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:-
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! 🙂
Earlier this year, I proposed that the VMs might possibly have brought by Guillaume Pellicier from Venice to Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier, and listed a short bibliography of titles that would be worth consulting to check this out. A few days ago, I found one of them on the Internet:
Correspondance politique de Guillaume Pellicier, ambassadeur de France à Venise 1540-1542, publiée sous les auspices de la Commission des archives diplomatiques par Alexandre Tausserat-Radel (1899).
Usefully, pp.700-704 of this contain an (admittedly fairly terse) inventory of Pellicier’s personal library of 332 books. However, only one of these sounds even remotely like a candidate for the VMs:-
Hospitalières de Montpellier, Fonds de l’Hôpital général, B. lU; copie.
323. Liber de astronomia., gr., script.,continens lib. XX
Unfortunately, Pellicier seems amply Greek-savvy not to have misdescribed the VMs as a “greek” text, so this seems rather like a dead end. Oh well!
pp.710-721 contains the text “Vita Guillelmi Pellicier, episcopi Monspeliensis, ad virum eruditissimum Bernardum Monfalconiuiu, Benedictinum“, which includes a little bit about Pellicier’s book-buying on p.713 (penultimate paragraph).
As an aside, it’s also possible that had Rondelet acquired the VMs by other means, a quite different fate might have befallen it. According to this 2006 aricle on Clusius (p.95):-
Rondelet himself became very worried after the arrest of Pellicier, and according to Joubert, secretly burned those books in his own private library which he thought might land him in trouble with religious inquisitors.
All of which defensive biblioclasm brings to my mind the underground “Bibliotek” memorial in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, located exactly where the infamous Nazi book burnings began – this was nicely evoked near the end of Alan Cumming’s recent BBC Four documentary on the film Cabaret. The plaque reads: “Where books are burned in the end people will burn.”
A couple of upcoming Voynich Euro-novels for your brief attention: firstly, the Spanish “El caso Voynich” (i.e. “The Voynich Case”) from Argentinian writer and columnist Daniel Guebel. Though references to it seem to have been temporarily removed from Guebel’s website, it appears to be based on contemporary-ish Voynich research, and may even include some VMs images. Due out next month (November 2009).
And secondly, “Engels Fall” (i.e. “Fallen Angels“ “Angel’s Fall” or “Angel’s Case”) by Helena Reich has a qualmless secret society leaving a trail of corpses across Prague, each with a tarot card signature… might a mysterious order of alchemists hold the missing pages of the VMs? Prague Post reporter Larissa Khek (the heroine of Reich’s earlier book “Watery Grave”) is determined to find out [etc, etc]. Due out in two months’ time (December 2009).
Here’s something you might like: a handy cut-out-and-keep map of historical conspiracy clichés, inspired (I’m sorry to say) by Peter Blake & Paul Blezard’s “The Arcadian Cipher” (2000). Of course, there were countless more conspiracy clichés I could have included (aliens, Roswell, MIB, etc), but seeing as the Elders of Zion paid me handsomely to leave many of those out, you’ll just have to figure them out for yourselves. 🙂
Though these are grouped in a (vaguely) thematic kind of way above…
…please don’t imagine for a minute that there’s any real abstract / analytical structure to this – it’s just a bunch of stuff to bear in mind when picking up historical conspiracy mystery thrillers. Oh, or when constructing demented theories for well-known historical cipher mysteries (I’m sure you know the ones I mean). Enjoy! 🙂
Voynich researchers often laugh about “dain daiin”, a curious text pattern that often crops up in the Voynich Manuscript’s strange text. But I’ve just noticed an (arguably) even stranger pattern on lines 20 and 21 of page f42r:-
shol chol shoky okol sho chol shol chal shol chol chol shol ctaiin shos odan
Here, it’s as though Voynichese itself is breaking down while trying to express some awkward low-level concept. If these two lines run on (as you’d expect), the mid-sequence runs “sho chol shol chal shol chol chol shol“. Sorry, but I really don’t buy into the idea that something as artificially structured as this could ever be some kind of repetitive pidgin or Hawaiian-style language (as those in the Voynich linguist camp would suggest): rather, these “words” more closelt resemble machine burblings, the output of some kind of proto-algorithmic process.
To my eyes, there’s a kind of elegant quasi-numerical symmetry to this, as if “sho[l] chol shol / chal / shol chol chol shol” is verbosely enciphering “X I X / or / X I I X“. Might these indeed be heavily enciphered Roman numerals?
I haven’t looked for this beyond f42r, but please leave a comment here if you find further examples elsewhere in the VMs! 🙂
Incidentally, the raw instance counts for chol /shol etc together with a rough percentage (showing how far against raw chance the combination occurs) are:-
That is, if “ch” (5.66%) and “ol” (2.92%) sppeared randomly throughout the VMs, “chol” ought to appear roughly 311 times, whereas it actually appears 780 times – hence 780/311 = 250%. That is, the “chol / chor / shol / shor” set is 2.16x to 3.25x more likely than chance to appear, whereas the “chal / char / shal / shar” set are all less likely than chance to appear.
Having deconstructed the Beinecke’s own Voynich Manuscript page here the other day, I thought I ought to repeat the trick for my own Cipher Mysteries Voynich page, which was similarly in need of a bit of renovation (if not TLC). OK… so I actually rewrote it from scratch.
And now, here it is – Ladies & Gentlemen, for your delectation and delight I bring you… the most genuinely useful webpage on the Voynich Manuscript.
As normal, let me know what I’ve got wrong & I’ll fix it. 😉
German fans of Pater Castell and of the Voynich Manuscript have a treat in store coming up, with the episode due to be aired on 5th November 2009 at 20:15 called “Das Voynich Manuskript“ (hopefully you can translate that from the German).
Here’s my rough translation of the programme blurb:-
16-year-old Ralf Hoffmann is found dead at Athanasius Kircher boarding school. Is it suicide? Father Castell, a former student himself, is asked in by his longtime friend Father Jonas Selby because a tragic event from the past seems to have exactly repeated itself. Marie Blank is surprised when she sees a youthful portrait of Father Castell on display and is even more surprised by what she finds at the scene. The two quickly decide to investigate the mystery together. Ralf Hoffmann was a misfit interested in encryption and anagrams – and especially in the undeciphered Voynich Manuscript. Crucially, Father Castells’ knowledge helps Marie in her investigation. It turns out that others in the in boarding school share Ralf’s interest in anagrams and encryption. A secret school club is active, even blackmailing a teacher – might Ralf’s death be linked to this “Voynich Club”?