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Shakespeare's Secret Booke

Deciphering Magical and Rosicrucian Codes

Paperback
December 2010
9781905570263
More details
  • Publisher
    Clairview Books
  • Published
    29th December 2010
  • ISBN 9781905570263
  • Language English
  • Pages 256 pp.
$29.00

And now I will unclaspe a Secret booke,
And to your quicke conceyving Discontents,
Ille reade you Matter, deepe and dangerous
As full of peril and adventurous Spirit . . .

William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, part 1

Whereas Shakespeare's literary genius is universally recognized, there is also a hidden, secretive side to his work that is little known. Indeed, he used a mysterious code that figures widely in the esoteric literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. The Bard of Avon was a master of such encoding, and those who had known him continued his methods, in the Folio of 1623, as well as in his various memorials. However, Shakespeare did not invent that code. Among the many arcane authors who made use of it before him was Michel Nostradamus, the famous French prophet and savant.

As David Ovason reveals, many leading esoteric writers—alchemists, occultists, and Rosicrucians—contributed to this “Secret Booke.” Among the more outstanding English literary figures who used the code were John Dee, the mysterious adviser to Elizabeth I, Ben Jonson, the turbulent author of The Alchemist, and the more classically minded Edmund Spenser, whose poem “The Faerie Queene” is the most famous esoteric work of the period. Shakespeare's “Secret Booke” reveals many other literary figures who together form a remarkable underground literary movement, including Jakob Böhme, the most influential esotericist of the period, and alchemists such as the English polymath Robert Fludd. Another was Shakespeare's contemporary, the youthful Johann Valentin Andreae, credited as author of The Chymical Wedding, a Rosicrucian work replete with sophisticated examples of encoding.

The fact that all these writers used the same or similar encoding suggests a secret teaching designed to be recognized by initiates. Ovason explores and, for the first time, reveals what Shakespeare alluded to as a “Secret Booke.”

C O N T E N T S:

Introduction

1. The Secret Number
2. Shakespeare’s Curse Stone
3. Some Rosicrucian Works
4. The Sacred Monas of John Dee
5. The Rosicrucian Code
6. Nostradamus his Codes
7. The Ego in Strife: Law and Boehme

Conclusion
Picture Section
Notes

David Ovason

David Ovason teaches astrology and has studied the life and writings of Nostradamus for more than forty years. He is the author of numerous books, including The Secrets of Nostradamus (1997); The Zelator: A Modern Initiate Explores the Ancient Mysteries (1998); The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital (1999); The Two Children: A Study of the Two Jesus Children in Literature and Art (2001); The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill (2004); The History of the Horoscope (2005); and Shakespeare's Secret Booke: Deciphering Magical and Rosicrucian Codes (2010).