Thanks to a nice post on Marco Ponzi’s website, a new block paradigm candidate has presented itself: the short “Liber de Angelis”, the first eleven paragraphs of Cambridge University Library MS Dd.xi.45.
As Marco notes, this was transcribed and translated by Juris G. Lidaka in a chapter in Claire Fanger’s (1998) “Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Late Medieval Ritual Magic“. (The full treatise, which is undoubtedly a collection of smaller treatises, is called “Liber de Angelis, Annulis, Karecteribus et Ymaginibus Planetarum”.)
“The Experiment”
Incidentally, this collection has the distinction of having been mentioned by the writer M.R.James in his story “The Experiment: A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story“, first published in the Morning Post, December 31, 1931 (as discussed here). Republished in “A Pleasing Terror”, p.402 refers to “Bishop Moore’s book of recipes”
James’ story concludes:
Bishop Moore’s book of recipes is now in the University Library at Cambridge, marked Dd 11, 45, and on the leaf numbered 144 this is written:
An experiment most ofte proved true, to find out tresure hidden in the ground, theft, manslaughter, or anie other thynge. Go to the grave of a ded man, and three tymes call hym by his nam at the hed of the grave, and say. Thou, N., N., N., I coniure the, I require the, and I charge the, by thi Christendome that thou takest leave of the Lord Raffael and Nares and then askest leave this night to come and tell me trewlie of the tresure that lyith hid in such a place. Then take of the earth of the grave at the dead bodyes hed and knitt it in a lynnen clothe and put itt under thi right eare and sleape theruppon: and wheresoever thou lyest or slepest, that night he will corn and tell thee trewlie in waking or sleping.
However, given that we are not presently concerned with asking the dead for advice about treasure hunting, I leave this merely as an aside / exercise for the reader. 😉
What we are actually concerned with is whether the eleven paragraphs of the Liber de Angelis might somehow be the plaintext of a section of the Voynich Manuscript: so, without any further ado, here they are (as transcribed by Lidaka)…
Liber de Angelis
[1] Signum admirabile experimentorum dixit Messayaac & incipit cum adiuncto Altissimi & est mirabile signum & ualde admirandum in quo sunt secreta Altissimi. Per illud autem ludei operabantur, Caldei, Egipcij, & prudentes Babilonici. Cum igitur operare uolueris, fiat annulus Solis, ex auro fiat, in quo scribantur carecter & nomen angeli solis. & hoc annulus habeatur in omni sacrificio super minore digito sinister manus. Cartam itaque cum mente curiose & studiose custodire in loco mundissimo, & inuolue in rubeo serico.
[2] & hec sunt opera annulus Solis. Cum itaque secundum annulum Solis die dominice ieiunes usque ad noctem, nocte autem facies sacrificium de quada aue non domestica prope litus aque decurrentis, & cum eiusdem auis sanguine scribe carecter & nomen angeli Solis in carta uirginea, & hanc tecum porta. Et cum uolueris transire de vna terra in alteram, depinge in terra carecter Solis & nomen angeli eius, & statim veniet equus niger qui portabit te vbicumque uolueris. Tene tamen cartam in manu dextera & annulum in manu sinistra.
[3] Sicus prius, habeas carecter & nomen angeli eius & scribantur in annulo, & ieiunes in die Lune quo fit annulus Lune, sicud fecisti in annulo Solis, in quo si operare uolueris continuo, sacrificabis anguillam flumalem, cuius sanguine scribe carecter Lune & nomen angeli eius in pelle tue, & inuolue in pelle anguille & reserua vt cum volueris ut appareat flumen uel arbor cum fructu, scribe in terra nomen angeli & nomen fructus, & uoca angelum carta aperta, & apparebit, Si uis ut non appareat, claude cartam.
[4] De annulo Martis. Fiat sacrificium de aue rapaci intra domum ad ignem, et scribe cum eiusdem sanguine in pelle eiusdem nomen angeli & carecteris. Et cum uolueris ut appareant milites armati uel castella uel lubricus ludus, uel ut vincas in prelio, fac caracterem & nomen angeli in terra & appari cartam & apparebit & faciet que preceperis, & cum clauditur carta recedet & cessabit.
[5] Totum fac ut de alijs, sacrificium fiat de uulpe uel de cato in loco deserto, scribe careterem et nomen angeli in fronte – vinces in omni placito. Tene cartam in manu.
[6] Fac sacrificium de gallo, karetter & nomen angeli scribe in pelle, intelligi, in quo inuoluas denarium, & qociens ipsum donaueris reuertetur.
[7] Fac sacrificium de columba alba viuente, carecterem & nomen angeli eius scribe in pelle leporis, quod si mulieri ostenderis sequentur te uelociter.
[8] Totum ut supra. [Damage to leaf has left a small section unreadable here.] Sacrificium de capra inter vepres, carecterem & nomen angeli scribe in percameno veteri. Cum uolueris inter duos odium mittere, eorum nomina in percameno, codem carecterem & nomen angeli in pelle capre, ut predicatur. Cum uolueris aliquem intoxicare, in eius potu intinge annulum Saturni: cum idem potauerit intoxicabitur.
[9] Nunc de generalibus mandatis restat docere. Annulus Solis in omni sacrificio habeatur, & annulus Febe, in quo nomen angeli ipsius; Febe tam in memoria habeatur quam in opera. & fiat sacrificium in circulo infundali, prius scriptus carecter, & in medio magister dicat: ‘Oya, sacrificium tue laudis suscipe’, proiciens carnes extra circulum. In qualibet autem operacione, nomen angeli inuocetur & annulus in digito habeatur. Carte uero mundissime reseruentur, nec in noctis tenebris aperiantur nisi operis necessario ingrauerit.
[10] Nunc de annulis. Annulus Solis ad equum & fiet de auro. Annulus Lune ex argento ad fluuium. Annulus Martis ex ere ad uictoriam in bello. Annulus Mercurij ex cupro ad scienciam. Annulus Iouis ex electro ad denarium. Annulus Veneris ex plumbo ad amorem. Annulus Saturni ex ferre ad odium. Annulus Capitis Draconis ex calibe ad toxicandum.
[11] Hox signum mirabile est experimentum magistri Messayaac de secretis spirituum planetis, secundum mencionem, & sumitur sic. Omitto nomina angelorum cum carecteribus suis (que incipiunt sic: Storax, Abamecta, Paymon, cum ceteris) propter certam causam hic scribenda.
It’s Not by Osbern Bokenham
Though it was once thought to have been written down by Augustinian poet-monk Osbern Bokenham, Lidaka dismisses this quickly. But as a nice point of history, Osbern Bokenham did once conceal his identity in the chapter initial letters (much as in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) as discussed here:
On 1st May 1456 he wrote Dialogue betwixt a secular asking and a Frere (friar) answering at the grave of Dame Joan of Acre. This is a very important source for the history of Clare Priory. This manuscript, which still exists, is written in both Latin and English, and richly decorated on parchment. Another of his works was called Mappula Anglicae, which covered the rhymed lives of English saints such as Cedde, Felix and Oswald.
It contained seventeen chapters, and was anonymous, except that Bokenham stated that, if taken in sequence, the first letter in each chapter spelt out the name of the author. It reads OSBERNUS BOKEN_HAM. Chapter 15 is missing.
[Yes, it does indeed look from that as though it was actually Chapter 14 that was missing, but let’s not quibble.]
It’s Actually by William Bokenham
Though the surname of the Liber de Angelis writer was clearly Bokenham, Lidaka points out that the author’s first name was William, and that he was copying various small treatises, not composing them. Moreover, given that two works dealing with urine (that most multispectral of medieval medical staples) by a William Bokenham are in Wellcome MS 408, and that in them he claimed to be “a doctor with a degree from Bologna” as well as “a monk at Norwich Holy Trinity (or St Giles)”, we would seem to have our copyist locked down quite solidly.
From internal evidence (the ‘Oya’ in paragraph #9), Lidaka suggests that the Liber de Angelis version being copied may well have been derived from an earlier French language version: and separately that the ultimate source of at least some of the tracts could perhaps be Arabic. In which case, it might be a good idea to get acquainted with David Pingree’s “The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe” (Ladaka’s note #14). [Jim Reeds is also mentioned in note #20, crypto-history fans.]
Personally, I’m also a little suspicious of the “karetter” in paragraph #6 as being a possible linguistic tell.
And Now We’ve Done All That…
…I’ll compare this with the Voynich Manuscript’s planets in a follow-on post, 1300 words is quite enough for the moment. 🙂
Nick: I was thinking about your block-paradigm model. It certainly seems to be a very sensible approach. On one level I wonder why such a thing has not been found so far. I suppose it must be a function of the variability in the documents of the kinds seen in the Voynich at the time. Also I have wondered to what extent the author’s drawings and writings are his/her original creations though, certainly, influenced by other peoples’ writings and drawings. Clearly the author was a highly creative and intelligent person, so it seems hard to believe that he/her copied verbatim large swathes of the Voynich from other documents. Also what point is there in recording secrets in cipher if they were obtainable relatively easily elsewhere, which they probably would be if we stand a chance of finding one. Then again does one really expect everything in the Voynich to be unique? It seems very likely that something in it was copied. I should mention the 9 rosette foldout which I very much doubt was reproduced from some template and that I believe to be largely a unique creation.
So my conclusion is that there probably is some kind of block paradigm in the Voynich somewhere. However I doubt the author was just a copyist assembling and reproducing other people’s work. So, yes, it seems to me that the search for a block-paradigm is a very worthwhile exercise though I can’t say I have huge confidence that a matching block will be found, but it may.
I wonder what scope there is for a block-construction approach. Given that many of the drawings were almost certainly influenced by other drawings, what scope is there for constructing or deriving a block-paradigm from the other sources that must have influenced it, even if it is not a perfect match to any one source. Can we work out what the author was thinking in constructing the diagram based on the rationale of other comtemporary, but related diagrams.(In this the astronomical drawings come to mind.) What I have said is doubtless obvious.
Mark,The idea of any “author …[as]… a highly creative and intelligent person” suggests a degree and type of image for the ‘creative artist’ which scarcely applies in medieval western Europe before the end of the fifteenth century. HIghly skilled artists were still regarded as technicians from the employed classes, and that is why Michelangelo had to paint a ceiling when told to paint a ceiling. His protesting that he preferred to sculpt was neither here nor there. The cult of the ‘author’ like the cult of the ‘artist’ as persons of qualitatively superior sensibility and creativity is really an invention of the Romantic era.
During the early decades of the fifteenth century, and also during the mid-twelfth to early fourteenth when the material now in the ms appears – to me – to have received its final recension, most of what the we call the arts were considered the techne to the more abstract ‘scientia’; so you had the art of medicine but the ‘divine science’ of Theology. Similarly, there were constraints on leisure time: few non-professionals had sufficient leisure between sun-up and sun-down to make a book with so many drawings unless they did so on another sort of instruction (e.g. the school room) or to relieve the otium of a journey. The cost of vellum is another constraint. To be considered worthwhile, a text had to be regarded as important in some way and that normally meant it had an eminent and widely known scholar as author. Copying earlier texts was the norm; books weren’t easily come by.. the only copy of Cicero’s letters within a ten-day journey might be in the private collection of a nobleman to whom one had to manage a letter of recommendation etc. in order to access the original. Most material in our extant mss was copied, and as late as the second world war it was still the custom to offer apologies for presuming to produce a book of one’s own ideas. Even works we today consider ‘original treatises’ constantly quote older works to prove their derivation from such matter. (Dante’s Cantos were made, I think, to amuse friends playing a particular type of parlour game … but this is long enough.)
I would like to inform you that Voynich Manuscript MS408 is already decoded by me. Each page of the Manuscript, from the first to the last, was read. The Manuscript was written in ancient forgotten Senzar language, like mix of Vedic Sanskrit and Devanagari, which was before them – Proto-language. The Manuscript was written in 1417, in Vilnius, by Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Rus-Ukraine, Lithuania, Zhemaytia, Mlodovlakhia (Moldova), Gregory (Gabriel) Tsamblakh (Samvlah), and his monks specially for the Queen of Bavaria and Bohemia Sophia, who was the second wife of King Wenceslav IV. This Manuscript was written because Queen Sophia considered herself a goddess Ra, after burned down Jan Hus, and Jeronim of Prague. If you would like to obtain more information, I will send it to you. Some information about decoding you can find here:
https://voynic-manuscript-decoded.blogspot.com
https://vimeo.com/258420600
https://youtu.be/T3DJYR6Slqo
With best regards,
Viktor V. Mykhaylov
Notes from dear old wikis:
1. In her book Secret Doctrine, (Madam) Helena Blavatsky – founder of the Theosophical Society – introduced the term Senzar to describe “a tongue absent from the nomenclature of languages and dialects with which philology is acquainted.”
and
2. As noted by John Algeo in his book, Blavatsky’s other statements about Senzar (including supposed connection to Sanskrit) “create a number of puzzles, which make it difficult to take the etymological language family references literally.”
How Madam Blatavsky hit on ‘Senzar’ to name a language apparently known to no-one else in the world, I cannot say. But we shouldn’t scoff. Many Voynich theories, and some of almost equal complexity, are based on little more than divine inspiration.
Viktor, posting a translation of the first page by itself is not very helpful since there are very few references on that page. If you were to translate a big-plant page, a pool page, and perhaps a couple of paragraphs from the small-plants section of the manuscript in the same fashion, it would give people a better basis for comparison to evaluate your claims.
Notes from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_Blavatsky#/media/File:Tashilhunpo_Monastery,_Shigatse.JPG
the place that Helena Blavatsky claimed held the Senzar texts she translated.
The Book Dzian, is either unknown to philologists, or about it, with that name, they have not heard anything. Helena Blavatsky did not invent Senzar, she only passed the Knowledge of ancestors that existed for a long time before her. Confucius, a very long-standing law-maker in historical chronology although a very modern sage in World history, usually moved Knowledge from ancestors, but was not like a creator. As Confucius said: “I only convey. I can not create new things. I believe in the ancients, and therefore I love them. (“Life and teachings of Confucius”). Helena Blavatsky also wrote the same way: “The one who writes these lines also loves them, and therefore believes in these ancient, their wisdom. She now conveys what she has received, and she has learned. For all who can perceive.”
Even, by 1838, Vedas was rejected and mocked, because it were considered at that time “modern counterfeiting”.
The Secret Doctrine, which was rewritten by Helena Blavatsky, is in fact one of the main sections of the Conjur – the main part of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon.
The popularized version of this Secret Doctrine is contained in 35 books and 14 commentary books. All these books can be found in the library of any Tibetan monastery. The place that Helena Blavatsky claimed held the Senzar texts she translated – was Tashilhunpo Monastery, Shigatse.
About etymological language family and opinion of John Algeo – this is a subjective evaluation, but not objective reality, what can not be liked by someone, or someone is not fully able to understand this objective reality that exists beyond all subjective assessments.
Looking at the location of the letters in the Sacred Manuscripts of the Vedas, we can notice that they represent musical notes, Hindi music. In Sanskrit and Holy Books, the letters are constantly arranged so that they become musical notes. For the entire alphabet of Sanskrit and Vedas, from the first to the last word, is a musical record written in writing. And they are inseparable. As Homer made distinctions between the “language of the Gods” and “the language of people”, the Hindus also did. Homer believed that Devanagari, the letters of the Sanskrit, is “the language of the Gods”, and Sanskrit is a divine language. he believed that “…Sanskrit is the perfect form of the most perfect language in the World…”, we see it in Earthly linguistic evolution. It means that Senzar with the Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European language family.
This is Senzar language:
Belfast – Beal Feirste – “Biele Verste” – “Biele Vustie” – “Bile Ustia” – “White Mouth”(Estuary) – White Mouth;
Ulster – Ulaidh – Cuige Uladh – Uladztir – “Wul tse tur” – “Ox this Bull” – “Wula ye duch” – “Wola ye duch” – “Ox is spirit” – this is spirit of Ox;
Nameton – “namet” – “tent” – “kurin”-“hut”-“hovel”-“light construction of branches and straw”-“nametaty gilla i solomu”-“throw branches and straw” (Ogham Irish – nemed – a temple);
Druids – Welsh: derwydd; Gaelic: draoidh; Old Irish: drui; Senzar: drew wid, drow wid, derew wid, derew widun – expert in trees.
Sipan – “this Master”, “this Lord”;
Deutschland – Diutisciu(Old High German); “Dew Och Lan”(Senzar): God’s Eye Land.
Nick, I think you’ve made at least one error in transcribing the text: “qociens” should be “quociens” = “as often as”. It’s also worth noting that A) medieval spelling is not uniform (e.g., the same word was also spelled “quotiens”) and B) that this sort of text often varies somewhat from copy to copy in a way that might make one manuscript’s version less useful as the plaintext for another’s. If you look at the notes accompanying edited texts you start to realize copying was rarely perfectly faithful.
Also, is there a reason you focus so much on individual manuscripts and copyists? It seems that texts & textual and manuscript traditions are the things that would be of more use.
Lastly, well-said, DNO, re copying v. authorship in the relevant period. It is worth pointing out that relationship between images and text in a medieval mss is complicated; IIRC illustrators sometimes improvised their own accompaniement to a copied text or gave their own take on a visual tradition. See, e.g., Borland’s “Freeze-Frame” paper on historiated initials in 12-13th-c. luxury copies of a health treatise (quite a different context, but it gives a sense of how images could be paired with a text in the Middle Ages).
I’ve only worked with the Middle Aged as an undergrad, but reading this blog I think more general knowledge about the period and its manuscripts would help y’all a lot in trying to understand the VM