The Historical Books Behind the Ancient Secrets Novels
Each Ancient Secrets novel has, as one of its foundations, a book or author that plays an important role in the development of the story. Here you'll find more information about each work.
Nicholas Flammel's Book of Abraham the Jew
While there is no longer a "Book of Abraham the Jew"--and perhaps one never existed--there was a Nicholas Flammel (also spelled Flamel). His tombstone is preserved at the Musee de Cluny, and it is known where he was buried. He died in 1418 when he was in his eighties. He owned a bookshop in Paris and, one day, a man came in and sold him, "for the sum of two florins, a guilded Book, very old and large." This book came to be called "The Book of Abraham the Jew."
Flammel then goes on to describe how he and his wife, Perenelle (or Perenella), spent decades attempting to translate the book which, he believed, told how to transmute base metals (usually lead) into gold by creating a Philosopher's Stone. Legend has it the book was written in ancient Hebrew letters as well as Greek. In any case, Flammel finally went to Spain where he met a sage who helped translate it, but died before he finished the translation. Eventually, Flammel announced he and Perenelle did managed to transmute lead into gold. The two became quite wealthy--more wealth (people said) than a bookseller should have been able to amass. When Flammel died, it is said the people of Paris tore apart his house trying to find the book, but were unsuccessful. His own translation of the book and his explanation of the alchemical symbols in it were written, of course, in French.
Below is a translation of Flammel's description of receiving the book, what it looked like, and the name and background of its author, "Abraham the Jew, Prince, Priest, Levite, Astrologer, and Philosopher, to the Nation of the Jews, by the Wrath of God dispersed among the Gauls..."
Here is Nicholas Flammel's house at 51 rue de Montmorency in Paris, 75003, said to be the oldest stone house in Paris
Investiture of the Gods (Chinese name: Feng Shen Yan Yi)
The book was written in the late 1500's to early 1600's during China's Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It is a gory yet romanticized telling of the end of the Shang dynasty and the overthrow of its weak, corrupt King. The Shang dynasty existed for centuries as almost a myth, but eventually archeological evidence proved its existence. The years are estimated to have begun around 1600 B.C., and ended 1046 B.C.
The Investiture of the Gods tells how the last Shang king, King Zhou, took notice of a beautiful peasant girl, and decided to make her one of his many concubines. A demon saw his interest and took over the girl's body, so when Zhou took her as his concubine, he took the demon. The demon completely bewitched him, so much so he ignored his duties as king, preferring to spend all his time with the girl/demon. She even convinced him to blind and imprison his true queen and place her in his place. She becomes known as Queen Daji, one of the most evil characters in world literature.
Queen Daji was known for the many, truly horrible, means of torture she subjected people to for the most menial "crimes." The population hated her and as she dreamed up more and more horrific tortures, the various groups opposed to her finally joined forces--with the help of immortals and spirits--and overthrew King Zhou and his loathesome queen. Heroes who died during this war were formally invested to the "rank" of god. The "tortures" described in Ancient Shadows are ones presented in the Investiture of the Gods book as having been dreamed up by Queen Daji. She continues to be a popular figure that people love-to-hate in historical books, movies and TV shows in China to this day.
Lafcadio Hearn's Books
Lafcadio Hearn was a fascinating man, once considered nearly as popular as Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain in the U.S., he is currently all but forgotten--to the detriment of those who love a good story. He was born in Greece to a Greek mother and Irish father, who brought both back to Ireland with him. His mother eventually returned, without her son, to Greece, and his father remarried. Lafcadio ended up raised by an aunt, and when he was nineteen, in 1869, left Ireland for the U.S. At age twenty, he was given a job with the Cincinnati Enquirer, but lost it when it was discovered he had married (or was living with) a black woman, which was a scandal. He left for Louisiana where his popularity grew based on his work in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, and his first novel, Chita. He also spent time in the West Indies, and eventually, traveled to Japan where he was promised a job and money for magazine articles. The promises sounded better than they turned out to be.
He ended up staying in Japan, however. An "arranged marriage" with a Japanese woman, Koizumi Setsuko, turned out to become a love match. He found himself fascinated by the Japanese culture and its legends and rituals. His writings of all he discovered there, and his retelling of Japanese ghost stories, both in magazines and books, sealed his reputation. Because foreigners in Japan had few rights, and he wanted to assure that his wife and children would inherit the small amount of wealth he managed to amass with his writing, he took the unusual task of becoming a Japanese citizen. He took his wife's name as his family own, and "Yakumo" as his "first" name, which is the second name in Japanese, thus becoming known as Koizumi Yakumo in Japan. His work is still honored in Japan, and his home, on the western side of Japan near Matsuo, is now a museum.
His best known books about Japan are In Ghostly Japan, Kwaidan, Kotto: Being Japanese Curios with Sundry Cobwebs, but there are also many others.
The photos below show how Lafcadio Hearn is still honored in Japan. The first of Hearn, his wife, three sons and a daughter, were to commemorate the 110th anniversary of his death. The next is his home in Matsue (said to have been his happiest home), and last is a collage of several books. An engrossing biography of Hearn is The Wandering Ghost by Jonathan Cott.
Pushkin's Poetry
There isn't a dominant book in Ancient Deceptions in the way other novels had. A major aid in writing the book was the fabulous biographical work, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith. However, the life and poetry of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) hovers over St. Petersburg, Russia, in many aspects of the novel from the hotel where much of the action takes place, the Pushka Inn which is just a couple of houses away from Pushkin's apartment (now a small museum), to the streets he walked, and quotes from his poetry.
Along with poetry, Pushkin wrote novels and plays. Many scholars consider him to be Russia's greatest poet as well as the founder of modern Russian literature. The Encyclopedia Brittanica states, "His novel in verse, Yevgeny Onegin, was the first Russian work to take contemporary society as its subject and pointed the way to the Russian realistic novel of the mid-19th century." Pushkin died in St. Petersburg in a duel defending his wife's honor when he was only 37 years old. He had developed a small interest in alchemy at the time, and one of his unfinished works had a main character who was an alchemist. The poem that Irina quotes to Michael Rempart is from Pushkin's "I Loved You Once."
Below are portraits of Pushkin, his wife Natalia, and his museum in St. Petersburg:
The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript has fascinated people from the time it first appeared in the 15th century. Much of the history of the manuscript is as presented in Ancient Passages. From the time Wilfrid Voynich purchased the strange book in 1912 from a Jesuit library in Rome, it has had wildly diverse reactions from scholars. Many considered it a scam--that it was recently created, perhaps by Voynich himself, and didn't really "say" anything, that the strange writing wasn't real writing at all, but just squiggles that were strung together with odd pictures for someone to sell for profit. When, however, the document was carbon dated, the vellum on which it is printed was shown to be from 1404-1438. In 1969, the manuscript was moved to Yale University's Beinecke Library.
Throughout the twentieth century and continuing to the present, both amateur and professional crytographers, including codebreakers from WWI and WWII, have been unsuccessful in breaking the code. Many strange formations of letters have been discovered. For example, some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle. This creates a highly regular structure of words which researchers say is unheard of in Indo-European, Hungarian, or Finnish languages. But at the same time, the "words" are not randomly used, but show a pattern that is compatible with natural languages. Innumerable studies and "findings" of the words and letters used in the manuscript have been made. Researchers claim it was based on Latin, Ukrainian, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and many other languages--or, of course, that it is a completely made-up language, or simply a clever hoax.
Since 1912, many people have claimed to have decoded the manuscript but researchers have consistently pointed out a variety of problems with each decoding. So far, all such claims have been debunked by serious Voynich scholars. To this day, many claims of a decoded manuscript that can be found by doing a simple internet search.
Here, from Wikipedia, is a chart giving the known history of the manuscript, beginning in the early 1400s based on carbon dating. Periods of unknown ownership are indicated in white. The commonly accepted owners of the 17th century are shown in orange; the long period of storage in the Collegio Romano is yellow. The location where Wilfrid Voynich allegedly acquired the manuscript (Frascati) is shown in green (late 1800s); Voynich's ownership is shown in red, and modern owners are highlighted blue.
Here are photos of Wilfred Voynich and pages from the manuscript that now bears his name:
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