As my plane reached New Haven in Chapter One, I began to realize that this “Voynich Manuscript” mystery was going to be a tough nut to crack. And when the first of my idealistic (but fruit-loop) cryptographic allies got ritualistically murdered by the end of Chapter Two, it was clear that the stakes were higher than an NBA star’s dandruff. Yes, it’s true that a succession of unconvincing experts blowing huge Wikipedia chunks filled Chapters Three through Ten, but by then it was painfully clear that only I could Save The Whole Darn World from the Strange Dateline Doom Curse someone had described and mysteriously encrypted 500+ years ago. So, I simply settled down to enjoy the gallop across a gaudily rich set of world mystery locations while various centuries-old rivalries played themselves out. Then, at the breathlessly cinematic set-piece ending, I Finally Saved The World From Itself (thanks mainly to my keen historical & psychological insights). Thank goodness I didn’t have to stick to the facts or it would have been a really dull read – hooray for the VMs and its lack of evidence! 🙂
Earlier this year, I was contacted by a 58-year-old US Army / Navy computer programmer from North Carolina: he claimed to have solved the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, and wanted me to post details on my Cipher Mysteries blog, but without revealing his identity.
Yesterday, however, Richard Rogers went public with his claims (which is why I can now say his name): here’s a picture of him (from the same Havelock News article):-
With degrees (it says here) in “ancient history, languages and computer science”, he originally used Voynichese to benchmark some anti-fraud pattern recognition software he had been developing, believing (courtesy of Gordon Rugg’s various publications, I’d guess) that it was what he calls “manufactured” (i.e. hoaxed) text. As an aside, his software was built around Benford’s Law (specifically, Hal Varian’s 1972 take on it), a logarithmic distribution law which has similarities with (the rather more familiar) Zipf’s Law.
However, when (to his great surprise) the software reported back that the Voynich Manuscript did actually seem to contain meaningful information, he found himself being rapidly drawn into the VMs’ tangled research web.
So far, this is all a straightforward techy “call to adventure” narrative: but where it goes from here is a bit odd. It took me ages to even begin to understand what he thinks he can see in the VMs – and I’m still miles off understanding why it might be so, as well as how he made the leap from (a) grasping that there is meaningful content, to (b) seeing how that meaningful content actually works. Which is why every time I tried to post about this, I’ve ended up giving up halfway through: but now he’s gone public, I guess I’ll have to complete the job as best I can…
Here’s how it all starts.
Rogers believes that Voynichese letters express a kind of symbolic language (which he calls “proto-sentential logic” or “sententional propositional calculus”) for encoding secret shapes (which he calls “runes” or “runic glyphs”), a bit like an encrypted Renaissance Logo driving a turtle trapped inside a 5×5 grid. He calls this system “Runus”.
He calls double-leg gallows “staves” (red text in the diagram) and single-leg gallows “stakes” (blue background in the diagram): these are “key to navigating the manuscript”, insofar as (if I’ve understood it properly) Runus expressions always contain these staves/stakes (or sometimes [EVA d]) in the middle.
Finally, here are the seven specific Runus rules Rogers believes Voynichese expresses (his descriptions not mine):-
- “RULE 1: Each line is an independent, stand-alone action. There is no punctuation because none is needed.
- RULE 2: All Rule-Oriented Expressions (ROE) are non-mathematical algebraic ‘draw & copy’ operations based on a 5X5 numbered solution grid.
- RULE 3: Draw operations always assume a horizontal top to bottom, left to right sequence unless modified by a functional character (i.e. a shape flag, left, right, top, bottom, etc.
- RULE 4: ALL ROA encapsulate one of eight turnstiles (sometimes 8 is applied as a turnstile)
- RULE 5: The eight turnstile shapes are broken into positional sets of functions. These are:
-
- Two stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the left set.
- Four stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the right set.
- RULE 6: Runus is a Rule-Oriented Expression (denoted by a the Greek rho, below). It is a coordinate system used to build a Rune character.
- RULE 7: The meaning, interpretation, and function of Runa – and the shapes they describe(RO), are very dependent.”
Here’s another of Rogers’ diagrams that might possibly help explain this:-
Just in case you glazed over halfway through the above (I’m not saying you actually did, but you certainly might have done), we should perhaps move swiftly on to look at a specific example of how Rogers thinks Voynichese works:-
[EVA odaiin] is translated as “Focus on the 3X3 square immediately adjacent to the left of the center position”.
From his Runus diagrams…
- [EVA o] = “left side”
- [EVA d] = “centre position”
- [EVA a] = “right side”
- [EVA ii] = “a count of 2”
- [EVA n] =”horizontal grid line counter”
According to his Runus rules, this appears to denotes a horizontal line drawn from the left side of the centre position across to the right side with a horizontal grid line count of two. But that’s about as far as I can usefully take this.
Here’s how Rogers annotates the first line of f1r into five individual Runus expressions. The “turnstiles” are red, “directional modifiers” are blue, while numbers (“grid coordinates”) are in pink:-
Here, ROE 1 says “Starting in Quadrant 1, in the DIRECTION Of the Right Half, DRAW a DEEP CURVED LINE from top to bottom“, while ROE 2 says “DRAW a SHALLOW CURVE from BOTTOM TO TOP, facing the RIGHT“. Put these two together and you get a “moon”. Rogers believes that the mysterious shape at the top right of f1r is the image described by the the first few Voynichese lines of f1r – and hence this acts as a kind of enciphering test.
Just as with the biliteral cipher I discussed yesterday, there’s certainly elements of steganography and verbose cipher at play here, lending an air of cryptographic plausibility. However, “Runus” does seem an enormously complicated piece of symbolic machinery to encrypt what are ultimately just shapes – a bit like using a Difference Engine as a shop till. And given that I personally don’t buy into the notion (however breathlessly expressed by conspiratorial iconologists) that any shapes are intrinsically heretical, or even that any particular shapes were intrinsically believed to be heretical, the whole proposed exercise of encrypting heretical shapes would seem to me to be both futile and improbable. Sorry, but that’s how it looks from here.
Also: I simply can’t see how Rogers got from pattern matching software to Runus – to my mind, there’s an inherent “chalk and cheese”-style gulf between the two. Though I can see the start-point and the end-point, I can’t see any logical reasoning that might step between the two. Yes, I can see that the “i” / “ii” / “iii” characters might in fact be Roman numbers (though even that I somewhat doubt, given that they resemble medieval page numbers so closely): but that’s about as close as I can get.
Rogers has tried to back up his “Runus” research with more conventional historical research, and “speculates that the manuscript was written by three generations of the Longhi Family in Italy, Martino Longhi the Elder (1534-1591), Onorio Longhi (1569-1619) and Martino Longhi the Younger (1602-1660).” However, I’m also somewhat skeptical of this, given that (a) the VMs appears to have 15th century marginalia, (b) the VMs appears to have had an Occitan owner in South-West France circa 1500, and (c) if the VMs was indeed bought by Rudolf II, that would have been prior to 1612, at which point Martino Longhi the Younger was 10 years old.
Of course, in the absence of any widely agreed decryption of even a single word, it’s almost impossible to disprove any assertion anyone makes about the Voynich Manuscript: and naturally, it is this rich loam of uncertainty that helps Voynich Theories to flourish so much. But now I have to go and lie down – my head’s hurting from all that proto-sentential calculus, just like it did every other time I tried to write it up. 🙁
I’ve had a few recent emails from historical code-breaker Tony Gaffney concerning the Voynich Manuscript, to say that he has been hard at work examining whether Voynichese might in fact be an example of an early Baconian biliteral cipher.
This is a method Francis Bacon invented of hiding messages inside other messages, by (say) choosing between two typefaces on a letter-by-letter basis – that is, steganographically hiding a binary message inside another message, one binary digit at a time. To squeeze in a 24-letter cryptographic alphabet, you’d need 5 bits (2^5 = 32), a bit like a fixed-length Morse code. Bacon proposed the following basic mapping:-
a AAAAA g AABBA n ABBAA t BAABA b AAAAB h AABBB o ABBAB u/v BAABB c AAABA i/j ABAAA p ABBBA w BABAA d AAABB k ABAAB q ABBBB x BABAB e AABAA l ABABA r BAAAA y BABBA f AABAB m ABABB s BAAAB z BABBB
Immediately, it should be obvious that this is (a) boring to encipher, (b) awkward to typeset and proof, (c) boring to decipher, and (d) it requires a printed covertext five times the size of the ciphertext. So… while this would be just about OK for someone publishing prolix prose into which they would like to add some kind of hidden message for posterity, it’s not honestly very practical for “MEET ME BY THE RIVER AT MIDNIGHT”. Here’s a simple example of what it would look like in action (though using cAmElCaSe rather than Times/Arial, I’m not that sadistic):-
to Be, OR noT To be: ThaT is ThE quesTIon:
whETher ‘tiS nOBleR in the Mind tO SuffeR
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
[…]
Famously, the giants of ‘enigmatology’ (David Kahn’s somewhat derisive term for hallucinative Baconian Shakespeare-ology) Ignatius Donnelly and Elizabeth Wells Gallup hunted hard for biliteral ciphers in the earliest printed editions of Shakespeare, but I’m pretty sure there’s more in the preceding paragraph than they ever found. 🙂
Historically, Bacon claimed to have invented this technique as a youth in Paris (which would have been circa 1576), so it is just about possible (if you half-close your eyes when you look at, say, the fifteenth century marginalia, and squint like mad) that he (or someone to whom he showed his biliteral cipher) might have used it to encipher the Voynich Manuscript around that time. But that leads on to two questions:
- How might the stream of enciphered bits be hidden inside Voynichese?
- How could we decipher it reliably?
Tony’s suggestion is that Voynichese might be hiding “dots” and “dashes” (basically, binary zeroes and ones) in the form of ‘c’-like and ‘\’-like strokes (and where gallows are nulls and/or word delimiters), something along the lines of this:-
Spookily, back in 1992, Jim Reeds tried converting all the letters (apart from gallows) to c’s and i’s, to see if anything interesting emerged:-
Starting with the original D’Imperio transcription, I converted some characters to ‘c’ and some others to ‘i’, and then counted letter pairs (for pairs of adjacent non space chars, viz, in the same word).
letters mapped to c: QWXY9CSZ826
letters mapped to i: DINMEGHRJKThe results, sorted by decreasing frequency:
15481 cc
4774 Ai
4375 Oi *** O like A on right
3612 cO *** O like A on left
2591 cA
2528 OF
2482 4O
2449 Fc
1496 Pc
1427 OP
1390 ic *** rule breakers
1313 Oc
1212 FA
690 cF
495 PA
455 iO
452 cP
362 Bc
359 FO
354 PO
330 iF
275 iA *** rule breakers
168 OB
164 ci *** a few more rule breakers
124 AT
102 Vc
89 cB
88 OA
87 BO
71 Ac
68 ii
54 OV
…From which one sees that O is as much c-like on the left and I-like on the right as A is.
Also notice that ic and ci does occur. In the B corpus, I-like letters seem to occur only at the ends of words. Typically a word starts out C-like and ends up I-like.
Can this I-like, C-like, and neutral stuff be a cryptological not linguistic phenomenon? Maybe the author has a basic alphabet where each letter has both a C-form and an I-form. He writes out the text in basic letters, and then writes the Voynich MS, drifting in and out of the C and I forms, just to amuse us. If this were the case, we should treat Currier <2> and Currier <R> as the same, etc, etc.
Or the author could be putting all the info in the choice of C-form versus I-form: C-form could be ‘dot’, and I-form could be ‘dash’, and choice of ‘base letter’ is noise. (Say, only the C/I value of a letter following a gallows counted, or maybe that and plume-presence of letter following a gallows.) That gives you a sequence of bits or of ‘dibits’, which is used in a Baconian biliteral or Trithemian triliteral cipher, say.
Or if you figure each word starts C-like and ends I-like, maybe the only signficant thing is what happens at the transition, which will take the form cAi or cOi. The significant thing is the pair of ci letters.
On rereading this all, it seems unlikely.
Could the VMs really be built on some kind of c-and-\ biliteral cipher? Cryptologically, I’d say that the answer is almost certainly no: the problem is simply that the ‘\’ strokes are far too structured. Though Tony’s “abandon all hope” demo shows how this might possibly work, his example is already both too nuanced (with different length cipher tokens, somewhat like Morse code but several centuries too early) and too far away from Voynichese to be practical.
While I would definitely agree that Voynichese is based in part around a verbose cipher (as opposed to what Wilkins [below] calls “secret writing by equall letters”), I really do doubt that it is as flabbily verbose as the biliteral cipher (and with lots of delimiters / nulls thrown in, too). I’d guess that a typical Herbal A page would contain roughly 30-40 characters’ worth of biliteral information – and what kind of secret would be that small?
As an historical sidenote, Glen Claston discussed the biliteral cipher on-list back in 2005:-
[…] I’ll clue you in to Bacon research – only two books are of interest, both post-fall for Lord Bacon. (I own originals of all of them, so I’m positive about this). The biliteral cipher exists in only two books, the first of which is the Latin version “De Augmentis”, London edition, 1623. This will lead you to the second, published “overseas”. (No real ground-breaking secrets there however). It raises its head only one other time, in a book entitled “Mercury, the Swift and Secret Messenger”. (Only two pages here, at the beginning, a simple exercise). [A brief use in a Rosicrucian manuscript, but Bacon was not a Rosicrucian, so this is simple plagiarism].
To be accurate, John Wilkins’ 1641 “Mercury, the Swift and Secret Messenger” does actually devote most of its Chapter IX to triliteral and biliteral ciphers (which he also calls “writing by a double alphabet”), with a reference in the margin specifically pointing to Bacon’s “De Augmentis” as its source. Personally, I suspect that Wilkins was having more fun with…
Fildy, fagodur wyndeeldrare discogure rantibrad
…though I suspect a “purer” version of the same would be…
Fildy, fagodur wyndeldra rogered ifsec ogure rantebrad
Read, decipher, enjoy! 🙂
About a month ago, I mentioned here that there was an upcoming episode of “Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell” with a Voynich theme. Well… this aired on ZDF on 5th November 2009, and (with a tip of the hat to Michael Johne’s voynichlupe blog) here’s a link to the “Das Voynich-Manuskript” episode online so that you can watch it yourself.
It’s one of those programmes where the main characters are pretty much so well-defined that you don’t actually need to understand German to make sense of what’s going on. The only bit that I didn’t quite get is how Pater Castell used the page from the book from the school library to decipher the note on the noticeboard (yes, Charles, it does sound like a text adventure).
Having gone to a boy’s school myself (though since it went fully co-ed, Brentwood’s most famous ‘old boy’ is now Jodie Marsh, horror of horrors), I have to say that the most implausible bit of the episode was the way that the sexy Münchner detective Marie Blank walked around the school in tight white jeans without any of the sixth formers giving her a second look. Oh well… artistic licence, I s’pose.
For maximum Voynich spotter points, have your copy of “Le Code Voynich” open to page f52v, and observe the nine vaguely fern-ish leaf-swirls rolling over as they branch off a single vertical stem – though quite why Pater Castell mumbles “Kabbalah” to himself as he looks at this page is a little beyond me (sorry, but to my eyes it doesn’t resemble the Ten Sephiroth at all). For what it’s worth (typically £9.95 + p&p), I suspect that this page is a late “A” page, and was part of the Voynich author’s transitional phase which used the ‘A’ language and fake plants to represent other things – in this case, a fountain.
One question that bugged me throughout the episode was… whom exactly did the main character remind me of? It took me right until the end to work out the alchemical wedding from whence Pater Castell (played by Francis Fulton-Smith) seems to have sprung…
Yes, he’s the offspring of Steven Seagal and Dom Joly. Watch it for yourself and see if you agree.
And finally: structurally, “Ihr Auftrag, Pater Castell” reminded me of another well-known TV series which combines two strong main characters’ arbitrarily flying around in a light aircraft with blocky expositions of things that are mysteries to its (admittedly slightly younger) viewers, all sweetened by a bit of light drama. I’m referring, of course, to “Come Outside” (1994), featuring Lynda Baron (as Aunt Mabel) and her clever dog Pippin – a far more rounded role than her appearances on Eastenders as Jane Beale’s mum. (Though I d-d-doubt Arkwright would accuse Nurse Gladys Emanuel of being anything but fully rounded.)
For reference, Pippin’s the one without the goggles. Actually, “Come Outside” is a sweet little series for kids, and I hope it continues to be shown until at least the year 2999. 🙂
After extensively meditating on the mysterious star-disk often depicted behind Christ’s head, Wayne Herschel suddenly realized that…
The Christ story probably involved a ‘gold plate’ that was given to Judas by The Christ and it most likely had a secret inscription on it that would show the star map of the sacred lineage of our ancestors.
So… whatever happened to that gold plate and its secret inscription? Wayne believes that he has uncovered a drawing of it in the Voynich Manuscript’s astronomical section:-
The images on the manuscript depict nymphs – souls travelling the cosmos through cosmic wormholes and records of plants that are probably not of this world.
Yes, “cosmic wormholes” (he had previously posted about this here). He continues:-
On one special page [f68r3] it depicts the sacred cross with all the missing detail Wayne was looking for. It had the star secret and a face Sun star at its centre. It has a cluster of seven stars and a little line as if signifying a path of travel to the Sun star very near to the Pleiades, as already discovered by Wayne in many other ancient civilisations!
Here’s Wayne’s vivid illustration of what he sees when he looks at f68r3 (slightly reduced in size from the image on his site, but I’m sure you get the gist):-
But beware! Discoveries this powerfully convincing are all too easy for rival ideologies to appropriate for their own twisted counter-factual historical narratives:-
A New age group ‘Silver Gate’ has already threatened that they will plagiarise and be promoting Wayne’s Voynich findings as well as all of his star map findings and falsely adjust all of them to make it fit their movement, hoping their followers will not know it is altered.
I don’t know what to say. I’ve now seen literally hundreds of Voynich theories in this same general vein, and it is logically true not only that they can’t all be right, but also that they can all be wrong. The secret history of Christ, Judas, John the Baptist, the Pleiades, Orion’s Belt, Voynich, cosmic wormholes, New Age plagiarists… I think I need to lie down in a darkened room until the crushing headache this has given me starts to abate.
Just be grateful that I read all these pages so that you don’t have to. 🙂
Alas, sometimes the limitations of Twitter are all too apparent. The follow-up to my previous VMs limerick simply refuses to be shoehorned inside the 140 character limit:-
A dodgy bookdealer called Wilfrid
Hotly denied he had pilfered
Or hoaxed, faked or shammed
His “Book Of The Damned”
(That he’d bought off a geezer in Ilford)
Alternatively…
Did the Emperor purchase “The Voynich”
For 600 ducats of coinage?
Perhaps he had hoped
It described a strange soap
That would cure his mysterious groin itch!
Ah well, perhaps blogs aren’t so bad after all! 🙂
I’m not really getting on with the whole Twitter @nickpelling thing. I try but… it just seems to have all the downsides of texting (apart from a slightly nicer keyboard). Here’s today’s tweet, though:-
The Voynich Manuscript
Is something someone ripped
Off guys who died
Then placed inside
A cryptographic crypt!
Other people have probably written almost exactly the same limerick before. But who cares? It is what it is! Enjoy! 🙂
Next Sunday (8th November 2009), $99 should get you into a one-day mini-conference in LA focusing on “hidden history, signs, symbols, and secrets”, hosted by Simon Cox, author of the brand new book “Decoding The Lost Symbol”…
OK, I’m sure you’ve rumbled the secret already: that it’s basically a one-day press launch for Simon Cox’s book, with a load of sort-of-relevant speakers doing their thing (and not a cipher mystery in sight, as far as I could see). I’m sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy this, but I personally won’t be red-eyeing over to the West Coast for this. (But please leave a comment here if you do happen to go.)
All of which does raise the question of whether I should organize my own proper cipher mysteries / secret histories conference (not to promote a book, but just to have some fun) and where. After all, there are plenty of nicely evocative places in Ye Quainte Olde Londonne Towne that I could hire for the day at less than staggering expense, and finding places to put speakers up should be straightforward. The kind of stuff I’d expect it to cover should come as no big surprise:-
- The Voynich Manuscript
- The Rohonc Codex
- John Dee’s secret history (a perennial favourite!)
- Rosicrucianism and Alchemy
- Historical code-breaking – a practical guide
- Armchair treasure-hunting / Treasure maps / The greatest (real) treasures never found
- Panel: “Renaissance Symbolism – True or False?”
- The Secret History of Renaissance Astrology
- The Phaistos Disc (possibly)
- (…and so on)
Would that be your idea of a perfect day out? Feel free to tell me what’s missing from the agenda!
Here’s a blog I found today (“Alan’s Mysterious World”) with an odd story embedded in a brief history of crossword puzzles.
Apparently, in 1926 a Budapest coffee house waiter committed suicide, leaving a blank crossword puzzle as an explanation. According to this page, a note with it said: “The solution will give you the exact reasons for my suicide and also the names of the people interested.” The police asked the public if they could help solve it, but I can’t find any reference to anyone’s having solved it.
Honestly, am I really the only person who wants to see that crossword puzzle?
Update: we now know that this really happened – here’s a 2013 update on the whole crossword suicide story.
Here are two German papers (from 2007 and 2008) by Dr. Michael Mönnich on the Voynich Manuscript I stumbled across a few months ago, both of which place it within the context of the history of pharmacy:
Pharmazeutische Aspekte im Voynich-Manuskript.
In: “Drugs and medicines from sides of the Atlantic Ocean”
38th International Congress of the History of Pharmacy, Seville, 21st September 2007Das Voynichmanuskript aus pharmaziehistorischer Sicht
In: Geschichte der Pharmazie 60 (2008), Heft 1/2, S. 9 – 14.
Dr Mönnich works at the Karlsruhe University Library (his homepage, his publications): I contacted him to ask if he had electronic copies of these articles he could email through for review here. He replied…
Unfortunately the article did not appear in an electronic form, so I could provide only photocopies, and it is in German. Then, I do not intend to publish anything on the Voynich in the near future.
So… if any Cipher Mysteries readers have access to a decent research library and are not put off too much by the idea of reading pharmacy history papers in German, please feel free to have a look at these and tell us all what Dr Mönnich’s particular VMs angle is. Thanks! 🙂