Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

Two long(-ish) form Voynich manuscript articles emerged recently, one in the Jewish magazine The Tablet “Tablet Magazine”, the other in the New Yorker’s online blog section. These tell us quite a lot – though not really about the Voynich Manuscript itself, but rather about how the Voynich Manuscript is now perceived.

The first article, by Batya Ungar-Sargon, is called Cracking the Voynich Code: The quixotic quest to read meaning in the patterns of a bizarre manuscript that has bedeviled scholars for years.

Her basic take is that “the Voynich Manuscript has become a beacon for a secular community of quasi-Talmudic scholars whose interpretive ingenuity and stamina have few parallels“, so her piece is built around interviews with several of them (including the “patient, tireless” Gordon Rugg, and the “deeply humble” Rich SantaColoma). [She also talked with me on the phone for an hour, but perhaps I didn’t fit her template 😉 ].

Taken as a whole, fitting her article into a primarily Jewish-interest magazine was always going to be a bit of stretch: William Friedman was Jewish, sure, but that’s a small piece of material to make a full-length dress out of. I can’t help but wonder whether Batya’s ambition is to write long-form pieces for the New Yorker, and that this was a try-out for her portfolio. She clearly writes well, but I don’t think her journalistic instincts are yet fully honed – her article, in my opinion, is still more ‘relating’ than the literary reportage to which she aspires.

The second article – The Unread: The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript – by Reed Johnson is, coincidentally enough, from the New Yorker blog section. As such, it’s a kind of New Yorker long-form take on a blog post, i.e. longer than a normal blog post, but quite a lot shorter than a typical New Yorker article (I used to subscribe to it, though how I ever found enough time to read each issue I don’t know 🙂 ).

This isn’t Ungar-Sargon-style journalism, but is instead Reed’s telling the story of how he came to waste three years (only three years? Pshaw!) on the Voynich Manuscript – basically, while trying to write his own “Dan Brown–style thriller”, having nearly completed his “M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Virginia” in 2010. He tries to introduce a little light drama into his account (Did he crack the Voynich? Did he finish his book?) but with enough of a wink to astute readers that they know the resolutions long before the end.

Unlike Batya, Reed is not an observer looking in on the Voynich research world from the outside, but is instead an active participant in what he calls the “often fractious” Voynich mailing list. His feeling about this is that “If crowds have any wisdom, soon we should see the fruits of a more recent deciphering project: Internet crowdsourcing“. And yet, he also wonders whether it would be a disappointment for the Voynich Manuscript to be decrypted – that, “no matter how thrilling such a text might be, it [would] remain a disappointment for being closed off, completed — for being, in the end, no longer a mystery“.

My own conclusion is that the Voynich mailing list has become more part of the problem than part of the solution: and that the extraordinarily productive collaboration its early days saw was more down to the small number and high calibre of the participants (Jim Reeds, Jim Gillogly, Jacques Guy, etc), most of whom left the list long ago. Really, the collective wisdom of the crowd very much depends on the crowd you happen to be dealing with: though Reed stops short of showing his hand in this regard, so we end up knowing what happened but not his thoughts or feelings about it. Perhaps the whole card game hasn’t yet concluded for him.

What’s nice about these two articles is that, for all their differences, they are both good examples of clear-headed contemporary writing about the Voynich Manuscript, far from the lurid wodges of mystery-soaked ahistorical fragments I frequently used to see. Indeed, both give an account of the Voynich’s history that is broadly correct, something which simply never happened even a decade ago: perhaps the radiocarbon dating has helped validate the Voynich as a “proper” subject.

And yet… it’s as if something (or someone) is missing from the whole party. The Voynich Manuscript has had many of the best codebreakers of the age (the Friedmans, Manly, Tiltman, etc) examine it closely: yet as these articles show, a lot of contemporary discourse still revolves around the – frankly rather foolish and shallow, I think – postmodernist cipher/hoax tension as exemplified by Gordon Rugg and Rich SantaColoma.

To my mind, it’s as if something really important is missing from the whole conceptual landscape of how the Voynich is perceived, that everyone is somehow in the wrong kind of doubt. We’ve collectively travelled a really long way forward, for sure, but the ideas and insights gained on that journey have all been zapped by a kind of “motivated learning” paralysis, where debate is held in a stasis between powerful epistemological agendas.

It often feels as though, myself excepted (and who listens to what I say, ha!), the Voynich-as-a-genuine-historical-artefact point of view has no champion. I genuinely tire of the way people continually generate possible alternative histories for it, when I’m just about the only person trying to reconstruct the mainstream history they’re so busy fighting against.

I want to ask those “theorists”: why do you find the idea that the Voynich Manuscript was made basically when its radiocarbon dating says so dreadfully upsetting? Why do you invest so much time and effort into identifying outlandish alternatives that might possibly be made to work (with a few well-chosen tweaks to the mainstream historical timeline)? Do you not see that, by kicking back so hard against a straightforward historical account that hasn’t even been written yet, you are yourself holding everything back? Can you not see that by doing this you have become part of the problem, not part of the solution?

That is the Voynich Manuscript debate that’s missing, the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. But nobody is writing that particular article, and I’m not sure anyone ever will… and perhaps we’re all worse off for that silence.

The news rattling the bars of the Voynich research cage loudest right now is surely the publication of a paper by Marcelo Montemurro and Damián H. Zanette called Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis, deftly summarized in New Scientist as New signs of language surface in mystery Voynich text.

M&Z’s abstract brings out a lot of what they were trying to do – and also points exactly to their mistakes.

“Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.“

Central Assumption: the authors implicitly hypothesize that they can get meaningful results for long-range comparisons because Voynichese is homogeneous across all its sections.

…The Problem: this assumption is false (or very nearly so), because there are significant macro-level differences in the way the language in different sections works (Currier A, Currier B, labels) as well as many mid-level differences (Herbal-A, Q13-ese, etc).

Central Conclusion: the authors believe that their language-centric statistical machinery has identified “The thirty most informative words in the Voynich manuscript”.

…The Problem: I’m pretty sure that the authors have in fact very probably identified arguably the thirty least informative words in the Voynich Manuscript. (That may be an independently useful result, but it’s probably not really what they were hoping for.)

I’ll explain.

Voynichese is extremely predictable at a letter-level: it has many rigid letter-level adjacency rules (‘4’ is almost always followed by ‘o’, etc) and position rules (4o- is consistently word-initial, -89 is consistently word-final, etc) and a high level of letter-context predictability.

Yet at the same time, it also has a very large dictionary relative to its text size. I often criticize Gordon Rugg for suggesting historically incorrect Cardan grille-like tables (i.e. they’re a century too late for the Voynich’s construction dating) and for inappropriately back-projecting his modern CompSci mindset onto the early Renaissance (i.e. it’s 500+ years too early for the kind of table-driven hackery he proposes). However, he is absolutely right that a reconstructed Voynichese “dictionary” would, to a modern computer scientist’s eyes, look very much as if it had been generated or permuted by some means.

The paradox is therefore that these two apparently opposite aspects of Voynichese are able to coexist: how on earth can we reconcile its letter rigidity & predictability with its wild word variability?

I think the key to resolving this is to grasp that there is some kind of generative or confounding principle at work within a rigidly predictable framework. That is, that even though there are lots of rules, these rules act as a kind of “container” for semantic or cryptographic variability to exist within.

Hence I believe that Montemurro’s statistical machinery is identifying “words” that fall within the container layer rather than in the confounded content layer. Hence these are arguably the thirty least informative words in the Voynich Manuscript.

It’s a hard point to understand, let alone accept: the confounding trick (some kind of transposition cipher? some kind of paper cipher machinery? some kind of cipher wheel?) driving Voynichese’s inherent variability remains as profoundly unreachable now as it has been for over 500 years.

My apologies to Montemurro and Zanette, but the central challenge we face isn’t to find new language-based statistical tests to apply to the Voynichese corpus, however clever they may be. Rather, it is to find ways of resolving the Voynich Manuscript’s central paradox: how is it that Voynichese is both letter-rigid and word-variable at the same time?

Incidentally, M & Z conclude in their paper that results point to a semantic link between the Recipe and Astro sections, and between the Herbal and Pharma sections. Actually, had they been more aware of the codicology analyses that have been done, they would have seen that their results are consistent with the writing phase order.

In fact, there are many indications that what I call Voynichese’s ‘container’ layer above evolved during the writing, with the most obvious evolution being between Currier A and Currier B. I suspect that what their statistical machinery has imperfectly captured is therefore simply a snapshot into the evolution of the container layer, and not anything ‘semantic’ as such.

In short, the aspect of Voynichese that is most nearly homogeneous across all its sections is its “container” layer: so what Montemurro and Zanette have done is make long-range comparisons between evolutions of the container layer. Currently, my best guess is that these are likely to be almost entirely composed of cipher system meta-tokens (shorthand tokens, transposition cipher placeholders, etc) rather than the semantic contents, which appear instead to have been confounded by some means.

So, rather than finding a “genuine message” (as New Scientist put it), perhaps they have instead found a “genuine container” for the message? This may prove to be a very useful result in its own right, but it’s probably not the smoking gun linguistic proof they were hoping to use to discredit Rugg’s tables.