Voynich – the McCrone report now online!

by ⋅ 188 Comments

Wowza – the long-awaited chemical analysis of the Voynich Manuscript’s inks by the McCrone Institute (you know, the one commissioned for Andreas Sulzer’s 2009 ORF documentary on the VMs) has just appeared sans fanfare on the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Voynich page.

Feel free to read the report as a PDF, though note that it wouldn’t render in Internet Explorer for me, so I downloaded it directly (“Save Target As…”) and opened it in Adobe Reader. Its key conclusions are:-

* A single ink [typical iron gall] was “in all probability” used for both the main body of the text and for the drawings.
* A second ink [high iron] was used for the folio numbers.
* A third ink [high carbon, very low iron] was used for the quire numbers .
* A fourth ink [high carbon, very low iron] was used for the Latin alphabet on f1r.
* The blue paint was ground azurite “with minor amounts of cuprite, a copper oxide”.
* “The green paint is a mixture of copper-stained amorphous organic material optically consistent with copper resinate, and copper-chloride compounds consistent with atacamite or similar compounds”, but without any resins obviously present.
* Gum (presumably gum arabic) was used to bind the green paint and all the inks (apart from the Latin alphabet ‘a’ on f1r, which seems to have been bound with a protein), though “the spectra include several sharp peaks […] that are not expected for a gum as per the spectra in our library”, which “suggests the possibility of other constituents, which remain unidentified as of this date”. Note that the blue and red-brown paints were not tested for gum.

It’s going to take a while to digest this properly, basically because the Beinecke has only released the text part of the report, and none of the figures, photographs or reference spectra mentioned in the text. Other scans referred to in the text (such as UV scans of f1r, and presumably of f17r as this appeared in publicity montages for the documentary) are similarly absent: it would be particularly nice to see these as well, wouldn’t you say?

To my mind, the various ink compositions would seem to suggest that there were three distinct codicological phases: a first text/drawing phase (normal iron gall), a second quire number and f1r Latin alphabet phase (where the inks are different, but made to broadly the same house style), and a third folio numbers phase. All of which should be no great surprise to most Voynich researchers, but all the same I personally find it interesting that the quire numbers seem to have been added in the same general phase as f1r’s attempted cipher alphabet. It therefore seems likely that the quire numberer did not know how to decipher the VMs, a conclusion I reached several years ago via quite independent codicological means.

Finally, it is somewhat disappointing that the single most-debated piece of information is conspicuously absent: I refer, of course, to the suggestion that the ink was added not hugely long after the vellum was originally made. Which unfortunately means that many of the nuttier theories are still in play. Oh well: apart from that, it’s a nice piece of work, highly recommended!

10 rules for making a (proper) Voynich documentary…

by ⋅ 56 Comments

With 2012 – the centenary of Wilfrid Voynich’s 1912 purchase of his subsequently-eponymous manuscript – inching ever closer, we will doubtless soon see a broad international wave of quick-turnaround documentary makers sniffing around its margins, snuffling for pungent historical truffles in the florilegial undergrowth of the Interweb.

If, dear reader, that thumbnail profile just happens to describe you, then here’s what you need: a brief guide on how to make a worthwhile Voynich Manuscript documentary that should continue to earn you money for years, regardless of whether its secrets somehow (and, frankly, against the run of play) get cracked in the meantime. Follow these basic rules, and I think you should do OK…

  1. The first rule of Voynich Fight Club is: evidence kicks theories. Don’t get tempted by fancy/fanciful hypotheses, just stick to the evidence – simply because it’s brilliant, confusing, paradoxical, splendidly detailed and evocative evidence. Sorry to point it out, but if you think Voynich theories are more fun than Voynich evidence, you’re probably the wrong person to be making the documentary. It’s a million-piece jigsaw, and everyone loves intricate puzzles!
  2. Don’t allow your own theories about the Voynich to guide you in any way whatsoever: they’re almost certainly wrong, and will just get in everyone’s way throughout production. And don’t trust Wikipedia to inform you (because it won’t)!
  3. The Voynich’s post-1600 history is worth no more than three minutes of anyone’s viewing experience. Don’t bother with overdressed period reconstructions of Rudolf II’s court, Sinapius, John Dee, Edward Kelley – by their time, the VMs had probably already had ten or more owners, none of whom showed any sign of their being able to read a word.
  4. Keep in mind at all times that there is no external pre-1600 evidence linking the VMs with anything, anyone or anywhere – yet radiocarbon dating indicates that the manuscript is 150+ years older. The only evidence we have to help us bridge that gap is hidden inside the manuscript itself – its pages, its inks, its design, its accidents, its execution, its forensic inner life.
  5. Hence, as early as possible, get high-calibre international experts on board to focus on the only two issues that really matter:-
    * codicology (How was the VMs constructed? What was its original state? What happened to it since?); and….
    * palaeography (What language are the marginalia written in? What do they say? What do the Voynichese letter shapes tell us? What structural similarities does Voynichese share with 15th century abbreviating Northern Italian scribal shorthands?)
  6. Once you have top-end experts on board, make friends with the Beinecke as quickly as you can. Go there; engage with the curators. Dismiss all theories (specifically don’t talk about alchemy or heresy, either would make you look speculative and foolish), while showing an appreciation of the limitations of the current evidence, and an active desire to improve academic knowledge.
  7. The viewer’s guide – the historical narrator – should be someone who can dive deep into a roiling mass of multi-faceted, heterogenous evidence and yet emerge the other side smelling of roses, all the while managing to make the (apparently contradictory) subject matter clear and accessible. An intellectual historian, in other words.
  8. Your challenge, therefore, is to produce a documentary that merges cunning forensic vision with big-brained intellectual history – essentially, “CSI: Voynich” meets Anthony Grafton. Can you do this? Really?

OK, it’s no big secret that the above basically describes the Voynich Manuscript documentary I’d really like to make. But all the same, I’d be utterly delighted if anyone else stepped up to the line (and in any language). But… will anyone ever do this? I’m not so sure… 🙁

PS:  I lied about there being ten rules – you’ll have to make up the last two yourself. 😉

Voynich news from Yale…

by ⋅ 4 Comments

Amid the me-too Voynich blog repost deluge of recent days comes – at long last – some genuinely new information courtesy of the Yale Daily News. From talking with the Beinecke’s Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts Kathryn James, we now learn that:-

  • Andreas Sulzer (the film maker) was originally utterly convinced that the VMs was 17th century, and so had to completely rewrite the documentary script when the 15th century radiocarbon dating came through.
  • Similarly, Kathryn James had to drop her own (16th century Paracelsian) Voynich theory for the same basic reason.
  • Kevin Repp suggests that a DNA test on the vellum might help locate the where the cow (assuming it is neither a goat nor a gnu, etc) came from, while Kathryn James “anticipates [that Andreas] Sulzer will offer to finance [this] testing sooner or later”.

Actually, until such time as a Quattrocento animal DNA database gets constructed (and I’m personally not holding my breath for that), I suspect a far better test would simply be analyzing a minute scraping of ink from every folio. The documentary mentioned in passing that ink variations between batches were detectable – so, follow that simple idea through to the end, and you should end up peering back through time to the original bifolio nesting, ordering, and the construction methodology. This is such a simple process to execute, but I’m certain it would yield a fascinating high-level codicological picture, quite independent of (for example) contact transfer evidence or other art history evidence.

Would any Yale History students care to step forward for an interesting afternoon’s project?

“Naked Science” Nat Geo Voynich documentary…

by ⋅ 23 Comments

Last week  (3rd February 2011) saw the US premiere of “The Book That Can’t Be Read”, the long-awaited National Geographic channel airing of the recent ORF documentary on the Voynich Manuscript. Though it prominently features the benign beardiness of everyone’s favourite Voynich expert Rene Zandbergen, for a pleasant change the star of the show is undoubtedly the manuscript itself, with the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s acquiescence to radiocarbon dating of the vellum the shining jewel in the Austrian documentary makers’ crown. If you missed it, it’s showing again shortly (10th February 2011, 4PM): it’s a fairly up-to-the-minute introduction to the VMs, so you should definitely fetch a mid-sized bag of toffee popcorn and settle down on your sofa for this one.

Interestingly, I don’t know if they significantly re-edited the programme for an American audience, but I was pleased – no: delighted, actually – to see some scans of the manuscript the film researchers had taken dotted among the set of low resolution Voynich promo photos on the NatGeo webpage (all © ORF). For example, slide #11 has the infamous erased signature on f1r (the frontmost page of the manuscript), which – with a bit of low-impact Gimp-fu – looks like this:-

Voynich Manuscript f1r, "Jacobj a Tepenece" signature, uv, enhanced

Voynich Manuscript f1r, erased signature

Having long ago slaved to produce not-quite-as-good versions of this from the RGB scans, it’s a pleasure to finally see this in its non-visible ultra-violet glory: to my eyes, it reads “Jacobj à Tepenece / Prag”, but I’ll happily defer to palaeographers working from higher resolution scans.

Slide #12 contains another UV scan, this time of my personal favourite piece of Voynich marginalia – the tiny letters at the top of f17r. Despite its ridiculously low resolution, what should be clear from the image (again, slightly Gimp-enhanced) is that the Voynich letters at the end (“oteeeol aim”, as per The Curse of the Voynich pp.24-25, 30) are an integral part of the writing, just as I claimed when I first saw them in 2006. The point being that if you accept that, then it becomes very likely that this and (by implication) the “michiton” marginalia on the end page were added not by a later owner, but by the encipherer of the VMs himself/herself. All fascinating stuff that, in my opinion, cuts deep to the heart of the VMs’ historical nature, but I’d be a little surprised if the documentary has been edited to cover it.

Voynich Manuscript, f17r marginalia, uv, enhanced

The "meilhor aller" marginalia from f17r of the Voynich Manuscript

Finally, the last photo of immediate interest to Voynich researchers is slide #13, which shows a close-up of the exposed quire bindings (i.e. with the manuscript’s cover partially removed). This kind of view offers a lot of information that you can’t normally see, because the bifolios are so firmly bound together that you can’t get at all close to the sewing holes in the spine of each quire – which is good for conservation, but bad for codicology.

Voynich Manuscript binding, close-up

View of the Voynich Manuscript's binding

Here, the features that particularly intrigue me are the faint writing on the inside cover (bottom left arrow); the non-continuous line of marks across the quire spines (mid-right arrow); and the many redundant sewing stations (needle holes from earlier bindings, indicated by short red underlines). These inexorably point to the manuscript’s complex reordering and rebinding history, i.e. where its quires and bifolios have danced a complicated quadrille over time to end up in their final order. What I don’t really understand is why codicologists don’t have entire conferences devoted to the Voynich Manuscript, because to my eyes it is surely the Everest of codicology – a complex, multi-layered artefact whose secret inner history can only practically be revealed through prolonged, collaborative, non-textual forensic analysis. And yet it’s only me who seems to have published anything substantial on it!

Anyway, set your PVRs to stun record and let me know what you think of the Naked Science documentary. Hopefully the documentary makers will now celebrate the occasion by releasing more information,data and photos on the Voynich Manuscript that they took during their research (hint: high quality versions of the above three images would be a very good start)!

J.K.Rowling apologizes for Voynich Manuscript, just a “viral marketing prank”…

by ⋅ 6 Comments

London, UK, 11 Nov 2010. In a surprising twist worthy of Voldemort himself, A-list children’s author and philanthropist J.K.Rowling has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the popular Internet cipher mystery meme “The Voynich Manuscript”.

She now says it all was a 1990 publicity stunt for an early release of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, which was – much like Norwegian band’s a-ha’s 1985 hit single “Take On Me” – released multiple times before gaining market acceptance from young readers. Rowling’s first version (“Harry Otter and the Voynich Manuscript“) was set in “Hogshead School of Wizardry” and introduced many of the timeless elements of her story that toy conglomerates have since stripmined so mercilessly, but where all the characters were animals – for example, Ron Weasel, Hermione Echidna, and the ancient Albus Iguanodon (though note that Rubeus Hagfish played only a minor role).

In an attempt to promote her book to publishers, Rowling assembled her own ‘Voynich Manuscript’ on cafe tables in Edinburgh on old vellum she’d bought in a jumble sale, and added a threadbare cover story linking it to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II that ought to make any sensible historian shake his or her head in appalled disbelief: the fake manuscript then somehow ended up in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (much to its curators’ embarrassment). But once some early Internet chat group participants got hold of low-quality “CopyFlo” scans of it and decided to try to ‘crack’ its cipher, the rest is cryptographic and cultural history.

“To all the codebreakers who have fruitlessly spent decades on this, I can only apologize for my viral marketing prank”, says Rowling. “Honestly, I tried to flag it was a fake on the first page but perhaps the clue was simply too obvious:-”

As a postscript, Rowling did subsequently manage to get all copies of “Harry Otter and the Voynich Manuscript” pulped: however, copies of her intermediate version (“Harry Snotter and the Handkerchief of Doom”) do still occasionally come up at auction. Jim Reeds was unavailable for comment yesterday.

“The Voynich Tattoo”

by ⋅ 3 Comments

Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she’d had a lucky escape: imagine ending up with that bozo Gap logo as a tattoo – now that would have really sucked.

But since then, her whole A-grade student train had derailed: and once bad boy boyfriend #1 had morphed into worse boyfriend #2, it was surely just a matter of time before her steadily-growing drink, drugs and abusive partner habits all conspired to help her paint herself into a truly dismal corner of society. All that Voynich research graft lay long behind her: why bother about history when you can see no future?

Countless times since she’d tried to fit herself into straight-ass day jobs, but the minute she got asked to work extra, she’d elevate the royal middle digit… and then it was just a matter of days before the order came from on high to clear her desk. And so, like Michael Palin, Jena’s life now danced defiantly from inhospitable pole to pole – though she somehow doubted Palin could shake his aging Pythonic tush half as as well as her. It’s a skill, she liked to console herself, however minor in the big scheme of things.

So, welcome one and all to her latest home from home, the Green Lizard Club in Muskogee, Oklahoma – ‘Green’ because the owners had replaced all the seedy lighting with LED lamps, thus helping its patrons to feel as though they were saving the planet while stuffing high-denom bills into pole-dancers’ lithely minimalist underwear. Sure, it’s a big fat eco-gimmick: but everybody loves eco-gimmicks, right?

All the same, tonight had been shaping up to be a stultifyingly mediocre night to cap a shockingly shabby week. Jena’s only ray of hope left was the bunch of startup guys – no, not the wind turbine crew (who came in once with some terrified-looking VCs but never returned), but the social media gaggle on Table 3. Bright people, no doubt, but… social media in Muskogee? As if Dave McClure is ever going to drop by here, of all places. Well, not unless he’d absolutely insisted on a live demo from some MIT Star Trek teleportation spin-out. How vividly Daveski would swear if he found himself unexpectedly re-materialized on Okmulgee Avenue, eh?

So, when the lanky one with a testosteronal chin (a bit like a pumped-down Matt Damon) called over to her, she twisted her mouth into her second-best smile (“positive, life-affirming, it’s-great-to-make-money-off-you-geeks”) and danced towards the group. As you’d expect, they knew her name already, but of course she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about theirs. Life is easy when you just don’t care.

“Hey Jena”, Matt Jnr shouted over Hooverphonic’s sweet music, “I think there’s a problem with your tattoo.”

Well, she thought, m-a-y-b-e: but that was when she noticed The Handsome But Odd Guy in the group, mouth slightly open, looking straight through her with his puppy-dumb X-ray eyes. “A problem?” she replied, her PanAm Smile still intact.

“Our guy Rain Man wants to know why you have a Latin poison book for a tattoo”, the tall guy continued. “Oh, and just so you know, Nate’s got Asperger’s, which for him means he codes like an angel but doesn’t like to get out of the office much.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s not a poison recipe”, Jena replied turning towards him, a wave of minor cracklets starting to break round the edge of her working smile. “It’s from an astronomical page of…”

“multa michi circa venenorum materiam“, Nate was reading, “dubia occurrent quorum declaratio nixi. Pretty funny tattoo you’ve got there, Miss.”

There was an odd, whooshing sound in her head, as clusters of Jurassic synapses creakily reassembled a fossilized memory from way back when she was still a basically whole person. Yes: it was an incipit she’d seen before, back in her Voynich research life. And if so, then it was probably from Thorndike’s History of Magic & Experimental Science, most likely her favourite Volume IV. So, it would be… the second half of Antonius Guaynerius of Pavia’s twin treatise on plague and poison, composed before 1440. Might Guaynerius have been the Voynich Manuscript’s author? The raw electricity of the possibility surged up and down her, like lightning trying vainly to reach ground. But… even if the idea just happened to be consistent with the radiocarbon dating, nothing that speculative could be true, it was all some spooky coincidence. It had to be, right?

Against her will, Jena was starting to get just a little freaked out. If any of this was even remotely right, the guy Nate must be some kind of idiot savant, unable to tie his shoelaces but able to read the frickin’ Voynich Manuscript. She sneaked a sly glance at his shoes: slip-on Vans. As if I couldn’t guess, she thought. “Does your friend actually know Latin?”, she asked as casually as her quickening pulse would allow.

“Latin?” the lanky guy replied. “He’s always seemed happier talking in Python or C++ than English. But anyway, what is that crazy shit alphabet on your back?”

“Oh, it’s from the Voynich Manuscript, a kind of weird cipher mystery thing”, she said in the best noncommittal voice she could muster. “But I think I’d better show your man the next line down, see if he can read that too.”

She moved down to the startup guys’ table, and turned to face away from them. Down went the already skimpy silver lamé pole dancing underwear an extra two inches to reveal the only line of red writing in the whole of the VMs. Way back in her Voynich research days, she’d often wondered whether this might be the single line that would some day serve to crack its cipher system. So what would Asperger’s Nate make of it?

“It’s a beautiful thing”, the Odd Guy mumbled. “But I can’t make out the first word, may I move closer, Miss?”

“Uhhh… sure”, she said.

Nate moved right up close, and ran his index finger tenderly over the red letters with a kind of Braille-reading intensity. Instantly, her long-submerged memories of holding the Voynich Manuscript at the Beinecke Library surfaced, and exploded in the physicality of his touch. For that moment, her skin was the Voynich’s vellum, her tattoo was the Voynich’s ink, and she felt utterly entangled in time and space with the Voynich’s author (whoever he or she happened to be).

But… then Jena noticed out the corner of her eye that all the other startup guys were taking out their wallets, placing hundred dollar bills into a pile on the table, and shaking their heads.

“Sorry”, said Nate in a completely different (and totally normal) voice as he stood up, “I can’t make it out, Miss.”

“Hey…”, said Jena as each of the guys high-fived Nate, “what’s going on here?”

One of the group’s regulars, a bald-headed guy with comedy glasses – perhaps the in-house web designer?, she wondered – was laughing into his hand. “Sorry, Jena, it was just a joke. Nate bet us a hundred bucks each he’d get inside your panties tonight, and we all thought he had precisely zero chance.”

“You did this for money?” Jena spat at Nate. “You made a fool of my ass to make yourself some freakin’ money?”

“Oh no”, said Nate handing her the cash, “the money’s for you. These guys work for me, I just enjoyed the challenge. When Larry” – he pointed at the bald-headed guy – “showed me a picture of you on his cameraphone, I thought you looked cute, and – you know – one thing led to another.”

“But all that Antonius Guaynerius stuff”, Jena spluttered, “how on earth did you…”

“Ah, all your old postings to the Voynich mailing list are still online”, Nate smiled. “Didn’t take long to find something to bait the line.”

“You bastard”, Jena said sotto voce, “you… smart bastard” – but this time she could feel her eyes twinkling, for the first time in a couple of years. “You… gonna come back soon?”

“I think I will”, said Nate. “I rather like the view from this table.”

All of a sudden, Jena fancied doing some problem-solving herself.

Review of Brad Kelln’s “In Tongues of the Dead”…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

With “write what you know” apparently ringing loudly in his ears, Brad Kelln constructed his fictional protagonist Jake Tunnel to be, just like him, a Nova Scotia-based psychologist (and is Kelln married with young kids too? Almost certainly). But probably unlike Kelln, Tunnel’s best friend at college Benicio Valori constantly globetrots on behalf of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the lookout for claimed miracles, in a very Gabriel-Byrne-in-Stigmata (1999) kind of way.

Hence when an autistic boy on a primary school tour of the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is shown the Voynich Manuscript in a permanent glass display case [this never actually happens, but never mind] and is miraculously able to read it, Benicio is sent by the CDF’s morally-suspect-yet-self-harmingly-devout Cardinal Espinosa to check it out. Once again, all very Alfred-Molina-in-The-Da-Vinci-Code (2006), though of course this is no more than a slightly updated version of the centuries-old ‘wicked Jesuit’ trope for whom the (holy) end always justifies the (unholy) means. Oh, and the autistic kid is pretty much Simon Lynch in Mercury Rising (1998), who goes on a similarly mad road trip with Bruce Willis. La-di-da.

Rapidly, the boy is revealed to be the last of the Nephilim, a race of (what X-Files scriptwriters would term) ‘human-alien genetic hybrids’ fleetingtly mentioned in the Bible and about which Erich von Däniken has spent the majority of his life writing phantasmagorically imaginative historical nonsense. And hence the Voynich Manuscript is revealed to be the Nephilim Bible, a document so earth-shattering it would Rock The Very Foundations Of The Church If Anyone Were To Read It And Reveal Its Secrets etc.

Complicating the plot are Shemhazai and Azazel, the two cursed ‘Grigori’ aliens / angels who landed on Earth seventy generations ago and whose intergalactic miscegenatory misdeeds quite literally spawned all this trouble. Despite having awesomely glowing megatronic powers, the pair mooches around the book, languidly chasing after Benicio and the boy in an almost Rastafari laid-back stylee. And complicating the matter yet further are the CDF’s dysfunctional twin thugs Maury and Jeremy, who are also tasked with chasing after the protagonists.

Kelln’s book covers a lot of ground and tells its story briskly, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated by it in two main ways. Firstly, even though it’s written by a hard-working forensic psychologist, none of the characters presents any noticeable character depth or development: sure, they move around the board rapidly enough, but they basically remain Ship, Boot, Dog, Iron, Hat, and Car for the duration of the game. Secondly, there are so many parallels between “In Tongues of the Dead” and Kevin Smith’s thoroughly enjoyable (1999) film Dogma that it’s hard not to see Kelln’s book as a dourly humourless anagram of the latter. For example, Shemhazai and Azazel are basically Bartleby (also a Grigori) and Loki crossed with Jay and Silent Bob; Maury and Jeremy are basically the Stygian Triplets; Metatron and Bethany Sloane are basically Harold Grower and Jake Tunnel; and so on.

As you can probably tell, I’m getting a huge screenplays-circa-1999 buzz off Kelln’s book, and not in a particularly good way: ultimately, it seems like he has fallen into the old trap of writing not about what you know, but about what you have seen at the movies. Brad writes perfectly well – but given that he’s a psychologist, where did all the psychology end up? 🙁

The Voynich Translation – Chapter 3

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 3 – “Unjust Desserts”

“I suppose you just happened to pick this up at a rummage sale?”, said Emm, minutely scrutinizing the jacket’s material through her Swiss army knife’s magnifying glass.

“No, it was my grandfather’s – Mani Harvitz, he was a WWI codebreaker. He knew John Manly well, so must have known all about the Voynich Manuscript, I guess.”

“Hmmm… so why’s it in such good condition?”

“Ah”, said Graydon as he leaned over to pick up his club sandwich, “there’s a family story. On the boat back to the US from some European trip in the late 1920s, my grandpa fell seriously ill – and that turned out to be the tail end of the whole encephalitis lethargica epidemic.”

“Oh my God”, said Emm appalled, “the whole Oliver Sacks ‘Awakenings‘ thing, right?”

“Right. My grandfather stayed in a kind of catatonic state for decades – he died before I was born. Somehow I ended up inheriting his favourite jacket.”

Emm paused, looking at him through narrowed eyes, furious mental calculations plainly rattling through her head. The moment she turned her magnified gaze around to the small piece of parchment. Graydon stuffed an ungraciously large lump of sandwich into his mouth, trying hard not to moan with pleasure at his accelerated relief from starvation.

“Well, at least we know what he was doing”, Emm said, her shoulders relaxing a little as she began to take off her white cotton gloves.

“Errrm… which was… what?” Graydon replied, trying hard not to open his overfilled mouth too widely.

“For a start, he was visiting the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze – the Czech National Library, you can tell from the handwritten shelfmark. And here’s the giveaway he was stealing this”, she continued, pointing at the vellum’s left hand side , “the clean edge where Mani cut it out – probably with a smuggled-in razor blade – before stashing it in his secret pocket.”

 “Jeez, so now I’m on a lunch date with Gil Grissom. Did you happen to notice any anomalous beetle larvae?”

“You ate your sandwich first, you tell me. Was the salad unusually… crunchy?”

But now it was Graydon’s turn to go vague and starry-eyed, triggered by a cascade of half-memories from his capacious mental warehouse of Voynich trivia. “I reckon the connection here is… Edith Rickert. See, my grandpa had had this massive crush on her from the codebreaking office, but she was utterly devoted to working with John Manly and so turned him down: basically, Mani got married on the rebound. I went through Rickert’s letters in the archives: the last one from him promised to travel up and show her something she’d be very interested in. Didn’t say what it was, though.”

“So, if Edith Rickert was into the Voynich…”

“Way back then, Wilfrid Voynich called it his ‘Roger Bacon Manuscript’, but I don’t think she was ever fooled.”

“OK, whatever the damn manuscript was called, it seems pretty likely to me that the thing hidden in this jacket was a Voynich-related fragment your grandpa stole from the Czech museum library to try to impress Rickert.”  Emm said as she finally reached over to her plate. “You know, exciting her mind to get her into bed.”

“People do recommend that, but honestly, it’s never worked for me yet”, said Graydon. “Personally, I tend to find a nice lunch far more effective.”

Emm laughed, nearly choking on her sandwich, before frowning and pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Don’t you get any ideas – it would take much more than a club sandwich to get me into bed.”

“Whatever you say, Scully. Oh, the desserts here are pretty good, by the way.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

“And you’d definitely have to promise not to wear those cotton gloves”, continued Graydon grinning. “That would be wrong on so many levels.”

“Well, as long as I get to keep my magnifying glass and ruler, though.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

They both paused awkwardly, eyes scanning the other, resolutely reading between each other’s lines.

“Look”, said Emm as she began putting her things back into her clutch bag, “I’ve… I’ve got to get back to work now, before Mrs Kurtz starts punching the film crew. Could turn ugly.”

“That’s good”, said Graydon, noticing that even he didn’t believe the sound of his own words. “Ummm… thanks for dismantling my jacket and giving me a whole new research lead. Might even save my PhD. Oh, and I’d be very happy to help you with your cleaning, any time.”

“That’s great”, she replied, but her face was looking away as she stood up to leave. “Anyway, the Voynich film crew are filming an interview with Marina Lyonne this afternoon, I guess you probably know her, right?”

Graydon’s face dropped faster than a Wile E. Coyote grand piano. “Yeah, I know her”.

Ouch-a-rama.

His Voynich über-skeptic ex-wife was in town.

Oh, Marina, Marina, Marina: she knew the Beinecke curators very well – far too well, in fact – and she had a score of scores to settle with him. And this was more than just a bad moment for her to turn up wielding her +10 Axe of Grudgery, this was surely the worst imaginable moment.

Whoever said “one step forward, two steps back” was surely wearing X-ray specs, looking at the workings of the heart…

The Voynich Translation – Chapter 2

by ⋅ 3 Comments

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 2 – “Game On”

Vivid dreams of a towering manuscript library on fire: the Renaissance inks and paints boil, become gas and swirl upwards into an angry elemental wind, textual spirits entombed for centuries but now set free to roam the atmosphere, their haunting transmuted into a gigantic elemental pall above New Haven, a Jovian minium spot written upon the Earth’s skies, a full stop in the book of the sky for many-parsec-distant alien telescopes to read…

“Hey, Mr Graydon Harvitz! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”

He started from his mid-day café reverie, nearly knocking his second half-cold latte over onto the sprawl of Voynich Manuscript scans as he half-rose, no less surprised by the sensation of his newly-shaven chin on his fingertips than by Emm’s voice.

“Yeah, well, what with my committee appearance coming up, it was time I cleaned up my act. A bit, anyway.”

Emm reached over to his shoulder, her long fingers swiftly transcribing the diagonal weft and weave of his grandfather’s ancient twill jacket, one of the few things Graydon had inherited. She paused for a second longer than he expected, reading the material’s texture as if it were a familiar book, her eyes briefly absent from the room. “Ah”, she said, “you like antiques as well”.

“When history surrounds you, you can’t really avoid it”, he replied grimly. But the truth was, he wore it in a superstitious half-hope that his grandfather’s whisky-soaked ghost might lend a hand on those occasions when he particularly lacked cryptographic inspiration. Which had been… most of the time this last few months. “Hungry?”

“As a horse – any protein-rich House Specials on today?”

“Naah”, he replied, “it’s all carbohydrates à la mode. But their Club Sandwich is pretty good.”

“Good call!”, she smiled, “I’ll be the hunter-gatherer, back in a minute…”

Graydon watched with no little curiosity as she lightly sashayed across to the counter, attracting both jealous and covetous eyeballs from the other customers as she went. Yet… even though Graydon had survived his epic (and admittedly much-delayed) battle with the razor this morning, he still felt like nothing whereas Emm really was something: where was the balance in the equation? What was in it for her? And moreover…

“What exactly does a cleaner do?” he asked as she carefully squeezed a fresh latte and her cappucino into two of the polygonal gaps between the printouts on the table.

“Well… we clean things – old things. Such as your favourite manuscript. The Beinecke’s curators have put off fixing it up for years, but let’s face it, the Voynich does need a bit of TLC, right?”

“I guess so”, he said. “I must admit my heart’s in my mouth every time I have to unfold the rosettes page. On balance, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who trashed the VMs‘.”

“Just so you know, sorting it all out is my next job, once ze feelm crew ‘az returned to La Belle France. Their director has already annoyed Mrs Kurtz, so I don’t think they’ll be here long.” She snatched a brief sip of her coffee, looking sideways through the café’s glass front. “Technically, I should just be able to get on with it, but… I’m going to need your help.”

Graydon exhaled relief as a smile rolled across his face. “And there I was thinking it was my eyes you were lusting after.”

“No, it’s your mind, you fool. Ordinary manuscripts are easy to tidy up because everything has its place. But in the case of the Voynich, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who wiped the code off the VMs‘. Without knowing what might be hidden where, being a cleaner isn’t such an easy gig.”

“Ordinarily”, he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I’d be a sucker for a beautiful woman so blatantly calling me to adventure, but… I also have the not-entirely-small issue of a ticking clock and a funding gun pointed at my head. And it’ll probably be no big surprise to you that my work on the manuscript is not quite as advanced as had been hoped.”

“So… is that a yes or a no?”

“Actually, as with everything else with the Voynich, it’s an ‘I-don’t-yet-know‘. I need to figure out in my mind whether hanging out with a supermodel doing cool codicology is worth risking my PhD for.”

“OK, no problem”, Emm said, quickly resting her forehead forwards onto her hand. Despite the amused self-deprecating smile on her face, Graydon could not help but notice a wave of stress flash through her eyes. “Maybe it’s not an either-or thing. Anyway, I’m just dying to ask you – what is that bulge in your pocket?”

“Jeez”, Graydon gagged,”what finishing school did you go to?”

“No”, she sighed, “not your pants, your jacket. If – as I’m pretty sure – it’s pre-1950, it really shouldn’t have a purely decorative pocket on the front. So… what’s it for?”

Graydon looked down at it as an oddly restrained silence fell over him: even though he’d worn his grandfather’s jacket countless times, he realised that he’d never properly looked at it before.

“Come on, then, pass it over”, she hustled, getting out a pair of white cotton gloves, a small ruler and a tiny flashlight from her Biba chainmail clutch bag. “I’ll have a closer look. Do you have a cameraphone?”

“Errr… yes I do”, he said, taking his Nokia out of the jacket as he passed it over the table to Emm, her eyes alive with the detail. “Though, I haven’t actually used it yet.”

“Here’s your chance to learn. You’ll need to photograph this seam here before and after I cut the thread, so I can restore it later.” Shining her light on the top seam with the ruler placed alongside it, she waited impatiently while Graydon haltingly navigated through the phone’s Byzantine user interface all the way to its camera submenu. At the clatter of the fake shutter sound effect, she lurched into action, selecting a microscopic pair of scissors from a diamante-studded Swiss army knife. One deft snip later, she was tweezing out the single long thread that had fastened the top edge in place for God-knows how many decades.

“Keep photographing, Gray… yup, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny…”

The waiter arrived with their Club sandwiches, but Graydon slid them to one side of the table: for all their previous hunger, suddenly neither had any appetite for food at all.

At first, all they could see was a sliver of a pale brown edge: but this grew one tiny fraction at a time until Emm had finally pulled out a small scrap of aged parchment, covered in fingerprints and dirt. At its top was an inventory reference written in a mid-Victorian European copperplate hand – but in the centre there was an 8×8 table of unusual letters.

Up until now, these curious letter-forms had – for all their study – been unique to a single historical document.

But not now.

Unmistakeably – incredibly – the grid contained letters from the Voynich Manuscript.

“Game on!”, moaned Graydon, shaking his head in disbelief. “Game on!”

“Wow”, gasped Emm, her mouth dry with the tension, “even I didn’t really think codicology could beat sex.”

“But… maybe it’s not an either-or thing?”

Voynich f116v: pax nax vax?

by ⋅ 103 Comments

Many historians and palaeographers have concluded that the interleaved ‘+’ signs added to the Voynich Manuscript’s back page indicate that the containing text is some kind of spell, incantation, chant, charm, curse, pious utterance, etc. Well, it’s completely true that ‘+’ was used in all of the preceding forms to indicate that the (non-silent) reader should physically trace out the sign of the cross at the same time, so this would seem a perfectly reasonable suggestion (if perhaps a little non-specific).

Here I’m particularly interested in the (apparently heavily emended) third line of text on f116v, where I have strongly enhanced the image to make the tangled textual mess I think this has ended up in clear. Note that (as I have discussed several times elsewhere, e.g.here) this line of text seems to end “ahia maria“, which I think pretty much confirms that the ‘+’ shapes are indeed crosses.

So, do we have any idea what the first part of the line originally said? It is certainly striking that all four words at the start of the line seem to end with the letter ‘x’, which gives the overall impression of some kind of magical chant. But what might that chant be?

This is where I wheel in Benedek Lang’s fascinating “Unlocked Books” (2008), which focuses on medieval magical manuscripts from Central Europe (and which you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I’m currently reading). As part of his discussion (p.65) of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus (Maximianus, Martinianus, Malchus, Constantinus, Dionisius, Serapion & Johannes, since you’re asking) who were walled up for two hundred years but magically awoke during the reigh of Theodosius, Lang mentions a 14th century Czech amulet with the seven sleepers’ names as well as the text “pax + nax vax“, all used as a healing magic charm against fever.

Incidentally, I should note that “hax pax max adimax” is another piece of nonsense Latin that (for example) appears in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, and which some wobbly etymological sources give as the possible origin of the phrase “hocus pocus” (though I have to say I’d probably tend more towards the idea that it’s a corruption of [the genuine Latin] “hoc est corpus“). But regardless, I don’t think “hax pax max” is what we’re looking at here.

“pax nax vax“, then, is basically the right kind of phrase, with the right kind of structure, from the right kind of period. I’m not saying it’s definitely 100% right (history is rarely that simple): but even if it’s wrong, it may well turn out to be a very revealing attempt at an answer.

All in all, I’m really rather intrigued by the possibility that this line originally read (or read something remarkably close to) “six + pax + nax + vax + ahia + mar+ia +“: it’s just a shame that the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library doesn’t have finer wavelength (i.e. multispectral) scans of this contentious feature so that we could test this kind of hypothesis out. One day, though…