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Below is Coetzee´s manuscript:
A small note on a manuscript and a rotten apple
My mother always said that everything started somewhere with a manuscript, in the back of the line of all why was always a manuscript. I will give her the right at least when it comes to this story it starts actually with a manuscript.
The author of the manuscript could never imagine the tremendous impact it would have even during his own lifetime and far less what took place several hundred years after it was written. The author could not reasonably foresee that even if, as in this case may be seen as ironic, the manuscript was prophetic in nature.
I will start with what is generally known, so far back that I in a reasonably honest way can describe the events.
The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in the mid 1400's. As many warlike men before them, they wanted to take over the world and the conquest was a step along the way. What they did not know was that they put the wheels in motion for something completely different.
When they took over the city escaped many of the Byzantine Empire intellectuals to Florence. One of them was the philosopher Pletho. After a short time he got close to the mighty renaissance prince Cosimo de'Medici.
Of Pletho learned the prince of a lost manuscript. Pletho said, a trifle exaggerated, although he stuck to the truth as he saw it, that the manuscript was stolen from Constantinople, he had seen the most gruesome things in the Emperor's palace. The few who read the manuscript was never the same again and ran into strange accidents. No one dared to tell what was there and no one dared to finish reading it.
Cosimo was fascinated when Pletho told what little he knew about the content. He put the work on the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore to rest and instead he began sending out agents to search through old libraries and monasteries where Pletho suspected that the manuscript was hidden.
In 1460 finally an ancient scripture collection entitled Corpus Hermeticum was discovered in a remote mountain monastery in Macedonia. Someone had too much trouble hiding it in a cavity under the floor of the exam room in the monastery. The title was new, sloppily painted over the old, but the content was the same. The manuscript was brought to Florence where Pletho testified that it was the handwriting of Constantinople.
Scripture was thought to be much older than Jesus and contain fragments of the Egyptian Thoths holy book. The book was the first book ever written, written 6000 years BC and long since gone.
Cosimo gave humanist Marsilio Ficino the task of translating the manuscript from Greek into Latin. They were convinced that the publication contained an ancient secret, which was written down in the book of Thoth in Egypt. A secret so powerful that, if revealed, the world would never be the same.