“There is a net beyond the net”
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1. The Patlican Zettel
Among the many autograph and scribal manuscripts attributed to the German occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), perhaps the most noteworthy is a scrap of non-follated laid-rag paper, written in iron-gall ink and found in the collections of the Patlican Library at Oxford,1 bearing the words:
“[E]st rete infra rete” may be translated, according to context, as “There is a net beneath a net”, “The net is below the net”, or perhaps, our preferred rendering, “There is a net beyond the net”. We believe in fact that, interpreted in this way, the phrase in question represents the earliest documented allusion to The Hinternet in its long history.
Our discovery compels a significant revision of an earlier historical reconstruction, which dated the origins of this enterprise to no earlier than 1915. Let us therefore, in what follows, analyze the historical evidence for this significant chronological revision, after which we will be positioned to offer at least a provisional interpretation of Agrippa’s intended meaning in this peculiar phrase.
