From the book
The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I
Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026
Browse this book’s lexicon →Orientation
At a Glance
- The wordAnathema names a solemn condemnation. Maranatha is used by this manuscript as a repeated curse protecting secrecy.
- In the bookThe opening warning attaches disasters to disclosure of the art; a later passage explains why forbidden knowledge was clothed in figures.
- TranslationMaranatha is retained, and the manuscript’s own linguistic gloss is translated rather than silently corrected.
- A place to readRead scans 15 and 241 together: the initial curse and the later explanation of concealed teaching.
Meaning
This is a narrow but consequential entry because the unusual formula stands at the threshold of the manuscript. The attributed Jewish priest demands reverent secrecy and condemns those who expose the art to unworthy recipients. Anathema is not a technical substance or operation. It defines the conditions under which the book expects its knowledge to circulate. Maranatha intensifies that prohibition through repetition and through its association with harm to the offender’s household and livelihood.
The manuscript calls the expression Greek and Arabic and explains it in the register of a curse. That explanation belongs to the source. It should be distinguished from the invocation of the Lord represented by the expression at 1 Corinthians 16:22, where the surrounding verse also contains a condemnation. The proximity of these elements helps explain the manuscript’s use without making its linguistic gloss reliable.217
Use in the book
At scan 15 the repeated formula moves from city and countryside to children, livestock, barns, and houses. Secrecy is described as a religious obligation whose breach brings comprehensive disorder. The catalogue resembles the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28. Its force is to make publication of the secret an act of sacrilegious disobedience, rather than a merely imprudent disclosure. The appeal to the silence of Pythagoras and Hippocrates places this injunction within the book’s own composite genealogy of sacred and learned restraint.218
At scan 241 the writer returns to the prohibition after describing the separation of pure from impure by a celestial fire. The secret is called a doorway into physics, astrology, medicine, and theology. Because open publication was forbidden under anathemas and terrible curses, the sages used types, characters, figures, and enigmas. The opening threat thus supplies a later explanation for the form of the whole work: its obscurity is presented as the consequence of an obligation to veil knowledge while allowing the wise to recognize it. This does not prove the antiquity or historical existence of the transmission claimed by the writer.
Places to read
- Manuscript 1r · Scan 15Repeated Maranatha formula and curses against profanation of the art.
- Manuscript 104r · Scan 241Anathemas explain the sages’ use of figures, characters, and enigmas.
Translation
The edition keeps Maranatha and renders the attached explanation in full. It does not substitute a corrected invocation inside the translated sentence. A note distinguishes the manuscript’s interpretation from the biblical usage. Anathema remains anathema where the solemn formula matters; curse translates the broader word malédiction. This preserves the text’s rhetorical escalation without presenting its explanation as independent philological evidence.
anathèmes
Attested: H001-S015; H001-S241. Plural condemnations attached to disclosure of the secret.
Maranatha
Attested: H001-S015. Repeated formula, glossed by the manuscript as a curse; its linguistic explanation is preserved with qualification.
Source note
1 Corinthians 16:22. The expression is conventionally understood as an invocation of the Lord, with the alternative division yielding “Our Lord has come”; the manuscript’s gloss as Greek and Arabic is not adopted as a linguistic fact.
Compare Deuteronomy 28:16–22 for city and countryside, offspring, produce, livestock, and diseases. The manuscript adapts the biblical curse pattern to secrecy about the art.