr- hand page crouches the Prince of HelI himself, poised to leap right out oi the page and seize the reader. That dread being is clad only in a loincloth made of royal ermine fur. His long, sharp horns and claws are red with blood. His eles Codex Gigas are beady and their pupils, too. are red. His face is green. He bares his teeth. and The Devil's Bible from his mouth protrude two long red tongues. Surely the Devil had a hand in THE LARGEST MEDIEVAL booK wondered at its size it began to ask the Giant Book's making and placed hi_r ever wdffen weighs an astonishing 165 themselves whether that monk might frightening portrait there as a signarure. pounds. It stands 36 inches tall and is 20 have had supematural help from God... The flve pages directly before rtre inches wide. It is almost nine inches thick. or, just maybe, from someone el,se. illustration of New Jerusalem conrain No wonder it is known as Codex Gigas, And so legends gathered around a detailed ritual for a monk to contess which is Latin for "The Giant Book." It the Giant Book. In their flnal form, all his sins, written in letters much was written in a monastery in Bohemia they told of a monk, a scribe, who had larger than the rest of the manuscript, (now the Czech Republic) in the early committed some very great sin, and The six pages directly following ttre i200s CE. Except for a few later notes, had been sentenced to be walled up illustration of the Devil, also wrirten in every word in this gigantic manuscript alive. He bargained with his judges: large letters, contain five magic spells. was written by the hand of one and the "Will you spare me if in a single night The first three spells are for healing- same scribe, who was surely a monk. It I write a manuscript containing all the other two are for identiff in_s a has been estimated that this monk spent knowledge, to glorify our monastery thief (by scrying in the first spell and some twenty orthirty years of his life writ- forever?" Thinking this impossible, his revelatory dreaming in the second l. ing out the Codex Gigasby hand, from its judges agreed. Alone in his prison cell Apart from these pages, the Code-r first page to its last. that night, the monk called on the Prince Gigas contains the following. all in The Codex Gigashas another name as of Hell and made a pact. With Lucifer's Latin: (1) the Old Testament, Q) Tht well The Devil's Bible. Since it seemed aid, the monk wrote out the entire Giant Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus an almost superhuman task for a single Book by hand in the course of a single Flavius, (3) The History of the Jarish monk to have written every word of so night. Thereby he escaped punishment, War, also by Josephus Flavius. r4r gigantic a book by hand, people who but lost his sou1. 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