History of the Codex

The Codex of Magical Labour was published in 1453 by the mysterious Gerald Gardner, not to be confused with the 20th century figure who will henceforth be referred to as the "Second Gardner".  The First Gardner was a former alchemist and necromancer who, having experienced an epiphany of sorts, underwent a dramatic life change which culminated in his publication of the equally mysterious Codex.  Unfortunately, the voluminous tome was not one of the lucky works printed on Gutenburg's press.  Scholars believe that as many as a dozen copies were painstakingly scribed by Gardner's followers after his death, but only three are known to us today.  The Louvre holds a copy which comes down to us from Charles the Bold of Burgundy who captured the Codex during the Swiss wars.  Another copy is housed at Castle Trim on the Boyne River in Ireland.  When William III defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, he found the Codex, but he dismissed the work of Gardner as "pagan" and promptly abandoned it, where the Codex was quickly spirited away by Irish Jacobites to Trim Castle where it has remained up to the present day.  A third copy is rumored to be in the possession of a prestigious English university which does not wish to incur the publicity and inquiries that housing the Codex always seems to bring.

A fourth copy was housed at the Castle of Loyola in Azpeitia in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa in northern Spain.  However, one of the sons of Loyola, Inigo de Loyola, who would later become St. Ignatius Loyola, lay wounded there after having his legs struck by a cannon ball during battle with the French.  During his lengthy recovery in 1521, he became very bored and longed for books to read.  However, the only books available were on the lives of Jesus Christ and the saints.  Near the end of his recovery, his father obtained a copy of the Codex, but in his religious fervor, Inigo seized the Codex and threw it into the fire, displaying the same zeal for Christ that would later lead him to establish Societas Jesu, the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as the Jesuits.

The over 14,000 pages contained within the body of work that is the Codex of Magical Labour make it both a physically, and intellectually imposing corpus of magical ritual, rite, chemistry, and philosophy for the seeker who endeavors to learn the wisdom contained within it's pages.  Ever an object of mystery, the conundrum of the misunderstood Codex is magnified by virtue of its rarity.  Sadly, the Codex is not open to the public at any location, although it is hoped for by an increasing number of historians and scholars that the Codex will be published so that it may be studied and examined, in the hope that new details will shed light on the Codex and its shadowy history.