October 2025

“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia”.

― Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100 - c. 170 CE), Ptolemy's Almagest, c. 150 CE.

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As much as I’d love our readership to believe I alone am the brains, brawn, and brilliance behind this whole Codex Hermeticus operation, it is high time to give a special shout out and acknowledgement to my partner in crime, the great and powerful Sarah. Sarah joined our team this year and is the one responsible for making this little newsletter experiment of ours beautiful, and even more important, readable!

In addition to making the frequent ‘BPH highlight’ posts and all of the Codex Hermeticus promotion posts on our social media, she devotes a considerable amount of (very patient) hours every week working with me and doing the very tedious formatting for each CH newsletter. She also helps me decide on sequencing of the articles and finding and capturing beautiful images. So, in honor of her efforts, I’d like to dedicate the October 2025 Codex Hermeticus to you Sarah!

Sarah and I have prepared quite the volume for you this month in what is definitely the beefiest edition of the Codex thus far.

This month we are thrilled to feature the work of a Brazilian scholar of Tarot, Dr Augusto Waga. Augusto spent around six months with us last year, helping us identify the provenance and rarity of some of the Tarot decks in our collection – an understudied part of our collection which Augusto helped shed light on, and which his contribution to the Codex this month concerns! In Paul’s, he discusses the famous and ominous ‘black square’ of Robert Fludd. My piece concerns a rare ‘proof’ edition we have of William Blake’s engravings of the Book of Job.

Natalie has written about one of the most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the BPH collection, the so-called ‘Isabella’ manuscript, no spoilers here. Charlotte has written a wonderful piece about the evolution of Hellenistic astrology. José brings in the book history dimension by analyzing the book plate of a masonic and magically influenced treatise in the collection.

Enjoy!

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Each issue of the Codex contains a selection of articles written by our contributors, exploring the themes and traditions at the heart of the hermetic world.