The Most Holy Trinosophia:
A Book of the Dead

Little had been covered in English since Manly P. Hall's book on the subject in the 1930s. His book was printed in black and white, and the illustrations were complex. In the mid-1990s, the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, which had been founded in 1937 to catalogue all documents and manuscripts from the Mediterranean basin in possession of French libraries, undertook the photographing of a manuscript in the Bibliothèque de Troyes, a much-debated item called La Très Sainte Trinosophe. This book has been attributed to Saint-Germain himself and also to Cagliostro.

While low-quality versions of the color photographs taken by the IRHT have been in circulation for a few years, permission to use the images had never been formally sought, and thus, their use remains open to legal consequences from the French Government for breach of copyright. It was, therefore, decided to formally approach both the Library in Troyes and the IRHT for permission to use the images. Fortunately, that was granted, stipulating that accreditation be given for each image reproduced in the book.

Since the images were photographed in the 1990s, their quality was not good by modern standards, both because of the low pixel rate of early digital cameras and because the original images had deteriorated over the centuries and decades they had existed: watercolours have a notoriously short shelf-life if exposed to air.

The assistance of an image restoration specialist upgraded the images to a far higher density using digital techniques not dissimilar to a polymerase chain reaction (a method used to replicate minute samples of DNA to a size capable of being analysed). The specialist also removed much of the accumulated colour fading, fungal invasion and other attacks on the original drawings over the years to produce a series of illustrations that look almost as fresh as the day they were painted.

The final result is a spectacular reissue of a famous alchemical manuscript, allowing the reader to see the entire book. This is complemented by an introduction that discusses M.R. Osborne's theories using illustrations from both the Trinosophia and the Egyptian Books of the Dead. His text translation is the first new version in English since Hall and provides close-ups of the illustrations from the original manuscript.

 Click here for a Selection of Images in the Book