I stumbled on a reference to Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), a work of art created by science fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. It is not a book you can buy. You might say it is not even a book. The title made me think immediately of two other books.
My first thought was Agrippa, the man. I found his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia libri III) when I was seduced in college by the occult and a woman who was deeply into it. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s books are a study of occult philosophy. It was a significant contribution to the Renaissance philosophical discussion concerning the powers of ritual magic and its relationship with religion.
I used some things from his books for a paper I wrote in a religion course. The three books deal with Elemental, Celestial and Intellectual magic. The books discuss things such as the four elements, astrology, kabbalah, numbers, angels, God’s names, the virtues and relationships with each other as well as methods of utilizing these relationships and laws in medicine, scrying (foretelling the future using a crystal ball), alchemy, and ceremonies. The occult didn’t stay with me )either did the woman) but I learned a lot of things through those studies.
The other book I thought of comes from the fact that this newer book is a clear allusion to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from around 1550 BC to around 50 BC. It is a book I tried to read many years ago and finally did read much more recently. The book appears in several posts on this site.
The original Egyptian name for the text is translated as Book of Coming Forth by Day, or Emerging Forth into the Light. It is translated as “book” which is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts. That really connects with the Agrippa I recently discovered. This Egyptian book is comprised of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person’s journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife. It was written by many priests over a period of about 1,000 years.
The modern Agrippa (Book of the Dead) consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by William Gibson, embedded in an artist’s wrapping. It was designed to decay from its very first use. It was an unusual idea that might have played into our fears about malfunctioning technology ahead of the dawning Y2K millennium madness.
Gibson’s text focused on the ethereal nature of memories retained over time. The title refers to a family Kodak photo album from which the text’s memories are taken. The book took on some notoriety from the fact that the poem Gibson wrote is stored on a 3.5″ floppy disk and it was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use. The writing is a 302-line poem that Gibson wrote after looking at an old family photo album filled with images of people who were dead. The poem disk would lock after play, meaning the user could experience the work only once. Dennis Ashbaugh’s artwork was on pages treated with photosensitive chemicals so that the pages would gradually fade from their first exposure to light. His images would distort if touched and naturally disintegrate as any paper book but at a much more rapid rate.
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is recognized as an early example of electronic literature. It is also a commentary on our desire for some degree of permanence for our memories and the recognition of their impermanence. It was “printed” or made on demand for $500-$1500.
Gibson said of his poem “It starts around 1919 and moves up to today, or possibly beyond. If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past. You can see it in Westerns, the way the ‘mise-en-scene’ and the collars on cowboys change through time. It’s never really the past; it’s always a version of your own time.”
— Gibson, as quoted in Details, June 1992
Publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in “End Notes,” The New York Times wrote “Some people have said that they think this is a scam or pure hype … [m]aybe fun, maybe interesting, but still a scam. But Gibson thinks of it as becoming a memory, which he believes is more real than anything you can actually see.”
We don’t like things that disintegrate. We like to preserve things.
The dominant theme in Gibson’s poem is the loss of his father. The name Agrippa referred to the photo album in his family home. The album was produced by Kodak, and the particular volume was called Agrippa. Inside the album, there were photo reminders of all those who had gone before him. So, it is a book of the dead.
The poem begins:
I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.
A black book:
ALBUMS CA. AGRIPPA
Order Extra Leaves By Letter and Name
A Kodak album of time-burned
black construction paper
The string he tied
Has been unravelled by years
and the dry weather of trunks
Like a lady’s shoestring from the First World War
Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen
Until they resemble cigarette-ash
Of course, memories fade, erode, crumble, and disintegrate almost immediately after the event. How often do you forget a dream – even a vivid one – minutes after you wake up?
The image at the top of this post of the book (Is it a book?) is from the copy at the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London which was shown in an exhibition entitled “The Book and Beyond” in 1995. (Fair use, according to Wikimedia)
In the years since Agrippa was produced, people have used various technologies and techniques to reproduce the poem and the art in other forms. You can find some of that using the links below. But that is not the experience of the original project.
- Agrippa (a book of the dead) the poem archived from WilliamGibsonBooks.com
- The Agrippa Files – an online homage to, and archive of, the book’s many forms by the University of California, Santa Barbara English department
- Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) at The Digital Antiquarian
- Gallery of Agrippa images from the William Gibson Aleph
Weekends in Paradelle 
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