If Only I Had a Babel Fish Who Could Read to Me

I wrote recently on another site about The Embassy of the Free Mind which is collection of pre-1900 books on alchemy, astrology, magic, and other occult subjects.

These books have been, and still are being, digitized under a digital education project called “Hermetically Open.”

A donation from author Dan Brown - who certainly has an interest in these areas and has used them to great advantage in his own novels - has enabled much of this work to be done.

Amsterdam’s Ritman Library has a sizable collection of pre-1900 books on occult subjects. Currently, the first 1,617 books from the Ritman project have come available in their online reading room.

If you are interested in having full access to hundreds of rare occult texts, you might want to check it out.

One caveat: these books are written in several different European languages, especially Latin, the scholarly language of Europe throughout the Medieval and Early Modern periods.
Other books appear in German, Dutch, and French.

This makes me want a Babel fish. The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like creature that feeds on human brain wave energy. After absorbing all unconscious frequencies, it can then "excrete" telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain.

That means the babel fish when stuck in your ear allows you to instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

The only problem is that it was made up by writer Douglas Adams for his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book series.

It would be amazing if we had this universal translator that neatly crosses the language divide between any species.

Adams says that the Babel fish could not possibly have developed naturally, and therefore it both proves and disproves the existence of God.

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man.

Is there the secret, the answer, to what we have been seeking in those texts? Maybe this is more than just the stuff of novels and movies.