A quick apology to Cipher Mysteries email subscribers: some illegal text characters (now fixed) that accidentally sneaked into a recent post caused Feedburner (the Google service I use to email posts to you) to go all huffy for a few days. Hence I’m very sorry to say that you’ve missed out on three recent updates to the site.
They were (in chronological order):
(1) Harvard Professor nearly wades into Voynich swamp… – discusses an upcoming lecture at Cambridge University on various Slavic mystery documents and John Stojko’s Voynich theory.
(2) Voynich fruitiness back in season… – discusses two recent fruity Voynich theories that popped up on the Internet, one linking the VMs with Jewish pharmaceutical conspiracies, the other with the coelacanth (yes, really!).
(3) Decent 2010 paper on the Zodiac Killer Ciphers – discusses a paper by two Norwegian academics searching for homophone cycles in the uncracked Z340 Zodiac Killer cipher.
Feel free to click through and have a look at them, they were all good posts, well worth a read. Enjoy! 🙂
Has Armenian been ruled in or out? That is a language, despite claims to being homogeneous and constant, is anything but with so many variants that a huge tome exists (Stone) of its many changes in the written language over roughly 1000 yrs. Ligatures and calliography abound in Armenian. Variants are found in the Sinai and Odessa. Anyway, I think it is: no alchemical treatise at all, but rather deals with the distillation of essential oils from various roots. The little cylinders are small furnaces to collect the oils. The plants are disguised but not the roots. Other internal clues point to Armenia. What passes for a zodiac is really an early calendar and the tipped tubs represent extra days of the Julian calendar that were corrected by the Gregorian calendar. There are essentially 9 1/2 putting this slightly ahead of the Gregorian change at 1585 where 10 days were subtracted in October. Pomegranates, a long-eared hedgehog, the astrological symbol, two fused circles, held by two of the nymphs represents the orbits of earth and moon and in some early Armenian ms, has the sun in the center of the larger circle. That could possibly be earlier or coincident with Copernicus? Reading around on Armenia one finds a literature that immodestly claims every good thing that was ever discovered. I think though the Voynich ms is essentially a practical manual on getting useful oils from plant roots and the start of a uniform calendar system where each month has 30 days and the missing pages probably indicated how to handle the excess 5 1/4 days. Now the question arises: If this thing is in some Armenian code, why did not Voynich the Russkie figure that out. He would have been exposed to Armenian for sure. I think the fancy stuff looking like plumbing is being demoed by the nymphs and is really ways of mixing in various salts and likely pomegranate juice into baths. More on all of this anon, unless someone has already raised these points and in that case, I will plug along with trying to make some sense out of the code (not cypher). Armenians under the Ottomans were masters at codes and Stone comments on this. Maybe he could crack this? Cheers, Tom
Thank heavens for Nick’s site; Tom I wasn’t pinching your idea about distillation of essential oils. Just happens the same idea drifted by, about the same time too I think. Will check my research ‘notebook blog’ and acknowledge. (Pomegranate baths is a new one, must say.)
On those apothecary jars. I have dropped the idea of some kind of alembic, furnace or distilling device but on the first 18 jars, it will be noticed they have small openings as for pouring out an oil; the others would allow whole herbs to be fished out. I think the colors are sort of alchemical: red=fire; green=earth and blue=water. No use for air here. Where two colors appear, herbs representing earth and fire for example are contained within. fire goes with earth and earth with water and there are even some instances of fire and water? Maybe this color coding idea needs moire work? There is a link with bathing and one apothecary jar from 88v2 or 88v3 as one of the nymphs in the left margin is holding this and the contents are indicated as dots. The Culpeper herbal (17th C)is really much more into alchemy than the VM is and makes note of what sign(s) of the zodiac controls each herb. Maybe that awaits us. Hope not. Cheers to all. Tom
Hi all, We have to be careful in referring to our familiar western numbers as “arabic”. They are not but are rather Indian in origin. Some arabic numbers do occur in the VM, for example the inverted V which is 8 in arabic. Only the western “9” is similar to the arabic nine. Cheers, Tom
ps. The Armenians used their alphabet as a numbering system. No zero. First 9 letters were 1-9; next nine were 10-90; next nine were 100-900 etc.