Page 87 of The Secret of Secrets

He grinned back at her. “As you can tell…I enjoy teaching that class.”

Only a month earlier—in a course offering called Illuminations: The Art of Medieval Manuscripts—he had shown several slides of the codex, beginning with the manuscript’s most famous page.

“Here we have Folio 290,” he said, displaying the bizarre illustration of a horned devil squatting awkwardly, entirely naked except for a white loincloth wrapped around his private parts. “And it is the page from which this book derives its oldest nickname.”

“The Diaper Devil?” chimed in one of Harvard’s lacrosse stars, eliciting laughter from his classmates.

“Nice try, Bruiser,” Langdon said patiently. “It’s called the Devil’s Bible. This image portrays Satan wearing a loincloth made of ermine—a symbol of royalty.”

“Wait…so the image presents Satan as a king?” a young woman commented. “In the pages of a Bible?”

“Bingo—thank you for noticing,” Langdon said. “It’s highly unusual iconography. But there’s a larger story to this document, and Satan’s appearance factors into it. According to legend, the scribe who created this illumination did so as a way to thank Satan for a favor. Rumor holds that this massive codex was written in a single night, by a single monk, who was able to complete the inconceivable task only because Satan himself stepped in to help him.”

“Will Satan help with my midterms?” chirped lacrosse guy.

“I’m about to silence you the same way this monk got silenced,” Langdon said. “Immurement.”

From the kid’s blank stare, Langdon gathered he didn’t know the term. “Immurement? Anyone?” He scanned the room. “No? Modern justice systems don’t use immurement as punishment anymore because it’s too cruel. It derives from the Latin—in murus—which means…” Langdon waited. “Anyone?” Bueller?

“In the wall?” someone offered.

“Correct. Immurement literally means to be sealed alive inside a wall.”

“Gross,” someone said. “Like in The Cask of Amontillado.”

“Exactly.” Langdon nodded, pleased to know Harvard students were still reading Edgar Allan Poe.

Another student asked, “Did they seal him into a wall for putting Satan in the Bible?”

“No,” Langdon said, “in fact, they sealed him in the wall for breaking his monastic vow of celibacy. But as the story goes, before the final brick was placed, the monk begged for mercy and was offered a chance at redemption. The monastery’s abbot left the last brick unlaid and told him that he would be freed only if he could create, within a single night, a book that contained all the world’s knowledge.”

“Well, that was a generous offer,” someone muttered.

“Yes, but in the morning,” Langdon continued, “when the abbot returned and peered through the opening, the prisoner was sitting atop a massive codex, explaining that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the book. The monk was immediately freed, mostly out of terror, and the Devil’s Bible instantly became a priceless artifact. In its early history, it was stolen, reacquired, and pawned many times, eventually becoming the property of the Cistercian monks of Sedlec. Perhaps you’ve heard of them? They are famous for having built…this.”

Langdon advanced the slide carousel, and as always, everyone in the room recoiled.

“What…the…hell…?” someone blurted.

The image before them was an altar made of human bones, above which hung a chandelier also made of human bones, flanking which were four massive pyramids of human skulls and femurs, all housed within a chapel whose walls and ceiling were adorned entirely with human bones.

“Sedlec Ossuary,” Langdon said. “The Bone Chapel. It contains the skeletons of an estimated seventy thousand people, mostly victims of the Black Death. If you ever visit Czechia, it’s worth a trip—about fifty miles outside Prague. It’s an astonishing location.”

“Utterly repulsive,” someone muttered.

“Memento mori,” Langdon said. “Remember death is coming…and live well.”

Langdon went on to explain how the Devil’s Bible was taken from Sedlec and eventually found its way to Prague in 1594, where it was housed in the library of Emperor Rudolf II until 1648, when it was taken as war booty by Sweden and moved permanently to the Swedish Royal Library in Stockholm.

“For three and a half centuries,” Langdon concluded, “the Swedes displayed the codex under armed guard. Then, in 2007, after pressure from the Czech government, the book was temporarily returned to Prague for a four-month exhibition at the Czech National Library, during which more than a hundred thousand people came to see ‘the book cowritten by the devil.’ ”

“That’s a lot of gullible people,” muttered lacrosse guy.

Langdon decided not to mention the millions who crossed continents and oceans to see miracles like the Shroud of Turin, Lourdes, or any of the world’s countless “weeping Virgin Mary” statues. Miracles and mystery had always been catalysts for hope—“reality softeners,” as Langdon sometimes called them.

“But whether or not you believe in its divine origins,” Langdon said, “there are other significant mysteries within this book. One of Codex Gigas’s most enigmatic features is the extraordinary quality of the calligraphy. More than a dozen top handwriting experts have examined the codex over the past century—and every specialist insists that the entire manuscript was written by a single hand. A lone scribe.”

Langdon waited for this to soak in, but his punch line fell flat.