About the Codex Gruitcurtensis

HOW IT WAS FOUND

It began almost by accident.

My beloved wife Ale and I (pictured below) had not set out that morning expecting to find anything at all. The ruins of what local maps vaguely identified as the Abbaye Saint-Arnoul de Gruitcourt lay half-forgotten on a wooded rise, little more than broken stone and nettles. The monastery, we later learned, had been abandoned and dismantled in the chaos that followed the French Revolution, its stones reused, its memory slowly erased. Only the crypt remained partially intact, sealed by a collapsed arch and centuries of silence.

Curiosity, more than intention, led us down.

The air below was cold and dry, strangely preserved. Among fragments of carved capitals and fallen slabs, we noticed a narrow niche in the wall, concealed behind rubble. Inside it lay a wooden chest, darkened by age, its iron fittings corroded but intact. When we opened it, we found a manuscript wrapped in brittle cloth: thick parchment leaves, dense with ink, written in a careful but unfamiliar hand.

Unsure of what we had found, I later spoke with a teacher of mine, a man deeply versed in medieval texts. When I showed him photographs of the manuscript, his reaction was immediate and serious. He told me that, following scholarly convention, it ought to be called Codex Gruitcurtis, after the Latinized name of the place where it had been preserved. He believed the text could be slowly and methodically translated from its strange language (it wasn’t Latin as I thought at first, but apparently an ancient form of French), and offered—almost with excitement—to help me begin the work.

We never got the chance.

Before any real progress could be made, he passed away suddenly. The project, so briefly alive, fell back into silence. For a time, the manuscript remained closed, as if waiting.

Eventually, unwilling to let it vanish again into obscurity, I reached out to a friend of mine, José Miguel. He was no academic, but he knew enough French and Latin to recognize words, phrases and patterns of this old text. Together, with dictionaries, patience, and many false starts, we began to tease meaning from the manuscript.

The manuscript had an old, but detailed and unmistakable form musical notation which, together with José Miguel, we closely and precisely brought into music. The more difficult part was the story that accompanied it: it spoke of order and disorder, of divine law and human arrogance, of cycles of collapse and restoration. It read less like a chronicle and more like a warning—part prayer, part reflection—written by someone who had lived through moral and political upheaval and feared its return. Whether it was prophecy, philosophy, or simply the anguish of its author, we could not yet say.

But one thing became clear.

The Codex Gruitcurtis was not meant to be read quickly, nor easily. It had survived destruction, revolution, and neglect, only to resurface centuries later in the hands of two people who had not gone looking for it—yet somehow had been found by it all the same.

And we both sensed that we had only begun to understand what it was trying to tell us.

➤ ENTER: THE CODEX
(under construction)